I mostly write on here about the business of photography, photographic techniques and photographic equipment. Every once in a while I will indulge myself and wander off into simply thinking about photography and see where a few paragraphs take me. With that in mid, let’s go.

In early December we were on holiday in Venice and whilst wandering around some of the beautiful back streets of one of our absolute favourite cities we stumbled across a small gallery showing the work of two British artists so we went in. We were lucky enough to met them and in chatting about galleries, art and shows to see they told us that there was a major exhibition of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe showing for a limited time at Le Stanza della Fotografia on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore.

Immediately I have three thoughts here: The show was wonderful as you would expect from such a famous photographer. Secondly, the gallery was itself gorgeous and probably one of the best dedicated spaces for showing photography anywhere that I’ve been. Thirdly, and finally, I kept my ticket and it has been sitting on my desk since we returned home. You can see above that the reverse side has a quote from Helmut Newton “Photography is always a way of seducing”. There were several quotes on the backs of people’s tickets but this one was mine. My wife got Josef Koudelka’s ” The biggest lesson in photography is that from negative we make positive”.

The Koudelka quote is a bit cheesy and hasn’t been particularly relevant in my career since the switch to digital in November 1998 but the Helmut Newton one is interesting and made me think. I hope that doesn’t mean that the photographer tries to literally seduce their subjects – I hope that he intended to mean he wants to engage meaningfully with those he photographed and to draw the viewer into looking at the work in that context.

When you look into Newton’s career he is supposed to have said his job as a portrait photographer was to “seduce, amuse and entertain”. His style isn’t everyone’s cup of tea and I’m not sure that my work has been directly influenced by his but that’s not always the way influence works. Good photographers don’t spend their careers imitating the work of their predecessors. They take elements from it along with elements of the work of others who were more directly influenced and so on until what you produce is a mash up of lots of different identifiable styles, some that are completely unidentifiable and a few that are from other art forms altogether.

What the back of this ticket has done is to make me go back and look at Helmut Newton’s work again and absorb a few bits of his undoubted genius with the camera and question my response to quite a bit of it. What it also did was make me read what others have written about his work and then watch a short video clip in which the writer Susan Sontag (more about her in a bit) described Newton’s work as “misogynistic”. I can see her point of view and it made my reaction to some of his photographs feel justified.

So what about Susan Sontag? As a student I was advised (forced?) to read her seminal work “On Photography”. At the time I discounted much of it but as I’ve got older, possibly wiser, more empathetic and more than a little woke I have re-read it a couple of times and now completely understand why it was required reading for a student of photography. One thing leads to another and I then grabbed my copy of “Women” the beautiful and thought provoking book with photographs by Annie Leibovitz and a fabulous essay by her late partner Susan Sontag and re-read the essay before looking, yet again, at the photographs.

Talk about photographic influences. I can look at Leibovitz’s pictures time and time again and know that there are elements of her work that I admire completely and that have made me take pictures in a different way on countless occasions. It’s always good to re-visit great work and my book shelves are heaving with it! As something of a new year’s goal (resolutions always fall flat with me) I’m going to work my way through Sontag’s other essays now that I have re-read the one in this book.

My wife calls going off on a never ending internet quest following a train of digital thought “disappearing down the rabbit hole again” and this morning I’ve been a bit guilty of doing just that. My excuse, this time, is that it has been in the line of work and I have spent a few hours gaining inspiration for my next set of portraits.

I started this piece unsure about where my train of thought would go. I talked about a quote that got me thinking so I’m going to leave you with one that I hope does exactly the same for you. It’s from the Susan Sontag/Annie Leibovitz book:

“A photograph is not an opinion. Or is it?“

Note: My copy of “Women” is the 1999 Random House Edition but there is a new version of the book with more words published by Phaidon that is still available to buy new