‘Storm engulfing the Cathedral Rocks, Yosemite Valley, 1970’ by Bruce Barnbaum
Bruce Barnbaum has a simple rule about what it takes to make a good photograph. “It has to mean something to you.”
For instance, the veteran landscape photographer and environmentalist explains, imagine a camera club goes to an abandoned farm to take photographs.
“There may be one or two people who are interested,” he says. “Most of the others are standing thinking, ‘Ah, I’m here. I’ve got to take pictures.’ But they’re not interested. They’re not going to get anything good.”
“It has to mean something,” he repeats, for emphasis.
Barnbaum has been making remarkable images – often in stark black and white – for more than 50 years, so it’s fair to say he knows what he’s talking about. Indeed, his entire portfolio is a visual expression of that simple idea – as the 1970 image ‘Storm engulfing the Cathedral Rocks, Yosemite Valley’ illustrates.
Interviewed in the October-December 2024 issue of the RPS Journal, Barnbaum is a natural-born storyteller in words and images. And he has thought deeply about how an image is made, about what that image should look like and how it should be presented to the public.
And while meaning is key, he says, it’s not the only thing that needs to be considered.
“You have to find something and then you have to very carefully place your camera so that you are optimising the relationships within the scene,” he continues.
“A lot of people, they see something, boom, they take a picture. But they’re not really placing the camera at any kind of an optimum position.”
Taking a photograph is all about the choices you make before you press the shutter, he says.
‘Cottonwoods and Caineville Buttes, 1987’ by Bruce Barnbaum
“So you are looking at the scene and you are envisioning the photograph, your final photograph. And you are basically mapping out every step along the way. Where do I place the camera? How do I expose it? How do I develop it? How am I going to print it?
“And then of course with black and white you’re altering the scene anyway. The scene has colour. You’re taking it out, so you are interpreting it in a radically different way.
“What I tell my students at my workshops is this isn’t any different from any other artform. Can you imagine Beethoven going, ‘Da, Da, Da, Dum … What’s next?’
“I bet he had a very good idea not only of that movement but of all the other movements in the Fifth Symphony from beginning to end, and he filled in the details as he went.
“I don’t think Rembrandt started a painting in the upper left corner thinking, ‘Well, we’ll see what this ends up with when I get to the lower right.’
“Every artist in every field has an overall idea of the entire endpoint. They fill in and change details along the way to make it work. Photography is no different. You have to look at the scene, envision the photograph and understand all the steps that are needed to go from A to B, or A to Z, shall we say. And there are a lot of stations along the way but you basically have an idea of where you want to go.”
In his latest book Discoveries of a Lifetime, Barnbaum has pulled fresh images from his archive, all but one taken on his 4x5 camera. What did he learn about his work from looking at it with fresh eyes?
‘Lady ferns, 1995’ by Bruce Barnbaum
“Well, I learned that in some cases I was ahead of myself you might say. Early on I was making some photographs that had an abstract character to them. And when I showed them people would look at them totally unimpressed and say, ‘Bruce how about another photo of a mountain?’
“I didn’t have the confidence in myself to say at that point, ‘No, no, no, take a look at this.’ I was letting them lead me. So, there were times when I was making photographs and I’d think, ‘I’m not going to print this because nobody is going to like this’. So when I started this review it was the early abstracts that really surprised me.”
It took him years to embrace his eye for abstraction in the landscape. But in 1979 he visited the home of photographer Brett Weston during a workshop and Weston showed him a portfolio in which every image was an abstract, “and every one blew my mind,” Barnbaum recalls.
“I had walked into his house with the thought that abstraction pisses people off, gets them angry. I walked out with the thought that putting an abstract in front of somebody is like putting up a puzzle. They can either solve it or they don’t. They can either like solving it or even like not solving it. If they don’t like it, it’s their problem. It’s not mine.
“It completely turned me around. So, when I was doing my review, and I found these abstracts I had put aside, I pulled them back out and I was attracted to them. Now I’m really attracted to them.”
‘Cloister tracery, Gloucester Cathedral, 1981’ by Bruce Barnbaum
Discoveries of a Lifetime by Bruce Barnbaum is published by Silvergrain Classics.
See more work by Bruce Barnbaum in the October-December 2024 issue of the RPS Journal.
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