JANUARY 25, 2015

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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.

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JANUARY 24, 2015

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Rapture

The lesson is; always carry your camera!

We were having dinner guests and Maggie, realizing we needed a fresh baguette, asked me to trek the 100 yards from our house to the baker. So out I went, and as it’s my habit to always carry a camera, whether it is 100 yards or a hundred miles, it gave me the chance to pause on my walk back to take in the spectacle of this nameless corner in a small town, in the Luberon valley, in the southern part of Provence, just as nightfall brought a rapture to these old walls and hills. And to me.

To stand here and breathe in the colors, because I believe you can breathe them in, how else to  account for that surge of knowing something, which comes from standing still some place and simply being, breathing in the all of it in that particular moment. And so what if the moment is illuminated by street lamps and window light, and the colors may seem a little garish. In fact it is the union of the two competing sensations that brings them into their momentary harmony.

Just to look at it all for what it is, is enough to fill me up with wonder about how remarkable, at any given moment, our world is.

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JANUARY 23, 2015

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Wake Up Call

After 5 days in Paris the countryside feels good! Even when there is nothing of conventional beauty to see, particularly this late in a grey, damp and cold day with the light going and the sombre feeling drawing the energy out of the drive home.

Yet there is something to be seen; the way the trees, in their spare branches and woven asymmetries seem huddled against the season, or the diminished yet radiant tone of the colors of winter, or the flattening of the light lending a last, eerie, tincture of blue to the onset of nightfall. All this puts me in a reverie, and out of it I feel the freshening of my vision, the desire to look harder at what this moment of reality is offering me. Another call to wake up and see!

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JANUARY 22, 2015

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(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

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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.

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JANUARY 20, 2015

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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.

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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.

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And so it goes.

JANUARY 19, 2015

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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.

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JANUARY 17, 2015

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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”. 

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JANUARY 16, 2015

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A Book and a Ball

A few days ago I made a still life of two pipes standing on this background. Of the two this one remained standing while the other took a nose dive which I read as its desire to get off the set and go back to being a pipe. Then along came a book and a ball shaped object that has a latch and a lot of holes. I can’t explain why they seemed to belong together, and it won’t be for long in any case, but for this hour they were my curious companions.

When I look at the image now the first thing that speaks to me is the shadow of the pipe on the page. The longer I look at it the more it seems to be studying the text. Or maybe my attraction is to the space between the shadow and the pipe, just so close, and yet a tiny space remains between them, which of course I put there as I moved things around. That space delights me!

More than that I don’t know. It’s a work in progress, and as such maybe tomorrow I’ll resolve what to do with the ball, and also have another understanding of why any of this matters to me. That’s the way with work that keeps me company in the studio, it is always available to be reconsidered.

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