hi, all,

I put together a brief online portfolio to show a photo prof here at Columbia to try to get into an advanced class, and I wanted to see what you folks thought with regards to the photos, the ordering, the design, the captions, etc.

The link is: http://joshwand.com/portfolio/

Thanks!
--Josh

-- Josh Wand (josh@joshwand.com), April 12, 2001

Answers

Josh,

I would open with the landscapes- don't worry, they have a strength of their own. Then I'd go to the portraits, and I'd put Martha at the end, and I'd omit the brain surgery part- its inconsistent with your other titles for one thing.... it's strong enough as it is for another...

I'd also pull the Julia image, its too dark and you have enough like it. I think the prof will see lots of potential and want you in the class- best-

-- Chris Yeager (cyeager@ix.netcom.com), April 13, 2001.

Josh, the portrait work is very strong. You should be proud. In my opinion, however,I think that many of the images are too dark. I don't know if it's because of a poor scan of your prints, or if the prints themselves are that dark. Dark images are fine, it contributes to the mood you are tryiny to convey, but not if they are so dark that they are murky and the overall effect is to mask the image - in other words become a barrier to the viewer. Still there is a direct honest quality to the portrait work that is very appealing. On the other hand ,I don't react too strongly to the urban landscapes.

Keep up the great work! --Paul

-- Paul Swenson (paulphoto@humboldt1.com), April 13, 2001.

Thanks for the feedback so far... keep it coming!

It's interesting to get two such different reactions to the landscape stuff... I think I'll keep it where it is, tho-- the portraits are really the main focus of my work, and I want to have them up front and center.

I agree about the Martha caption... I was waffling back and forth about whether to include that alternate title.. I'll go back to the simple one.

About the images being dark-- I also thought about including a monitor calibration page at the beginning-- I looked at the whole series on a terrible computer lab monitor last night, and then once I calibrated it everything looked a million times better. Here's one from the government that works pretty well:

Once you're calibrated to this target, all of them (save the julia image, which frankly was just a really underexposed polaroid, which I think looks lovely dark) should look bright and balanced.

Can you two go into more detail about why you disagree about the order of the images? I'm curious about this (and I've never recieved much in the way of feedback on my Cape Cod images)...

Thanks again,

-- Josh Wand (josh@joshwand.com), April 13, 2001.

On the order thing, I think because the portraits are your stronger suit you should end with them. Musicians in performance dont start with their strongest stuff and work their way to the weakest. I don't think your landscapes (or buildingscapes) are weak either, they have a stark formalism that seems to go well with the subjects....

-- Chris Yeager (cyeager@ix.netcom.com), April 13, 2001.

I tried to look, but as of Friday, April 13 2001, 19:01 UTC your site does not seem to be responding... :-(

-- Allan Engelhardt (allane@cybaea.com), April 13, 2001.

Hmmm... it works for me right now (4:53 EST). My hosting provider can be kinda iffy sometimes, but the outages never seem to last more than a few miuntes.

-- Josh Wand (josh@joshwand.com), April 13, 2001.

I don't know if it is a problem with your scans or your prints -- but many of your pictures look much too contrasty on my monitor -- blacks without detail and highlights without detail. I am reasonably certain my monitor is OK -- your test target looks perfect on my system. Some of your landscape stuff appears to suffer from uneven development -- several of the images look darker on the right side of the frame.

The last image (a 35mm of path and trees in MA) doesn't really belong. For a presentation like this, I think you want to show 1 body of strong work to illustrate your ability to commit to producing a body of work - - you are going into an advanced class. With 2 groups of work you might be dilluting your statement a bit but if these are 2 of your favorite groups, then go for it. The last picture doesn't seem to fit into either category.

Did the teacher tell you anything about what he wanted to see in your presentation?

Very nice work. I enjoyed your portraits but hope your prints look better than your scans.

-- William Blake (linhof666@excite.com), April 14, 2001.

Well, I showed a slightly different version of this portfolio to the professor, the one and only Thomas Roma, who is no slouch-- founding contributor of DoubleTake, has had solo shows at MoMA, ICP, etc.

He has very strong personality-- I talked to a number of former students of his (unfortunately not beforehand), and he is the type who doesn't hold back criticism at all, and challenges everything you do just for the sake of challenging you. It's a "tough love" version of teaching photography, and many of his students appreciate it afterward (though not during, and not all his former students are fans).

He took my folder and speedily flipped through the 15 or so prints, looking at each one for about .33 seconds. He said he
"didn't see anything" there worth letting me into Photo II, and that "none of these would last 30 seconds in a Photo I critique." He admitted that some of the landscapes were "starting to get a little more complex," but he didn't let me into the class.

He did, however, let me sign up for Photo I-- which does not guarantee I'll get into the class. The first day of Photo I about 150 people show up, and he weeds people out so that by the end of the hour he has only the 28 people he'll let into the class left standing and with their egos intact (and sometimes not even then). He said I'll have a better chance than most of getting in, however, because of my sincere interest in photography-- he tries to weed out people who aren't serious, "the kind of people who are just the shutterbugs of their families."

It was quite the experience. I didn't take notes, but all the quotes above are as close to direct as I can remember.

I was a little miffed at the experience, seeing as he didn't take the time to look at my photos for even a second, or give me any opportunity to defend them. I gather that it's his philosophy that a good photograph should stand on its own, and not require any further context or explanation. While I don't completely agree with this idea, I can understand why as a teacher it's a useful philosophy to teach.

I wonder what you all think of my experience-- do you think he was fair? Any way I could have approached it differently? Thoughts on his philosophy (read the article linked above for additional material)?

Thanks,
--Josh

-- Josh Wand (josh@joshwand.com), April 30, 2001.

I looked at some of your portfolio. Some of the photographs I liked a lot, some I did not.

When you ask some one to critique your photos you are asking them to tell you more about themselves than about your photographs. I am telling you not about your photographs but about the visual experience I had when I looked at them. Talking about photography is not photography. It is a form of art criticism.

In today's visual market place 0.33 seconds can be a very long time. How many of the several thousand visual images that you saw today did you spend that much time on?

As for learning photography I would suggest this. Practice your technique. Get the blackest blacks you can and the whitest whites. Compose, then recompose. Find the extremes on each end of the scales and explore the ranges between them. Once you have mastered a technique move on to another. If you decide to follow a teacher, do not waste time arguing. Do what they tell you until you have acquired the technique they are guiding you toward. Do not look on things as good or bad but as have I learned or not learned. Learn all the rules, then later on your own time, break them. As you do this you will develope your own vision. When you have this vision you will not come to us and ask what we think. You will simply show us your work, knowing you have done what you set out to do.

-- Robert Boon (RBBoon@mvtel.net), May 10, 2001.

This guy sounds like a jerk- if he didnt see any potential there he wasnt looking. But didn't i say your landscapes were stronger than you thought?

On the subject of >I gather that it's his philosophy that a good photograph should stand on its own, and not require any further context or explanation.

I completley sgree with that- you have to look at your portraits from the point of view of someone who doesn't know them.... something has to be happening visually, independently of the story... hang in there-

-- Chris Yeager (cyeager@ix.netcom.com), May 01, 2001.

Personally, I feel like that's a good way to be a camera teacher - after all, a photography teacher is not a peer evaluator like a person you'd find on an internet board. They're someone that you're relinquishing control of your own vision to so that you can learn something.

Josh doesn't make it sound like the teacher was particularly harsh - just objective. I think if I was going to have the audacity to try to get into an advanced class based on the merits of my portfolio, I would either be:

1) darn sure that my portfolio quality was the kind of work that the professor would be impressed with

or

2) expecting the photography teacher to quite honestly say it's not good enough to get into an advanced photography class.

Don't get me wrong - I don't agree with tough love teaching philosophy. However, I DO agree with tough standards for getting into upper level classes. Those two things are completely different and completely unrelated.

Doing what Josh did was a gutsy thing to do and it turned out to be a great learning experience.

-- edward kang (ekang@cse.nd.edu), May 10, 2001.

In retrospect, I have a few observations:

1. My number one error in this whole exercise was to underestimate what a College-level Photo I class would be-- I was expecting a "this is what a shutter speed is; this is what an f-stop is; this is how we use contrast filters, etc" kind of affair. I thought that my technical knowledge and years of experience would place me out of any "introductory" photo class. It turned out, of course, to be something quite different-- a serious art class (he said that it was more of an art criticism class than a photography class) and one where everyone's work would be held to a very high standard (making good photographs, not simply technically good negatives and prints).
2. The portraits worked in the original context(s) in which they were presented-- a school art show, where the faces are familiar but shown in a new light, and here on the PP Forum, where I provided the all- important title to my "Martha" image. He didn't have any of that information. It turns out that while the images may have been successful in their original contexts, without additional information they were all but meaningless. I don't know if this is a failiure on my part as much as it is a lack of foresightedness; when I made the pictures I never expected the images to be viewed without their original context. In this regard the landscapes worked much better; they contain much of their context in the images themselves.
3. I don't think the professor was unduly harsh, given his expectations-- I just happened to have misunderstood the object of the course I was trying to bypass.

-- Josh Wand (josh@joshwand.com), May 14, 2001.