APRIL 12, 2015

4 Replies

Simile

The world often throws metaphors, similes, analogies, and other language cues out to us in its own effortless manner, all we have to do is be alert to the throw and the camera becomes a great catcher’s mitt. Since baseball season has just begun perhaps that is an apt metaphor.

The simile here, was breathtaking in its simplicity even at 60 miles an hour. I got it in a blink.  The cloud of cherry blossoms and the oncoming layers of mist and cloud rolling down from the cold reaches of the hills beyond, into the warmth of the valley.

04-12L1027662

APRIL 6 -11, 2015

1 Reply

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.

April 604-6 L1027504

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

04-7 L1027552

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.

April 804-8 L1027572

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.

April 904-9 L1027598

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

04-10 L1027613

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

04-11 L1027626

APRIL 5, 2015

3 Replies

Vocabulary of Signs

It’s often hard to know what to make of almost anything we see in the world at large. Garry Winogrand, with whom I daily walked the streets of Manhattan, LA, Paris, and elsewhere for a few steady years in the mid 60’s, used to say that when he photographed someone on the street with their mouth wide open it was difficult to know if they were screaming, laughing or yawning, and it was that ambiguity that made it an interesting photographic moment.

Here too, the ridiculous angle and action opens the frame to suggestions of a violent nature, as well as just thoughtless family teasing. These unknowns are part of the photographer’s vocabulary of ‘signs,’ which indicate something of interest is happening right here! But will it yield a photograph?  Only the photograph after the fact will tell us if it amounts to more than the sum of its parts.

04-5 L1027460

March 29 – April 4, 20125

Leave a reply

Say Yes!

Speeding south from Paris on a rain slashed day, the fields monotone, the light heavy, with occasional flashes of brilliance compared to the overall density. These glimmers seemed to be   of possible interest, since at 100 plus miles an hour they are visible and gone in a fraction of a second. And the camera can handle that, just barely under these condition, so I was watchful for these tinkling moments, and the way the power lines rise and fall in the window, and then, there it is!

March 2903-29 L1027202

Back in Bonnieux Maggie visits a friend, an antique dealer, to pick something up, and while I’m waiting I watch the little theater that presents itself. It always pays to stay open to the chance that ordinary moments offer. First I saw the lovely quality of the light inside, and then how animated he was, so French, I thought, and then, a step to the left and the mirror added another dimension, and all the while I’m feeling myself smiling at the pure, simple pleasures any day can bring.

March 3003-30 L1027259

For some reason when I saw this head in a local library it reminded me of the Gallic quality of the antique dealer in the image above. Not that it really looks like him, but that it played on my eye that way, and caused me to respond. In that way images accrue over time and have their own strange linkages later on in the editing process. It also made me aware of certain facial characteristics in that part of Provence. It’s not stereotypes that I see but heredity, and the  feeling that at one time the tribes of that part of southern France blended in a way that produced the look one sees there.

March 3103-31 L1027285

After dinner we ventured out to be in the stillness of twilight. The fading of the day brings out tones and colors that the eye works hard to discern, but there are advantages to today’s technologies. The Leica has such a delicate system that the most subtle luminance can be described even at times when one might think, ‘I won’t be able to get this.’ But it’s not the case any longer and I find real pleasure in seeing into the oncoming darkness.

April 104-1 L1027320

I used to be critical of the kind of ‘design in mother nature’ images that popped us so easily, as if it was without merit to see something that was simply beautiful in and of itself. But I don’t feel that way after all these years of seeing. Sometimes the ‘thing itself’ is just there; complete and generous in the way nature and time have woven their strands and left remarks of simple beauty.

April 2

04-2 L1027325

Inside a church crypt, in a tiny roadside hamlet, we stumble into this subterranean thriller. Even without a sound in the space we heard the music

April 304-3 L1027337

When things get put together like this chance combo of car and bin, who can resist? Odd couples abound in life, and when a day brings me into this kind of encounter I always say Yes!

April 404-4 L1027381

MARCH 22, 2015

2 Replies

7 in 1:

Announcement: I have to try an experiment this week. I am in the middle of preparing a set of 4, 20 foot high, 3 sided, triangular columns for the EXPO 2015 World’s Fair in Milan, which opens in 5 weeks. I have been given a whole Pavilion to install these works in. The theme of the Fair is “Feed the Planet,” and my Pavilion is dedicated to Cereals and Grains which translates, to me, as ‘Bread.’ So I have made 75 portraits of bread from all over Italy. These will be stacked on Totem-like columns. So I must, starting this week, post a weeks worth of my one-a-day images all at once, while I dedicate myself to finishing the work on the pavilion.

The week that I made these images took me to Lourmarin, near Bonnieux, and Bonnieux itself, then Paris, and after Paris on the TGV to Deauville, where Maggie and I were asked to do a commission about the town in Summer, but once we saw the place, we decided that it wasn’t something we were interested in doing, so back to Bonnieux we went.

I had the sense that the dogs in Lourmain (3/22) were ‘getting acquainted,’ and that these rituals are an interesting thing to consider, maybe even as a subject for a body of work. We see this in human beings all the time in the dance we do, the gestures we make, the knowing looks sent back and forth between people are all part of our subtle communication. Sometimes themes and ideas spring from surprising sources.

3/22 Lourmarin03-22 L1026983_dogs

The power of the tree in the landscape at this time of year is rich with suggestive force. The small shocks I get from these relationships of trees to the whole space never cease to please me and open me up to considering what makes a landscape photograph. Even with such minimal conditions as these something comes into play. That fountain-like tree in the distance and the groin of the tree in the foreground spoke to me of needs and surges that all nature’s things can express.

3/23 Bonnieux03-23 L1027053

3/24 Bonnieux03-24 L1027072

In Paris (3/25-26) it’s always the parks and boulevards for me, where life is at its most Parisian and something always comes along, both the expected and unexpected. And lovers have arguments as well as making up, and an argument in public is an observable intimacy of the unguarded moment. Then, on a visit to the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, to see a great show of Howard Greenberg’s private collection, I found myself looking out the Foundation’s window at a scene that the master himself might have looked at, although this image certainly isn’t worthy of him. Nonetheless, the activity in the schoolyard below changed every few seconds and was fun to look at when seen with the running figure on the wall above the window. Later, while passing a shop, I saw this amazing 4 fingered glove. Eerie and mysterious, as well as a strong image all on its own, I asked the owner if I could buy it for my still life collection of objects with that kind of power. No deal she said! So, it’s just a memory now.

3/25-26 Paris03-25 L1027103

03-27 L1027134

03-26 L1027114

(3/27) At 120 miles an hour on the TGV, things come and go in the blink of a second, yet every once in a while something lovely is revealed, plucked by speed itself. Here! and Gone! And all I have is the camera’s 1000th of a second to save it from oblivion.

3/27 From the TGV03-29 L1027187

(3/28) The beach at Deauville, while wide and clean, had behind it a town that was developed by rich Parisian merchants early in the 20th century. It was a holiday town for the well to do who wanted to get out of Paris, and as such it had no history, and it shows it now. After 30 minutes of walking around Maggie and I were dispirited and longing to get back on the train and head for Bonnieux. Yet the red, white and blue of the beach on that second day of spring, bitter as it was, did bring a moment of longing for those sweet summer days by the sea.

3/28 Deauville03-28 L1027161

 

 

MARCH 21, 2015

Leave a reply

Notes in Passing:

Some days strange things come my way. A large boot made out of wax, oversized apples on a roundabout, a strange tree, and a woman looking at the passing scene. All notes in passing. And there were more, but one picture a day was my method and I have overdone it today.

03-21 L1026947

03-21 L1026960From the car

03-21 L1026956.From the car

03-21 L1026933

MARCH 20, 2015

1 Reply

Gritty

It happens to everybody, I am sure, that you find yourself somewhere and it seems to be blasted, brutal, boring, or ugly, and it’s easy to say, ‘there’s nothing here.’ I think that in those moments it is precisely the time to look harder, to try and see something, even  when your wish is to be somewhere else. And looking harder then may still not pay off, but one never knows.

I walked around this particular town looking for a place that I was told did metalwork, and of course those kinds of places are often in parts of town that are deteriorating, so when I came to this gritty spot with its hacked trees, crumbling steps, and failing masonry, I was ready to move on. But something in the physical space nagged at me momentarily and made me lift the Leica to my eye. Maybe it was just the relative scale of some of the forms, or was it the overall tonal similarity on this grey day. Who can say? But for some reason it called me to spend a few minutes there looking at the parts and absorbing the feelings the place gave off, before moving on.

It is that call to instinct that serves me even when an image fails to be a ‘keeper.’

03-20L1026908

 

Nota Bene: Some readers pointed out to me that the Wunderkabinet image the other day had a Squirrel not a Rabbit and I realize that I saw squirrel and mistakenly typed rabbit. So thank you for being so observant.

MARCH 19, 2015

1 Reply

Incidental

While waiting at the train station for a friend’s arrival I looked up and saw, once again, how something can come from nothing. It may not be something totally interesting, but it makes me react, think about whatever the prompt was, consider the way things work, or don’t, and add another moment of being present to the day.

These ‘incidental’ observations keep me tuned up and hungry for whatever may be next, while giving me a tingle of pleasure in the moment.

03-19 L1026871

MARCH 18, 2015

2 Replies

Wunderkabinet

At a friend’s house I saw this ‘wunderkabinet’ of creatures. It fascinated me on several levels. On the one hand this is just a glass box with an owl and a rabbit and some woodland background, but looked at another way, which is what was so interesting to me, it is similar to a photograph. Someone made this! They brought all the elements together, they put them in a frame, they charged the whole thing with their own sense of mystery, value, color, form, context, reality, all in a search for meaning or beauty.

Isn’t that what we all try to do? Put a frame around a moment of time and try and invest it with all our feelings for the precise fraction of a second when we saw or felt something! Often we are not completely certain what it is that emanates from our observation, but the call is clear to us; make this moment count!

So, too, in this glass box of wonder. The effort here, by a taxidermist, or a hobbyist, or someone who just wanted to preserve something they found beautiful, is extraordinary and invites both speculation and wonder. Isn’t that what photography does.

03-18 L1026841

MARCH 17, 2015

Leave a reply

A Shadow of the Light

A young friend from Paris came for a visit. We decided to show him a mysterious old settlement called ‘the Bories,’ up in the woods above Bonnieux,  Ancient nomadic people, perhaps Celtic shepherds, or so the legend suggests, built stone bee-hive and igloo- like structures, in groups of 30 or more dwellings and animal pens.

03-17 L102679

03-17 L1026797

This place, long abandoned, has an air of spirituality and power that is still undeniably present. Each time we visit it courses through us with the same intensity. Over time, other visitors, some artistically inclined, have added things to the structures; woven branch roofs, stone circles, odd objects that set off the modern against the ancient, and other strangely affecting gestures.

03-17 L1026811

On the day we were there I saw, nestled in a stone wall, this rock on which Nature, in its effortlessly creative way, dissolved a leaf over time and left this negative image. It reminded me of how, at the dawn of photography, the early inventors also made a shadow of the light to mark their moment. If photography is about anything it is about that; light over time.

03-17 L1026791