When Old Is New

When Old Is New

by William Lulow

Lately I have been spending some time watching some “new” old footage of The Beatles, called “Get Back.” It’s a kind of documentary that features the famous band rehearsing and otherwise just being themselves. As most people probably know by now, even some of today’s younger generation, this was, without doubt, the greatest pop band in history. We still listen to them almost like we listen to Beethoven or Mozart. They have had an effect on the popular music scene like no other group ever has before. It’s hard to believe that they were exerting their magic on fans for the past 60 or 70 years now. The classical genius composers have been doing it for 300 years or more.

I listen to The Beatles’ music just about everyday. I can actually play many of their compositions on the guitar myself and I am still learning some of the tricks and techniques used by George Harrison, John Lennon and Paul McCartney; not so much Ringo Starr because I don’t play the drums, but I do have a very healthy respect for his talent. So, why am I writing about this on a blog piece about photography?

Well, one of the reasons is that it has become evident, listening to the “Fab Four” talk about their experiences in the music business, that after playing the same music for over 20 years (don’t forget they really started playing together in 1956 and didn’t really stop until 1969, and were still playing, although not always together in the 1970s. They knew their stuff cold long before they became famous. Thus a couple of them began to seek more challenging things in music by the time many of us were just getting used to them. And, the band actually stopped performing live in 1969. Their last public concert was in San Francisco in 1966. At that point, they had been playing together as the world’s top attraction for approximately 10 years already.

I have been doing photography since I was 11 years old! I was practically brought up with it, but didn’t realize what it was truly all about until much later in my life. The interesting thing about this is that I cannot remember ever wanting to do anything else. I have done many things within the genre of photography and print-making, even pushing some boundaries in terms of making traditional photographs. I have embraced the new digital technology while still maintaining allegiance to some of the tried and true precepts of photography generally.

But although I have been doing similar assignments for the past 40 years or so, these days, I have brought a new outlook to just about everything I shoot. I made the transition from film to digital photography just about twenty years ago now, and I have to say that I think the work I am producing today is superior in many ways to what I used to do. The only thing that is different is the amount of experimentation that I do now. When I was just learning about lighting, I did all kinds of experiments with the equipment and techniques I was learning. Here are a couple of experiments from my past efforts:

This was an experiment with negative and positive space in an image. The perception of it changes as you view it longer.

This was an experiment with lens flare and how an image can tolerate it. Most of the time, photographers seek to avoid it, but here you can see the possibilities of using flare creatively. These images were obtained from pushing boundaries that would normally would not be attempted.

This was an illustration for one of my classes in lighting taught at New York’s New School For Social Research in the 1980s and 1990s (as was the next example as well).  It was a “step-by-step” example of how to set up a certain lighting for portraits.

After many years of doing digital photography exclusively, I began to experiment with various filters in Adobe Photoshop to see what they did and how I might use them creatively. There is really no end to what you can continue to find out and create.

So even though some of my experimentation has taken different paths, it’s still there. I am exploring new ways to light my subjects and I have been teaching others to do the same. But it highlights the fact that the more you know about a subject, the more you are free to experiment and lay new groundwork. It continues to be fascinating.