Diane Arbus – Hong Kong Lucida

First Roll of Film from Spotmatic F (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on January 27, 2015January 27, 2015 by eddietay in Colour

Holding a Spotmatic F reminded me of my first encounter with an M16 rifle.

Could something that felt so clunky really work?

After having learnt how to disassemble the rifle and put it back together, I felt no better.

It looked suspiciously uncomplicated – I actually understood how the rifle worked.

How could that clicking sound when I pull that trigger be taken seriously?

As I eventually discovered, after zeroing that rifle (aligning the sights to my eye for projectile accuracy) at a 300m range, it was powerful indeed, and not something to be taken lightly. I’ve never forgotten that feeling (and the recoil).

It’s the same with a camera – after all, it involves training, preparation, positioning, proper gripping, sighting and shooting.

And you’ll need to control your breathing to maximize shot accuracy.

The rifle (and camera) is supposed to be an extension of your self and will.

Did I mention I was a marksman in my previous life (2 decades ago)?

In case you think I’m some kind of gun-crazy nut, it’s actually a common experience, if you’re a combat-fit Singaporean male who had to do national service (30 months of it in my time).

As you can see, I’m sublimating all that weapons training, channelling it into street photography.

It’s all about vision, discipline and decision points.

You are what you shoot.

You are how you shoot.

Street photography, especially with film cameras, have taught me to respect mechanical tools and appreciate the history that came with them.

The evolution of Leica, Asahi Pentax, Voigtlander, and so on, is a history of modern life.

It is this history that gave us our Henri Cartier-Bresson, Vivien Maier, Diane Arbus, Martin Parr, Bruce Gilden, etc.

Thanks for reading.

Camera: Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic F

Lens: S-M-C Takumar 24mm F 3.5

Film: Kodak UltraMax 400

The Artistic Process: On Being in the Zone

Posted on March 29, 2014April 30, 2014 by eddietay in Monochrome

Street photography can get addictive.

Sometimes it’s the challenge, because you’re setting yourself up to be unobtrusive.

My cameras are all very small. My Minolta AF C and Olympus XA 2 look like plastic toys so people don’t take me seriously even when they spot me.

Sometimes you want to be spotted. It adds drama to the scene.

Sometimes you’re right in their faces but they can’t be bothered … this man saw me with my camera pointing at him and went on doing what he was doing…

I get out and walk and get “in the zone”. It’s a subjective (but common enough) experience.

For me, it happens when I’m writing or reading or when I’m teaching, when I’m fully immersed in the experience without any sense of self-consciousness.

In “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, one of my favourite essays on writing poetry, T. S. Eliot wrote (among other things) on the artistic process:

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

And he goes on to say:

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

Writing, reading, teaching, and street photography are ways of getting myself outside of myself. It’s a way to silence that inner voice at the back of my head so that I’m not second guessing and talking to myself all the time.

Anyone who wants to be good at what he or she does (especially though not necessarily in the field of the arts) ought to read Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.

He uses the word “flow” to describe that happy state of being engaged in endeavours such as artistic creation, athletics, scientific tinkering, and so on, to map out relationships between learning, enjoyment and satisfaction.

It’s rather “pop psychology”-ish, but it’s very enabling in terms of helping me think about art creation in a wholesome way, in a way that is opposite to that image of the tortured artist celebrated by the media. Van Gogh, Diane Arbus and Sylvia Plath – the list goes on.

But surely there’s also room for artists/writers who want to be productive and remain sane… there’s Henri Cartier-Bresson, who deliberately moved away from photography to take up painting later in his life, there’s Wallace Stevens, poet and vice-president of an insurance company, who was productive as a poet all the way till his death in his seventies.

I get out of myself and look at other people and think about what it is that occupies them…

This man, for instance, stood just like this for a really long time, looking at a building across the road.

I took some time to frame the scene properly, and turned around later and saw there were bemused people looking at me looking at him…

Everywhere we go, we bring along a baggage of impulses, desires, anxieties, ambitions…

Maybe one day I’ll get caught and someone would tell me to grow up and that this is not a proper use of my time…

The Art of Life

Posted on October 24, 2013March 10, 2014 by eddietay in Monochrome

I’m planning to use the following quote for a talk on poetry and photography for fellow writers.

It’s from Zygmunt Bauman, a sociologist who has written on what he calls “liquid modernity”. This passage from his book The Art of Life is relevant to those who are on the quest for meaning:

To practise the art of life, to make one’s life a “work of art”, amounts … to being in a state of permanent transformation, to perpetually self-redefine through becoming … someone other than one has been thus far. (The Art of Life 73)

I now have the habit of bringing along one or two film cameras wherever I go. It’s usually a Leica M6, paired with either a Yashica GX, Canonet QL 17 Giii or more recently, the Olympus XA2.

The Olympus XA2 is really stealthy because of zone-focusing. And it’s really quiet too. For example, I could do this in a cab without the driver noticing:

Try that with a Canon 5D Mark III.

Part of my fascination with film cameras has to do with their longevity – digital cameras either go out of fashion or break down after 3-5 years (though it has to be said that my Canon G11 is still going strong). The Olympus XA2 was made in the 1980s, which means the thing in my hand is about 30 years old.

I guess I am now using my cameras as a sketchbook of sorts, storing material for writing and thinking. This is probably a little too deliberate, but I think of this as pushing myself beyond what I am, “becoming someone other than one has been thus far”, asking street photography to teach me to be a better writer and thinker.

For now, the art of life for me is about storing moments which might otherwise seem artless.

Lately, I have begun to take pictures with only my eyes, imagining what a scene would look like on a photograph… click… click…

And I like this quote from William Todd Schultz, who wrote An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus, a wonderful psychobiography of Arbus:

Artists aren’t always in complete command of their material. Sometimes it commands them and they let it; they get out of the way, the subject matter comes unbidden, it compels them and they follow its lead.

This might be a careless comparison, but Arbus is to photography what Sylvia Plath is to poetry.

And as for material for the street photographer, there’s often poetry to be found in places you least expect, which is why that tiny Olympus XA2 is so handy:

The above is just next to where I live, a plot of land on which a small shopping mall is being built. *sigh*

I’m always fascinated by how one could be in a built-up area in Hong Kong, and after walking for 20 minutes, be in the midst of idyllic village houses where clothes are hung in open air and kitchens are next to public walkways:

And then, 10 minutes later, one is at the beach.

And you would come across scenes like this:

This is Wu Kai Sha beach, and there’re now plans for land reclamation in the area which would mean the beach would be no more… *another sigh*

Thanks for reading.

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