'The Brood'

The nigh is late in holiday season, relatives have been visited, presents of minor value

given the young ones, mom is absolutely exhausted, giving away her authority more

than usual, and the youngsters know that, but they gather around her in their

rambunctiousness that shows their attachment and their love. Mission accomplished

for mom and the New Year's holiday. Your ratings, critiques and observations are

invited and most welcome. If you rate harshly,very critically, or wish to make a

remark, please submit a helpful and constructive critique; please share your

photographic knowledge to help improve my photography. Thanks! Enjoy! john

Nicely captured.

Thanks!

 

It should be very obvious now that I see life in a very different way than many; life is a series of stages, and my actors and models are really dawn from  real life.  They're so very much better than I could dream up if I were writing or directing a movie!

 

I never could have thought up this scene.

 

Or had this interaction without a camera.

 

Have a best new year; I appreciate your critiques and knowing your thoughts about my photos.  

 

john

 

John (Crosley)

Good shot, John and I agree with you about the constantly changing world which seems to have been created for each of us alone. There is beauty and ugliness and pathos and joy and each sees what he is destined to see. I photograph almost exclusively in my neighborhood and every day is a new feast but only if I pay attention and maintain an appetite for life. All the best for 2016. The numbers mount up, don't they? But still a lot of images yet to be captured.

Life for a street photographer is a smorgasbord.  I can spend days or even weeks just reviewing 100 of my downloads without even working up those photos I've missed -- just identifying those I'd like to work up.  That ignores going out and taking new ones.  No wonder Garry Winogrand died leaving so many rolls of film undeveloped and so many, many rolls unreviewed, with the process still ongoing carried on by his ex-wife, so I understand.

 

It's just ongoing, and I am still uncovering gems from my first year of taking photos that are getting highest ratings i could not then Photoshop, or that I just did not then see the value of.

 

This photo is different, though; I think it has great artistic value and is full of varying and interesting content through these subjects' looks and more so because they appear to be interacting with me.  That's far from the 'stealth' that some feels goes hand in hand with 'street' photography, but I just don't care; I'll do it my way, whether my subject(s) are aware or not.

 

This photo's taking and posting is taken and shows a love of humanity, whether or not I'd love to invite these people over for a barbecue or dinner party.   They're not the people I think I'd want to discuss modern economics or politics with, but I enjoy them as fellow humans who brightened my day (and the man sitting next to me who observed how our antics brightened up his as well).

 

If there were a contest I were to enter, to show my best, most interesting work, I think this would be in my short list -- it's just that different and interesting (to me at least, regaqrdless of ratings which often are spot on for traditional photos.)

 

Have a good -- no -- wonderful New Year, Jack, and thanks for your continuing contributions and our dialog here which I always find enlightening.

 

john

 

John (Crosley)

 

 

Hello John,

I always find this spontaneous joyous expression of people in your portraits when they are looking straight at your camera. This one is no exception. Usually when you point camera at people, they become conscious. How you manage to loosen them up is a great art of yours.

 

By the way, there are actually five faces in this image, including the one in the window.

You make an excellent point -- one in my vanity/modesty (a combination, however bizarre), I've been loathe to point out myself.

 

I think you could only explain the reaction by having been there, because it didn't start out that way; I was at first regarded as a either a curiosity or a 'strange man', but I learned a lesson from one of my children's old (she wasn't old, but long ago) nannies.

 

She wouldn't say to my children, 'time for your bath,' when bath time came, but instead 'who wants to play mermaid?'.  

 

She had what I call THE GIFT.

 

I didn't.

 

But I learned from her, and I think it shows when you look at the spontaneity of those who regard me (in selected photos).

 

I still get some harsh glances from time to time, but the Ukraine people are not warriors or hostile people and for the most part are intellectually curious and admire both Americans and those who take photos with 'expensive' equipment, though mine is not always even as expensive as a good smartphone depending on the outing and what I've chosen that day.

 

That's a very fine compliment you've given me, and I'll wear it as a badge of honor when people start telling me that street shooters are loathsome people who hang around in shadows, 'stealing souls' and trying to embarrass people by surreptitiously taking their photos.

 

I take my photos with honor and am proud of what I do; something that was not always the case, but I preserve for today's audience, and for the future (as much as these survive, which I hope) very special moments that I saw, special looks, special relationships between people, people and objects and just objects -- a sort of 'visual intelligence' that is not easily learned and is a special gift I didn't even know I had until the first day I held my first camera (and the day I saw my first roll developed with one 'winner' -- a photo I still show today with my best.

 

Have a wonderful New Year.  

 

Thanks for a well made comment.  Raters are NOT in love with this photo, but frankly I am not deterred, and I would post it again and again, 'Ground Hog Day' style. ;~))  Frankly for expressions, it's a very 'dense' and thus 'rich' photo, and its triangular composition to me is very interesting in itself.  

 

Best to you.

 

john

 

John (Crosley)

This isn't a photo of great wealth.

 

This isn't a photo of poverty with beggars asking for sustenance or shelter.

 

This isn't a photo of social climbers.

 

Or even 'down-and-outers'.

 

It's just a photo of people being people.

 

These are 'everyman', though not rich, they seem to me to be very 'rich in spirit', and I hope I captured that.

 

For me, as it seems you both have written, in that regard, it's a joyous photo.

 

It's a celebratory photo.

 

Mankind and especially children are diverse, and in my photos I try to celebrate that; my subjects are almost always white is only because of the geography and the inhabitants.  If I were in Africa, India, Sri Lanka or the Middle East, my subjects' skin would have different hues.   In fact, that is so much of the time when I photograph in Los Angeles, for there I tend to stay out of the wealthier neighborhoods, because i find them pretty boring.

 

I grew up when the US was mostly white and also on the West Coast where there wasn't much thought of ethnicity, but at the same time citizens of all hues and countries came into my family's house for university work my mother did, and no one ever said a disparaging word in public or private in my household that I knew.

 

I also grew up Middle Class when that really existed instead of the growing oligarchy one finds today, at least in the US.  I had numerous chances to try to be in that oligarchy and turned them down flat, instinctively.  A broker who owned a huge nationwide stock brokerage firm literally offered me a yacht and a huge house if I continued to show enough interest in his daughter to marry her.  

 

I vanished.  

 

She was sweet, charming, and smart, but I could never love her, and I never loved money enough to be a climber who compromised love.

 

In Ukraine (and neighboring Russia) oligarchy is both an undisputed fact and, at least in Ukraine, a bone of contention, but the USA, where the top 400 wealthiest families control so much wealth, it's a growing thorn in society as well as the body politic.

 

Sam Walton, before he became his own sort of oligarch and when first founding the Wal-Mart mammoth retail chain when I was briefly but very intensively a business journalist, used to call me (or me him), and we'd often speak twice weekly often at length.

 

He's dead, and his entire extended family has little connection with its roots, in my view.

 

I vowed at Columbia and even as I watched Sam Walton grow Wal-Mart, I'd never lose connection with my roots. Even before when I was at the seat of power as student  assistant to two different Vice Presidents of Columbia University, NYC, one of the stalwarts of the Ivy League, where I attended undergraduate classes and graduated.  I saw and lived day to day where the mammoth and prestigious university's power was wielded, warned them of impending student unrest that resulted in riots and cost the university president (Grayson Kirk) his job.

 

They ignored me saying it could never happen.

 

In between matriculation and graduation, thanks to rioters shutting down the entire university (not just my 4,000 student anchor, Columbia College), but the entire 25,000+ graduate student campus, I had a chance in the interregnum (1) to go to Viet Nam as a merchant seaman (with a shipload -- almost put a 't' there) of bombs (2) Left ship in Viet Nam, and transformed into a freelance 'combat photographer', (3) returned to the US and freelanced campus riots and uprisings, contributing photos to both AP and UPI, then went to work trading stocks for a S.F. Montgomery Street securities firm, not knowing that AP was processing my photo job application and their board was waiving hiring rules to hire me as a photographer with no university degree (4) I got hired by AP as a photographer, and almost the same day at a staffer's recommendations went to the Henri Cartier-Bresson traveling exhibition in a famous San Francisco museum,, met the ornery old gent, HCB, himself who advised me 'shoot for yourself' and told me the AP would have me shooting sports (true), so (5) I went back and before there was any photo assignment I quit my neophyte photographer's job, but (6) AP made me into a writer, and within a day my stories were going nationwide and in two, worldwide . . .and me with absolutely NO training ("Sink or Swim, kid!', my editor and co-workers told me my first day as a writer), and after a stint in S.F., then Reno, AP moved me to (7) AP world headquarters, NYC as an editor where I also sat with the their general manager (worldwide boss) and world department heads planning the next day's news 'budget', and in my final year as a journalist (until later in life), 8. left AP which had suggested/almost promised me a chance to be boss of entire AP in the far future, and at the new job I earned four times my prior AP  salary at a business magazine (turning down an editorship of 'Business Week') then (8) went to law school on the West Coast (Silicon Valley) and (9), and after getting licensed, law occupied the next 17 years of my life, with almost no photography.

 

In between AP and while working for the business magazine, then in a 'year off' just to go back to Columbia, I was able to complete my studies at Columbia and get my degree, and then was from an undergraduate perspective an 'old man', but very, very, very much more experienced and hence 'wiser'.  (I was older than many faculty members, though I was in my mid 20s.). I did a lot of living early on!

 

Law school was one of the hardest things I ever did, but the first year I was in the top 10% of my class and graduated with honors, all to my very great surprise.

 

But in law, there's always some 'strategy', conniving, or figuring out who is conniving against you and/or your client.

 

Things were seldom as they appeared to the naiive.  Words and stories also meant almost everything and often the truth (for many opponents and their attorneys) was an inconvenience.

 

When you have a camera and are free to roam streets, there's just you and the honesty of the image.  

 

Feints and strategies that help as an attorney can't be underestimated in developing street shooting style and approaches to strangers, but in the end, the photo either is 'good', 'not so good', and one image might appeal to a certain audience (as this one is, I think) or not appeal to another (same with this photo) and for the overwhelming vast number of 'street' images, it's like golf, it's a shot that just exercises the shutter button.  You swing and miss or maybe give it a 'college try'  but come up with 'craps', and try again, until one day or one hour (maybe even the next shot) you may end up with a world class photo, and that photo may be a complete surprise, taken as a sudden reaction to a situation that unfolded and was recorded in less than a second.

 

I keep exercising that shutter button and every once in a while . . . . 

 

To my eyes, these people here are all of humanity, sitting on a metro bench playing their roles as humans before my eyes and my lens.

 

I'm not just recording mom and her three rambunctious kids, but all of life.

 

I try my best to make 'art' from whatever I've chosen to work with, and don't require diamond encrusted celebrities (or those with front teeth sprouting diamonds) to make photos that people will look at.  I just hope I just have the ability to identify interesting people and/or visual relationships

 

I almost never take the same photo twice, but at the same time, many can spot a photo I've taken, no matter how disparate the subject matter, by the composition and style . . . even though my work is 'all over the board' and includes a multitude of subjects/genres.

 

I identify (in some small way) with Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman who earned renown for groundbreaking work in physics, but he also spent a great deal of time in Brazil dancing the samba for a samba club for Rio de Janeiro's extravagant days' long carnival and 'parade' of samba dancers and singers.  

 

He just refused to be pigeon-holed.  Feynman understood you only get one  go-around, and there's pleasure in being able to do more than one thing well in life.  (No, I don't think anything I've done will ever earn me a Nobel Prize in anything, and do not pretend to be at Feynman's level as a person, but I do draw inspiration from the life he lead.  

 

Read 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman', by Richard Feynman, now deceased.  

 

This photo reflects the influence of those two men and a touch of wisdom learned from Sam Walton (Mr. Sam to those who knew him).

 

I put together a book in PDF format and also ready for publishing but at great expense per copy, confined to my best early work.  

 

A woman friend whose judgment I value highly today saw it (the first ever to have a look) and said "'this is way 'retro'"!), and I am sure she meant it in the most flattering way,

 

it's the same way I take photos today, for part of my work.

 

I'd be proud  if I could only take photos in that style, but then it was ages between good or great photos, there was no money,  even film was prohibitively e

I can only wax rhapsodic so much in one evening.  The Arbusesque (is there such a word?) expressions, the poses, the body language, the weary but loving look on the mother's face (what else could she be?), and the juxtaposition of oddness with banal normality -- wonderful.

If I may be a photo's only fan, for I may be seeing things in a photo other critics may not see or value, but now you have proved me wrong, and happily so.

 

I am thrilled to find your critique; thrilled beyond belief.

 

Thanks so much.

 

john

 

John (Crosley)