ยฉ Sergio Larrain
The Display Breaks the Look
Every time you lower the camera to check the display, you are telling the scene you are done with it. The scene is often not done with you. It keeps moving, changing light, pulling apart the composition you had, and you notice it only when you raise your eyes and the moment has become another one.
The display looks like a technical aid. It works as an interruption of attention disguised as control, it breaks your seeing every two or three seconds, and after every pause you start over.
Sergio Larrain had put it in words that sound almost religious today. He wrote to his nephew Sebastiรกn Donoso that a good photograph is born from a state of grace, and that grace arrives when you have freed yourself from conventions, like a child discovering reality for the first time. The key word is conventions: every era has its own, and the operating convention of digital photography today is to look at the screen after every shot, a ritual of verification that breaks into your gaze and splits it. After his Valparaรญso work of 1963 and the Magnum years, Larrain leaves reportage and retreats into the mountains of northern Chile to study with the Bolivian philosopher Oscar Ichazo. Few read it as escape. It was the logic of someone who treated photography as a form of continuous attention, incompatible with any interruption.
Translated into daily work, constant verification kicks you out of the state where photography happens. Every time you check the display for two seconds, you shift the quality of your seeing from the world in front of you to the machine in your hand. Then you raise your eyes and have to rebuild attention from scratch. The shots you miss are the ones your attention stopped following, one second after the second that mattered.
The concrete discipline is simple: do not review during the session. Cover the display, turn off image review, give yourself the rule of looking at your pictures only at home. The technical control you think you are losing, you recover in the continuity of your gaze, which is what you are there for.
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.
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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.
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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.