The Żuk is a van made in Lublin, the city where I live, and this early version probably dates from the 1960s. I have a fond spot for these and have even had a website devoted to them, and this early type is so rare now that over the past decade I have only found five examples. As you can imagine, that does limit their photographic opportunities.
I often see people on photo website talking about their equipment, which I and many other people cannot afford either in time, storage space or cash, so does this limit our potential as photographers? One answer is to expand our photographic range by taking advantage of image editing software, which can be downloaded for free if we cannot afford the marketed equivalents. The problem here is that there is a marked coldness on the side of some 'equipment' people because we are not catching the image in the camera. This is an old question, and one with no resolution to some people.
More interesting is the opportunity question - what if there is no time to deploy all the equipment necessary? The amount of time I have had to photograph the five Żuks was between 15 seconds and 5 minutes, which is not a lot of time to deploy an array of equipment especially since the meetings were unplanned. I was simply lucky that each time I had some form of camera, often just a compact and only once my SLR. One shot was taken in the street as the van passed, the image above was made over a fence in someone's field.
With such fleeting contacts woefully short of equipment and access, how could I have arranged the above image? If I were a painter, would it be bad if I made a quick sketch and then made the 'proper' painting later in my studio? Paintings of fleeting events cannot possibly be completed during the event, so why do people apply such restrictions to photography?
The idea for this image occurred some two and a half years after I took the photograph, and I have no idea how I could arrange access to an equivalent van. The answer could be to choose a different van, but the intended use of the image required this early type of Żuk. For me to create a fresh image I need a good idea, and here the coincidence of idea and access time were a long way apart.
Let us assume instead, that I am able to organise an opportunity to create this image as a photograph. By preparing myself to take the photograph, I am influencing the photograph. The very act of preparing means I have already made some of the decisions: I am no longer going to respond to the situation but instead take control of the situation.
Control is artifice, and whether we control the players in the image or the pixels on the screen, it is all artifice. One type of event has no better intrinsic quality than the other.
Ultimately we only sense the world through our bodily organs, the best we can do for ourselves is to be interested in the quality of what we choose to sense rather than trying to establish if equipment X is better than equipment Y. If you can apply X better than Y, use X - but if you can apply Y better than X, use Y.
Lublin - Traditional Cottage Room
12 years ago
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