The pinhole box was dutifully stored in a new location. A day or two later I came across a Graflex “23″ roll back. This was an odd one that someone had once grafted onto a Busch 6×9 Pressman, and then abandoned. The camera had come to me last year following a ten-year exile in someone’s garden shed.

After a mere twenty-four hours, I was able to visualise the two together as partners, and after a little hacking, screwing and filling, plus a few extra additions from the parts bin and the wood store, a new 6×9 was sitting on the tripod. (Well, since I already have an RB67 roll film holder it can be a 6×7, too.)

For a pinhole camera, that was already labour enough. But I also wanted to find a meniscus lens that could work with the new focal length – about 55mm. This is a wooden box with a fixed focal distance and I didn’t have a suitable helical, but the Pressman back was a Graflok and a view screen would be a straightforward way to check the focus of different lenses.

A couple of years ago a friend who made ground glass pieces for large format cameras sent me a couple of samples and I still had one that was just a fraction larger than 6×9. Cue a couple of 5mm strips of limewood, which is the right registration distance to support the glass, and a few other strips to make up a viewing frame.

Playing around with some glass I found that the rear element of an 85/4.5 Agnar was actually quite suitable for long distance if turned around. Fortunately the threads on the Isolette shutters are the same fore and aft, so I reversed the lens in its casing and put it on the front of the camera. That worked, and so well that it could be focused from infinity down to about 2.5 metres by unscrewing it to the limit, though with quite a lot of swoosh at the edges.

Another rear element that fits the thread actually gives a close focus range of around 150mm – very useful for extreme close-ups. I don’t remember where this one came from, possibly off a defunct Bessa 66 as it’s marked with a V. number (Voigtlander) on the casing, in which case it would have been a 75/3.5.

The middle element of the Agnar also has the same outer thread and the lens unit can also be unscrewed. In the past I’ve always inserted pinholes into the rear of the shutter, but this time, taking advantage of the technology on offer, the pinhole is now sitting in the second element mount and can be quickly swapped with either of the funky singlets.

Almost any camera with a normal lens mount can also be used as a pinhole just by making a pinhole body cap to replace the lens, but typically a mod cam is designed with just one style in mind. Not this one.

V. Lens

Pinhole

Agnar Rear Element (Reversed)

Agnar Rear Element (Reversed)

And doing what it was designed for.

Well, that’s one old part that can be reused. Cue a broken Cobra tripod, the front fork from a Houghton Folding Klito, (1920′s), the ground glass and fresnel from a Speed Graphic, (1950′s), the viewfinder from a set of Taron auxiliary lenses, (1960′s), the 1/4″ thread socket from some unknown ever-ready case, the film back from an alternative version of the Neretta 4×5 that was never completed, knobs leftover after building the Surveyor 4×5, a mini ballhead, and of course some new bellows which were made for the purpose. Creating a new camera out of old parts just needed a little cobbling, and some casting.

Using a tripod leg instead of a standard focusing rail seemed feasible but I needed some way of attaching the rear standard, hence the casting. Some piece of plumbing might have done it but I couldn’t find any shapes that would fit securely. I still had some Britannia metal, (lead-free pewter), lying around from casting small sculptures years ago. It does not have a high tensile strength, but it melts at a low temperature, is robust enough to bear weight and easy to fashion.

So first the mould.

Then the hot metal.

And finally, the functional base for the camera.

Bit by bit it assembled itself, almost. The rest was aluminium strip from B&Q. I prefer brass, but that would be too expensive for a parts cam!

The front standard has a free range of movements due to the ballhead, including rise and fall on the fork. The rear has forward tilt, and just a very slight degree of backward tilt. The extension runs from 135mm to 250mm for macro work. I also have two other lenses that cover 4×5, a 90mm and a 150mm, but they usually live on other cameras.

Although constructed as a 4×5, in a studio context I might just as often use a 6×7 roll film back. And Polaroid’s are not impossible, (pun, geddit?)

OK, boring test shots on a dark and rainy winter’s day, on Wephota NP27, an ISO 400 sheet film, dev’d in Rodinal.

One shot straight …

And one shot twisted !!

A test out of doors.

And finally some serious work.

While these shots were taken in the street or are of the street and people they cannot all be strictly categorised as ‘street’ photography. Some might better be described as documentary, even though they are single images and do not have a storyline attached, and others are really portraits of people I’ve come across. This sits fine with me, as I’m not in any sense a journalist and my background lies in the visual arts. Ideally, a single image will contain enough narrative content to stand on its own.

It was in 1982 that I first got a decent SLR and started shooting in black and white. News photography informed my perspective but I hadn’t studied it in any depth. I wanted to record what I saw and create pictures that could stand as independent compositions.

I also shot quite a lot of colour slide film which, to be honest, is a huge regret, not least because the colour dyes do not stand up well to frequent changes of temperature and humidity.

There have been long gaps when I concentrated more on landscape, architecture or sculpture, or portraits of people I knew rather than any street work. But sometimes there’s also been public disapproval to deal with. In the south of Oman, for example, there was a guy who shouted at me not to point my camera at him – and he had to shout because he was over a hundred yards away!

I’ve had that reaction in the UK as well, though usually from people who were worried I might be working for the Department of Work and Pensions.

In 2002, I started developing my own film and scanning negatives which obviously gave me greater freedom in post-processing, and larger formats and learning to pull exposures offered greater tonality. Given all the possible combinations of film and developer, this also gave me the opportunity to experiment with a range of film speeds.

I’m now on my second DSLR, but the more expensive that investment becomes the more I tend to use film for choice, and where possible a 6×6 TLR. And sensor noise, of course, is no substitute for grain.

Performers and people who are working are obviously an easy target for the photographer on the street, but I have a particular interest in musicians, especially migrants. Having worked in Europe as an illegal immigrant, (this was through the mid seventies, before we had freedom of movement across the EU) I’m aware of the difficulties some of them face.

In many of the shots there is very little happening, people are absorbed in their own discussions or just standing around lost in their own thoughts. At times, the subject may show some slight reaction to the fact of my observing them.

What I am doing can probably be described as ‘pointing’ the camera, selecting views or scenes that I feel worthy of note and worth sharing. But while the portrait or the person may be the starting point, I try to be rigorous in controlling the composition, using what I have learned not just from other photographers but also from the past ten thousand years of picture making.

Black and white photography did not then die away or disappear with the advance of colour, rather it retained its appeal and maintained its own niche as a fine art or photojournalistic medium. And since colour development and printing with film is more complex than black and white, b&w photography has usually been considered more accessible to the amateur who can retain control of each step from first exposure to final print.

A colour photo contains a great deal of the same information that we take for granted in our everyday lives. No great leap of faith is required to understand a straightforward colour snapshot, and the ‘suspension of disbelief’ (a print, after all is no more than a flat sheet of paper) is almost automatic. Advertising depends on colour photography for its impact enticing us to spend on colourful items such as food and clothes, while black and white advertising images tend to be used for more subtle or abstract aspirations.

The earliest printing techniques, (woodblock, etching, etc) were invariably monochrome, again largely for technical reasons. You could say that scratching a map in the sand (possibly the earliest use of graphics) or sketching a hunting scene on a cave wall didn’t require an elaborate colour palette; after all in the dim light of a cave using colour might seem rather pointless given that our night vision is monochromatic. But contrasting colours were used for effect seemingly as soon as painters became able to create the pigments.

Black and red ochre can be found in cave paintings from 20,000 years ago, but technological discoveries rapidly led to the use of blues and a myriad of compound colours that have remained in use for over four thousand years. Cost might have placed a limitation on the use of a few particular colours, but economics is unlikely to have been the only reason for anyone choosing to make a monochrome rather than a polychrome image.

For example, in the 14th century both monochrome and coloured frescos were used in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, a design choice that may have been intended to emphasise the narrative themes of the coloured panels. Or, since they were along the lower section of the wall, monochrome was perhaps used to suggest carved stone supports to the panels above.

Whatever the reason for such choices, monochromatic and polychromatic images have lived side by side for a long time and seem to have their own distinct values. A possible explanation for this is that looking at a black and white image is never simply a visual experience alone – we perceive the difference at an intellectual and emotional level as well. We may actually be forced to, in much the same way that a cross-processed colour photo forces us to reconsider the norms of colour association.

Apples are either green, or red, or a mixture of both colours. A colour photo that includes a bowl of apples can instantly suggest to us which are, say, Granny Smiths and which are Cox’s, and we may even find ourselves involuntarily identifying each fruit. The type and tastiness of the apples is less likely to be at the forefront of our minds when presented with a black and white image of the same bowl of fruit. Visually, the first thing of note is likely to be their size and shape as a group and the relationship between the fruit and other objects in the image.

We might then notice individual differences, and here an interesting thing happens. Certain shades of red and green convert to the same tone of grey, such that whatever the mix of apple types or skin colours they may all look identical in b&w and the only difference we are likely to notice are differences of form.

Having said that, real apples are unlikely to have exactly the same tones of grey and even a small percentage difference is very noticeable. All the same, the strongest colour contrasts, like red and green, can disappear in a black and white image, leaving only the modelling of the object and its sculptural shape as defined by the light source. Light and shadow become predominant forces in the composition and the important contrasts are tonal.

You’ll notice that in the b&w version of the shot below the tomatoes can be distinguished from the clementines by shape, texture and the reflective surface of the skins, even though Photoshop’s Eye Dropper Tool can pick out equal greys among the two types of fruit. Indeed, texture and surface are emphasised as much as overall shape in the black and white version, again a direct consequence of how the light happens to fall on the subject.

It’s sometimes suggested that a good colour image will make a good black and white image if the colour information is removed. There are many elements in the make-up of a good colour image, but interesting colour contrasts must surely be one of them. However, if the brightly contrasting greens and reds of the apple bowl are reduced to a uniform grey, one significant value of the colour image would seem to disappear. Advice like, “… the best starting point for a top-quality digital black-and-white picture is the well-composed, well-exposed RAW image file, with all its color information intact”1 is at best misleading.

A good black and white image is more likely to be defined by lines and planes of contrasting tone. Tonal differences help to emphasise form and the relative importance of differently shaped elements in the composition. This requires an element of ‘seeing’ in black and white, as much for the viewer as for the photographer, though the photographer also needs to develop an eye for strong forms.

This is echoed by many photographers in forums across the web who write that it’s very difficult to shoot a successful b&w image if they are not thinking in black and white. Post-processing software doesn’t make that challenge any easier either, since a successful colour shot may prove very muddy when converted.

There is, I think, a quality of visual literacy that comes into play with black and white images that is different to our response to straight colour photography. Precisely what that is, I don’t know, but it may involve an awareness of, or sensitivity to form and shape that operates in a different way to the common and casual reaction to colour. We may need to look more closely to interpret the details of the scene just as we have to look more carefully when walking around at night. Or perhaps the fiction of the photograph becomes more persuasive as we move further away from direct representation. As Steve Fell so neatly puts it, “You look at a colour image, but read a black & white one.”

In the image below (shot on black and white film) there may be many interesting varieties of fruit and vegetables but it is the overall pattern of their arrangement that matters. The grid of wooden boxes presents a contrast to the jagged lines in the stack of plastic crates, which themselves contrast with the brickwork and floor tiles that surround them. Against these patterns the two men stand out in their plain shirts, the only textures being the shadows created by the light falling on the folds of cloth.

Pink, blue, green or orange, the colours of the shirts have no relevance here. Of course, no one would choose to live in a world without colour, but the b&w image provides an experience that a colour version cannot approach. It is unreal, in the sense that there is only a tenuous link to the reality we see with our eyes. Perhaps in some way the black and white photograph creates a more honest fiction, stripped of superficialities, encouraging us to focus on forms and the fundamental meaning of the image.
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1 John Beardsworth (2007) “Advanced Digital Black & White Photography”. ILEX.

Stephen Fell Photography: Stephen Fell

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lascaux_painting.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Giotto_-_Scrovegni_-_-25-_-_Raising_of_Lazarus.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Giotto_-_Scrovegni_-_-43-_-_Justice.jpg

I also took a Rolleiflex from 1934. I particularly like the square format and using a TLR at chest height is very suitable for discreet shots in the street.

Montevideo is a fascinating city of contrasts and in the two and a half weeks I shot over a dozen rolls of film and several hundred digital images.

2001
I moved from Malaysia to Singapore and through the year made brief trips to Australia, India and the USA carrying a Fuji Finepix 40i with me. This was all of 2.4 Megapixels – more computing technology than it took to get a man on the moon, but half the power and resolution of the meanest camera phone today. It was very small, so apart from the minimal memory (a 16 Megabyte card) there was little excuse for not carrying it everywhere.

Especially on the street. A flat tyre meant a twenty minute stop by a busy roundabout in downtown Mumbai while the driver changed the wheel. This family lived and worked by the roundabout, begging or scavenging through the day. The older women were preparing vegetables while the kids milled around, some collecting water, others looking after their babies.

2002
Clearly the image quality of these early consumer digital cameras was not high and they were no match for the image resolution obtained from a 35mm negative. Pentax had recently brought out a new pro-spec film camera, the MZ-S, so I bought one together with the 77mm Limited lens.

During the four years I’d spent in Oman I’d been shooting mostly colour negatives and relying on the shop for prints. The question was how to gain more control without having any access to a darkroom. Scanning film was now a realistic possibility and the idea of shooting pictures on film and printing them with an inkjet was appealing. I was also projecting a lot of images for my students and scanning 35mm negatives gave better results than shooting with the Fuji.

When I started a photography group at the college we went out to view as many exhibitions as possible. News photographs were of particular interest and the majority of these were shot on film, drum scanned and printed with ink.

2003
A post on an online photography forum described using software to manipulate an image to make it look like a soft focus pinhole photo. It had that dreamy, ethereal quality associated with mid 19th century photographs and I wondered how much time and money had been invested for the photographer to do this on a computer. Hundreds of dollars, perhaps, compared with the minimal cost of a do-it-yourself pinhole camera.

I made a couple of pinhole cameras as trials before designing a practical wooden box that would take a 4”x5” Polaroid holder. This meant learning several new skills all at once: making pinholes and handling Polaroids, as well as brushing up on my woodwork.

The Polaroids got me curious about using 120 roll film instead of the ‘miniature’ format of 35mm. I found a couple of second-hand camera dealers in town and tried out a Pentacon Six and a Rolleicord but neither were in good condition.

The other option was to build one. The Garden Camera was a working toy – fun but somewhat impractical. I made two backs for it so I could shoot sheet and roll film.

I bought a couple of diopter lenses and old shutters and started shooting. The advantage of these shutters from the 1940s was that they were leaf shutter designs and had a flash sync that was much higher than the typical SLR, /500 instead of /60. This was generally better for studio work with flash lighting.

2004
I came across a 6.5×9 Voigtlander Vag, made around 1929, and thought it might be worth trying. The camera had a couple of sheet film backs but a Mamiya RB67 roll film back proved easy to modify so I could use regular 120 roll film. This was my first ‘classic’ camera and it made me think a lot more about the impact of technology, in particular the development of shutter types and lens designs. It was not a convenient camera to use, but the sharpness of the Skopar lens made it worthwhile.

Returning to the UK after eight years in the Middle East and South East Asia meant I was in for a degree of reverse culture shock. Snow was the least of the problems.

2005
This was the year of the Surveyor, a 4”x5” folding view camera that I’d started designing in Singapore and only finished building after arriving back in the UK. Working with camera movements was instructive and offered a completely different level of control through selective focus.

Normally the lens plane is exactly parallel to the film plane. By tilting and/or swinging both planes in contrast to each other it’s possible to reduce the plane of focus to a line or even a single point. View cameras were developed to achieve total focus throughout the image area, something that is often difficult in architectural or product photography, but by using this capability in reverse the most important feature of the subject can be isolated.

2006
No single camera can be expected to perform well in every situation since different problems tend to require different solutions. The issue is sometimes the negative size – finding the right compromise between speed of use (35mm) and tonality (large format). One alternative was to use sheet film in a point-and-shoot camera and with this in mind I developed the Neretta.

A 90mm lens I’d bought for the Surveyor turned out to be perfectly suited to using on the pinhole box I’d made a few years earlier. At f.22 the massive depth of field meant that no focusing mechanism was necessary – everything from 3 metres to infinity was in focus. If the expression, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” comes to mind, don’t worry, as a friend has already made that suggestion. In certain respects my development as a photographer seemed to be mirroring the evolution of photography itself.

And I now had a darkroom.

2007
At the same time, I was discovering the textural range offered by some older lens designs for large, medium and small format film: doublets, triplets and Tessars, as well as a wealth of later designs produced in the 1960s.

This might be seen as more choice than any photographer really needs but lenses are like a painter’s brushes and can be selected for their tone and texture. There are two areas where lenses might differ in an interesting way, one is sharpness or resolution, the other is contrast. Older lens designs had a greater variety of aberrations and the designers of the time worked hard to counter these using different kinds of glass and complex multiple elements.

Many of the early designs that have long since been left behind can still be appreciated for creative applications. For 35mm cameras in M42 mount, the Meyer Orestor 2.8/100 is a favourite portrait lens.

2008
Street photography comes in several flavours. At its most rigorous and exclusive it may appear to be quite random in the selection of subject matter, loose in its framing and reflective of the chaotic nature of day-to-day activities. The more poetically minded photographer might look for visual humour in bizarre juxtapositions, highlighting the incongruities of daily life. The sights, signs and people of the city are key to the character of a place and this can be captured by the inconspicuous photographer.

My own interest lies more in portraits of people in a given context, which is one of the reasons I often photograph street musicians. Where they place themselves to perform is their stage, or at least the photographer can make it so. Shots of this kind are part portrait and part documentary since the individual and their activity are both important in composing a structured image.

The rectangular format is by far the most common, but sixty or seventy years ago, before the rise of the ubiquitous SLR, the 6x6cm square held sway. Cameras like the Rolleiflex offer a different angle of view for the photographer since the camera is generally held at chest height rather than at eye level. Not only is the square an interesting compositional challenge, but the lower viewpoint of a TLR can be very appropriate for shooting in the street.

2009
My involvement in local activities in the UK was gradually starting to increase and I photographed a number of events throughout the year. At this point I was invariably using a Pentax K10D with a 43mm Limited lens whenever I needed to work in colour. One downside of the digital revolution was, of course, the increased cost of processing colour film.

In Wales, street performers include jugglers and face painters as well as musicians. This shot has a special resonance for me as it brings to mind Oliviero Toscani’s photography for Benetton in the 1980s and ‘90s. Not the advertising campaigns as such, but the sharp colour contrasts he used to illustrate collaboration between people of different ethnic backgrounds.

2010
There are many ways to make a portrait. It can be direct or oblique, depending on the relationships that can be observed between the subject and their environment or created between the subject and the photographer. One might wonder at the meaning of a portrait of a person in which the face is not visible. But much as we are attuned to read the face of the subject, there is more in the structure of a portrait than might be read from facial features alone – poise and posture together form a dynamic relationship with the surroundings anchoring the subject in the frame. At its best this can become the three-way rapport to be found at the heart of documentary and environmental portraiture.

Choice of kit is important, if only for ease of use. The shot below was taken with a Pentax K7 and the 43mm Limited lens, the crop factor making it equivalent to a 65mm. The sensor on today’s digital SLR is now capable of fully displaying the resolution of the lens, putting it on a par with medium format. And where colour and tone are concerned very fine control is now possible using processing software.

At the same time, I was also shooting on black and white film, (Fuji Acros) with the Orestor 2.8/100 and a Pentax MZ-5n. Each combination of recording medium and lens has its own signature and technologies that go back a hundred years or more may still find their place according to context of the shot and the vision of the photographer.

For the coming ten years? Well, there’s a range of subject matter and equipment that I feel quite happy with and I’ll continue working with these, unless new challenges demand a different approach.

Over the past year and a half I’ve been shooting circus performers in south Wales – primarily poi spinners. Poi spinning originates in a Maori tradition from New Zealand, but in the transition to contemporary circus it has been updated to include LED glow lights as well as fire.

The image incorporates compositional elements that I find interesting, and which have been important to me for a long time. One aspect is the theatrical stage setting, another is the use of an expressive figure. I worked in figurative and abstract sculpture for some years and generally want to explore similar themes in my photographic work.

When sculpting I’d quite often use news photos as source material. This shot by Felipe Caicedo Chacon is a news photo from November 1985 showing one of the survivors of a volcanic eruption that left 20,000 people dead from a mudslide in Armero, Columbia.

At that time, 25 years ago now, I did a series of sketches based on the shot that I’d seen in a magazine.

I used images like this because the figure has more depth than a straightforward art pose. It could be described as just a body in motion and therefore appropriate material to work with, but for me photojournalism carries a lot more weight than fine art. The human figure describing lines in space can be very moving, creating a narrative of emotion.

Eighteen months ago in July 2009, I was wandering around Llandovery in west Wales when I heard drums. I used to go to drumming workshops so the sound is an instant call signal for me. When I got to the source of the music I found a group of street performers.

I was intrigued by the creative possibilities of this kind of performance because of the continuous movement of the artists. It was musical and rhythmic rather than static or posed. I got talking to Sian Brown about the bigSMALLevents group she had founded and she invited me to photograph two other events that summer.

There’s obviously a huge difference between shooting daylight figures and fire at night. The backdrop is important because it creates a stage setting while controlled lighting can emphasize the balletic qualities of the performer.

The silhouette is one way of achieving this, at least, if you have an appropriate sky. Or you can use the lighting provided by both the fire poi and the on-camera flash.

You’ll note that a slow shutter speed captures the trail of flame while the performer is illuminated by flash. You can also see that the chain is captured at the head of the trail by using rear, or second curtain flash sync.

The next three shots are all from one event, Hay-on-Fire, in October, 2009.

Working closely with Nic Hemsley of Organised Kaos in Pontardawe meant I could track an entire show from preparation to closure.

I was able to concentrate on shooting individual performers but at the same time I wanted to ensure that I could fit them into their setting. This has always been my practice in shooting street musicians since the spot where they choose to perform becomes their stage.

There are several things going on at once in this shot. Between the banners on the left, the main subject is working his triple poi to the end, as in a moment he’ll run out of paraffin. In the distance, two performers, one of them half naked, are nonchalantly watching another poi spinner as they stand in front of a towering burning man. It’s as bizarre as it’s dramatic.

It’s also interesting to work with pairs of performers who have perfected a duet routine. These were shot in Carmarthen, and working in a city centre created a particular challenge with the bright neon lights in the background. I have another shot where there is a huge, blue neon advertisement for MFI in the background – a serious distraction from the poise of the spinners!

Sometimes the backdrop could complement the performer.

Or it could completely upstage them.

I use flash a great deal in conjunction with a slow shutter speed. I’ve tried various combinations of hand-held flash, but in the end having the flash gun mounted straight on the camera hotshoe works perfectly well and saves a lot of grief with connections, especially on cold winter nights.

With good background lighting flash may not be appropriate. In this shot there was still plenty of light in the evening sky and the light of the poi themselves was enough to illuminate the spinners with the slow shutter speed.

Other times, the lack of flash may be purely fortuitous, as in this image when I took a panning shot before the flash had recharged.

Public performances of this kind are chaotic and quite often, since these are in open areas rather than a theatre, there may be a number of changes to the running order between rehearsal and performance. It’s never going to be like a scripted TV shoot. Quite often you won’t know what’s going to happen next or what sort of photo opportunities there will be.

Shots like these don’t represent what the audience sees. The spectators are usually too far away to see the details, but also the spectator doesn’t have the advantage of slow motion vision.

Right up close, the photographer is seeing the action from the inside and can create their own micro version of the stage show.

Even when you get to know one performer well, catching the right moves in the right way contains an element of luck and sometimes the rate of wastage is high. They move fast and you’re watching a trail of light. You might see where the movement starts but you cannot know for sure where it will end one fifth of a second later.

The subject might even end up half out of the frame, or another performer may have stepped in where you weren’t expecting them. I have no qualms about cropping as necessary to create a balanced image.

For me personally, the right shot incorporates several elements together. Ideally, the face of the fire spinner should be clearly visible, and holding a positive expression. It also helps if clothing and makeup are appropriate. As much as circus jugglers these performers are also actors.

Focus should be sharp and the exposure should be good, without too much adjustment to Curves as you don’t want to introduce noise into the file. Though some Curves adjustment may be necessary if there is a lot of smoky haze in the air.

The position of the subject relative to the background is crucial, and the background itself has to support the subject, either as complement or contrast to the main action.

Finally, the pose of the subject has to be meaningful to the viewer in some way or other. It must communicate through its own physical presence and work as an element of the overall composition.

But the artist, the decision-making addict, must make creative choices alone. The artist takes responsibility for their own decisions, accepting the risk of failure because the challenge of creating new knowledge offers the reward of better understanding the world we live on. What we observe around us we draw into ourselves as stimulus, inspiration or provocation, to spit out later as creative output.

It is because of these conflicting stresses that I admire the duet as much as the solo. The great solo may be a tour-de-force. A solo gives free rein to explore and push boundaries, but it can be isolated and limiting if it means that we ignore the background rhythms that give the solo its context, if not also its meaning.

The duet, whether two voices or a pair of instruments, has another quality beyond the performance aspect of the solo. The duet is built through communication and collaboration. The language, the tone, the rhythm must all be in sync, and finding that syncronisation is a huge challenge given our individuality. No two people can really be said to speak the same language – we always compromise, making allowances for understanding and being flexible in how we express ourselves to ensure that the partner has understood.

Social constructs show how much we depend on compatibility and synergy. The aircraft falls quickly from the sky if the fuel tank is empty, though that is a mechanical and inflexible rule. The duet is an interplay of flexibility.

It demonstrates performance, collaboration and dialogue. The ability of two singers to generate and control rhythms that stem from two differing decision-making processes is hugely complex but immensely rewarding as an aspect of our humanity.

I tend to avoid the term art as much as possible. The standard definition appears to be that it is art if the maker/presenter says it is. At best this is narcissistic, at worst it can give an inflated value to a pile of poo. And to speak of the creative arts would seem a tautology, though we do, accepting the implication that some arts are not creative.

Art and artist are words that we must necessarily use whether we are discussing painting, printing or photography, when we want to refer to a product, a genre or a person. Art and non-art are held to be polar opposites, whatever non-art might be. But the word art contains implied exclusions, including the suggestion that anything derived from a scientific approach cannot be art. Well, tell that to the Raku potter.

But beyond fine art, or art that is an end in itself and serves no practical purpose as an object, the art word is as relevant to the cook and pastry maker as it is to the mathematical theorist as it is to the sculptor or musician. Or the dancer and the surfer dude. Or it should be.

My suspicion is that all this defining of terms is nothing but a smokescreen, imposed by Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci at the height of the Italian Renaissance to persuade ordinary folk that being an artist was a specialty and that the lesser arts were mere crafts. Crafts can be learned, art is inspired, etc, etc. This has been continually reinforced by successive generations of Romantics who fixate on a belief in inspiration, whether as some form of external flaming tongue or as a so-called heightened state of consciousness.

I take issue with this, firstly because there are no flaming tongues and secondly, a heightened state of consciousness, (an unfortunate expression) is nothing more than an alteration in brain chemistry.

The first time I saw Tony Smith’s Die, a sculpture created in 1962, I thought to myself that at last the Renaissance was over. This was an anti-art, not in the sense of a found object like Duchamp’s Fountain, but rather an object intentionally created to compress all that mankind had learned since we first scratched out a hunting map in the soil. It seemed like a black hole that had sucked all knowledge inside itself and closed it off – and a fitting end to both Modernism and the Renaissance.

I’m exaggerating a little, perhaps, but the cube was both art and ‘thing’. The only meaning it could have was whatever the viewer sought to impose on it, since, apart from its cuboid form, it offered nothing. I daresay it prompted arguments over whether it was art or not, and it might still today, but it was clearly a product of Smith’s own creativity. And that is perhaps the key point to explore.

Creativity is what matters. And indeed there is a scale of creativity, though a little different from what I described at the beginning. Not from mundane to genius, but from indecisive to decisive. This has been known for some time, but it required the insight of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson to bring the idea back into public consciousness. He found it in the writings of Cardinal de Retz (17th c.) who had written of “un moment decisif”. Cartier-Bresson elaborated on this, saying that for him, “photography is the simultaneous recognition, in the fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organisation of forms which give the event its proper expression.” A faint irony being that photography has had a hard time being accepted as an art at all.

Creativity and being creative is all to do with making decisions, decisions that are frequently complex, though not always calculated. Working with my students I can often see how indecision prevents them from making progress. They worry and fret about expectations, about results, about effect rather than form, surface rather than structure. Drawing a line, (here, not there) or constructing a phrase (to be, or not to) requires a decisive action from the nervous system to the muscles. The impulse may stem from the imagination, from the memory, or from the senses – from ear to mouth or eye to hand. Creation demands decisions.

Creative people (or, if you will, people who are engaged in a creative activity) are involved in making decisions in every moment of their work. The artist is simply one who is addicted to making decisions.

The frequency of fresh decisions has a parallel in the complexity of the work. Jazz improvisation may be a good example of high frequency decision making, though any fine focus or collaborative work will be equally demanding. And to the decision-making addict, the greater the demand the greater the satisfaction. This is why the snapshot, even though it is accepted as vernacular art, can be placed at some distance from the creative photograph. Almost by definition, the snap involves relatively few decisions.

The inversion of creativity, the so-called writer’s block, is less a lack of inspiration than a disengagement of the decision-making faculty. Time for digestion must be given its due. If you watch how animals hunt, you will note that they will usually study their prey for a long while before taking action. The action they take, to track, chase, seize and kill is a sequence of critical decisions. Eating and sleeping follow.

In photography, the decision-making processes can be quite complex in arranging the final image. There are many steps that lead through opportunity and selection, including proficiency and vision, towards whatever decisions will yield satisfaction. Creative decisions are demanding, and sometimes difficult to make, but there are few things we do that can say more about us as creative beings than how we arrive at a decision.