Ex post facto influence

Paris, 2011

To quote Wikipedia, "An ex post facto law (from the Latin for "from after the action") or retroactive law is a law that retroactively changes the legal consequences (or status) of actions committed or relationships that existed prior to the enactment of the law."

I'm adopting the Latin term to describe retroactive influence, specifically, an influence that affects the way you assess a photo that you have already taken. 

Have you ever looked at a photo you once ignored and reassessed it in light of work you had appreciated elsewhere? That is what happened to me today. I was sorting through some Paris photos for a project and my eyes stopped when I came across the photo above, not because it was what I needed for the project but rather because it made me think about the following Saul Leiter photos I had been looking at the night before:

 photos via (ana)logbook

Not that my photo is as good as Leiter's or that it was inspired by him at the time I took it. Two immediate differences: 1. there is no human presence in my photo and 2. the tones in my photo are less warm and saturated. In Leiter's photos, the angle of the hand or of the head draws in the viewer's eye. The slight glimpse of humanity haunts the photos. It makes me wish someone had been sitting in that blue car when I took my photo.

But my point is that I might never have noticed my photo today (which, although it is no Leiter work of art, still really pleases my eye) had I not been admiring Leiter's work last night.

Last night I had been thinking how I would like to do some photos inspired by Leiter. Today, I realized that I already had—retroactively. And that, dear reader, is my tale of ex post facto influence.

ABC Paris prints prices reduced

 buy any letter here

Prices Slashed JUST IN TIME FOR...anything. I don't usually do promo stuff on my blog (although maybe I should), but since I just cut prices on my ABC PARIS galleries I thought I should advertise it. If you have been reading my blog for at least a year then you probably remember when the project got covered by DesignSponge and Black Eiffel.

love those macarons!

When I first started the project (15 years ago!) it was something you didn't see every day. Now, of course, there are a lot of alphabet photos out there. I still like mine, though, because I worked on it for so long, because I started it when my oldest son was a baby, and because the photos are little pieces of my favorite city.

 The complete original set of PARIS ABCs as a poster

I've been working on less commercial projects lately, but I've never been an art snob. I am thrilled if anyone enjoys something I do enough to hang it on a wall. I have the poster version of ABC Paris in my office. I wish it could be less expensive (it's $75), but since it is an actual 24x36 inch photo print (as opposed to cheap poster paper), that's already a low price (and it looks amazing).

One of of the original set with its corresponding quote as an 11x14 inch print

At one time, the project was meant to be a little coffee table book. It was almost picked up by Assouline publishing, but it fell through and I decided to cannibalize the project by doing the individual letter prints, the poster of the original alphabet, and the prints with quotes that would have gone in the book.

 

 The mouth-watering "F" is one of my favorites

I've decided to lower prices on everything in order to make the prints more accessible. 5x5 inch prints are only $8. Feel free to tell your friends :)

The processing conundrum

As I was uploading proofs from a recent wedding shoot, I began to think about the difficulty of conveying different possibilities for each photo. Even if you create a sort of "look" gallery (which I should probably do), you still have think about tailoring the looks to the photos. Here is a brief example:

I liked this sweet moment that I took at an overexposed setting (which I like to do on closer shots sometimes because it tends to make very flattering skin tones), but darkened up for a more traditional look that you see above. As shot, the photo was a lot closer to that hazy sunny look I talked about in a recent tutorial. So, I exaggerated the effect and added a layer of yellow with an overlay blending mode to get this look:

Personally, my tastes are heading toward a very classic black and white:

Nothing is as timeless as black and white. And to further complicated things, you'll notice that my black and white example above was actually taken a second later, when the groom's arm was no longer bent. So far, you have three very different looks. Then you have to consider the effects of cropping:

An 8x10 crop takes away the white space at the top, like it or not.

A square crop changes it even more.
Or what if you wanted to change the crop, convert to monochrome, and do a romantic pink split toning effect:

Or you can crop it even tighter:

I've always been a fan of close crops, so I like this one as well.

The moral of this story is that making processing decisions can be as hard as taking the photo, and communicating the possibilities can be problematic. Which would you choose? If you were the client given nearly 500 proofs, how well would you do envisioning the possibilities?

If Plato were alive...

  

Plato: copy (copy!) of portrait bust by Silanion via Wikipedia

...he would have a thing or two to say about the discussion over at Tech Dirt about a judge dismissing a copyright lawsuit as bogus. In the lawsuit, one photographer (Janine Gordon) sued another (Ryan McGinley), claiming that he had violated copyright law because they both had photos of people jumping in the air with their arms spread out, or kissing, or other such nonsense. Thank heavens, the judge saw through the claim and let common sense prevail. I mean, look at my last post. Are we going to say that everyone that ever took a photo of someone standing in the middle of a road or sidewalk with a neutral expression looking at the camera is infringing on, um, Sander's pose?

I'm no lawyer, but from what I have read in books about photography law I had always heard that you can't copyright ideas, only the actual products that come from those ideas. In other words, I couldn't stop someone from replicating all of my ABC Paris photos (cue shameless self-promotional plug). They could go and take the exact same photos (or so I thought) and it would not be my product, therefore, not protected. And none of that ever bothered me. I mean, good luck tracking down all those things.

But then I read what the judge said about Gordon's frivolous case. There was a lot of explanation about how the photos were not all that similar once you really looked at them. Wait! So if they were more similar, Gordon could have won? This didn't coincide with my understanding.

This led me to start reading the comments after techdirt's post. It wasn't exactly like reading Plato's Sophist ("lawyers suck!" is hardly great philosophy), but it's a pretty fascinating, and for the most part, civil, read. In my mind, commenter "Dandon TRJ" (a law student) is the interlocutor who gets to be Socrates. Not that his are the only smart comments. Go read the comments if you are interest in copyright issues. Toward the end, the discussion starts to stray into questions of whether photography itself if art. "Bnesaladur" imagines a world in which you have to watch how you stand lest you be infringing copyright and then makes the provocative assertion that "photography is not art" because "all you have is a near exact representation of the world." I don't think it's too difficult to cut through that argument, but I just may ask my students to do it and see what they come up with. Since I was just making up a syllabus for the critical theory class I'm teaching this semester, I couldn't help but think about all the hullabaloo (can't think of when I last used that word) over Plato's idea of the simulacrum (as in "similarity"). At the mercy of post-structuralist theorists, the idea became as complicated as copyright law. If you feel like putting on your black turtleneck, smoking a gauloise, and getting a hot cup of coffee at your local pretentious coffee house, you have months of mind-bending reading ahead of you. Non? Then check out the comments at techdirt.