How A Book Improved My Photography

A New Yorker as my subject gives me a chance to dredge up old images from a holiday that started and finished in that city… My first impression back in 2008 was that it looks rather like the pictures in the cinema.

First, the credits. The title and ideas here are from Adam Gopnik’s book The Real Work: on the Mystery of Mastery. Gopnik is a writer and art critic based in New York, and reading a review of the book led me to buy it, then nod my head as I went along. Although the book digresses somewhat from the topic along the way, it’s a good, mind-broadening volume, and well worth the time it’ll take you to read.

One of the things that are counter-intuitive to most people is that broadening one’s mind is good for photography – so if your diet of books is purely photographic, picking up a novel, a biography, or a history book may inspire new ideas, or simply leave your mind refreshed when you return to your usual reading matter. What category does this book fit into? Maybe the best way is to read it.

The real work is a term used by magicians, Gopnik tells us, and it’s about putting the pieces together in a way that turns them into a whole. The person who does the real work isn’t the one who invents a magic trick, but the one who brings it all together to make it fluid and effortless, to make the audience suspend disbelief completely.

Gopnik explored different areas of accomplishment and found common themes. (Magic. Drawing. Breadmaking. Driving. Boxing. Dancing. And, oddly, urinating in public lavatories.) My job, in this article, is to say something about how you can apply his wisdom to your photography. Oh, yes – one other thing. He makes a distinction between achievements, like getting an A in an exam, and accomplishments, which are much more of an internal thing. To be accomplished, you don’t have to outsmart the examiner on a given day but have a rounded knowledge and understanding of your subject.

It doesn’t matter whether you get your information on paper or through the ether – but you do need to make sure that the reality in your camera tallies with the theory.

(I think that also means that you can forget some of the metrics, because you can always look them up in the Ilford Manual of Photography, or on the web. You’re not concerned, any longer, with a definition of a 0.5 millimetre depth of field, but you know that if you stand THERE, and use THAT aperture on THIS lens, the picture will look right.)

Practice, and practise. It’s trendy for artists and thus photographers to talk about their practice, in a way that suggests that if you follow the same framework of technical requirements, you will be as good as they are: you won’t, of course, because they did it first. But it is important to practise, in the sense of keeping doing the same things in the same way, and not randomly altering bits of the process every time. Get it right first, and then play around: learn the notes and get them right before you start to improvise!

Vampire Princess at The Attic studio, during a workshop we ran there. Teaching is more than telling people: a colleague at work described the best way of learning as ‘experiential’ – others may prefer the old ‘monkey do’ terminology, but what you have done yourself, you are far more likely to remember.

An uncomfortable moment came reading that relatively few people can share their understanding of what they do… That’s what I attempt with these articles, and with the workshops I run in studios with models. Erm… yes. Answers on a postcard, please. But it’s worth seeing what you can learn from anyone you meet who shares your passion for photography. Some less-talented individuals have the ability to share all they know and inspire others to greater heights – at school, they were the people who inspired the love of a subject in every pupil, and they would have been wasted, perhaps, pursuing stratospheric academic careers, where they only taught the most talented. A drama teacher who inspires ordinary, leave-school-at-16 pupils to love theatre and performance does a mightily wonderful thing.

Graveyards are often places where people sit and think, and wonder about what might have been. ‘If only’… They are, for photographers, the source of all kinds of picture opportunities, and provide static subjects in the trees and gravestones that let you practice techniques and ideas. Concepts such as depth of field and telephoto perspective come to life through taking comparison images.

Grey’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard deals with local talent, though it’s only the two lines preceding the words that lock down the absence of fame that are well-known:

Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast

The little tyrant of his fields withstood;

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,

Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.

And that applies to photographers, too. In many towns, you will find a ‘GP’ photographer who is quietly competent at everything, but who isn’t known outside the area. She will shoot weddings, still life, and houses for estate agents with equal skill and care, and will go out with a camera just for fun a couple of times a week, just like you and me. She – or he – is a professional, in that the job provides a roof, food, and a modest standard of living: but also an amateur – someone who loves what they are doing. That’s from the French word for love, as I’m pretty sure you know. We are photograph lovers, and often camera lovers, as well.

My friend Stewart was a professional photographer for many years, and equally adept at weddings and closeups… There are thousands of highly competent photographers who nobody has ever heard of.

As Adam Gopnik writes in his book, ‘We overrate masters and underrate mastery’: I’ve known for many years that (on my day) I can be very good indeed with a camera. My day comes around occasionally, and so does yours. It makes sense to seek out those who have some degree of mastery and bask in their company and knowledge.

And, always, listen carefully to what they say about those who they admire. If anyone ever says they don’t think anyone does it better than they do themselves, be suspicious: real mastery, I think, involves a degree of humility, an understanding that the search is never over, the road never completely travelled. And that any given day may see a misstep.

Boxing clearly holds a special magic for Gopnik. There’s family history, and so, in his sixties, he learned to box at a New York gym. Not with the intention of ever fighting anyone (sensible), but to understand what makes great boxers special. He was taught a sequence of punches, to be run through with precision… The intention in the ring is to lead the opponent into reacting to the sequence, rather than thinking about it and countering with an appropriate move. Once they are off-balance, out of their own sequence, there’s the chance to land the knockout punch. Each sequence begins and ends in a defensive position, guarding the head – after all, the objective in boxing is to concuss the opponent into unconsciousness.

I’ve never seen a live boxing match: but I have tried my hand at taking pictures of professional wrestlers. The skills are entirely opposite: wrestlers learn how to avoid damaging each other while appearing to be very violent: boxers aim for maximum damage with minimum effort. Here, Walsall wrestler Mad Dog Max shows delicacy in a throw, and aptitude for making spectators hate him…

Gopnik’s book is a good read overall, but is discursive and meandering, which is no bad thing in itself. However, the evidence for the same meticulous putting-together of the pieces is never as strong as in the chapters dealing with magic, boxing, dancing and drawing. In particular, I feel that he underestimates driving as a skill – possibly because of the prevalence of automatic gearboxes in the USA, and perhaps because he didn’t encounter anything like the IAM (Institute of Advanced Motorists) handbook. My own feeling is that really good driving requires a combination of physical coordination (operating the clutch, accelerator and gear lever at the same time as steering is a big initial challenge!) and rapid thinking, as well as careful and thoughtful observation.

So a bit more about the Institute of Advanced Motorists… I’m not a member, but my son is, and I’ve read the book, which is based on the driving system taught to British police drivers. A YouTube video shows how careful application of the method maintains a high level of safety even when pursuing a drug dealer at 60 mph above the speed limit. This suggests that Adam Gopnik’s view (that the big thing about learning to drive is to forget that it’s an inherently dangerous thing to do at all) is flawed, to my mind.

I shot this rather lucky frame on a stretch of road included in the YouTube clip referred to in the text. This police car was not pursuing an erratic driver, but was definitely ‘making progress’.

The IAM test, I believe, requires the driver to keep up to the speed limit unless there is a reason to slow down (so that driving 4mph below the limit as a matter, of course, tilts towards failing), and also asks the student to keep up a running commentary on what they see and what they are doing about it – so that a car coming rapidly towards an oncoming road junction from the left may require a slackening of speed so that if the car pulls out without looking and stopping, only gentle braking is required, rather than an emergency stop. Having to talk about what you are doing increases awareness of the process, and tends to raise questions that are worth thinking about!

Gopnik is right on the money in his chapter about ‘catching the bullet’ – a magic trick known for killing a number of magicians, because the trick is that the magician catches the bullet in his mouth. It actually is dangerous, like driving, but much more so. It’s a real bullet, fired from a real gun, and it ends up in a real metal cup in the magician’s mouth. That’s inherently dangerous, just like letting people loose with a car weighing more than a ton. However, it’s the culmination of a lot of careful calculation and preparation: the bullet is small and relatively light. The cartridge propelling it sends it at low velocity, into a titanium cup – a bullet-proof gum shield, so to speak. The aim is laser-guided (and the red sighting spot, seen in so many films and TV dramas, is part of the theatre of the trick). In the end, it’s a matter of trusting the system, just like a police pursuit driver.

Driving a stretch limousine in New York requires, I suspect, a number of additional skills over and above ordinary driving!

There are definitely patterns in ‘doing the work’ – in everything, there is a mix of physical and mental individual jobs that go to make up the complete project. There’s a need to accumulate knowledge to put at the service of your vision: a requirement that you reap the harvest of your imagination and then apply your intellect to turn an idea into a finished picture.

Doing the work, for photographers, is like learning a driving system. There is knowledge that you need to store in your head, both about the technicalities of the equipment and the rules governing what you can do (some more old-fashioned clubs may bear more resemblance to the Road Traffic Act in rigidity and rigour than others!) There is physical coordination so that you operate the controls under stress with the same precision and certainty as the rest of the time. And there is familiarity with every process and procedure that you may encounter from doing it every day, for hours at a time.

The repetition is made clearest in the account of Gopnik’s treatment for a ‘shy bladder’ problem, a mental block that made him unable to urinate in public lavatories. It’s not funny, especially when it leads to a fear of long aeroplane journeys (though, oddly, train journeys did not seem to be a problem).

Rather than lowering the tone of the website with a row or urinals, here’s a New York tour guide who knew her territory, and knew her job: her best advice was to get off the bus in Harlem to shop and eat. We did both.

The treatment prescribed was to practice by visiting public restrooms around New York with his therapist. Taking the time – time and possibly sheer boredom often helped. And, gradually, he overcame the problem, simply by defying it. Repetition can train away a problem, or ingrain good habits deeply, and that’s what we all need to do. An interesting side note is that Gopnik and his therapist travelled around the city on bicycles, which are a far more personally risky way of travelling than driving a car. The author acknowledged the risk, and noted the therapist’s casual attitude to crossing red lights, but didn’t comment on the fact that the trick to cycling in a city is, partly, to learn to ignore that it’s a very silly thing to be doing in the absence of dedicated cycleways, and in the presence of New York drivers…

My suggestion for homework? Train yourself to adjust your camera functions without taking the camera from your eye. It’s simple – providing it’s what you already do… And if you are one of the people enslaved by screens and ‘touch controls’ it may prove an interesting exercise to identify physical controls by touch alone…

Gopnik learned to dance, but his learning curve was a lot less public than this. Dancers rehearsing in Central Park.