Interview with Edward Olive (english version, updated, new photos, new stuff)

“Mirror on wall and ikea sofa” (self portrait Canon EOS 300, with Asahi Pentax Spotmatic 1970’s radioactive lens via EOS m42 adapter. Your Takumar radiactive / pentaxforums)



Edward Olive wedding photographer, born in Dublin, currently based out of Madrid, is one of the most authentic photographers that I’ve been able find.His photography transcends, goes beyond and envelopes you in an atmosphere that only he knows how to find. Here we aren’t talking about technique or equipment, we’re talking about soul. His pictures have their own soul. Real pictures of real situations, but with a special atmosphere, breathing sensations, moments, and his air charged with the magic of film….

"Couples love their sh*tty own wedding photos that nobody else could stomach looking at for more than 30 seconds unless you knew the people". We envy the few couples that look further then these one in a million pictures and end up with Edward Olive. Because Edward Olive is not just a wedding photographer. He's not just a photographer, but embodies the struggle of a great artist who is yet to get the recognition he deserves. Refusing to water his style down, his photos are raw, pure, grainy, erotic while remaining the delicateness and finesse of someone who puts thought in every aspect of his work. Just have a look at his photostream and you'll notice that your heart pounds faster. Please enjoy this feature with one of our favorite, if not favorite artists"



What do you have to say to someone who has never used anything but auto focus?

Sound like a good idea to me. The easier the better.

The most important thing in art in general, whether in photography or in any other medium, is to express oneself in a unique, original and genuinely personal way, provoking or sharing ideas, sensations, contrasts, plays on words, humour, emotions…Using technical aids such as autofocus help to free us up to think about other more fundamental aspects of the composition of the picture. AF gives the photographer speed, and for certain types of photography the faster the better. Intimate, fleeting, unrepeatable moments are not lost.

Working in weddings I use a lot of different types of camera including three Contax g1 rangefinders with Carl Zeiss t * f2/f2.8 auto focus lenses. Whilst the Contax G series don’t have the same level of fame as Leica M with the wealthy family doctor and airline pilot amateur camera buffs, nor the same cachet factor with vip clients, they are comparable in size and weight to a Leica M7, really give the Leica a good run for its money on quality and are incredibly reasonably priced. Considering price, quality of lens, size, weight, ease of use, quality of build I would say they are almost unbeatable, and combined with AF, that the Leica M doesn’t have, makes them ideal for me.

“Man with digicam & man with cigarette & happy lady” (Contax G1 Carl Zeiss 45mm f2 t* using auto focus and aperture priority exposure)



In weddings I used to use Canon EOS 5/a2 y EOS 1 AF advanced film auto reflex bodies with Canon L lenses, always with AF. However I think I now prefer the size, weight and quality of the Contax (canon L lenses are absurdly large – it must be just a selling feature or fashion). To the standard sane photographer the difference in size and weight is not that crucial, but since I shoot off 3-4 cameras at once all hanging from my neck with different lenses on the front and a variety of black & white, colour negative & slide film inside, the weight difference multiplied by 3-4 starts to make a big difference on the neck and in the camera bag when working long hours. The only “drawback” of smaller lighter rangefinder bodies and lenses is that more cameras & lenses fit in the bag so I end up taking even more bl**dy cameras to work than before.

“After hours” (Canon EOS 5/A2 85mm f1.2 L)


Recently I’ve also been using the panoramic rangefinder 24x65 (on 35mm film) Hasselblad xpan. However I soon found out that focusing the thing on little kids running up and down or catching a split second kiss from the wedding couple was almost impossible especially “wide” open at f4 in lower light. Now for day shots I just stick it on f16 set to 1.5 metre focus that way pretty much everything is in focus without needing to screw up my eyes trying to manually focus and still lose shots.
AF though is just one part of the “lottery” shooting process I use in social event photography. Basically I just press the fire button on AF, with auto advance and often even aperture priority shutter speed auto exposure and keep pressing none stop all day on ridiculous numbers of cameras until I run out of film and have to reload them all, stopping briefly for some soft drink, if one’s handy, before going on again until the end of a 12-14 hour shift. After that much squinting and that many hours the truth is my own eyes don’t work well and the brain has few ideas left. Fortunately if you keep shooting auto cameras long enough something decent will inevitably always come out, even if it’s just playing the lucky numbers game in a 62 film roll wedding.

“Newly weds 3am” (Contax T2 compact “point and shoot” with Carl Zeiss 38mm f2.8 t* on auto focus and aperture priority at well past my manual focus possibilities by 3am. A camera I always keep on my belt at work to have to pull out when all other guns have run out of bullets)


We should also not forget the ease of zone focus point and shoot 35mm semi wide angle cameras like the Lomo lca or Olympus XA range, Minox GT, etc etc cameras, especially useful for street photography – super small and light you can carry them anywhere with you, discreet (you don’t even need to put them to your eye that way nobody know you’re shooting them) and fast easy to use, so fast in fact they are faster than auto focus with no delay or fiddly focus in low light. Better a XA4 than the newer MJUII for the street in my opinion.

“Young lady in street” (Olympus XA2 35mm f3.5)



There also even exist focus-free cameras like the medium format 6x6 Pouva Start or compact 35mm Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim. Often dismissed as toy cameras these little 20 euro or less eBay bargains can get super pictures by liberating the photographer almost completely by having no focus at all (everything more or less in focus from 1 metre away), only one shutter speed of about 125 (plus bulb if you are lucky like on the Pouva) and in the case of the Vivitar only one aperture (of about f22).


creative commons license CC BY-SA 2.0
By alf_sigaro



What do you think about manual focus?

The truth is I do actually use manual focus quite a lot in my own personal work when I don’t have the same pressure to produce huge amounts of images quickly and safely that I have at work in weddings.
Perhaps the main reason is that my favourite cameras are only manual focus. Here I mean cameras from the 1970’s and 1980’s that are made of real metal with lenses made from real glass, that don’t break when dropped, don’t get stolen because they don’t look fashionable and even have amazing abilities to stand up to rain and seawater getting in without dying.

I would particularly mention the Hasselblad V series that, in my opinion, are the cameras that produce the best images of any cameras ever made. I use a pair of Hasselblad 500 c/m with the range of Carl Zeiss t* lenses and A12/A24 film backs + Polaroid type film backs when I really want to take a serious picture. I always try and persuade clients to go for the Hasselblad pictures over just digiphotos. When shooting erotic sessions with brides or outside work I almost never use any other type of camera and indeed point blank refuse to shoot erotica using modern digital equipment. The colors, contrasts, light control, textures and dreamlike qualities obtained naturally from this level of 6x6 medium format film camera, without any need at all for the computer special effects many modern photographers now resort to, is in my opinion unrivalled. There does exist I admit a range of medium format Hasselblad H1 and Mamiya 645 auto focus film cameras but even there I still believe the quality is just not quite the same… and they aren’t square images which I do really like as a format.

“Man under sunshade” (Hasselblad 500 c/m Carl Zeiss 80mm f2.8 t* Kodak Portra 100T 120 film (expired year 2000) manual focus)



Of course, with the exception of Leica M, another gigantic advantage of non-AF cameras is the price. They now almost give them away on eBay. When you think of the ridiculously high prices these Japanese companies charge for some dreadful modern plasticcy digicam that doesn’t even have a sensor the size of real 35mm film let alone a 6cm square negative I sometimes think the world has gone completely insane. For the same price as a tourist level digiSLR like a Canon 500d and dreadful kit lens you can buy a Hasselblad V series with standard focal length lens, film back and still have money left over to get a super 8 real film camera on eBay to use instead of the 500d video facility.

“Railz” (Hasselblad 500cm Carl Zeiss 80mm f2.8 t* manual focus)




What is photography for you?

Photography has now become my main source of income and as such allows me to live… almost everything I have and everything I do is paid for by photography. As such I am lucky to make a living off what is essentially artistic creation. I am also lucky in that in photography a pro photographer can be his own boss, a one man band, his own small business and with a bit of luck get a decent lifestyle and the odd luxury out of it. As such photography is freedom from the rat race of office worker commuters chained to desks and bosses in often mundane jobs. I was once a commercial lawyer, which, as office jobs go is really not that bad, but I’m not going back.

It is however untrue to say that to work as a pro photographer is not an awful lot of work. It is. In weddings it means constant travelling, almost never having a weekend free, long hours and late nights and above all pressure always to produce super pictures and never to miss anything.

Leaving aside more prosaic matters, photography is a way to express oneself artistically and emotionally. Not only this, but with creative freedom that does not necessarily need to rely on others. This is a big difference from my other day job as pro actor where, whilst it can be possible to put together a one man show or perform in the street or self-film oneself for YouTube, it is much more difficult to produce a finished creative project alone. Actors are very dependent on the need to be chosen for parts in projects produced by others and to form a very small part of a much larger team. Whilst the superstars of photography, like the recently gone bankrupt American lady I won’t name, go with truckloads of equipment and endless lines of sycophantic assistants, I think that working almost alone wherever possible is much more conducive to a personal creative process and intimacy with models and clients.

La Perla creative bosses are either so far above mere mortals such as myself that they don’t yet know I even exist or consider my work beneath them still and don’t call me to shoot their campaigns… but if they did I don’t think I’d be able to stand all the “creatives” and make up people and hair people and wardrobe people and catering people and lighting people and set and props people and agency people and client people getting in the way and all crowding around monitors, all having different opinions and telling me what to do. It would water down purity of expression and risk taking. I think I would go AWOL the night before the shoot without telling anyone with a couple of the models, a bag full of the fancy client-made micro knickers, the models’ own minimal makeup, natural hair and shoot the whole thing from 2-6am in late night bars, the back of taxis and anywhere else that we found, turning up the next day with a hangover only to send them all home. I do not necessarily like all of Terry Richardson’s images from his little point and shoot auto flash cameras but I do think that he has been instrumental in bringing some anarchy back to photography.

Photography was for me before all the business cr*p came into it self-expression and hobby. When I get enough time off work to recover enough to get ideas it still is.

Wedding guests always refer to the fact that I’m a professional photographer, as if that somehow means I will therefore automatically take better pictures than them. That could not be further from the truth. Give me the pictures taken by a little kid under the table in a wedding with his mum’s compact camera and his little buddies pulling faces all at odd angles and out of focus than the (hopefully) technically adequate, but almost invariably soul-less, anti-creative, bland, client-friendly, uncontroversial, posed, staged, fake-smiled, big front-on flashed digi-wedding-photos produced by local professional photographers in provincial small towns and suburbs all over the world…. professionals who care more about paying their mortgage and the hire purchase on their family saloon than trying their best to stir up something new or genuinely exciting or original.

Photography can be frustration.

Am I where I want to be yet? No. Not yet. But I’m going to try by f*cking hardest to get there. Here I mean all the sweat and effort possible both to take better, more creative, more original, more aesthetic pictures with more thought, messages, contrasts, plays on words, sensuality, emotions… and at the same time to bring these pictures out of still relative anonymity and to take them places… to get them out there… and as big time as I can.

Photography can be happiness, satisfaction, relaxation. Stay amateur it will always be simple and always happy.

Photography can be something you share with others at the time of taking the picture together (people still love having their picture taken or having pictures taken of their kids)… or at the time you give a picture to that person... a picture they recognize as from that day but taken in a way they could never have imagined, an image that will at the same time preserve their memory and somehow change it... as if the fantasy that is the picture somehow must have existed. Talking with a client last night I realized what I sometimes almost forget… my photography makes people happy (absurd!). The pictures you produce are important to people. Whilst I strive to produce images with artistic & aesthetic values we cannot forget the emotional and sentimental value a picture can have for someone. I am the first to admit I am useless at shooting landscapes where you can actually see the landscape, but in a wedding a couple of months ago I somehow managed to get an ok shot of the church alone in the fields from the open top car I was in with the couple. When the bride saw it later I realized that even that shot had a profound sentimental and emotional value for her. Whilst outside my work in weddings my pictures are almost never descriptive in the sense of clearly showing people and events, even here the capture of the essence of a place or a moment or a person can have a strong emotional effect on people.



What makes a photo for you?

I will reply as I did to one of the lovely ladies who appear in my erotica (in whose estimation I seem to have gone up in since she has seen her pictures).

My pictures are:

25% the people who appear
25% the photographer
25% the place, wardrobe, light & colors
25% the best cameras, lenses and films ever made, from all over the world

I know I only play a small part in the creative process, and in weddings I try to leave the people and moments create their own magic. In my own personal private shoots I will take advantage of places, times of day, and the people I can get to appear to create images.

I also rely heavily on the alchemy of film + light/colors + development to create images I admit I could not fully imagine at the time of shooting, with colors I did not see. All my films are out of date and I never really know exactly what I’ll get especially when, even with a light meter, by the time I have had to calculate sky and land differences and count in several Cokin filter +1-+3 etc etc I invariably make mistakes with exposure.

There are photographers who get a little over-obsessed with equipment, thinking more about the kit than they do about the subject and ideas of photos but the lenses and films used do make a difference. That said at the time of the actual shoot a photographer needs to be able to overcome all technical issues and even artistic concepts to be able to shoot instinctively, to react naturally to what he sees. Many brides want to send me lists of my past shots they like so I can do the same colors, frames, lighting etc etc. I always refuse to look at them simply telling the rather surprised rich young ladies that I just do whatever I feel like, whatever I see, the way that takes my fancy, without planning shots or listening even to the expressed tastes of anyone. In drama school it is said that acting is reacting. An actor who does not react to the other actor in front of him and just follows a pre-planned emotional journey he thought up beforehand is not really present and is not behaving how humans really behave. Another example would be a DJ. Imagine a DJ who just played the songs in order he had prepared in a list without reacting to the dancing public. A photographer should be the same. The better shots are always the ones that just happened, and of those the mistakes, that can somehow be salvaged, are always the best.

Example - “anonymous young lady in hotel room” (wonderful 5* grand luxe hotel I was staying in to attend a wedding, bedside lamplight, wonderful lady I persuaded to appear, wonderful Hasselblad 500cm Carl Zeiss 80mm f2.8 t* + wonderful Fuji Neopan 400. Unplanned, shot in sequence just following the lady.)




Which celebrity would you like to shoot and why?

I like Obama. He’s stylish and seems like he’s trying to do the right thing for once in America. I reckon his first lady could be pretty good too and not just fully dressed

Politics aside but talking business, I would probably be best advised to shoot all the A-list celebs I can get my hands on. Only when you have the superstars in your pictures will many people suddenly be able to understand your work… not just that … be able to respect it. The portrait photographer of the rich and famous is no longer in the category of the positive nonchalant comments regarding a picture looking nice or the negative comments of it as blurred/grainy/dark blah blah etc etc. All of a sudden people will queue up in central London galleries in their thousands to admire it as ART on their bus trip weekend from up North (where I’m from too) squeezing a gallery in-between Oxford Street shopping and a musical starring someone from reality TV. Those familiar with the theatre will know Yasmina Reza’s obra maestra ART and its social comments regarding art and fame and money. Buy it on Amazon you won’t regret it. The English translation from the original French by the also wonderful Christopher Hampton - http://www.amazon.com/Art-Play-Yasmina-Reza/dp/0571190146

Business and perceived prestige aside… really big celebrities are all interesting not just for the viewer of the picture but also for the photographer. It is as if we know these people and have done so for a long time - but do we really know them? Are we just thinking of their public persona or the parts they have played? A portrait of an old man or a child in the third world can transmit emotionally. We can feel their thought s through the transmission of eyes to camera. A celebrity perhaps goes further. When we see De Niro we are aware also decades of his performances and so on.

Really top celebs are easier in many ways to shoot. It doesn’t matter whether they are big time sports stars, performers or politicians… they are used to still and video cameras… they know how to transmit something. That however can also be the difficulty… they transmit what they want to show. A “normal person” is more vulnerable and once you get beyond hiding behind the smile people put on for cameras (not just in weddings), arguably more open.

“Mr mini peeper” (little ones are of course always super and totally natural)



All this said here in Europe the vast majority of pictures taken of both local national celebrities and even the biggest international names are far from ground breaking or soul searching. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the stomach churningly posed Hello magazine shots at home with the whoevers or the robes and crown posing session the QEII did with the American lady I mentioned earlier. The only difference is that the American lady’s pictures were far, far more sophisticated. All though were emotionally, creatively and anarchically valueless. Even the really great photographers who are capable of taking stunning personal work for the books they publish (and I buy) have their hands tied by publicists and contracts when working and are more concerned about not showing Madonna’s age in her Vogue shoot than they are about showing her real emotional vulnerability.

There are of course exceptions.Famouz: Anton Corbijn Photographs 1975 (Hardcover)

I don’t necessarily know even here whether you really see the superstars emotionally vulnerable and not projecting a persona, but you certainly see some incredibly powerful, original, technically and creatively brilliant images of many household names. Buy it!



Who would you choose to take your portrait?

I don’t have much interest at all in pictures of myself. I often appear in mirror shots almost inadvertently anyway… but photographers who take really super portraits in whose pictures I suppose I would like one day to appear in would include:

Here in Madrid: Edelor
In Barcelona: JordiGual
and a bit further afield: TommyOshima



Your favourite flickr photographers?

There are lots of people going off in their own ways, doing their own thing and doing it really well. It depends on the day who I check in on. Below are a few who I like for different reasons:

Jim Blob Blann
gary isaacs
/ crack jackson jr
gorbot.
jaxting/
edoardo pasero
:pap
fabiolanotte

I would say though that whilst these guys are obviously all always really interesting creatively and technically super-proficient there are many amateur photographers who I see who only have normal cameras and don’t necessarily have super mega photoshop pro tricks etc etc but are (much more importantly) still able to have great ideas and capture super moments… like their little kitten being “cooked” in a frying pan or whatever. Photography doesn’t have to be all pseudo art or F number nonsense. A kitten in a frying pan is fun http://www.flickr.com/photos/merwells/1094499351/



¿How did you feel when you were nominated for the Hasselbald Masters?
“Hasselblad bride & groom” (selected for Hasselblad Masters 2009 wedding social category)


For about a day I was really quite excited. It soon wore off though. Someone somewhere will make sure I don’t win. I have absolutely no doubt about it and I have no reservations about saying it publicly. How can they sell fancy 60mp digicameras with me as pseudo ambassador when I state publicly I prefer an old eBay Hasselblad and a dollar a roll expired film any day? I saw the other photographers in my category and with all due to respect to them (they are all clearly Photoshop Grand Masters), its just another kind of photography to mine. My pictures were all, as they always are, a bit rough round the edges. I think I’m swimming against the tide.

I was also nominated finalist in the pro wedding category of the International Photography Awards with my series “Real wedding photos”, but having shot them all on a 15 euro second hand eBay Olympus XA2 and terribly expired high grain black and white film with no staging or photoshop I only got an “Honorable mention”. Which, I suppose considering I was swimming against the current and upriver wasn’t that bad?

“2009 vintage wedding portraiture - the brother” (Olympus XA2 35mm f3.5 auto point and shoot zone focus compact camera)



Whilst I may now have my pictures in certain magazines, collective exhibitions, get photography competition runner up wooden spoons etc etc, there is still a long way up – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzBFxI-WzmE


I am not there yet.




Edward Olive
October 2009
www.edwardolive.info/
Wedding photojournalism & fine art photography






Note - Hasselblad Masters on Tour

A special exhibition will bring high quality prints of each finalists' submissions, which will include work from the wedding photography portfolio of Edward Olive, to specially selected venues in Hong Kong, Copenhagen, New York and London. This will enable photo enthusiasts to see all of these fantastic images up close and in full, glorious quality.

Every event place will have a special program and VIP opening, please see the next dates and venues below.


New York
MILK Studio
450 W. 15th Street
October 22, 2009 (during PhotoPlus Expo)

London
To be confirmed

http://www.hasselblad.com/masters/masters-2009-video-presentation.aspx


“Dawn” (Hasselblad 500cm)