Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Volleyball referee feet

The image above shows the feet of two referees adjudicating side by side matches of a middle school volleyball tournament. Their job is to enforce the rules of the game; to blow the whistle if lines are crossed. Sometimes they miss a fault or let one slide.

This photograph has been manipulated using Photoshop but only within the limits of my rules.

There are no rules that fine art photographers must obey but many of us define our work in part by the restrictions we place upon ourselves. My self imposed restrictions are these:

• Move yourself but nothing you see – change the framing but not the framed

• Use the computer only as a daylight darkroom – do nothing that could not be done in camera or in a real darkroom

These are old fashioned rules but I am only truly comfortable when I keep them. The myth that “photography is truth” is crucial to the images I make. This is not because I wish to share a post-modern joke with the viewer but because I intend the claim that the images are true; their truth being vouched for because “photographs” are pictures of real things that the viewer could have witnessed for themselves.

These are arbitrary rules – I allow digital manipulation to alter color saturation and exposure but I will not remove a wrinkle or pebble, I will turn red into gray but not into blue. The viewer could not actually have witnessed the view presented in the image without colored glass, a telescope and one or more other camera and darkroom tricks. But the form has been preserved, the form would be acknowledged as true.

I break my rules sometimes. The first picture that I ever sold was manipulated to the point of being unrecognizable as a photograph; I doubt the buyer would have known it was not a painting if the dealer had not told them. But if I do that too often I fear that I will undermine the myth of photographic truth that I rely on for the rest of the work. I cross the line occasionally but retreat quickly back.

Timeout, volleyball

Another weekend, another volleyball tournament; the last of this middle school season. As with the earlier tournament (see Knee Pads and Blue Filters) my photographic focus was on the feet – no parent wants a stranger pointing a telephoto lens at their teenage daughter. It turns out that feet can say a lot without the rest of the body.

Knee Pads

The parents of American middle school teenagers spend a lot of time waiting: waiting in traffic lines to drop the kids off at school, waiting to pick them up after the school dance, waiting between matches at tournaments. Last night was the first dance of the school year, today was the first sports tournament – volleyball.

Modern middle school gyms do not, at first sight, provide many opportunities for art photography and I did not even look through the viewfinder for the first four hours of the day. Capturing sports action is not a talent I posses. The best sports photographers must really understand the game they are documenting and anticipate the action – I had two left feet and three left arms growing up, I have no such aptitude.

Then I started to notice the feet and the reflections from the gym floor. Feet are anonymous but still signal the presence of a whole human; feet speak of where the person is headed and where they have been. Joining the feet were reflections of the players and referees in the gym floor. And lines, lots of lines to mark what the players can and can’t do; where the feet may and may not fall. Now that is something to make art about.

This row of knee pads, sitting on the team bench, is the image I like best from the day. The reflection of the white socks off the floor caught my attention, and the large number of them made a change from my normal addiction to pictures of isolated individuals.

A modern SLR (Nikon D300) allowed the use of ISO 1600 without too much noise in the artificial light but the colors are not so interesting – white socks and pads reflecting off a yellow wood floor offer much less contrast than my mind perceived. Without contrast the subject of this photograph draws too little attention – Photoshop and a blue filter were the solution, with Georgia O’Keefe as the expert witness called to justify their use:

Nothing is less real than realism… Details are confusing. It is only by selection,
by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Photoshop CS3 has made the rendering of black and white images with a range of color filters much simpler than earlier versions. The yellow floor is reduced to near blacks by the selection of a blue filter and tweeking the levels. Now the row of legs, pads and their reflections command attention.

But what is the real meaning of these things? What would Georgia say to that?

Actually she might have quite a lot to say; that there are girls competing in a school sports tournament at all might have pleased her considerably, this is Title IX at work. Figuratively, we could all use knee pads in our lives but knowing that these are middle schoolers we might agree to let them hold on to the protection for they are perhaps passing through the hardest stage of life.