Last night was the annual Monster Drawing Rally benefit for Midway Contemporary Art. I was happy to participate again this year. Since I’ve been exploring the realm of photography more and more in my work, this time around I chose to perform one of the exercises I do when I really want to study a great photo: making a blind contour drawing.
I only had an hour, so I decided to focus on just one photographer whose work is definitely worth detailed study, namely Alec Soth. I picked four images from his book, Niagara, and spent 10-15 minutes on each. While wearing a pair of ski goggles with tape over the right eye to keep me from cheating (see the drawing someone did of me*), I traced the contours of the image until I felt I had a complete picture. The results are always strange, and I felt rushed during the event, so these aren’t necessarily the best examples. But in my opinion there is no deeper way to study a photograph than to make a blind contour drawing of it. Try it. I guarantee that even if you’ve looked at a particular photo 100 times, new insights will suddenly appear and at the very least you’ll never see that picture the same way again.
After “Impala“Â 
After “Melissa” (one of my all-time favorite photos)Â 
After “Comfort Inn“Â 
After “Rebecca” (another favorite)
(My apologies for the poor-quality photos. I had to snap these at the event before giving them away to be sold.)
*Here is the drawing another artist did of me while I was working. I can’t make out the name. She just quietly handed it to me. I was in the middle of one of the drawings, so I didn’t get  a change to catch her name. Anybody know who this is?
Update: I believe the artist is Claire Strautmanis.
STEVEN LANG 