Comment: Lecture by Christopher Anderson

So I happen to come across a lecture by a photographer Christopher Anderson. He was a war photographer and currently work on Magnum. Some of his work can be seen here:

http://christopherandersonphoto.com/#/index

The lecture was about how his work first recognized in Haiti when he asked to get on the hand made boat along with the locals to smuggle to America. Then he got interested in people making effort to transport themselves to another country for a better life. Some of the work involves himself getting on an overloaded weagon traveling on a dersert for many days. Many of his work involved getting himself in a dangerous situation with the locals.

Sometime I wonder if we are working so hard to getting better technique and equipments, we have forgotten about finding interesting subjects to photographs. I was reading about flowers lately because it is one of the possible subjects for the colour assignment. Then I came across the line saying that flower is one of the most photographed subject in the world and most people get good but not breath taking images. I am not trying to minimize the effort to getting technically good images. Personally, getting the correct lighting set up is very difficult. However, when we step back and think about this: why are we photographing flower after all? Beauty? Yawn.

Fashion magazine is about beauty, travel magazine is about beauty. They are technically fantastic, but I wonder why they do get boring to look at.

At the second half of the lecture, Christopher Anderson said that he got burned out in photography, and decide to take random pictures he ran into with a Holga camera. There is next to no control with a Holga, so he just snapping in a almost reaction way. Believe it or not, he got a book deal out of it.

I think once someone is visually trained, any equipment is capable to produce good pictures. Some of the equipment might produce a good one after a thousand bad one. I remember this quote from Asnel Adams.

"Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop".

No one asks me about the thousands that are thrown away.