I was asked to write down a few words about my experience of the Magnum Workshop in Derby, UK. I’m not too good with words, I tend to be longwinded instead of more to the point, but I would like to start with a link to Sarah Anne Smith’s blog post about her experiences of the same workshop, with Richard Kalvar:
http://sarahsmithphotography.tumblr.com/post/3791250964/take-a-break-reflection
Ok, so my teacher that week was Bruce Gilden. If you haven’t heard of him, go look up his Magnum in Motion videos. His style is direct, close, straight to the point and sometimes very confrontational. His personality shines through in his work, although his style may be terrifying to some, you only have to spend a few minutes with Bruce to find out that he is just very passionate about his work and he expects you to have the same passion if you want to pursue a career in photography. Besides that he is a great story teller and incredibly funny. If you see his videos, he always mentions he likes to shoot characters.. well I would say he more than qualifies for that title himself ;)
About my experiences.. I showed as part of my portfolio a selection of these photos that I shot in NY past summer.: http://www.flickr.com/photos/renzsu/sets/72157624338717448/
Immediately it became clear they weren’t as good as I had perhaps thought.. the perils of forum and flickr comments became immediately clear. Bruce was very open about what he thought about them. ‘Not close enough’, ‘wrong angle’ and ‘boring subject’ were heard most often. It became clear after having discussed the work in more detail, that I had problems cutting out unnecessary background and that I could get much more dramatic photos if I chose my focal points more selectively. Frame what you want to show and leave out the rest, and don’t be afraid to step in very close if you have to.
The funny thing is that I had a second talk about my portfolio with Richard Kalvar a few days later. Although his style is very different from Bruce’s, he basically gave me the same feedback. I could see these were all experienced photographers with a deeply trained eye. Although they may not like a certain style, they do recognize when something works or not. This is what made the workshop so interesting. You expect that perhaps they will try to force their students to work in a certain style that they like, but this was far from it. Every student was pushed to do something they did well, or even the opposite of that, train them to work on something they felt uncomfortable with, but which would help them out in the long run.
My assignment for this week was to do close-up portraits of people who I had asked for permission as well as horizontal candid scenes. In the end I didn’t find Derby lively enough that I thought I would get a good selection of candid photos, so I focused on my portraits (which is perhaps more indicative of my skills than anything else, although Bruce did admit he had a hard time shooting in Derby himself).
How my candid street photography will evolve, I have no idea.. except I know I will have a much more increased sense of what will work and what not. I have to be strict and be honest with myself.. if the framing is off, the background distracting (examples of trees and lighting poles sticking out of heads passed the workshop reviews often), the subject shot from the wrong angles.. it’s just not as good a photo as it could be.
Closing words: sometimes you come home from a day of shooting and you’ll think you’ve done great.. only to find out all your photos are shit. Stuff like that happens, also to the big names like Bruce Gilden. If it doesn’t work on the contact sheet, it won’t work if you enlarge it. The thing is not to let that distract your or demotivate you. Stick with it, put in the work and keep going. Practice makes perfect, gear doesn’t.
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