Fruit Is Good for You

Here are some new pictures from a series I'm starting (click on image to enlarge). I thought of calling it Rational Fruit, but changed my mind. I bring this up because it gives you an idea of what I am thinking about these pictures. They take a lot of work, but I've got another five or six going now. They might take a few weeks because I have to let them sit or redo them if they are not quite right. God, I have a lot of patience, but only when something seems really worth doing and exciting. Otherwise, I get bored easily. I am looking forward to spring and getting outside to take pictures.

Orange Abstract

Orange squares and circles dissolving (left to right) to foam on a blue background. --Peter

Here's the next one. Thanks, Peter. Anybody else have a description? Scroll down for more info and click here for the original instructions.

Absractor No. 2

An array of boxes filled with curved shapes. All in black. --Chris

In an earlier posting, I asked put out a general call to all readers to describe an abstraction as concretely as possible. Chris supplied the words in the caption above a few days ago and I did the picture this morning. (Click image to enlarge.)

Send me your description and I'll do a picture for it! See here for more information. Also, feel free to break the rules. All I need is some kind of idea to photograph.

Google Street View

These images are from Google street view. I collected them back in April, 1010, before I saw this.

The Best Moment of the Year, So Far

Jasper Johns, Target, 1958.

It was a warm, breezeless New Year's Day, and my wife and I were out for a walk along the Muddy River in Brookline, where we live, which runs between the the urban hill of the VA Hospital in Boston and the more suburban environs of our town. There was plenty of snow on the ground after last week's big storm. We were up on a path that overlooks the river, still mostly iced over. The trees were brown, but with a sappy green coming through.

I said to Margaret, "watch this. See that tree, the big one? See the first big branch? See the knot?" She nodded. "I'm going to hit it." It was about a hundred or a hundred and ten feet. It was fairly high on the tree, so it was level or only slightly downhill from where we stood. It was an almost impossible shot. It was the kind of throw it would ordinarily take me four or five shots to get pretty close. I've got a very accurate arm, although I don't throw all that hard any more. I made a snowball. The warm day made for perfect packing. It was a nice hefty ball, not too big, and unlikely to come apart in the air. I loosened up my arm by swinging the snowball in a big circle and doing a couple of mock-throwing motions. I took a crow hop and strode into the throw. The release was clean.

There is something I love about the arc of a thrown object. You can see in the arc all kinds of invisible forces. Gravity. Wind. And, well, force itself. But there is something fantastic about an object that hits its mark, especially a distant one, as this was. It almost looks film in reverse, the way movements seem fated and inevitable (because they've already happened!). In this particular case, which was my first and only snowball of the day, the arc and the destination of the snowball were fated, but only by the precise motion of my arm. After a long three seconds of watching the snowball against the pale blue winter sky, I felt a sudden happiness. The snowball exploded, a white asterisk on the grey-green bark. Right where I said. Certainly the highlight of the young year, all of eleven hours of it. But maybe the best moment of the last twelve months, too.

Abstractolator No. 1

outer space without getting into a space vehicle

Here's my first official Abstractolator photo. (I am the Abstractolator, at yoru command.) And it's kind of literal, after all that. Stars! Paul Light sent the text under the photograph, and I did my best to make it happen. Anyway, send your descriptions, audience, such as you are, please! Just a word or two describing colors and composition to pelle_cass@yahoo.com and you will see your words realized photographically. (See the previous post for full explanation.) Thanks, Paul!

Describe an Abstraction

Friends, family, acquaintances, and complete strangers: I need your help. Just describe a painting or any abstract work of art. I'll do the rest, using your description as the "idea" for a new photograph. The point? I want to experiment with how words connect to objects, and how form and content are connected. Also, I've run out of ideas of my own and could use a few handouts.

Just describe any abstract work that has lodged in your mind. Your description can be very brief, but please at least mention color and composition. I am interested in your memory of the artwork, so it's best if you don't consult the image or tell me the artist or title. You don't have to be elaborate or eloquent. You can even be brief and sloppy. (See example below.)

Your words will become part of the artwork, and I'll post both here.  (Let me know if you don't want your name mentioned.)  To send your description, just use the comments section on this blog or email me at pelle_cass@yahoo.com.

Thanks! I hope I'll have tons of new "ideas" to work with. I'll post the photographs as I do them in the order received. And I promise to do a picture for every idea posted.

***

Here's an example, supplied by my wife, Margaret:

“over a gray background, a dance or tangle of white, red, and black lines, maybe some green or yellow ones, each culminating in a small pool of color. it may be the product of a disordered mind but to me it looks gay in the old sense or joyous -- color and lines are joyous.”

Here's the picture.

My photograph, based on a my wife's memory of an abstract painting.

My Abstracts

Photo by Paul Smith.

Painting by Clifford Still

My studio photograph, composed according to my memory (without consulting books or the web) of Clifford Still's painting.

The results of a Google image search for "peeling paint." There are many, many pages like this.

Lately, I've been mulling over a typical approach some photographers take to abstraction: "My photo of peeling paint looks just like an abstract painting!" (My series Artist's Statements is on a related topic.) Judging by the quantity of this work I've seen over the years, these "instant paintings" must seem like miracles--at least to the photographers involved. I like how it's a little like a game of "telephone," the message becoming garbled as it's passed along. Something undeniable remains, yes, but I'm just as interested in the garbling, maybe more.

My version of the Still (he was an American Abstract Expressionist) was made in my studio from a vague memory, photographing bits of string, tape and whatever was at hand to approximate Still's work. It's not really an homage to Still, exactly. It's an homage to all those photographers who take pictures of rusty old cars, walls of peeling paint, old barn doors, etc., and call them "my abstracts."


I have another related project in mind, and in a future post, I'll ask you, dear readers, for help and collaboration if you're willing. More in the next day or two.

Here's some new work, based on some pictures of bits so string, yarn, and tape that I took at Yaddo in January. For a while, I haven't known what to do with them. But I realized I could combine them with another project I'd been wanting to work on using artist's statements.

So here are a few images, each paired with a sentence or two from artist's statements found in the Web. You may need to click on the images to read the text.

Impressions of FotoFest Meeting Place 2010

Just to the left of the Downtown Doubletree, Houston, where I stayed for FotoFest 2010. Google Street View.

Here's something I don't usually do here: blog. I usually talk about my own work instead of blazing around the Web. But I since was at FotoFest, I thought I'd write about some of what I saw there, with no particular judgment or methodology applied. In fact, these are simply the people I bumped into and was somehow able to remember their names or retrieve their business cards. I'll do a couple now, and hope to mention some more people later.


Elizabeth Chiles is first on my list. I like this work because it sneaks up on you and it's smart. It perhaps looks precious at first, but at it's core, it's not at all. It's happy and skewed at the same time. The work I saw was presented small and was very refreshing. I met her standing at the "portfolio walk," when FotoFest invites the public to see the work of photographers attending the portfolio review.

Also just outside the hotel. I was indoors almost all the time, but when I ventured out, I was glad to get back inside to some fresh air. Google Street View.

Triiibe is the moniker of identical triplets Kelly, Sarah, and Alicia Casilio plus pro photog Cary Wolinksy. Nicer triplets you absolutely would not be able to locate anywhere. As ordinary citizens, they are as plain, upstanding and as meritorious as can be. But as Triiibe they fool around with identity and politics and the fungibility of idenitity, and maybe the entire universe, profoundly but lighthandedly. Cary does the photographs (the sisters are performance artists) and the superb, super-clean technique plays to advantage the basic shagginess of triplets dressing up, having a ball.

The Jackson Twins naturally follow Triiibe, and cover some of the same ground. However, they certainly have their own unique identity/identities (irony intended and apologized for, but I didn't feel so sorry that I delted it). I saw a snapshot of the five of them together somewhere and heard a rumor that they might do a project together. Power to identicalness!

Chris Harrison is a photographer who is from the north of England, so far north, in fact, not only does he seem to have a Scots burr (to my American ear), he seems to have been strangely compelled to wind up living in Oslo, Norway. For me, the short, incisive paragraphs he uses to introduce the various series on his web site at least double the strength of his already meaty documentary photographs.

B: Q & A with Pelle Cass

Estimable Oregon photographer and blogger Blake Andrews has posted an interview with me. If you crave more (much more) of my wit, charm and verbiage, take a trip here. The subject of the interview is whether it's okay to digitally fiddle with photographs and why/why not. I'm a bit of a fundamentalist on this subject, and insist that artists have the freem to do whatever they want. But read Blake's blog and check out his work, which is free-wheeling, wide-ranging, and very interesting. If you carefully read the whole interview, you will be rewarded with the comedy of me actually using the phrase "our democracy" with zero irony and plus sincerity.

FotoFest

I'm going to FotoFest in a week (March 28-April 1). FotoFest is a big photo biennial in Houston, which runs something called The Meeting Place, a conference in which photographers show their work to curators, dealers, and collectors et al. in a sort of round robin of speed dating. Here's the list of the people who will be there. I'll see about sixteen of them as determined by the FotoFest robots. It's intense, and there's a lot of good work at these portfolio reviews, so I'm looking forward to mixing it up in Houston.