February 16, 2007
What in fact DO you want to say?
Chris Steele-Perkins
With my new book Tokyo Love Hello being launched, I thought it might be interesting to some of you out there to get an idea of what sort of issues, problems and questions have gone through my mind during the process of making this book.
How, as a photographer, do you try to put out your work in such a way as to make the most sense to you and, hopefully, to your audience? What in fact DO you want to say?
Front cover of Chris Steele-Perkins' new book Tokyo Love Hello.
Should you do a book, a magazine story, an exhibition, a slide show, a podcast, a Magnum In Motion-style web piece, a combination of these things; all of them? How will this affect the work? An exhibition will create a different response to a book. With a web piece you can use sound, in a magazine you might reach an audience of millions. If you do an exhibition is it like doing the book on the wall? If you do a book is it an exhibition between covers?
For any photographer who feels he or she has something to say, these are questions that should be asked. But let's think about what it is we want to say. Even though that will be different for each photographer, the question remains the same: what does "What I want to say" actually mean in a medium that is primarily wordless?
Generally it means "These are my best photographs," but what are Best Photographs? Often the most aesthetically successful, the best resolved compositionally, the ones with the most fascinating tonality or colour relationship. The ones where it all seems to "work." The best photographs, it can be argued, are those that most successfully translate the photographer’s experience of being there, as witness, reporter, artist, into a two-dimensional image. The image of course explains nothing. It describes a scene, probably real rather than manufactured. We, the audience may be able to deduce something from our body of knowledge about what we are looking at – we may identify a photograph as taken in Africa - but if we want to know what the subject matter of the photograph is, we have to wait for the photographer to tell us.
However, if the photographer wants to say something further, about, say, Aids in Botswana, then they will photograph victims, health workers, hospitals, graves, political meetings and provide significant factual information, maybe write a long essay or draft in a writer to do so. If they want to remain less rooted to conveying a specific piece of information, they can give no, or limited caption details.
If information is withheld, or reduced to a minimal increase in information, "Botswana game reserve. Africa," what can we think it is that the photographer wanted to say? Presumably something beyond that banality? Or maybe not, because what they want to say is in the image alone, an image that may well be intriguing, beautiful, strange, powerful and so on, and that can be the point. The photographer may be saying, "Hey, look at this, it is interesting, see it the way I saw it because I see it different from you and it is worth your time to do so." And why not? I value the ambiguity of photography; the uncertainty about what in fact you are looking at. I like to use that for some work and particularly for a project like Tokyo Love Hello where I want you to ask yourself questions, not for me to give you answers.
I don't want to try and answer all the questions raised, but to give a sense of the process by which I come to select photographs of my own and how I made the selection for Tokyo Love Hello and some of the ways of trying to present the work. The success or otherwise of this effort is to be decided by the audience, you, the ultimate measure of that success, for you will accept or reject it.
For me, the book remains the most interesting medium to work in with photographs, so my primary aim was to make a book, but even that was not planned. I shot a lot in Tokyo, sometimes for assignment, sometimes for stories I wanted to do for the magazine market and often as I was wandering about the streets. For some reason I got all my pics together as little ink-jet prints and went through them a number of times and slowly a core group of images, the Best Images? emerged, and seemed to make some kind of sense together. It was then that I thought there may be a book on Tokyo waiting to be made. I was also sure I did not have the material for a book yet and I needed to shoot a lot more. So that is what I did.
Then you start making dummies - I find iView MediaPro really useful for making sequences and storing them and printing out little contact image sequences to look at and develop. As things progressed, I would make A5 proofs and hold them together with a bulldog clip, record the sequence in iView and develop new sequences, try different images. You can do the maths, 100 pictures have a lot of ways to combine, yet sequences and an overall shape seems to start to emerge fairly soon.
I was never concerned with making a conventional travelogue of Tokyo, many exist and are useful guides. I was more interested in atmosphere, feeling, a sense of the strange, the whimsical, the daft, all quite intangible. I wanted the viewer, like me, to feel they sort of understood it, but didn't. They recognised something but could not quite figure it out. That, if you like, was what I wanted to "say" about Tokyo, or at least part of it. You could call it Art, the conveying of a personal reality. Call it what you like really, but I knew what I wanted to do.
People do often ask "But how do you make the final choice of photographs?" So perhaps it is worth trying to say more about the image selection process, even though it remains a magical sort of process to me still.
Working extensively with the pictures, mixing them about, certain pictures and groups of pictures start to select or exclude themselves and some seem to fall into place. For example, I knew when I had the opening picture and I knew the final picture would be one of two possible pictures. I built little possible sequences from these and realised I wanted a "narrative" starting at night, going through day and ending in night - It felt right. One long day shot over a number of years. Other little sequences emerge and seem to want to stay together. It is as if the collection of images has its own, hidden, DNA which starts placing images in certain positions that seem "right". This process also seems to determine the format of the book. I decided early on that I wanted there to be just one picture on a page so they all carried the same weight, none were favoured by being made larger, and that they came in a clear sequence, but that the sequence jumped all over the place; inside, outside, close, far, people, objects in a fragmented journey, as if the turning of the page was a turning of a street corner and finding a different, unexpected experience there. (Rene Burri has called these changes different flavours.) It was also soon clear that I wanted a book you could hold in your hand and easily turn the pages, not something too big. It is smaller than a horizontal A4.
Double page spreads from Chris Steele-Perkins' new book Tokyo Love Hello.
I also don't want to underplay the importance of showing it to friends you trust who give their feedback, and things change because of this.
Once I had the book more or less in its final form I started showing it to publishers who give various responses, brush offs, some dithering and also some useful feedback. The feedback I really wanted to hear – “Yes, we really like it and will do the book” - came from Intervalles because they are, of course, a lot smarter than the others.
Then there is the introduction, the captions, the typeface, the cover... I had a cover (the DNA is not infallible), the publisher suggested another and it was better. Good. A publisher should be able to offer good advice, develop design ideas, tweak things as Kamy Pakdel, the publisher and designer did. Some ideas you take on board, some you don't.
Early cover of Chris Steele-Perkins' new book Tokyo Love Hello.
When you wander around Tokyo it is always fascinating to read the English texts that appear on T-shirts, bags and accessories which re-invent the language in a way that you can understand yet is quite different. This sense of thinking you understand something, yet being conscious that everything is happening in a parallel universe, is, I am sure, common to most visitors to Japan from the West. After a while you realise it is not a parallel universe but one at some strange and extraordinary angle to the one you are used to, but none the less, you still feel connected. Or at least I did.
I never actually saw Tokyo Love Hello written on a T-shirt, I made it up. It is not clear what it means, but you think you understand. That is what I want my book to do; it won't explain anything, but perhaps you will begin to understand something about this great and special city.
So, once the book is done, what else is there? How else can the work be shown? Exhibitions and the web are the most obvious routes, but I am not interested to simply put the pictures from the book into frames and hang them on a wall. An exhibition should be a different experience if possible. Selecting the "best" and blowing them up is interesting for trying to sell prints, but the point of my book is that all the pictures are given equal weight. It is the sum of its parts.
For a Magnum Tokyo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo, I made a giant montage of all the 101 photos into one image. They can be read individually, but they also interact off each other in interesting ways.
Part of montage shown in Tokyo. Chris Steele-Perkins/Magnum Photos
For the web, I made a Magnum In Motion animation of the pictures with sound. Do they work? I hope so, I enjoy it, it is a challenge to find ways of getting your work out there that remains true to the work and the subject but explores some new ways of presentation.
Visit Chris Steele-Perkins' website
See the Tokyo Love Hello multimedia essay produced by Tia Dunn/Magnum In Motion
Buy Tokyo Love Hello from Amazon.fr
Buy Tokyo Love Hello from Amazon.co.uk
Published on the Magnum Blog on February 16, 2007
© 2007 Magnum Photos and the authors. All rights reserved.
Duplication of any material without author's consent and attribution is expressly prohibited.