Gallery of George Stranahan Images

George Stranahan Photography

George Stranahan family photography really started with my mother Virginia, universally called Did. She was an early user of 35mm and did her own chemistry. When I was eleven, she handed me her Leica 111g and the key to the darkroom. She acknowledged that with six kids she was finished. I don’t know if any of her negatives or prints exist; I remember them as quite domestic, family and kitchen scenes.

My best buddy Tommy had an Argus C3, and we photographed together and shared the darkroom. Tommy was an avid student of the sciences of photography: lens distortions and chemistry, such as the Beers formulas with different ratios of metol and hydroquinone for developer. He also led my way into larger formats and an f64 approach to what was worthwhile photographically. The black-and-white landscapes here are such, and done on 5x7-inch sheet film. Only occasionally do people show up in this early work; if they do they are highly posed. Such is the nature of the view camera.

The view camera is about finding and keeping one’s distance, and it’s impersonal. Taking the color out, making it black and white, also makes it unreal and abstract. There’s a tradition to it; view cameras and black-and-white film were once all the tools the photographer had. And there’s a form of snobbism that comes with holding to tradition; the large-format BW prints were, and often still are, called “fine art prints.” All else is candid, commercial, photojournalism or such, where “not real art” is implied. It goes back to an old argument, “Is photography art?” when it’s just all physics and chemistry? The grudging answer became, “Yes, if it’s large-format and black-and-white.”

I say that it was the war that radicalized me, but it was my children and their friends too. Humanity, its complexities and absurdities, the predicaments of it all. I bought a 35mm camera, I bought a Minox, and I took pictures of people. I thought that somehow this would help me to figure it all out. I did learn a lot, not so much from the pictures themselves, but from talking to people about the pictures and other things.

Nowadays I do large-format studio portraits, the “keep your distance” landscapes with medium format, and people pictures in both medium format and 35mm. I try to bring compositional order learned from my fine-art days into the spontaneous moment. On a regular basis, I think of getting a Minox again, believing that more spontaneity and less order would be a quicker route to understanding.

My children all grew up with a dad hooked on photography; and without wondering how much is nature and how much nurture, we will have their works here, too.

The question “Is photography art?” has all but disappeared, replaced now with the question, “When is a photograph a photograph?” The computer, digitized images, and ink jet printers have augmented film, developers, enlargers, and silver chemistry in the process of “through the lens and onto a piece of paper.” I personally have replaced my cold, wet, and dark room with Macintosh computers, Epson printers, and that remarkable software, Photoshop. I can manipulate photos now in ways that are simply impossible in the darkroom, and I do.