Tag: street photography

Categories
Memories Music

The Engineering of Feeling

You’re always captive when it happens. A stoplight in the rain. A straightaway with nothing to look at but the white lines. Eight lanes of brake lights and nowhere to be but exactly where you are. The riff starts, and you’re not driving anymore so much as being driven — pinned by something that arrived four decades before you got in the car.

It happened once near Havana. You were there with a camera, working the old cars — fat-fendered Chevys and Buicks, kept running past the embargo by Cuban mechanics who became, out of necessity, a nation of engineers, scavenging parts and refusing to let something good die just because the factory that made it no longer existed. You didn’t think about Tom Scholz once, photographing a ’57 Bel Air held together by stubbornness. But the two belong in the same sentence. A man in a basement in Watertown, Massachusetts, kept a song alive the same way — building the tools himself when the tools that existed weren’t good enough.

Scholz had a master’s from MIT and a day job at Polaroid, designing the instant camera that would eventually lose to the VCR. He was an engineer — the kind who solves problems by taking them apart. What he did nights and weekends for five years instead was build a recording studio in his basement and use it to construct a song about a girl he’d loved in school, inspired by an old Left Banke single that used to ambush him with longing every time it came on. He played almost every instrument himself, layering twelve-string acoustic over electric over more electric, take after take, through amplifiers he’d built because the ones on the market couldn’t get the sound in his head. By the time Epic signed the band, the label assumed the demo was already a finished master. It was — just not one made anywhere near a studio.

An engineer built the least mechanical-sounding record of 1976. Every track is stacked with the precision of someone who understood signal paths better than he understood how to be a rock star. None of it sounds calculated when it hits you. The quiet drifts a few bars, then the chorus arrives like a held breath let go — the same structural trick Kurt Cobain would later borrow, half-consciously, for “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Scholz built the explosion out of engineering. What you feel is the girl, the ache, the years.

The song is about the way music smuggles you back into a memory without asking permission. Scholz built that experience the way memory actually works — not in one clean take, but in fragments, layered over years, until the whole thing cohered into something that felt, impossibly, spontaneous. The method is the meaning. He didn’t just write a song about the past ambushing you. He built the ambush, piece by piece, until it was good enough to catch strangers in cars forty years later who never loved the same girl and never will.

Another song does this to you too, and it got there by the opposite road. “Listen to the Music” arrived almost the way lightning does. Tom Johnston wrote it in his bedroom on 12th Street in San Jose, brought it to his producer half-finished, and the band recorded it without changing a thing — no five years, no basement, no solitary engineer stacking takes until three in the morning. Its density comes from somewhere else: Patrick Simmons’ loose fingerpicking threading against Johnston’s percussive strumming, two drummers locking into a groove that shouldn’t work this easily, and one bold studio choice — a phasing effect, that underwater jet-swirl, laid over the vocals as well as the guitars, which almost nobody does. It sounds less like a song someone assembled than a room full of people who fell into the same current at once, then got bent sideways by one effect and printed.

Two songs, same seat, same stretch of road, opposite methods — one built alone across five years by a man who wouldn’t let go of a track until it was right, the other built in days by musicians whose parts happened to interlock, finished by a single flourish nobody else was doing quite that way. There’s more than one route to the kind of complexity that outlasts you. Refuse to stop. Or know exactly when to.

Categories
AI Photography

The Price of the Cold

Two men are standing close to a brick wall trying not to talk, because talking wastes what little warmth is left in a body that has been outside too long. One of them has a camera — Jerry Schatzberg, a fashion photographer. His hands are jammed half into his coat pockets between shots. The other man has his collar up around his ears and a scarf wound twice, black and white, and he is not moving much, because moving costs heat, and heat is the one thing neither of them has enough of. Schatzberg raises the camera. His fingers, by this point, are not entirely his own. When he presses the shutter there is a tremor in it he did not order and cannot undo.

The picture comes out smeared at the edges. Bob Dylan’s face, in the frame, is dissolving slightly into the gray behind him, like a man photographed through a windshield in the rain. It is, by any studio standard, a bad photograph. Schatzberg knows it’s a bad photograph. He has made a career out of not taking bad photographs.

And it became the cover of Blonde on Blonde, which is the best rock album ever recorded, and in nearly sixty years nobody has managed to improve on it by reshooting it clean. The blur isn’t a decision. It’s a symptom — of two men standing in the cold too long, of a photographer choosing, afterward, to keep the evidence of his own discomfort instead of erasing it.

There’s a difference between an accident and serendipity that I don’t think gets said out loud enough, and it matters more than it used to. An accident is the cold — involuntary, uninvited, spent before you know if it was worth spending. Schatzberg didn’t choose to shiver. His hands moved because his body was doing what bodies do at a certain temperature, and the shutter caught what his hands actually did, not what he meant to do. Serendipity is what happens next: a verdict, rendered after the fact, that the wreckage of an intention was better than the intention itself. The accident is what makes the verdict possible. Without the cold, there’s nothing to render a verdict on.

I’ve been sitting with a large language model most days for the better part of a year now, watching it write, asking it to try again, watching it try again in a way that is never quite the same and never quite different enough to matter. Somewhere upstream of me there is a number called temperature, and I will never see it. Somebody else did, once, in a meeting, and decided that the word for controlled, pre-approved, refundable randomness should be temperature — the same word for the thing that made Schatzberg’s hands shake, the same word for the actual physical stakes of standing outside too long in January without enough coat — and then set it, and moved on, and nobody in that meeting laughed, because nobody in the room had ever been cold in a way that mattered to the work.

Picture the room instead. It is climate-controlled to sixty-eight degrees, humidity held flat, year-round, by a building management system nobody thinks about until it fails. Somewhere in it, the hardware is generating your next five versions of a photograph like the one on Blonde on Blonde. Nobody in that room is going to lose feeling in their fingers today. Nobody’s collar is up. I don’t know his name — nobody outside the building does — but somebody like him tuned the sampling distribution and went home at six. That’s the guy in the good suit. He built the weather. He never once stood in it.

The small model inherits conclusions. It never inherits the cold. Whatever accidents shaped the teacher model’s own training — whatever costly friction produced the insight in the first place — the student model gets none of that weather. It gets the photograph, cropped and sharpened, with the blur removed because somebody along the way decided the blur was noise instead of signal — the way Schatzberg, a lesser photographer, might have reshot Dylan clean and thrown the bad one away. It is heir to a serendipity it never earned, because it was never present for the accident that made the serendipity possible. It is, in the most literal sense the industry means by the word, cheap.

I keep coming back to the fact that nobody at the API layer is shivering. That’s not a complaint, exactly. It’s just an observation about where the cost went. Somewhere in the training data, some human being was cold, or scared, or holding a fish that was starting to smell, or standing on a stepladder with ten minutes before the traffic came back, and that person paid a real price for a result they couldn’t yet know was good. The model downstream of all that gets the result without the price.

Two rooms, then. In one of them it is January in New York and a man’s fingers have stopped entirely obeying him. In the other it is sixty-eight degrees, always, on a Tuesday and on a Sunday and at three in the morning, and the machines are making you nine more versions of that same blur. Sixty-eight degrees. A number, upstream, that you will never see.

Categories
Aging Living San Francisco/California Street Photography

The Zone

Sail Away - San Francisco - 2014

I have been alive for nearly a third of the time this country has existed. It arrived the way facts do at a certain age, sideways, while I was thinking about something else, and it sat me down. Two hundred and fifty years, and my own decades take up a third of it — whether I meant to claim that much room or not.

I used to think the road was where I went to escape the smallness of a life. Now the road doesn’t call the way it once did. Some of that is willingness. More of it, if I’m honest, is a body that’s less steady, a bladder with a mind of its own. The body files its objections. I used to override them. I no longer do — not because I’ve grown wise, but because the overriding costs more than it used to and buys less.

But I want to tell you about what I got instead, most Fridays, for not quite a decade, because it isn’t nothing.

Doug came across on the ferry from Larkspur, and I’d meet him at the Ferry Building — watching the boat come in, watching him pick his way down the gangway with his camera bag, before either of us had said a word or made a single decision about where to walk. Then we’d head out along the Embarcadero, sometimes up into the financial district, and for the first ten minutes my mind would do what minds do. It would analyze. It would compose. There, the light coming off that glass tower, wait for the man in the overcoat to cross into it, no — too late, gone. Appraising and timing, the way I’d once weighed a stock, or a runway, or a route.

And then, without my choosing it, something released. There’s no threshold you feel yourself cross. But sometime after the tenth minute, the appraising stopped, and seeing took over. Not looking for. Not looking at. The street would stop being a set of problems to solve and become only itself: a longshoreman on a break outside a pier, a gull working the same patch of pavement three times, fog sliding under the Bay Bridge like it had somewhere to be. Doug, a few yards off, would go quiet the same way, and we’d shoot for an hour or two and then find each other again at the end of the block.

By then we’d have worked up an appetite for something other than pictures. Tadich Grill, if we could get in — the linen and the old wood and the waiters who’d been there longer than some of our careers. We’d order something plain and good, and that’s when the talking would start. Not small talk. The real kind. Work, kids, the state of things, whatever had lodged itself in each of us that week. The seeing on the street and the talking over lunch were not two different activities. They were the same hour, extended. One was attention paid to the world. The other was attention paid to each other.

I have flown airplanes and driven through weather I shouldn’t have, and I loved both for the demand they made on me — the total, narrowing attention that leaves no room for the self that worries. What I didn’t understand then was that a boat crossing from Larkspur, and a Friday, and an old friend across a table at Tadich, could ask the same thing of me, for free, without a single mile of my own driving.

Covid stopped it. Not gradually — the way most rituals fade, through scheduling and distance and the slow drift of people’s lives — but all at once, the way everything stopped that spring. The ferry didn’t run. The restaurants closed. We never quite picked it back up, not the way it was. I don’t think either of us decided to let it go. It just didn’t survive being interrupted.

A third of the country’s whole life, and it took me most of my own to learn what those Fridays were teaching me — and then to lose them before I’d finished learning it. I still see the ferry pulling in. I still see Doug on the gangway with his camera bag, in no hurry, already half in the zone before his feet touch the dock.

Categories
AI Learning Photography

Autopilot

“Superb photographs are not just taken with cameras. They come from within you, your eyes, your mind, your heart, not ice cold equipment.” Fan Ho

There’s a half-second on the street, somewhere between seeing a frame and shooting it, that used to take me whole minutes. Early on, with a camera in my hands on the streets of San Francisco or on the subway platforms in New York, I’d see something — light falling a certain way, a gesture about to resolve into a gesture — and I’d think my way through it. Assess the composition or the angle. Worry about the background. By the time I’d worked it out, the moment might be gone, replaced by some lesser version of itself.

That doesn’t happen to me anymore, and I couldn’t tell you when it stopped. Somewhere along the way the thinking disappeared and the shooting stayed. I see the frame and the shutter goes, and only afterward, looking at the file, do I understand what I saw. I didn’t explicitly decide to skip the thinking. It just stopped showing up, the way a habit eventually stops asking your permission. Or how driving a car becomes second nature.

I think about this because of a problem the AI labs have been calling continual learning. The AI models we use are like brilliant interns. They can solve a hard problem at nine in the morning and a harder one by five, and they’ll astonish you doing it. But every session starts over from zero. Whatever they got right on Tuesday evaporates by Wednesday, the way a dream is gone by the time you’ve found your slippers.

The industry’s first answer was to give them a longer memory — let the window hold the whole case file in front of them, all the time. This works for a while, the same way it would work for me on the street if I stopped and re-derived the exposure math for every frame. But that isn’t how I shoot anymore. I don’t have the math open. I have what’s left after thousands of frames did the math for me and then got out of the way.

Based on some exploration I did this morning using AI I found three different AI research efforts that are now chasing that gap, from different angles, none of them all the way there.

A team out of Stanford and NVIDIA built something called TTT-E2E, which lets a model keep adjusting its own internal weights while it reads — not just holding the page in front of it, but being changed by the page, a little, as it goes. It runs thirty-five times faster than the brute-force method of remembering everything, because it isn’t remembering everything.

Google’s research arm published something called Nested Learning around the same time, built on the idea that a mind isn’t one system learning at one speed, but several systems nested inside each other — some updating by the minute, some by the year.

And a scrappier strand of work called self-distillation has models teaching cheaper versions of themselves, not by handing over a transcript, but by training the cheaper model to arrive on its own at whatever the well-informed version would have concluded.

None of this is what happens when I make a photo. Not yet. But it’s aimed at the same gap I live in every time I shoot before I understand what I’m shooting. The gap between having the math and having the eye.

I once asked Doug, a good friend who’s spent as many days on the street as I have, how he knew when to press the shutter. He didn’t have an answer, not really — just a shrug, and something about the moment feeling complete before he could explain why. That shrug took him years to earn. He didn’t keep the years. He kept the shrug.

And then a few years ago Doug did something I still don’t fully understand. He abandoned digital and went back to film. Not for any project, not for the look of it — he could get that in post if he wanted it. He went back to the actual mechanics: loading a roll, metering by hand, often using a tripod, etc. I needled him about it some, the way you’d needle a cigarette smoker who’d taken up a pipe instead, as if the inconvenience were the point. He told me he wanted to slow down, and that film was the only thing that reliably made him do it. Twelve frames and then you stop and reload and you can’t fix it later. The very friction he’d spent decades shooting his way out of, he went looking for again, on purpose.

I don’t know what to do with that, except to notice that he’s the same man who can give me the shrug and also the man who walked back toward the thing the shrug had replaced. Maybe that’s the part the labs haven’t gotten to yet, underneath all the vocabulary of weight updates and meta-learned initializations. Compression is the whole point, until the day it isn’t.

Note: This line of thinking started with a recent essay by Dwarkesh Patel on what he calls continual learning. It’s become a real focus of his thinking about how we get to a better future with AI.

See: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-next-paradigm

Categories
Cuba Photography Street Photography

Havana, In Deep

Dangling Conversation - Havana - 2013

There is a box between them with a screen in it, and to this day I do not know what it is for. It could be for sifting. It could be for rolling. It sat on the table in that Havana market like a piece of furniture too tired to explain itself, and the man rested his forearm on it the way men rest their forearms on things that have been useful to them for a long time, without needing to look at it. A couple of guys a few steps off were selling meat, and somewhere a radio was losing a slow fight with distance.

He was asking her something. You could see it before you could hear it, if you could have heard it at all, which I could not, standing twenty feet away with a camera and no Spanish worth the name. His eyebrows were doing the work. His mouth was doing the work. The cigarette in the corner of his lips had gone unlit and forgotten, a prop in a scene that had moved past needing it.

She had not expected the question. That was the whole of it, the thing the photograph is actually about. Above and behind them the light came down through warehouse glass gone frosted with age, softened, the hard edges sanded off. It had been falling on that table for years before either of them sat down at it. A woman’s face has a setting it returns to between thoughts, and hers had been somewhere else — the work, the heat, the cigarette she’d just lit, which she now held between two fingers like a held breath, smoke rising into that same light, catching it, going from invisible to visible to invisible again. Then he spoke, and the setting changed. Her eyes came around to him sideways, the way eyes do when the rest of the head hasn’t decided yet whether to follow. Caught. Not afraid — caught, the way you’re caught remembering something mid-sentence, or caught by a question that arrives at an angle you didn’t see coming.

They had stepped away from whatever the work was — the particular slackness of people on a break, elbows down, shoulders forward, the posture of two people who have stopped doing the thing they get paid to do and have not yet decided to start talking about anything in particular, except that he just had.

Neither of them knew I was there, and I have never quite settled how I feel about that. I took something from two people who never agreed to give it. I have made my peace with it the way photographers do, which is imperfectly, but I have not stopped thinking about it. This is the only kind of photograph worth making all the same, the kind where you are not in the room, not really, where the camera has gone as invisible as the screen on that box, recording a question and an answer that the two of them will forget by the end of the day and that I will keep for the rest of my life, lit by a window neither of them ever turned around to notice.

What they were talking about, I will never know. I have looked at this photograph for thirteen years now and I still want to know.

Categories
Monochrome Photography New York City Photography Photography - Black & White

Bookends

Bookends - New York City - 2010

The tile is the first thing, and it should be. Count the squares if you want — institutional cream, grouted in a pattern nobody alive remembers choosing, the kind of tile that has been absorbing the heat and noise of trains since before anyone on this bench was born. This line has been running since 1904. The platform across from it, the old City Hall stop, closed in 1945 and now exists only as a rumor riders pass through without seeing, a loop the express makes for no reason except that turning around takes track. Everything in this photograph is standing on top of something that used to be a destination and is now just a curve in the dark.

Seven people are sitting on a bench that has nothing to do with any of that history, and everything to do with it.

Start with the one who’s still here. T-shirt, checkerboard skull, gym bag held against his ankle the way you hold something you can’t afford to lose track of. His hands are clasped between his knees, not relaxed, not nervous — occupied. Everyone else on this bench has gone somewhere else. He hasn’t. He’s looking off toward the tunnel mouth with the specific stillness of a man doing arithmetic about how late he already is, and the bag at his feet is doing exactly what gym bags do at that hour, which is stand in for whatever he’s actually carrying.

To his left, a woman reads a paperback — Wilde, from the spine, which is its own small joke on a subway platform, a story about a man who doesn’t age sitting in the lap of a woman waiting on a train that’s already late. Her purse, gold, sits on her knees like a paperweight holding her place. Next to her, a woman in a cream jacket has wired herself into something private through a pair of earbuds, hands folded over a small plaid pouch she’s guarding like it’s worth more than its size suggests. Two men at the far end have given up on consciousness altogether — one with his chin dropped into the posture every commuter eventually perfects, the other with his head against a fist and a phone somewhere near his ear, gone in whatever direction that call is taking him.

This is what a downtown platform in lower Manhattan does to seven strangers at whatever hour this was: financial district behind them, City Hall and the courthouses above, the bridge somewhere overhead carrying its own century of foot traffic — and none of it matters to the bench. The bench doesn’t know what borough it’s in. It just holds people until the train comes and takes the holding away.

The photograph is called Bookends, for the two men slumped at either end, and that’s the obvious read. But look again at who’s in the middle — the reader with her book, held between two men who have shut the world off completely. She’s the only one inside a story while sitting inside someone else’s. That’s the trick of the title. It sounds like geometry. It’s actually about who, on a bench like this, is still willing to be somewhere other than gone.

The train would come. It always does, eventually, on a line that’s been doing this since 1904, two minutes or eight minutes late, and it would take all seven of them in whatever direction they were waiting for, and none of them would know they’d spent four minutes on a bench old enough to have held this exact scene ten thousand times before — six people who’d left, and one who, for reasons of his own, hadn’t gone anywhere yet.

Categories
Creativity Photographers Photography Serendipity Writing

He Taught Us How to See

Michelangelo said he didn’t create his sculptures. He just removed the marble that wasn’t the statue.

I’ve been thinking about that lately. About what it means to have a collaborator whose job isn’t to add things but to help you find what’s already there. I’ve been doing that kind of work recently — the excavation kind — and it has changed how I write and honestly how much I enjoy the making of it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Start with Jay.

Continue reading “He Taught Us How to See”
Categories
Photographers Photography

Todd Hido: A Master of Moody Landscapes

Here’s another great video that I really enjoyed watching. It’s photographer Todd Hido talking about his life in photography, how he’s moved through various generations as he’s continued to explore making photos. William Verbeeck made the video and did a great job with it – just letting Hido talk about his life and work.

He has one stern recommendation for young photographers in particular: print your work! He talks about how images don’t really live until they exist on paper and you can hold them in your hands.

I first came across Hido’s work when I discovered his photographs of homes at night. These photographs reminded me very much of my high school years in Daly City – foggy nights, streetlights, homes with a light in one window, etc. Hido’s nighttime images evoke those moods. He collected much of that work in his book: House Hunting.

His work is currently on display in the gallery at the Leica Store San Francisco: A Series of Small Decisions – Todd Hido | April 15 – June 8, 2023. The store is located at 463 Bush Street, San Francisco, CA 94108.

Categories
Fujifilm X-E2 Lightroom Photography Photography - Fujifilm X-E2 Photoshop CC

No Parking in San Francisco

DSCF0115-Edit-framed

While walking along Pine St. in San Francisco, I captured this image with my new Fujifilm X-E2 of this guy and his elongated “Texas-size” bicycle frame. He was here for a moment and then gone. Fun street photography!

Post-processed in Lightroom and Photoshop CC with a bit of an oil paint filter applied to make the textures of the light more interesting.