abstract

Today my age is the same as the year I was born: 56. While to some, that might be a reason to celebrate, to me it just means that I’m older. It’s nothing to be proud of, or a sign of anything, it just is a fact.

Making photographs is a way for me to make use of my time, a means of pursuing philosophy, maybe, in a variant form. While I am interested in a certain sense of beauty in my work, it is by no means what generally passes for beauty in photography. I have little interest in scenics, the grand landscape with over-saturated skies and billowing clouds, etc. etc., especially the over-done HDR variety. Flowers are mainly of interest to me when they are well into their decay phase. And so on for most photographic genres.

What I find most fascinating is light and its interaction with stuff. In the photo above, that stuff is ice and a small rock, partially shadowed, but with effects of light spilling out into the shadowy areas. At the same time, what the photo contains of the world is less important than the structure and the overall aesthetic impression, the play of the shapes and the gradations of tone.

While, when I first started thinking about his post, I thought it would be more bleak (and in a few weeks it will be four years since my first step into death), it seems that art provides a foothold and a discipline that can form a foundation for thought. This thought can be transposed into photography. When it connects with my consciousness then the beauty that my art expresses finds a way into the world as a new thing, a thing that puts a conception, an interpretation, into the photograph.

So I will continue to seek out my beauty, the meaning enfolded in the world.

what

Today I finally found some time to begin serious uploading of photos to my website. I’ve had it set up for a couple of months now, but for many reasons haven’t been able to add more than the few dozen photos I had easily ready to upload when I started it.

So far I have mainly uploaded several of my street candids, a genre that I’ve spent a fair amount of time on over the past couple of years. Because of where I work, it’s one of the easiest things to focus on during my breaks. There is usually a steady stream of people going about their activities. I’m not interested in the standard sort of “street photography” that concentrates on bums, weirdos, and just the general randomness of urban life, and in black & white, no less. The latter, in particular, I can’t really understand, because the city is full of color and that’s a big part of the interest. It seems that, to me, the street photography genre is just stuck in the mold of the period from Cartier-Bresson to Winogrand and can’t get beyond it.

At any rate, what I look for is catch people in unguarded moments, with hair flying or lost in thought. Along with this is looking for little pools of light to catch them in and aiming for some sort of conscious composition, although this latter is hard due to the spur-of-the-moment nature of street work.

light story

It being winter, I’ve largely gone into hibernation photographically (that’s probably another post). Although since it was somewhat mild this past week, I have had a few days here and there to get out to make photos. What I’ve been concentrating on are my continuing studies of reflected and filtered light. To me, this is a very fascinating study and challenging in its own right, at least partly because places where these conditions apply are not necessarily easy to find. Where they occur, and when, has a lot to do with the location of the sun and where obstructions can filter the light or windows can reflect light into a shaded area.

In a way, in winter it is almost easier to find filtered light of a certain kind, because there are no leaves on the trees, which makes more for a sort of spread out shadow than the full shade of summer. It’s the edges of the shadows that are the most interesting. There is often a fringe of blurriness that can provide a very useful sort of light.

Pools of reflected light, though, are rarer, a more urban phenomenon. Again, maybe winter is more useful in some respects, since the sun is low and the angle of reflection puts the reflected light farther away into the shadows, rather than more straight down and into the street, as in summer. The photo for this post was taken in a little pool of reflected light that was also heavily filtered. There is very little processing on this photo beyond normal sharpening and contrast. The light temperature is a bit cooler that sunlight, but still has some of the warmth of shade mixed in, which gives it that mysterious and uncertain quality.

In a photograph such as this, the quality of light is more the subject than the content, what it’s falling on. It becomes a metaphor for the environment, for what is present but only liminally. At the same time, the minimal and mundane content of this photo is also suggestive of an aching emptiness.

vertical curve

With the onset of winter, I’m forced indoors and need to try different things. This is not entirely a bad thing.

Making abstracts can be done with any object; it’s purely a matter of point of view. If you get close enough to something, or look at it from an unusual angle, it will take viewers a moment or two to begin to sense what they’re looking at.

As a sort of study for my series of body abstracts, I took some photos of myself. This is not entirely ideal, because it is impossible to frame the shot in the viewfinder and it is not easy to use autofocus on skin when there isn’t some sort of detail for it to focus on. So the process results in a lot of useless images. A few, such as here, can be cropped into something usable.

close

In November and December, I took a masterclass with Tom McInvaille, one of the more established photographers here in Madison. Since this was during the time I was first getting involved with and exploring the possibilities of Google +, I didn’t think to write anything here, even though it would have been an outlet for some of the thoughts that I had during that time.

At any rate, the group of people was small, only 8, and they were all quite serious; so it was worthwhile and fascinating seeing each of us gradually grow in our expression during the eight weeks. Since we were all rather on the shy side, it also took a few sessions for our discussion / critiques to really open up. As we got to know each other, it became easier and we learned respect for each other’s vision.

One of the main points that Tom tried to instill in the class was the idea that idea precedes narrative. The photo above was for our second assignment, which was to “think locally and not globally — find large meaning in small things or ideas.” Although I do think about my photography a fair amount, much of it is perhaps more unconscious than explicitly stated. So thinking ahead before shooting, especially in the sense of preparing a set or situation, was not something that I have done a lot.

I knew that looking for idea and narrative in the local sense could best involve something in my own life. So it happened that during the week this was the assignment, my wife and I went on a small getaway to a bed and breakfast. While we were relaxing and she was puttering on the laptop and I was trying different things with the camera, she put her hand on mine and I snapped a photo. It was clear right away that this was probably the shot I’d want for class.

After loading it into Lightroom, I worked with it a fair amount, starting with a crop from 3:2 to 5:4, and then closing in on the shapes of the fingers and the details of the skin. After discussion with the class, people seemed to think that it needed a bit more cropping, so that is what I show here.

One of the longterm projects that I want to explore much more deeply is exactly this idea of close-ups of bodies, as here. I am interested not so much in personality, but more in the purely formal way that skin folds and creases, and how the various angles and shapes of limbs and curves can be made into abstractions. The roots of this probably go back to my study, beginning in the 1970s, of Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, and Henry Callahan, to name a few.

There are other aspects of this that I will dig into at another time. This, though, shows an initial view into what I hope is a fruitful process.

teal scarf

Earlier this week, I went down to Chicago for a couple of days. Had a chance to spend an hour or two each day on Michigan Avenue shooting people on the street. I haven’t done much of that since early November, so it felt good to get out there and try some things I can’t do at home.

The first two days, it was at dusk and shortly after sunset that I had time, so there were challenges with light. I was able to overcome this by shooting at water tower place, where there were suspended holiday lights over the walkway. For the rest, I found bright store windows and worked with catching people in the light.

On the last day, though, it was warm, for late December, and sunny. I spent most of the time looking for pools of light reflected off buildings and illuminating patches in the shadows, so I could catch people as they moved through them. This was a little harder than I thought, since you need the correct angle from the sun, as well as the right sort of windows doing the reflecting into a place where people could be illuminated from a suitable angle. In spite of this, I did find a few areas that were quite productive.

upward

One side note: it was curious how many other non-tourist photographers I observed; at least 6 – 8 on Thursday. So I wasn’t alone.

corner

Photography is unique among the arts in the way it depends on the world for its very existence. In order for there to be a photograph, something had to be present in front of the sensor/film at the time that it was exposed. While this can be seen as a limitation, it is more properly seen as a kind of discipline. A photographer needs to become an acute observer of the world and, at the same time, develop the technical skills to act quickly, when necessary, to capture the often brief moment when pre-visualization and reality coincide.

In this necessary combination of elements lies the source of the power of photographs.

Over the past several months, I have been reading writings by Jacques Rancière, who has many valuable insights into the question of aesthetics. While I don’t want to go into his entire outlook here, he has this to say about photography:

“Photography was not established as an art on the grounds of its technological nature. … [it] did not become an art by imitating the mannerisms of art. … it is rather [through] the appropriation of the commonplace.” (The politics of aesthetics: the distribution of the sensible. Trans. with an intro. by Gabriel Rockhill. [London: Continuum, 2004], p. 33.)

From this, we can understand that it is the world in its entirety that presents itself as subject matter for the photographer. And it is the proper source of our subject matter, which we make use of to elaborate and express our vision. Whether we wander the world in search of moments or prepare elaborate sets in a studio, the thought behind and before pressing the shutter is what is important and what allows us to make an image that embodies an idea.

ice whorls

Since I discovered Google+ a couple of months ago, I almost totally forgot about this blog. I know I haven’t been the most active at it and to some extent it’s been an experiment.

Now, though, I have come to some decisions about how I present myself and my work online. One result is that I will try to begin being more regular with this, not least because I have linked it to my new Photoshelter site, which, although it is now live, is still under construction, as I learn how to get my feet on the ground with it. The website represents a big step for me, in that I now am confident that my work can stand on its own and that at least some people find it worth their time. I will continue to participate in Google+ and Flickr, but I will concentrate my efforts on the website and this blog.

Doing so allows me to have more control over what I publish and what happens to it online. I have not been entirely happy with the censorship and licensing issues with Flickr and Google+. It also provides a central place where I can sell my work and accept offers of interest for new work.

So here’s to change, since all we can do is try to deflect bits of it in our direction.

Please feel free to comment or contact me with ideas and suggestions.

angles

Sometimes, the way things are going these days, it helps to remember the long view; that the world, the universe, predates humanity by billions of years. And the amazing thing is that if you look at the world through that lens, the antiquity of it all is all around us, plain as day, ready for reflection. And not only is that ancient time there if we can see it, but it appears with a thin layer of the present, the transient, which is probably what most people see.

This is part of the fascination of the North Shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota. The whole length of it is a lesson in ancient geology, having been created in a now dormant rift valley about a billion years ago. The ancient rocks are matched by the power of the lake itself. And the two together form a synthesis that one perceives as beyond human, that has no time for our flightiness. It’s refreshing, if not entirely comforting.

crossed

This is getting closer.

Bodies are more varied and interesting than fashion and conventional portrait, or even street, photography allow. Skin is not unnaturally smooth or eyes excessively white; people are not always in their 20s and unblemished. Time is an essential element of photography and the time of a body is essential, as well. There are shapes and angles of bodies that are ignored by the mainstream photography aesthetic.

Making abstracts of bodies provides an endless fascination. The way the crossed knees, here, echo each other and make interesting rounded shadows along the edges of the legs. The angles of the dress complement those shapes. The small area of background color is closely related to details in the dress. And the skin, with its veins and hair follicles and the suggestion of the underlying muscles, is a fullness, a surface of tactility.

Making art is a process of selection. Of seeing. Of finding in the world that which completes the conception in the mind.