Category Archives: Light

JUNE 22, 2015

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Roadside Opera

Here’s a little story. We had gone to a nearby town for dinner and on the way back, as we passed through a burgo, a small collection of about 5 houses, we saw that 3 people were sitting on the bench right there on the edge of the road that passed through the place. Gianni, ever the connection between all things Tuscan, called out to them as we passed by and they waved to us to stop.

As soon as we did, the Italian Opera began, as always, with gestures, and a half hour of stories and laughter. One of the men had broken his arm and was holding a hand carved stick which helped him do whatever he needed to do with his one good arm. By the end of the exchange Gianni walked away with his stick. How he managed to get the guy to give it to him I cannot say, but it offered me a wonderful few minutes of watching the whole drama play out.

Even the nights in Tuscany are rich with possibility.

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MAY 31, 2015

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I Take It In

After Rome we came home. What a relief to stand in the open countryside and simply look. That to me is one of the joys of being out of a city where the activity is all over the city’s surfaces, and the layered densities of the movement and constant life on the street build a fevered concentration in me. I love it when I am there, whatever city I am in, because I am truly a city creature, but, oh, the surprise of the spacious and quiet Tuscan countryside, brings out another side of who I am. And that is my meditative nature.

I stand still and let my heartbeat find the rhythm of what I see and smell and hear, and often, then, I see something small and maybe even familiar, but with a freshness that opens me to accepting just the pleasure of seeing it, and slowly, it seems so slow after the city , I take it in.

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MAY 18, 2015

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Anniversary Day

One day a year Maggie and I travel Once More Around The Sun and find ourselves on the road where we were married 14 years ago. It is a road enclosed by tall Cypress trees, male and female trees mixed together for the last hundred years, or more and whose shapes tell you the difference. The female trees are rounder, thicker, taller, and have small, round, fruited pine cones the size of chestnuts, all over them. The males are slender, not s tall and seem to bend in the wind easier. They certainly are the inferior looking part of the species.

We always go for a walk there at the time of day that we were married, around 6 o’clock. Some days it’s sunny, as it was on our day, and others, as in this image, cooler, clouded over, grayer. We have had it every way and it doesn’t matter what kind of day it is, it’s still our day, and we always make the most of what we are given. Which, as you may have heard me say before, is what is at the heart of the photographic experience; ‘make the most of what you have.’

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MAY 15, 2015

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All of a Piece

Oh, the mornings! Sometimes they were as sweet and ancient as the dawn of time. Looking out at the pooled mist lying in the valley I felt the sea that must have filled this basin in the valley eons before the present.

What moments like this do to me is bring me to a stillness that daily life too often shatters. In that stillness the wonder of it all fills me up like the mist in the valley, and makes me linger and sail out of myself to the trance state we call ‘witness.’ And sometimes I don’t remember the actual making of the photograph because the whole experience is all of a piece.

This quality of being present is what I love about the act of making a photograph. Ideas, even ideas about things beyond what is in front of me, slip though the veil between me and what’s out there, and bring the experience inside so that outside and inside blend together like the rangefinder image in the Leica, until there is an alignment, a sense of the whole.

When I recognize and understand that moment of alignment the photograph feels authentic.

05-15 L1028815Later on that day (15th) I flew to Washington DC to meet with a group of collectors and to have dinner with my daughter, Ariel. We met at a restaurant in a complex in DC that was and looked so different from the Tuscan countryside I left 12 hours before, but which had in common some of the same color palette, but in the most exaggerated way.

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MAY 14, 2015

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Simple Forms

There are moments and places that speak to me out of their simplest, most elemental nature. It could be the light – as it often is for me – or their form; mysterious, pure, layered, intricate, organic, ancient… This sunny space between two dark buildings announced itself, as places often do, by making me gasp when I turned into the lane, and when I gasp I know I am in the right place, or the right moment. I trust that gasp to be something from my source speaking without words. Words come later, but in the moment there is only the intake of breath that means, Now!

These simple forms; the house fronts in the light, the pair of quintessential Tuscan trees, the cypress and the pine, the face full of ivy on the building on the left, that flawless blue sky, the blush of pale color on the sunlit facade, all of these ordinary facts combined to make something ineffable, yet felt with the precision and economy of a Haiku.

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MAY 12, 2015

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Inside The Light

My eye is dazzled regularly by the Tuscan light.  A light that caused us many years ago to name our book on the region; “Tuscany: Inside The Light,” because it so often seemed as if the light was emanating from within the landscape rather than falling on it.

There is something very special in the composition of the soil here which I believe contributes to this light effect, and my reading of it this way. The earth here is not the typical dark earth of many agricultural zones. This earth is known as the Tuscan crete, which is a light toned, clay-like material deposited millions of years ago as sea bottom, and as such it is incredibly nutrient rich, but not dark. I believe that this light toned earth forms a base below the grasses, grains, sunflowers, vineyards, etc, that are part of the landscape here.

This produces a more reflective surface than a dark soil does, and so there is a luminous lift to the light bouncing back from the land, which I believe is what generates the special qualities of Tuscan light. Certainly daily atmospheric conditions emphasize light and color as well, but from my 20 year point of view working here, it is the accumulated resonance of this scattering of the light that accounts for these remarkable and emotional displays.

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APRIL 17, 2015

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Simple Seeing

The days in Provence were gentle, and spring began to flow like fragrant water over the land, lighting it up with color and sending the perfumes of the earth everywhere. It was an amazing experience to not only see the color, but know how the color smelled. Not quite like those old ‘scratch and sniff’ perfume ads that magazines tried out back in the 80’s, all of which smelled like room freshener. No, this was a high that made the experience of seeing all the more intense.

And yet a photograph like this is as plain as can be. No special equipment, no filters, no tricks of the light, no photoshop to intensify what was already a heightened reality. Simple seeing, which is always a great test of the persuasive power of the moment you are in, stated simply, is a truth, if you will, of the fact that you were there, and this is what you witnessed.

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APRIL 6 -11, 2015

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Seeing the Light

I look out the window never knowing what I’ll see that may be of interest. Will it be the weather? The landscape? Street activity? Even if we are familiar with our window’s frame, expecting it to show us the same old scene just altered by time or season, we can be surprised. The frame can move our attention just as we move the camera in front of our eye. On this bleak day, with a light rain falling, the delicate tracery of the cypress trees on the water, and the subtle coloration of the pool’s structure, made me feel as if I was seeing lavender in the overall aqua that I wasn’t sure was there. There was no lavender in the grey sky. Yet the grey bands in the pool delicately resonated with color. My feeling was that all that aqua produced a lavender echo in my eye, and on the sensor. And it is that magic of color seeing that has always seduced me.

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Carrying the camera always makes me interested in something along the way, and thus I am always having to catch up to family or friends who are already ahead of me. But sometimes it pays off if even in small ways. Seeing Maggie and our friends ahead of me as we hurried to the cinema made me appreciate the now lengthened hours of the day, and the lovely mix of last light and lamplight in this old town’s narrow alleys. I had that jolt, as I so often do, that, “I am Here, now!” And the recognition of the meaning of being in every moment becomes ringingly clear.                                                                                                                                                           April 7

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Nature takes hold wherever it can, it is, after all, nature’s dominion that we live in. So when I stand in front of something as simple as an ivy covered wall, naked in this season, I see the vivacious complexity of it all, and thrill to the marvel of it once again in yet another form. I imagined a print of it at 8 or 10 feet, and see how something so simple can also convey great power, depending upon its scale.

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I pulled into an empty lot to turn the car around and swung into line with the back wall of a  cemetery filled with crazy topiary bushes and trees. But what really called out to me at this late hour of the day, was the enormous pile of stones banked near the wall. There was something so funereal about the pile and the way it was stacked and ordered, that i got out to walk around it and take it all in. The scene became more mysterious as the light faded and the stones emanated a ghostly radiance. I guess it was just right for a cemetery.

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What a riot of color this restaurant was! Earlier in the week I was taken with the barely discernible lavender tones in a green pool, and was questioning color’s way of working in a subtractive or additive way. But here, the mix and bounce and reflection and blending of colors was a whole lesson in primaries and complementary colors, and the wait for our food to arrive was taken up with the beauty of how light transforms wherever we are and what we see.

April 10

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With all the various kinds of light this week presented, when it comes to feelings of intimacy there is nothing like candlelight. That old touch of primitive fire, flickering and dancing the shadows on the walls, making moods and mystery where electric light would elaborate the harsh details and leave us looking at the repairs we need to make rather than at the beauty of the moment. The cameras of today do very well in low light situations, and in fact have advanced our ability to see into the dark in ways that film struggled with. I am grateful when the technology of our times adds expressive potential to our ideas.

April 11

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MARCH 8, 2015

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The Diversity of the Moment

When I come across plain geometries in nature, like this simple square with a roof, a certain  pleasure arises immediately. How did the maker know to do it this way? Is tradition the simple form that drove the decision? Did whoever built it have an innate sense of Feng Shui? Was it the practical needs of farming and family that created this particular form for this particular house?

Whatever it was it is an undeniable gift to see Euclidean shapes amidst the rampant energies of nature. It makes me consider both the man made and the wild in a fresh way. And of course the light at this time of year has a new intensity as the earth once again tilts on its axis to lengthen the days and add warmth to the light.

I photographed this place by moving the square around in the frame, left, right, lower and higher horizon line, centered, then vertically, and so on. But when it came right down to it, keeping it centered had a logic as clear as the geometry itself. And 35mm, too, has its own beautiful dynamic of 2 to 3, or what Henri Cartier-Bresson referred to as the ‘golden mean.’ Which I imagine most of the world’s photographers work with since that is the basic format of  cameras today.

In that sense we all are working with the same essential vocabulary, and yet the diversity is amazing between how each of us might see the scene. I remember many times in workshops I have taught, seeing how 2 photographers standing nearly side by side, photographing the same space or event, have come away with such different results as to make it seem as if  they came to the place at different times. Photography holds the diversity of the moment.

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