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Wanted A Picture: Picasso wanted to destroy absolutely everything. His rebellion against the myth of feminine beauty was relatively insignificant compared with his other rebellion: with this picture he wanted to destroy the image that people had been forming of him as a painter, and he was rebelling against the whole of Western art since the early Renaissance. Nevertheless, his painting had not been created out of nothing. Picasso had been studying Iberian and African sculptures. They contained precisely those archaic forms which inspired him to create stylized natural forms, then arrange them in rigorous geometrical patterns and finally radically deform them.
The best way to avoid cliches is to always try and see the familiar from an unusual angle. Some time ago I was in my dentist's chair looking at a set of large training teeth. It occurred to me that I might use them fora funny picture in a children's book on dentistry I was doing. I wanted a picture of the dentist working on teeth as seen from inside the throat, looking out over the tongue. I made a tongue out of Spam, covered the upper and lower plate with black cloth and got the dentist to drill one of the front teeth. Using a wide angle lens just behind the piece of fake tongue, I was able to photograph the dentist through the teeth. To my pleasant surprise, I got many letters from readers who had seen the picture in their books and wondered how I had done it. When the gas shortage hit, I did the same picture from inside, presumably, of a gas tank looking up the gas nozzle, past the rushing stream of gas.
Any good photographer will soon work out standard Lighting plans and exposure and development constants, so that catalog technique becomes a routine which produces good pictures almost automatically.
All-in-all, catalog photography can hardly be considered exciting, but a few catalog accounts can provide an excellent bread-and-butter basis for anyone.
I was awakened in the small hours of the morning several years ago by a telephone call from a man who wanted to pay me a hundred dollars to come and take one picture of a beautiful woman, just one simple single-flash picture. Perhaps you can guess why this picture, which he could ordinarily have got someone to take for five or ten dollars, was so important to him that he offered a hundred. It was because the beautiful woman was his estranged wife, from whom he was seeking a divorce, and she was at that tune in a compromising situation. |
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