Jay Maisel
Since he stopped taking on commercial work in the late ’90s, Jay has continued to focus on his personal work. He has developed a reputation as a giving and inspiring teacher as a result of extensive lecturing and photography workshops throughout the country. He also continues to sell printsl , which can be found in private, corporate, and museum collections.
“You see shape, and how the light hits things, how the color changes from one end of the photo to the other, and how movement affects the mood of the photo.” -Jay Maisel
Jay Maisel’s earlier background is actually in painting rather than photography. He went to a high school that emphasized fine arts and that is what ignited his passion. When he graduated he was lucky enough to get a scholarship to study painting with Joseph Hirsch, who, although he was a painter, he thought and taught in photographic terms. He was always asking questions of Maisel about light: Where it was coming from? What is the subject? What is its worth? How do you draw that out?
After that year of studying, Maisel got into Cooper Union and Yale where he studied painting, drawing and 3-D design. He says at Yale they wouldn’t let him into the photography studio because that wasn’t his course of study. He was able to get in, thanks to a helpful night watchman and he worked in the darkroom every night. There, he had found something that he loved.
That love of photography did not alter his school plans, though. He did not decide to become a photographer until he had gotten his degree in painting. He says it was more of a cowardly decision, that he was not confident in his abilities as a painter to make a living. He started doing commercial work in the beginning doing jobs for Dance magazine and album covers for Columbia Records. One of the more famous covers he did was Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.
Coming from an artist’s background and going straight into commercial work where every job is assigned might seem like a difficult jump to make. Maisel has always made a point, though, to shoot pictures for himself, something he stresses in the workshops he teaches in the gorgeous bank building that has been his home and studio since he purchased it in 1964. Whatever job he was on he would walk around looking for things that were interesting to him. At times, these were even the shots the clients would pick. The pressure of shooting commercially eventually lead Jay to retire from it. Now that he only shoots for himself, you rarely see him without a camera in his hands. I think shooting photographs is like breathing to him. Photography is not something he does, but rather something he is. Thankfully, we are all able to share in his journey and his vision.
10 things Jay Maisel taught us.
1-Always carry a camera. Unless we have the camerawith us at all times we may lose the opportunity to capture that great decisive moment when it presents itself because most decisive moments are also elusive moments. If we just wait until we “go out shooting” to capture those moments then we will miss many of them because they may happen when we were out, but not “out shooting”, so we didn’t bring a camera. The key is to train ourselves to take our camera wherever we go, the grocery store, the movies, a bar etc, so you’re always prepared for the unexpected moment.
2- Nothing in the image is neutral, it either works for you or against you. It’s important to always be aware of everything that we capture in an image because we are responsible for every square mm. of the frame. As Jay says, nothing in the image is neutral, it either works for you or against you. The background, the signs, the branch coming out of the head, the extra person etc. I am learning to pay attention to everything I see through the viewfinder before I take the shot. In street photography is not always possible to correct or change what we see but is important to train the eye to see what might be detracting from getting a better image.
3-Gesture over graphics. If the gesture is powerful then nothing else matters. Even if there is a lot of clutter in the frame ( see # 2) always go for the gesture instead of trying to “clean up” the frame. Gesture is what makes the picture emotionally involving and always overrides form.
4-Show something that the viewer has never seen. Is easy to just take pictures of what’s happening in front of us, but is it something that no one has seen before? This question forces us to look for the unusual, the extraordinary . The special gesture, the weird light, the complex combination of things, the funny juxtaposition of subject and background. I sometimes use the following question: if I google what’s in the picture I just took how many image results will I get?.
5- Don’t imitate. Jay says that the goal is revelation not replication. We need to shoot until we find our own style. We could have elements from someone who we like and admire but in the end the viewer has to know that the picture they are looking at is undoubtedly ours.
6- If it looks bad in the viewfinder it won’t look better in the computer. This is the old “garbage in, garbage out” rule. If the picture is mediocre when we are taking it then no amount of cropping or post processing will make it great. It may improve it but it will still be mediocre. This is where the art of street photography resides.
7- Great pictures don’t just tell you things, they ask questions The challenge is always to look for situations that will make the viewer want more. If we show everything then the fun is over. If we entice the viewer to create a story around the image then is probably a good image8-Shoot where all the others aren’t. This is such a simple rule and changed my pictures dramatically. Is obvious that if everyone is shooting the same thing then most likely the pictures won’t be very original. This goes with Jay’s 180 degrees rule, which basically says if someone is shooting in one direction, turn around and shoot the other way, there might be more interesting things there. An example would be shooting the sunset. The most interesting pictures are sometimes looking 180 degrees away from the sunset ( and you can google sunset images if you want to see one).
9-Lettering becomes content even if you don’t want to. Whenshooting in the streets is almost impossible to avoid some sort of lettering: street signs, ads, posters etc. We have to be aware that the brain always gets attracted ( or distracted ) by words because the first thing it wants to do is to read them, taking away the attention from the subject. The challenge here is to avoid distracting signs or words ( remember nothing is neutral) or if we can’t avoid them then make it part of the story.
10-Life is in color. Jay shoots only in color because life is not black and white and if we are trying to capture life then we have to capture it the way it is. The tendency in street photography is to shoot only in BW but I think one of the reasons for that is because shooting in color is a lot more difficult. Any image can look a little better by making it BW just because it gives it a classic nostalgic look but the content remains the same so if it was a predictable image in color it will continue to be after the change. The key here is to develop our own style ( see #5 don’t imitate).
Due to copyright infringement I cannot share some of his work on my blog as i do not have the permission.. So I will leave a link to some of his beautiful work
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