How not to present your pictures

Museums and galleries have traditionally displayed photographs as big prints hanging on walls. You peruse them at your own pace and in any order you choose, even if a certain order is suggested. Captions and other information are usually provided, and you can absorb that information any way you like, or not at all. There is generally an air of gravitas that inspires reverent quiet.A lot of these conventions translate well to the books published to accompany big/important exhibitions.

Compare that with your uncle Hobart's slide show, where you willingly travel to his house, march unfettered into the rumpus room, sit down, remain seated when the lights go out, and then slowly surrender your will to live as uncle Hobart reacts to each 35mm film slide, extemporizing a disjointed narrative that falls somewhere somewhere between disorder and schizophrenia.

The contemporary analog of the slide show is the multimedia slideshow DVD. You would think these would be more tolerable to sit through, considering the forethought, discipline, and self-editing that is built into the process, but still they manage to raise the bar for bad taste. Now uncle Hobart adds his favorite songs to the mix - a sort of air support in the assault on your sensibilities. If uncle actually did have any pictures you might want to see, there is new prime real estate available in Tartarus, because Hobart is going to follow the long trend toward cinematizing photographs; the borders of the image - photography's most important design element - will not be visible because of the asinine scaling and movement that are supposed to simulate cinematic dollying, trucking, and panning.

How is it that the gallery's cool, minimal approach to displaying pictures is so satisfying and inviting, but the sincerity and hard work that poor uncle Hobart puts into his slide shows yield little more than frustration? Is the content really that different? I don't think that's it at all; the art world is full of examples of shows in which gallery walls are crowded with recontextualized vernacular photography (crappy little prints of snapshots, among others); uncle Hobart's pictures could easily have been displayed in a hip New York gallery in something like Stephen Shore's All the Meat You Can Eat, and enthusiastic, intellectual crowds would laud Hobart's work as great.

I think it has more to do with the basic way in which people experience photographs, and how presentation either encourages or discourages that experience. Any photo can be a contemplative object in a way that is preverbal, preintellectual; any child can look at a picture depicting something abstract like sharing and go to work on what is happening in the scene, where it is, what might happen next.

Pictures invite viewers to discover the surface of another world - to speculate about its underlying reality. Photographs by themselves demand that you draw your own conclusions, make your own story. When the para-descriptive information is taken from the small card politely placed out of the way on the wall next to a photo - or the text on the opposite page in a book - and forced into the viewer's mind by uncle Hobart's ill-considered ramblings, it spoils some of the fun of viewing a new picture.

There is another level on which Hobart is at war with the photographic sensibility. The normal viewing of photographs has been beautifully illustrated in a number of movies in which a child or young adolescent or Adam Sandler finds some magical way of freezing time. This device is a metaphor for the way a photograph allows the viewer to roam through a world that is frozen in time, free of haste or any compunction to interact with the surface of the depicted world. This is one of the things that makes viewing pictures so fun - you can go crazy in a self-contained little fantasy world, discovering explicit details, guessing implied details about its inhabitants and accoutrement, generally just taking your time to do whatever you want inside that frame and any space implied beyond it. The forced pace of Hobart's slideshows is destructive enough to this important aspect of appreciating photography, but when he uses animation to change the frame of the photograph within the frame of the viewing screen, there really isn't much left of photography's quiddity; it has become something else, and mostly likely Hobart's skills are not up to the task of jumping between media. Then again, Hobart is pretty old and there is a lot we don't know about him - maybe he worked as a big time film editor in the Noir Age. Mom said nobody knows what he was doing out in California for those two years after high school...

So there's a great heap of fetid negativity for you - that's what I do best. By now you get the gist - I am a cranky, frustrated photographer who would rather blog than make pictures or do any productive work. Wait, no - the gist was supposed to be that the slideshow is an unideal mode for displaying photographs. The slide show - and especially the faux-cinematic animated slideshow - is really a medium altogether different from photography. And yes, I'm cranky. Sorry - I'll work on that.

The easiest ways of displaying photos are still the best. For example, there is no reason you can't come back from your vacation to Hawaii and make relatively large prints and display them very simply, either in a portfolio or in simple mounts on picture ledges in your house. I purchased an "annual plan" from Shutterfly, for which I get something like a 30% discount on prints, so a flawless 11x14" print on great paper only costs $5.59. You can keep using the same portfolios or foamcore over and over and return the photos to their shipping tubes for archival. Cheap, easy, impressive - perfect.

In the past few years photo books have become one of the most popular ways to share photos, and with good reason. When you get back from Hawaii with your six full SD cards, you can pare them down to the fifty best photos, have a book made cheaply via Shutterfly or any of the other such services, and just leave the book out in plain view when company comes over. The photo sharing activity will just happen organically; like locking a dude and a hot girl in a room together for a couple of weeks - actuaries, anthropologists, and womanizers agree that human nature generally follows a predictable course.

Another method I like a lot is to simply plug a camera into a television and hand it to the most attention-needy person in attendance, e.g. a child. This way everyone still engages in the the temporal aspects of browsing pictures, but as a group. Giving suggestions/directions to the kid navigating the images adds another social dimension to the activity. Make sure to edit your photos - either in camera or on the computer - before you make someone else try to navigate them.

The least imposing way to bother your friends and family with photos is with a web gallery like Flickr. If you want other people to see pictures of your pets - and you're not William Wegman - this is the route for you. Your family and friends can skim hundreds of pictures at a glance and then truthfully tell you that yes, they saw the new Fluffy glamor shots, and yes, they enjoyed them, especially the one they noted for the specific purpose of proving to you that they looked at them. If you notice the theme of the order, this is also the least impressive medium for displaying pictures. The impression made by a photo takes a big hit when it ceases to be a physical object - moving from prints to a purely photon-based display - and the web is pretty much the last stop on the devaluation bus route. The upshot is that nobody feels compelled to look at pictures they don't like.

There are a few simple things you can do to help your pictures generate more interest in any presentation. First of all, edit ruthlessly. Photography has been aptly described by many artists and brainiac critics as the process of selecting and organizing interesting scenes from the disorganized universe. The selection process can continue long after the last shutter click. The most obvious way in which selection can continue is by selecting which pictures to display. Software can help; I try to steer newbies toward Google's Picasa software, which they provide free, no strings attached. Software like this - or Adobe Lightroom or the impressively overhyped Apple Aperture - gives you lots of tools for rating, sorting, selecting, and ordering pictures by any number of criteria you choose, including your own keywords. It is better to be too critical than too permissive in your self-editing; a tiny collection of an extremely few good pictures always looks better than a great herd of rejects with a few good ones thrown in. Don't show your rejects.

You can also revise your selection of scenes by cropping. Most underdeveloped photographers shoot way too wide with the subject in the middle. This makes for static, uninviting pictures, but the good news is that this composition flaw invites revision. Cropping basically lets you change the design of the photo, which gives you the potential to change its appeal and its meaning.

Design/composition is too big a subject to tackle in a couple sentences, but it's not rocket science. Get a book like "The Photographer's Eye" by Michael Freeman¹ and work through it. The world heavyweight champion of intro-to-composition books is "The Simple Secret to Better Painting" by Greg Albert, but using that book there is no hand-holding to figure out how to relate the concepts to photography. With any such a book you can move from hack to competent photographer in a week or two. There are even good videos on visual composition specifically for photographers.

Consider groupings and order in your presentation. Chronology is often the worst choice for any medium, even with a book that is easily navigable in any order. Put a little more thought into it. If you really think it's so important to document the exact order in which you apprehended the prefabricated plastic awnings at Holiday Inns and Best Westerns, make a separate design of it, e.g. a collage based on a map. Make something of it - chronology is not intrinsically narrative.

If you absolutely cannot help yourself - and your family and friends do not love you enough to intervene - and you decide that you must make a slideshow, consider the following. Your project is really a movie and not a collection of pictures; you have moved from the medium of photography to cinema, so adjust your thinking and your skill set accordingly. Tell a story with your slideshow. Even documentary films follow a pretty rigid narrative structure. If you can't make an outline of three act dramatic structure or the hero's quest from memory, your story is guaranteed to suck. Get some books from the library. This stuff is at least as old as the Hellenic Period, so there is no need to send your money to Amazon.com. Study cinematography. Cinematography is just a fancy word for the technique of making movies, which is exactly what you're engaged in. Again, the public library will probably have everything you need. And of course, DVD commentary tracks are widely touted as a poor man's film school, so you can start investing hours in those.

The best thing you can do to beat the odds against making a tolerable slideshow is to plan your movie on paper - or any fancier kind of storyboard, but paper is fine - and bend the software to execute your vision. This is opposed to the more popular approach of letting the software instruct you how to put together your show. Don't just use a stock template because it's easy; create your own movie from scratch that looks exactly as you imagine it. You'll notice that most big Hollywood blockbuster movies generally use cuts, dissolves, and deliberately designed text titles - that's it. No novelty wipes, no flying 3D text, no purposeless trucking/panning. Use the 100-year-old, well developed language of cinema for your cinematic project. Just because you can add music doesn't mean you should. Better yet, just because you can make a slideshow doesn't mean you should.

I think if you are interested in a moving presentation, you're more of a cinema person at heart. The good news is that cameras are starting to include better video features, to the point that hyperweenie, tech-watching nerds are already announcing that video and still cameras are merging into a single class of device. In the here and now, you can shoot adequate video (for home/web presentation) with any digital camera made in the past several years. I have a Canon SD450 that is practically an antique on the timeline of digital photography gear, and even it takes decent video. Why not make a video project instead of a collection of photos, or in addition to it?

I think the one thing you can do to make any kind of artistic exhibition more enjoyable is to simply let go of your creation once it is finished. When your friends and family come over to your house and you are dying for them to see your Hawaii pics, let them discover the pictures on their own. If you have photographs, let them flip through them at their own pace and without unsolicited commentary; if you have a movie, let them watch it without your additional narration. In general, say what you need to say in your art and let the viewer ask you for more information. If your art is good, they will be fascinated.

¹ This book is inexplicably titled the same as the older, vastly more important book by John Szarkowski, of which the author was doubtless aware. This is a great mystery to me, as the text is absent of the kind of hubris necessary to pull off the apparent stunt.