This blog assignment is unusual in that we are not really being asked to give thoughts on the work of these artists, but rather to touch on what we got from their commentary in the film Contacts.
I thought it was humorous that Erwitt opened by stating "One must never show their contact sheets" and followed with "Now lets take a look at my contact sheets."
The thing that stuck with me most from both commentaries is the themes of persistence and time.
Klein pointed out the number of images it takes to capture 2 minutes worth of time shooting at 125th of a second. It is 960 images if my math is correct. If you assume you will get a good shot out of every 36 exposures, thats about 27 usable images. Of course numbers aren't always so absolute, and at times we may get more or less good work per 36 frames. That seems consistent from what I remember about my film shooting days, I was happy to get 2 or 3 photographs worth printing from a roll.
The point is taken though. Photography is work, hard work. People seem to think that just because everyone and their dog has a camera nowadays that photography is somehow "easy". I would argue that the very fact that we are so inundated with imagery, much of it bad, makes it that much more difficult. It is easy to make bad images, but to make a photograph, that takes thought. Erwitt said as photographers we need to persist, to make just one more or 20 more images to assure ourselves the best chance for success.
We need to be prolific as artists.
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