I checked out Chase Jarvis’ book, The Best Camera Is The One That’s With You, for the second time from the local library recently. It’s worth a second look. Chase is a commercial photographer who has worked with some of the best medium format digital cameras found anywhere. He knows his way around any number of medium format systems as well as the array of studio lights and light modifiers. He has traveled the world doing commercial shoots. But the whole premise of his book is that you can make appealing images with simple cameras from anywhere. Compelling images don’t require fancy cameras or expensive travel plans. (I agree, but I might add that both of those things are enjoyable in their own right).
This is a relatively short book packed with images made with a two-megapixel IPhone. The images can be taken individually or as a collective. He repeatedly stresses that an image can be made with any camera, provided the photographer has the imagination to see the end in mind before starting. “If you can see it, it can move you,” he said in his introduction. The simplicity of the IPhone is its strength – that, and the fact that it’s always with him. Chase uses this ubiquitous tool to capture the obvious, the absurd, the silly, tragic — in short, everything life has to offer and then to share it with families, friends and other loved ones.
One of the key messages of the book is that compelling images are everywhere – if you know how to see them. The book is a great inspiration to all photographers to take a second look world around us and to look for what is unusual in common objects. “It’s not always about creating pictures. It can be about finding ones that already exist,” he writes. Chase has done some interesting work with everyday items: under a freeway, soccer match, traffic cones, frying bacon, trees in a park, a flooded dinghy, skylight in a reflecting pool, or shadows from a garage door. Compelling images can be made anywhere, although many of these images were made from a variety of locations: Buenos Aires, Seattle, Dubhai, Chile and elsewhere. Chase uses shadows, lights, colors, patterns of things that already exist in the world around us to tell a story or ask a question.
That a camera phone is not particularly sophisticated is no impediment to seeing and capturing interesting images. In some cases, Chase argues it can be an advantage, as many subjects are less intimidated by a tiny camera phone. He tells stories of using his Iphone as he wandered until it ran out of batteries. He offers another piece of advice to photographers: shoot lots and edit heavily. “The dirtiest secret in photography: shoot a hell of a lot of pictures to get the ones you want,” he writes.
Another piece of advice from Chase gives photographers everywhere license to explore and make mistakes: “Every photographer takes crappy pictures, every painter makes crappy paintings, and every actor blows their lines. What really matters is you’re out there sending stuff into the world.” That advice suggests to me that the images in the book are culled from a larger universe. For every image that made it into print, my guess is that a dozen or two dozen images were taken. The skill in storytelling is often twofold: the courage and discipline to walk out and produce the image and then the honesty to discard those that don’t live up to a given standard.
As I said, it’s definitely worth a read.