Ugly Hedgehog Newsletter wrote:
Hi,
I am new to this. I am used to being the person getting photographed. I modeled for a few years so I love photography. I want to be the one that takes the pictures now and I really could use some pointers on a few things.
Like a good photoshop and how to do a few things with my camera. Anyones help would be appreciated.
Tasha
Tasha, I chaired the department of photography in San Antonio, Texas at the Southwest School of Art. My long experiences with students revealed certain great insights to teaching participants to both basic and advanced classes and workshops. What I learned as an educator in the field of photography is that women and men have very different interests in how women approach photography and how a woman deals with photographic ideas and issues.
Women in general are not driven by the technology nor the mechanics of the photographic experience. Books to study and review would be the life of two of the most dynamic women who ever made their mark in the area of photography. First Juliet Margret Cameron and then Margret Bourk-White are two of the truly greats historically. A contemporary of the modern 20th Centry was Imogene Cunningham. There are of course others, but these women not only carved out powerful niches in photography, they changed the way all photographers respond to the making of photographic images.
Do not get caught up in the technology and skill craft of photography, that will come as you begin to define what and where you find your path in the creative pursuit of the creation of images.
Women have been defining and have been the great pathfinders of photography, they have lead the way and shown men what the art of photography really can be. Personally, I watched Imogene Cunningham mold and direct the F64 group and help Ansel Adams to clarify his path to greatness. Portraiture would not be what it is today if it were not for Juliet Margret Cameron. A position held by greats like Arnold Newman. Photojournalism would never have been what it became in the 20th century but for Bourk-White, she remolded that approach in ways that are still taught today.
Oddly enough, the great world of fashion photography was as much created by the women who modeled for the many great male photographers of the post World War era of the 40's and 50's and into today. Models are not just 'clothes horses' for fashion, they educated and trained the photographers and shifted the idea of the modern ideas of portraiture to shift from head and shoulders' presentation to the face as the defining power of the human conditions, clothes here then part of the identity of the face of humanity, the individual.
Women are truly at the cross roads of defining our culture and that culture is so bound to photography and the photographic experance that it has become the primary point of what humanity is and will be.
Remember this quote from over a hundred years ago, "The illiterates of the future will not be those who cannot read, rather it will be they who cannot make a photograph."