ยฉ Sally Mann
Deciding Before, Not After
You open the display after every shot, it is part of the workflow. Sally Mann in the mid-1990s did the opposite, she pulled out the wet plate collodion from 1851 and started photographing with glass plates that you have to pour, expose and develop within minutes before they dry. No verification, no screen, a mobile darkroom behind the car, every shot is a gamble.
Mann used collodion for the work of the next twenty years, from the body of her decomposing greyhound on her farmland, to the Body Farm at the University of Tennessee, up to the memoir Hold Still in 2015. The plates often come out streaked, dirty, crossed by what she calls ghost lines, residues of silver nitrate that dried wrong. She does not correct them, she accepts them. She declares them part of the work.
Choosing a process that makes immediate verification impossible is not nostalgia. It is deciding that the time of error becomes part of the work. With digital an error is a nuisance you remove at the first display. With collodion the error is already in the plate while you pour it, and when you step out of the mobile darkroom you do not know what you got. The decision was played earlier, in how you positioned yourself.
In your workflow, where have you replaced a choice with a verification. How many times a day do you look at the display to decide if the position was right, without having decided it before. Mann is not asking anyone to go back to collodion. She is declaring that her work lives inside a technical constraint that is also mental, and that constraint is what gives her a voice.
The process you choose is a frame of mind before it is a tool. Digital lets you decide after, collodion forces you to decide before. The difference is not the quality of the photos, it is how much of the work you are doing at the moment of the shot and how much you are postponing to the screen. Mann has chosen a medium that does not allow the postponement, and that choice is the work.
Marco Savarese
Editor-in-Chief
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marco Savarese
Marco Savarese is Editor-in-Chief at Eyeshot, the independent publisher he founded in Italy in 2018. He spends most of his year reading portfolios, judging the Open Call, and editing the magazine catalogue. The reading desk is open, and he takes one-to-one Professional Reviews from photographers working seriously on long-term projects.
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NOTE #209. A face lost in shadow reads as underexposed, a defect to fix. Gordon Willis kept Brando’s eyes in the dark in The Godfather and held it against the studio. Before you rescue a shadow, ask what it does; if you can say it, you decided it.
The Place After
NOTE #208. Of a huge event, often only an ordinary place is left. In On This Site (1996) Joel Sternfeld photographed fifty banal American places where violence happened, each with a line of text. Photograph the aftermath, and let the line do the work.
The Photo Made Together
NOTE #206. Street photography teaches you to steal people; there’s another way. In Malick Sidibรฉ’s Bamako studio the youth chose how to be seen. Before you take someone, ask how they’d want to look, and make the photo together.
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NOTE #205. The thing that improves you most isn’t a new camera, it’s a short list of your own faults. Tony Ray-Jones kept a notebook of orders to himself and it shaped Martin Parr. Write your three rules and keep them in your pocket.
Watch the Master Work
NOTE #204. You don’t learn from a master’s finished prints, you learn from watching them work. In 1962 Joel Meyerowitz watched Robert Frank shoot, quit his job that day, and picked up a camera. Watch the body, not the result.
The Work Before the Name
NOTE #203. The worth of a photo and the worth of the byline are two different things. Koudelka shot the 1968 Prague invasion anonymously as ‘P.P.’ and revealed it sixteen years later. Photograph what must be photographed even when no one will know it was you.
The Subject You Run From
NOTE #202. The strongest subject you have is the one you’d rather not photograph. Ishiuchi Miyako went back to Yokosuka, the occupied base town she was taught to fear, and made it her life’s work. Point the camera where it’s uncomfortable.