MY BIRTHDAY!
Sitting on the breakfast table was this box, and a rose in a nest, a sprig of thyme, and an embroidered love note from Maggie. A lovely way to start my birth day.
Although many other notes were struck during the day, and they were fun filled, friend filled, and intimate, I remembered this one for its simplicity, honesty, humility and love.
Brands and symbols
The Mayor’s office is in this building. Why all the arrows? What did it mean, back whenever they built this place, to fill the void’s arc with arrows flying toward a sun? Why is it called God’s House? I know some of our French readers will let me in on the story, but while I walked the streets of Bonnieux I always found myself discovering these vestiges of the past that play differently in today’s world of symbols. And what will the future readers of our municipal leavings make of our logos and brands and symbols?
I don’t often collect this kind of imagery, it seems too static and perhaps too easy to pluck it out of the surround and stick it in the file, and then what? But on the other hand, sometimes these odd musings on time’s leftovers can lead the way to a fresh thought about something that may be there in a corner of our minds and we don’t yet know it. So I carried this away with me – it’s so light – and I remembered that once before, for Maggie, who’s a writer, I found a doorway arch just like this, and it had a lovely and elegant metal hand holding a pen!
I did add it to the file.
Trust Your Instinct
These fire roasted artichokes, ash covered and charred, were sitting on a plate in the kitchen where I passed them many times during that day, each time thinking. “I have to get to them, peel and quarter them, and cover with olive oil and garlic and some wild herbs.” I finally got around to it after first taking them to the studio and setting them up in a little corner I had just built.
This corner has played a significant part in what has happened since I made these first corner series images. It amazes me still that one can do something on impulse, like decide to build a corner and put things in it, and then have that innocent instinct develop into an intense new way of working. It’s like coming to the proverbial fork in the road and having to choose left or right, and whatever you choose determines the rest of your life. It just does!
This corner series (although not these artichokes) is something I am now working on for the EXPO 2015 World’s Fair in Milano, opening this May. I’m making four large, triangular, totem-like columns about 20 feet tall. And the images on them will be bread portraits from bakeries all over Italy. I have a Pavilion all to myself, well there are about 9 countries represented in the Pavilion, but the theme – Cereals and Tubers (Feed The Planet is the Fair’s Theme) – is mine to work on, and because it’s a grain pavilion the work became about Bread. And all this has come alive precisely because when I made this image I began working in a new way.
It pays to trust your instinct.
Pipe
Magritte titled a painting of a pipe, “this is not a pipe”.
IT
Every once in a while I find myself stopped by some indefinable sensation, as if a have just passed though a ‘locus point’, a zone of visual force that tingles in such a way that I look around to get my bearings. “What is here that is holding me”? Usually we respond to things that can be defined easily, a space, a tree, some figures doing something, a whole range of sensations that we know how to organize. But when there is nothing as concrete as that how does one make a photograph?
I have learned to trust those ‘calls’. Learned way back when I was first using the 8×10 view camera and working on my St. Louis commission. It happened to me one day right in the heart of downtown St. Louis. Nothing specific, just a feeling that something in the zone in front of me was whispering my name, stopping me from moving on. I remember yielding to the instinct and setting up the 8×10 and waiting to see where the call was coming from.
The image here was pretty much the same thing. Nothing going on but the voluptuous mess of nature. No beautiful arrangement, or scaled relationships, or counterpoint between near and far. Just chaos. Just the indefinite, overall, layered, complexity of nature, as if it had a mind of its own which presented a thought that was purely natural, not within the bounds of the esthetics we have applied to it for centuries of landscape painting and photography, nothing but the rawness of IT.
I would like to apologize to some of my readers for a confusion I may have let creep in when writing this blog about the year’s worth of photographs I have made. Sometimes my tense slips between past and present as it did the other day. So let me reiterate again that I finished this work a year ago and then let it sit while I worked on the accumulated days, and then decided to reflect on that passage of time, so perhaps my enthusiasm gets the better of my grammar.
Confetti
Our rental house comes with an old well (this was once a farm house) which is now filled with fish, and it’s been my pleasure to feed them every day. It’s gotten to the point that when I walk by they all surface and start following me, even when it’s not feeding time.
As I scattered the food today I saw that the casting of the flakes and the rising of the fish made for a confetti-like dazzle of energy and imagery, particularly because there’s that grille (probably so that the guest’s grandchildren don’t fall in and disappear) which adds to the buzz that made it all seem so abstract and delightful, like a mardi gras for goldfish.
What has been interesting to me about this process of a picture-a-day is the outcome of any given day’s seeing. Because, surely, that is all this is about. For example; if someone asked me, “Joel, what did you make a photograph of today” and I answered, “well…there were some goldfish….” it would, on the face of it, sound inane, and maybe seem as if I had abandoned my standards. But here is what this whole discipline is becoming for me, now that I have completed 2 months of it. It is an exercise in opening up the limits that a lifetime of working can impose on any one of us. And so for 5 minutes I stood there, still as a stone, and just let it all play for me, and the trance was hard to leave, but then I snapped out of it, leaned in, and made a photograph.
It’s become a way of looking harder at my quotidian comings and goings, and thus pushing me to make something out of what normally could be overlooked. My freshening sense is that like confetti, the random juxtapositions that daily looking offers may awaken some new idea that I might not have considered had this not been risked.
Emptiness
The end of February! An unusually warm day, springlike even. We walk through the fields outside the town and realize how the sun adds a lightness to our step as well as to our sense of place. Coming back into town we cross the library plaza and suddenly the scale becomes theater-like, and Maggie’s caped form, bold in the hard sunlight, makes her seem like an actor on the stage, then she twirls and comes to rest laughing and blinded by the full on glare of the sun. It is an irresistible moment! I feel the hard blue of the sky, the hard sunlight, the hard black edge of her form, the hard edge of the frame above her head, all known in that moment’s grace after the twirl, and before she walks away. It’s as fast as that!
Emptiness is a condition of photography that I have come to cherish. And as you may know, I love the charged, crowded precincts of big cities where everything going on all over the frame has enchanted me since I first began making photographs. But now there are times when the simplicity of place itself sends its awakening call through me, and when someone I love is passing within the boundaries it makes it even more vital for me.
License To see
It breaks my heart every time I see a tree cut down in a town. This one was hollow to the core as I learned when I walked around it. But first I stood there for awhile – it was market day and I had bags full of winter greens and root vegetables that I was happy to put down – leaving me free to contemplate the body of the tree and the emotions that came and went.
Then the woman in the beret walked by, and for some reason a figure entering the frame made me think that it would take about 8 people her size to equal to the mass of the trunk of that tree, that is if you stacked them up like cordwood. Not a pleasant thought but one that came to mind momentarily, as these things sometimes do..
Part of the pleasure of photographing is the amount of speculation that races along in my mind when I am out in the world. Carrying a camera is like having a license to see, and also to think about the unexpected ideas that rise up in relation to wherever I find myself. I have always said that photography – even though it is made of images – is really about ideas. Our ideas about who we are, what we feel, what things move each of us to raise the camera and acknowledge any given instant, as if it is only we who can see this. And it is!
I feel that photography, even though the format is exactly the same for billions of people around the world, gives us a chance to say something about what we see in a truly individual way. We just have to figure out who we are so our identity comes through clearly. Photography can help to do that!
The other side of the camera
This is what it looks like from the other side of the camera. I was being interviewed and filmed by the BBC for a documentary on Vivian Meier. I had been involved with her work almost from the very beginning, because, when John Maloof discovered what he had bought, and began asking for opinions from a number of photographers about the quality of the work, he called me, and I said, “she’s the real thing’!
I contributed to this BBC version because a friend was the producer of the film and I couldn’t say no to him even though I had already been filmed by John. It all worked out in the end and John’s film has brought a lot of attention to the work, which is the best result possible.
But as I sat there facing them I had the impulse to make a record of the moment, since it was one of the parts of the day that seemed worthy of remembering. It’s a record, more or less of who was there, how the place served us, and what life in Bonnieux offered. It’s what photography can do in its simplest, most utilitarian way.
The Presence
I had to run out to pick something up for Maggie from the pharmacy before they closed. I always take the camera even if I am just going around the corner, which is where the pharmacy is. What a moment! It may seem like an ordinary evening, and to the extent that nothing happened, it was. But we have to make the most out of what we have, the hand we are dealt as photographers is always a straight. It is what it is. The dull moments and the exciting ones, you never know what you’ll get.
But, in fact, it is our recognition of something special, to us, within the overall moments of life that puts us near the presence, the sense of necessity, that makes us gasp and say, Yes!
For me it was the hour, and the color of the street lights seen against that particular winter evening blue, and those shutters! Their blue off by just enough toward the cyan to make the last of the magenta in the blue of the sky seem even more radiant. These color events,these relationships, small as they are, are enough to bring a rising sense of joy to me. I stand in them, breath them in, linger, while my mind and eye let me know how wonderful it is to be alive.
This is what photography means to me.
ONCE MORE AROUND THE SUN 