Planning and Preparing

I've stopped taking pictures for the moment to get ready for my show at Gallery Kayafas early next year. The picture above is of the scale model I made of the gallery. It is kind of helpful, at least to figure out how many pictures to include. I'm getting ready so early because 1) I have to rent a printer at NESOP (New England School of Photography) to make thse 24 x 36 inch prints, 2) I'm going to Yaddo for the month of January and the show starts at the end of January, making my deadline for having the show printed and framed December 1 so I have time to plan for Yaddo, and 3) I have no experience in planning for two major events at once.

The practical upshot is that I'm spending my time color correcting and printing tests and fidding with my little model instead of doing new work, which drives me a little crazy.

Danforth Museum

I'm in the Danforth Museum's photo biennial. I'm very pleased about it and hope to see you at the opening on September 12, 6-8 pm! Click on the screen grab above for more details.

Also coming up: the Photographic Resource Center's auction in October and a solo show at Gallery Kayafas, Boston, in February. More about these later.

Crosswalk Two

My previous crosswalk picture is about waiting and boredom, men and women. This one, from the same set of a couple of hundred exposures, is about families--clusters and strings of them. In the very same space and period of time, two very different dramas happened.

Crosswalk

(click to enlarge)


I've always liked crosswalks. First, I like the word, which is backwards: you walk across. I always see an "X" when I hear the word, and for a time, I usually said "let's X the street" instead of "let's cross the street." I like the way people look when they are waiting, at their most static. Gather enough boredom together and it's pretty dynamic. These people are simply waiting for a a walk sign or perhaps a break in traffic, when the real drama begins, I suppose. (I am working on such a picture, using the same set of 200-odd exposures that went into this image.)

Pilgrims

Here's the Pilgrim monument on the edge of Boston Common. Most of these people are tourists, and I really like the pastel palette of their clothing. Pilgrims and tourists? Some relation, I suppose. (click image to enlarge)

Basketball

That's my son with the red hair. He's a pretty good player, although I beat him in a game of one-on-one last summer (he smoked me all the other games we played) and I always beat him in horse, which is a stationary shooting game. This picture was tricky to photoshop because the shadows were moving so quickly. I think all the hundred or so pictures I took to make this only represent about ten minutes.

Frog Pond, Boston Common, Summer

Here's a new picture. I've been doing these composites for a year and a half, but it still amazes me that so much goes on in fifteen or twenty minutes, which is what this picture represents. It was not a particularly busy day, and most of the frames I shot only contain 5 or 6 figures. And of course, there's something strange about the way we coexist with other forms of life, dogs, birds, squirrels, for instance.

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.

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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.