Is being associated with a place important in photography? Photographer Keith Carter once told me he heard the author Horton Foote say that it is part of being an artist to embrace your surroundings. So today, as a YouTuber and photographer I will take you along to explore my home town.
Music from Epidemic Sound: https://goo.gl/v5wWKr
Subscribe for more videos!
http://www.youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=theartofphotography
Watch More Videos:
PHOTO ASSIGNMENT #6 :: PHOTO SEQUENCES
THEY LOVE IT WHEN YOU DO THIS
HOW TO SHOOT CONCEPTUAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Thanks for watching – if you like this video, remember to share it with your friends!
Ted Forbes
The Art of Photography
2830 S. Hulen, Studio 133
Fort Worth, TX 76109
USA
My name is Ted Forbes and I make videos about photography. I’ve been making photographs most of my life and I have a tremendously deep passion for photography that I want to share with you on YouTube.
The Art of Photography is my channel and I produce photography videos to provide a 360 degree look into the world of making images. We all want to get better so lets do this together!
I make videos covering famous photographers, photography techniques, composition, the history of photography and much more.
I also have a strong community of photographers who watch the show and we frequently do social media challenges for photographers to submit their own work. I feature the best and most interesting on the show when we do these so come check it out and get involved!
Original source
28 responses to “PHOTOGRAPHY AND LOCATION”
Hey Ted, what about William Eggleston and Memphis? I think you can photograph everywhere, but in fact, lot's of friends of mine say that living where they live makes photography more difficult for them. I have so many examples on how that is simply not true.
LOL that train-killed me in a good way! Thanks Ted! What mic do you use for your outdoor work? Sound is really clean.
I really like your shirt, what brand is that?
I live in Paris. I'm a lucky guy.
AWESOME
PERMISSION TO FAIL AKA
RISK!!!
I always tell people I help to fail, get over failing and if your not failing at least a little then your not pushing the envelope at all!!
GREAT other than being in Texas hahaha
Bros both went to school there, in UTA remember a fun restaurant with little pullies and flags, thousands of restaurants later and decades too, I still remember those flags….
OK thanks again and lets take some risks!!!
Places are the most important thing for me.
I'm working on my portfolio right now and what I do is asking to people I know (which are not necessarily all photographers) to look at the pictures I chose and tell me what are the thoughts that come to them.
I've noticed that they all say more or less the same thing, I'm focusing on the space and the feeling that space gives me.
So the place I'm in is everything to my photography but I guess what I wanted to say is: it's doesn't matter what place, it doesn't have to be a super exotic location.
I quite like the most ordinary places, I find myself looking for and photographing the most anonymous details even when I'm visiting some super touristy or famous city.
So the location is actually very important because it sets the tone of your photos but it could well be the most familiar place you can get access to.
Anyway, that's my two cents 🙂
Great video as always
Looking forward to the Artist Series new videos!!!
As a Fort Worth photographer I REALLY enjoyed this one!
This is all very true. Placing yourself within the space rather than shooting it as an outsider makes a huge difference. We also need to get those places unique to Fort Worth before gentrification take all of them. We just lost half of the, "old stockyards," the swift packing plant and probably will lose more soon. I'm still trying to warm myself up to get onto the stacks and the old incinerator even though Jason Lanier met our finest out there some months back.
Ted. This is seriously next level content. I love watching the growth creative's such as yourself go through as time passes. -Cheers 🙂
Loved this episode, primarily because I often fail when I attempt to make photographs. It's heartening to see that even the accomplished experience the same issues!! The concept of place reminded me of the work of Charles "Teenie" Harris. Harris was an African-American photographer who documented life in Pittsburgh, PA from around the 1930's through the mid-1970's. I find his work interesting from both the "place" as well as the "time", reflecting life of African-Americans in one of the nations industrial cities. His work is on line at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
TEXAS FOREVER!
Go old school stop by a DMA.
Really enjoyed this style of 'en plain air' presentation! Keep em coming!
chatting my ear off!
I do think that place and people are important in photography . And by that i mean any place , and, pretty much any person. It doesn't matter if it's your home town , or if you drove a few hours to a newer place , or if it's a completely new environment . You can use a model , or just your old fashioned street photography people shots.
And it does get difficult to take photos of a place that is so familiar to you , because you get an impression that because you yourself know of this place so well , that the people who might see that potential photo that you didn't take yet , are going to find it too familiar as well , almost boring .
So i guess what one can do is , go out on a field trip with a friend , or a picnic , or any sort of outdoor tiny little adventure, this will give your mind a nice little happy emotion , and you will be more free and you'll be able to take more photos . And the more you shoot, the more you you wanna shoot. If that makes sense .
as European in Texas everything looks wide and big
There is a photo to be had anywheres !
In my point of view there are two ways to use location in photography. First you can use it to love it. Something about that place makes you want to shoot it. This protagonises the location and not anything else (with the location including its life and everething in it). But there is another way of using it…. You could just use location as a build up to your subject. Like a cat or a person and things like that. By shooting in certain locations, maybe one is just worried about the light, contrast, colour that place offers, and just using the location is for me not protagonising the place…
I loved it Ted!
Oh snap, this video made it up onto an Fstoppers article https://fstoppers.com/education/do-you-have-place-photography-173319
Just stick to teaching 'cause shooting ain't your bag! 🙂
Hey Ted
Great video, as always. For me place is something that happens through circumstance. Saul Leiter for example was a working photographer so he probably could not travel around as he wanted. I think a lot of his photos were actually shot on the way from or to work.
For me photography is just a hobby so the time budget available for it is quite limited. I want to make the most of it and not only shoot on weekends so there just can't be much time spend on travel. By default I end up taking pictures of what is around me. My hometown, lakes and forrests nearby.
To me art is about discovering something new in what is around and then share it with others to shape their view of the world.
Greetings from Hannover, Germany
Daniel
I used to work heavily under the guise that place and timliness are paramount for my photography, but I've changed. I'm kinda glad I changed. Now, most of what I shoot involves a timeless and a seemingly placeless place to start, because I can fit more of my stories and ideas from everywhere at anytime into the work, without too many limitations. Could be the right way to go, not sure but I'm making more fulfilling work (AND I get to challenge the work I did in the past, influences and inspirations and all) with this new guise. I can understand why street photography is a bit difficult for you, and thank you for stepping out to showing love for your old cowtown. I dig your whole production, including the music.
You went to Fort Worth Camera! I actually missed out on the grand opening, hope it was cool.
I have an academic background in geography and many (if not all) of my interests in life frequently have some place-centric root. I think about it a lot because I feel like "place" is a central component of a lot of other things including culture and personal identity. Being a self taught photographer, I'm constantly noodling with new things, but one of my ongoing projects is all about place and, in particular, the nuances of how putting certain elements of the built environment inside of a frame can denote or evoke unexpected (for lack of a better word) emotions. anyway, none of what I'm doing is particularly original (other than that I'm using my own eyes) and I mention it largely because I've been heavily influenced by a few people that might make good fodder for further discussion on this topic. Off the top of my head – Rebecca Norris-Webb's "My Dakota" is a pretty powerful place-based piece and it was just reprinted, making it semi-current, as well. Her husband's work (Alex Webb) is probably better known and is very place-aware, IMO. Stephen Shore's "Uncommon Places" bears mention, too (as does much of Shore's other work), as I think it really underlines how an artist's eye can work to package disparate places into unified work. Lastly, local to me, I also recommend "Looking At Appalachia:" http://lookingatappalachia.org/ The project is way behind schedule, but it is still going on as far as I know. Full disclosure, I live in WV and have submitted to this project but have never had anything published there.
Really glad to see this topic being discussed by you and looking forward to more. I can't overstate how helpful and vital your channel has been in my own education – "The Artist Series" videos in particular. Keep it up!
I am from Newfoundland, "the rock" as we call it. My home there was the town of Gander which hovered around 10000 people and was the major airport hub for cross Atlantic flights until the age of long range airliners made it somewhat low key. The events of September 11th 2001 put us in the limelight briefly but it is just a fairly sleepy little town. Newfoundland however is an island with a rich cultural heritage linked closely to Ireland and parts of England. St. John's offers a cityscape like few others and the small fishing communities still have the flavour of the past. I find that, even though I no longer live there, the images I shot before moving are the most moving to me at least. Place matters.
It was very cute the see you “exploring” the outside world out of your studio haha Thanks for this video Ted!! Very inspiring, as always. In my opinion, and related to the sense of place notion, it’s very important to make the most of your present time, I mean, if you’re living in an specific place, or get to travel to one, or don’t think you have the right equipment (limited budget, for example), well I think that the best way to process this is how we use our creativity to embrace that space, the identity behind it, according to what we want to express and the glass of our own perspective, background and thinking process.. Thus, we should try to get the most of our present situation in order to master ourselves and learn from our mistakes for future shooting possibilities..
You mentioned that this video was a failed attempt but I actually enjoyed the fact that you decided to shoot this outside rather than in the studio. I feel like it gave us, the viewers, some of which may not get out very much, to see a bit of what your hometown looks like and also breaks up the manotony. Sometimes when I get stuck and "fail" to find a great location to shoot at, I focus on details at the location I am currently at. I usually always find something interesting….usually…lol.