Category Archives: Uncategorized

FEBRUARY 5, 2015

Leave a reply

Follow Through

I was invited by HP to come to Barcelona to be part of a conference. Of course these events always have a big dinner the day before to start things off and bring the participants into some kind of harmony. Usually the venues are what one expects from ‘convention mentality’ planning, but not HP. They always make it interesting, so when I arrived at the event, which was in an old naval works near the port, I saw this vaulted chamber lit and arranged as you see it.

I am always intrigued by public spaces; how they are used now, what they might have been a long time ago, what kind of sensation do they project to me, and so on. Questions that often make me explore them photographically because they look this way only because some event planner has responded to the space and is trying to transform it by light or other interventions. And so it becomes an invitation to consider just where am I, and how do I feel about it.

To me this is part of the great, daily pleasure of making photographs, that I can get lost in the musings about the moment I find myself in. And musing can be both a-musing, and muse, as in being inspired by something. So I let myself be taken over by this kind of whim just to see what comes from this freedom of association. And although the image of the hall is more or less a record, the image below that is somewhat stranger and perhaps the more interesting one. But one produces the other, and that part of the process of follow through is what keeps us inspired.

Feb-5 L1025847

 

Feb-5 L1025848

JANUARY 30, 2015

5 Replies

What Beauty

Again, a cold, wintry day, no one out on the streets of Menerbes, the light was gray, the town was ancient history, stones and more stones, and then, perhaps 30 feet away, I see a stain of acid-green leaking out into the street, a kind of luminous, neon-ish color that had nothing to do with anything in the town. This color is a modern artifact, and as such it defies naturalness.

So, naturally, I let myself be drawn toward the light, already feeling my openness and anticipation beginning to play with the ‘what ifs’ that might await me. And there it was! I cannot tell you what it was, as it only showed itself as a window, no store, just a space someone wanted to show this in. What was really fun was to stare into the room for 2-3 minutes and then turn around and look at the world. Everything was a glowing, electric magenta, which of course faded in 30 seconds or so, but was a lovely optical trip for the time it lasted. (you might want to try it right here on this page where, just a moment ago, I got the same flash of magenta on the screen when my eyes flicked to the side)

Let’s face it, photography is an optical trip too!

Jan-30 L1025732

On the way back to my car I saw the daylight changing and glowing in its own natural way, not to mention the lovely complexity of the layers, and I am sure that my response was in relation to that window I stood in front of a half hour before. The green! and the glitter of the light on the land, although less intense than the window, were nonetheless wondrous, as only nature can be. How many times daily do I stop and say, ‘what beauty’!

Jan-30 L1025733

JANUARY 29, 2015

2 Replies

Swept Away

It must have been a fantastic January sale, even the window models lost their clothes! I see things like this on the streets of New York all the time since they change the windows a lot faster there, but to be in a small, French, agricultural town, on a back street no less, and to turn the corner, on a late and grey day, and come upon this window was quite a pleasant surprise – and let me tell you there was no one else on the streets, as is so often the case in French towns – where do they all go?

This kind of photograph is like shooting ducks in a barrel. It’s all there already, and all I have to do is stand in front of it and put a frame around it. And I probably have made more than my share of these kinds of ‘record’ photographs. But what do they record? And why bother to make it again and again.

Well, when I am out wandering and nothing much is going on, then anything that has a sign of life seems to be of interest. And in a way it’s a little like ‘priming the pump’, if I make a shot like this I feel somewhat freer, because something happened!  It feels good to be called out of the lethargy that can come over all of us when walking in strange, often quiet towns. It’s like a warmup, or a stretch.

So it records a moment of engagement for me, and it also records what this particular time, in France, in a small town, in the 21st century looked like. It is also a reminder that throughout the history of Photography this kind of image has called photographers to account. Think of Atget’s great photographs of windows with mannequins. Not that this has any bearing on his image, but whenever we connect with the past we keep the continuity of the medium going. And one never knows what might happen next because you stopped here to look, spend a few minutes thinking about what you are seeing, and then life resumes again and sweeps you away.

Jan-29 L1025728

JANUARY 25, 2015

Leave a reply

Line Dance

We are now 25 days into our line project and just today we saw the scale of the task we set for ourselves. How are we ever going to keep being inventive with the simple stroke of a line as our subject? We laughed when we recognized the futility of any resistance to the subject and the project. This is in the name of fun we agreed, a no-holds-barred kind of fun, where we can throw away any doubt that arises.

Perhaps it was actually seeing what variety we have already made that gave us doubt about our own capacities to add more to it, but after a few minutes of looking at the pages we felt better about the effort and the results so far.

So we’ll step forward one stroke at a time and watch the slow accumulation of the line as it dances across the pages and through our time in Europe.

Jan-25 L1025658

JANUARY 22, 2015

Leave a reply

(N.B. Internet failure here prevented this from being posted on the 22nd, there will be 2 today) 

Coincidence #2

Jan-22 iPhoto

 

Coincidence, as I wrote about yesterday, now has struck twice in a row. At the opening of my exhibition at MEP who should I have seen in the crowd but that very same young woman from the 19th, she with the glove in her mouth, now standing in the same room as I was. I went over and introduced myself and told her that I had photographed her on the street a few days before, but she had no memory of being seen, which is a testament to my still being able to be somewhat invisible on the streets.

Of course I had to photograph her again, but this time with an iPhone and close up, more, simply a record of her and the fact that our paths had crossed again. She was an art student and was there with friends, but we had a few minutes together to walk through the show and it pleased me to see how much attention her hairstyle and outfit brought her. In a way it gave me a moment of anonymity to enjoy my show in the company of someone who was the attraction while I tagged along.

JANUARY 21, 2015

3 Replies

Coincidence

I was going through the work from the 21st for today’s Blog and what do I discover but a funny coincidence. In among the 65 photographs I made, here, again, was another young woman with a glove hanging from her mouth! What are the odds of that happening?  And it was even near the very same place as the one from January 19th.

Of course it is a wholly different image, less of a portrait and more of a general slice across the late in the day street hustle. Still, there are lots of small things to notice, like the 2 tiny heads above and below her hand, which, if you really are looking all over the frame, give up their small pleasures at being discovered.

However, it’s not a great image, just a workaday photograph made in an effort to stay sharp out on the street, which, in some ways, is just as important as making a really tough photograph, because keeping one’s instrument tuned up is part of the larger game of sight.

Jan-21 L1025486

JANUARY 20, 2015

1 Reply

Adding it Up

I came through the revolving doors into the warmth of the vestibule of the hotel, paused for a moment to take off my hat and gloves, and then caught sight of this kid sitting there like a little puppy waiting for his master. Something about the scale of the boy, and then the strangeness of the whole space; that room to the right, with the slightly underwater glow, and that crazy instrument from another era, circa 1900 I would guess, a piano roll, or reproducing piano I think it was called – look at the size of that thing! and think how far we have come and how we carry our music around with us today!

But what was really happening, as it so often does, was that all of it suddenly filled me with a quickening of the pulse and the mind, which made me stop and really look at just where I was!  Moments like that are expansive. Everything comes into play. I look all over the frame to make it register clearly, and out of that disciplined looking sometimes an interesting photograph comes.

Jan-20 L1025357

Back on the street I passed a cafe where a woman was drawing, and again an interior space made me stop. This time it was a more ambiguous space that caught my eye, but also the hard focus of the woman within, which made me take the moment and carry it off with me. It always astonishes me when themes arise, however loosely, on any given day, and connect disparate, non-events to each other, which then, sometimes, keep adding up.

Jan-20 L1025419

And so it goes.

JANUARY 19, 2015

Leave a reply

Exotic Birds

This unforgettable woman passed me on the street while I was being filmed for a documentary about my street work ( you can see the filmmaker in the background). How fortunate was I that she appeared just then?

She was lost in thought, glove dangling from her lips, extreme hairdo, like an exotic birds’, and an angular and chiseled face. I kept pace with her for perhaps 10 seconds of backpedaling on the crowded street, during which she never saw or felt me and my fascination with her.

In moments like that the street is still a wonder for me, mainly because we are all such exotic and mysterious creatures, and when instinct calls my attention to another human being, or the interaction between people, I simply accept and move with it as quickly and invisibly as I can. It’s amazing to me that I can still keep up, and that I still desire to see and know something about the moment.

This curiosity about strangers has been my passion for more than fifty years, and I am grateful to have learned the necessary behavior to be out there seeing it all and not bruising the situation in any way that might turn it from reality to something staged or predetermined.

Jan-19 L1025339-Edit

JANUARY 17, 2015

Leave a reply

Fool the Eye

After leaving the market in Apt and heading home I passed this corner where for a brief second the trompe l’oeil of the man in the window made me me jump as if he were really there. Probably the traffic, the turn I made, my mind dealing with the rest of the list of things to accomplish, allowed for the suggestion to express itself as fact for the briefest of seconds until my mind rendered the reality for what it was.

I guess that’s the reason trope l’oeil means fool the eye, because it really does. And it also fools the mind, not just the eye. But for only a moment. Perhaps photography does that too, in the way it asserts that what we are looking at is real when it is only a thin sliver of what the moment, reduced to 2 dimensions, and the play of light and space, looks like. Then we deal with the ambiguity and its relation to reality, and decide what it all adds up to. The gift of this medium is to challenge us this way.

John Szarkowski once wrote, “a photograph is what it looks like”. 

Jan-17 L1025226