The Moving Tripod

Walker Evans
Garage
Atlanta, GA, 1936


Walker Evans Anodized Red Alloy Beadlock Wheel, Walker Evans Racing, Riverside, CA


I couldn't find the picture I was looking for. It's of Walker Evans's car, and I think it was from the thirties when he went on a road trip to photograph architecture with Lincoln Kirstein. (I have probably garbled the facts here, since this is from memory.) But that snapshot of Evans's car always stuck with me. (I've substituted the beautiful Evans picture above.) It's just a homely picture of an old-timey car on a dusty lot.

Ziess Planars, carbon fiber tripods, strobes and soft boxes--none of them are as important a tool to photographers as the car. It's unacknowledged, I think, and it's not just the road-trip photos of Frank, Friedlander, et al. It's true of almost any photograph that depends on a location, which covers a lot of ground, so to speak. Photographers like Gursky, Burtynsky, and Crewdson must rely heavily on their cars (or tractor-trailers, for that matter) for their pictures. Mobility is key. And the car is like a moving tripod, perfect for positioning the camera exactly where it needs to be. A lot of the history of American photography is inconceivable without the automobile. One obvious irony is the image of a nature photographer bumping along in his jalopy, burps of carbons dioxide and monoxide puffing from his tailpipe.

(Photo of Tom Stoppard's book case, made by T. Anthony, via The New York Times.)

This is of special interest to me because I don't drive, and I'm acutely conscious of how it affects my work, all of which is conducted along the routes of my everyday life, home to work, basically. You could say my work is about imagination, even introspection to the degree that it is a little about how the mind works. That would make the book my second most important tool.

Trinity Church 2

This picture is from the same set of exposures as the one below. I've always liked rhythmic compositions, somehow.

Copley Square

Here's a new picture. It's a composite of about 45 images over half an hour. It really happened just like this, however. Even though it was only in my head.

I've been thinking about a certain kind of photographers often says something like, "reality is richer, stranger and more varied than imagination." They mean that you should go out and take pictures of real things and leave making things up to painters, novelists, sculptors, filmmakers, etc. It's true that the strength of photography is its documentary capability. But I think it's also true that all photographs are acts of imagination. The decision to photograph, say, man's effect on nature by taking pictures of orange lakes, trash-strewn fields, etc., is an idea, an act of imagination itself. And the truly successful work in this vein succeeds because it's imaginative, that is, we see this standard subject in a new way.

Call me defensive, but I think reality-imagination divide is kind of artificial. I guess I think my work straddles the divide, or at least does both things wrong.

54

Sometimes I just put my camera on the bench where I'm sitting and take pictures. If I don't bump it, it works as well as a tripod. It also makes me pretty inconspicuous. Many of these people, I believe, were snickering over the figures in the fountain--two nude boys, one riding on the other's bare bottom. When I was taking the pictures, I noticed people smiling, but involved as I was, I didn't notice what they were smiling at.

Another Self-Portrait

This is a Cezanne--The Bather.

Here's a self-portrait, done in the Boston Public Garden. I am categorically against photographic self-portraits. But that hasn't stopped me.

China Photo Press

I'm all excited because something called China Photo Press is publishing some of my pictures and an interview. The editor, who is very nice, asked for a portrait of me, and above is the self-portrait I sent. China Photo Press is sponsored by the China Photographers Association, which is affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party! It's a twice-weekly printed newspaper! The self-portrait was made while I was taking pictures for another composite (Stepping). Some tourists dragged me from behind my camera and asked me to take their picture. I also took my own picture taking their picture.

Flowers and Blurs

This picture of flowers continues my pursuit of cliche. It also uses another cliche: blurriness. This is a composite of around a hundred exposures taken in the Boston Public Garden over about twenty minutes. A detail is below.

School

(Detail)

I got to work one morning an hour early. I took pictures out my office window as parents were taking their kids to school and people were walking to work. It put me in mind of both my childhood and taking my own kids to school.

Men and Women

I went down to the Boston Common before work to take pictures last week. I wanted to photograph people walking their dogs, but did this instead. I did another picture of men on the left, women on the right last year, but I wasn't happy with it. This picture took about half an hour to do and there are about 150 men and women as well as roughly 2 buses, 3 trucks, 6 dogs, and 14 birds (including a hawk, I think).

Done and Done

Chris's comment below (on May 9) asks, " If you're going for cliche, how about doing a composite of tourists with cameras?" Already done, Chris! You're on the right wavelength, bud!

Tulips

Another new picture. 25 minutes worth of pictures, maybe 30 layers in photoshop. At the PRC/Griffin portfolio reviews a couple of weeks ago, someone said to try some simpler compositions with fewer people. It seemed like a good observation.

Stalks

It's a good month. I went to the Griffin/PRC Portfolio Reviews last weekend (these events gather art and photo professionals to meet individually with fine art photographers, kind of like speed dating), and people were kind of nuts over my work, especially my squirrel picture. Also, I'm doing lots of new work, like this picture of stalks. Again in the Public Garden, about a hundred exposures in 20 minutes. The tourists are back and people are out with their cameras. Ideal conditions for me.