Tag Archives: Bonnieux

APRIL 23, 2015

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Fetish

A friend brought this hand made old doll for me to see. It had tremendous power for such a small and innocent thing. Its oversize head and the tail between its legs lent it a kind of  talismanic, or fetish-like presence, but one with no ill will attached to it. It seemed to me, with its bowed head, to express some kind of shame.

I put it on the background I was working with that day, an old, cowhide, butchers, or perhaps metalworker’s apron, which, when I put it on the table I was using, offered a powerful sense of landscape scale. I moved the doll around to see what it could say within its small range of movement. If you click on the link below the photo you can see a video of the sequence of images I made as I was trying to understand what it could do.

I can’t say I solved anything with this first attempt, and to be perfectly honest I always felt that the doll photographs that were so popular back in the 80’s were really dumb, and I couldn’t see the reason for people to play with them when the world outside was so much more compelling and challenging. Yet here I am making still lives at this time in my life, and someone comes along with this gentle soul and I find myself interested. If it is nothing more than that – interest – in seeing what this might ‘say’, then that is good enough for me now. I will just have to wait it out and see if it continues to stay interesting.

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http://youtu.be/-lGs3juG154

APRIL 19, 2015

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Which One

A day after visiting the winery with the sculpture gardens (in yesterday’s post) we went to visit a friend who was beginning a small gardening business. tomatoes are his dream crop. Standing in the newly raked rows I thought about how this space will soon be filled with these rough bamboo stakes which will, in their way, create a space and impression not too dissimilar from the work of art in the last post. Except that this is functional and made without esthetic concerns, although, as can be seen by the sense of order visible in these first 3 rows, there is a pure and practical, and even beautiful esthetic underlying his system.

What came to me while standing there was that this ‘installation’ would ultimately be be the more impressive one once it was fully staked, and then, during each stage of the season, it would be transformed by nature and time, and that in the long run it was this place that might be the real work of art.

I know it could easily be said that this is a garden not an art work, but who is to say what kind of effort brings us closer to the spirit and intention of the maker. I would like to stand here at summer’s end, with a sun warmed and ripened fruit in my hand, and take in the thousand bright red spheres shimmering against their sun burnished leaves, and breathe in that particular fragrance that tomatoes in the field give off, and then ask myself which experience pleased me more.

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APRIL 14, 2015

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The Wonder of It

The snow bursts of cherry blossoms in the Luberon Valley drove me mad! The scent of the blossoms, their whiteness in the newly warmed spring air, the way they shivered in the faintest breeze, called me in close, as if to stand inside their space was to bring me closer to spring itself.

This search for the essential nature of anything that calls out to me has been my long time practice, and I find that in moments like this I want to be part the experience, not photographing it from the cool distance of the observer, but becoming integrated in it somehow. And this tree – one of many in the long lines of orchard trees – brought me close to that kind of trance state, where I stood, spellbound, and felt as if I could have stayed forever watching the barely discernible flutter of petals, while listening to the steady hum of the bees.

It almost doesn’t matter to me at that point what the photograph looks like in the camera, what matters is keeping the simple wonder of it all alive.

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APRIL 13, 2015

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Characters

I went to  some antique fairs during my time in Provence and found myself drawn to these odd forms and sizes. It’s something I don’t really understand very well since I never was a ‘collector’ of things. I have so many photographs from my 50 years of shooting that I never wanted to have ‘things’,  but now that I started making still lives I am surprised by what I find fascinating.

I created a little stage for them to behave on.  I am not really interested in making beautiful arrangements of forms and then lighting them so that each object is a thing of beauty in and of itself; unlike the way that much of the history of the still life plays out.

I like the oddness and the used-up quality of these things whose function, in some cases, is hard to guess. And I had the feeling that my years on the street would tell me what I needed to know in order to play with these new characters. In fact, thinking of them and responding to them from that point of view, as characters, would be the way this new work would develop. We’ll see what happens over time.

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March 29 – April 4, 20125

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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!

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MARCH 18, 2015

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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.

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MARCH 17, 2015

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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.

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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.

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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.

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MARCH 16, 2015

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The Bride and Her Suitors

A funny thing happened when I went back to the dressmaker’s dummy and some my objects after a day or so away. As i said, I’m not really a still life guy so my approach to it is something I am discovering as I go, and the strangest ideas pop into my head as I study the things arrayed on the set. While I was moving these objects around – and I wish I could figure out how to make a little flip book of the moves to share with you –  because it’s interesting to watch the objects seem to move, like a stop motion film capturing all the little, incremental, steps they take. In a way it’s like animation, really.

While I was moving the pieces a thought floated up from nowhere, which was; these pieces around the dummy feel like ‘suitors’ in a fairy tale, and the dummy was the “Bride”. Now where did that come from? But as soon as it came to me I could no longer put it back in its box, and so my process kept on entertaining that notion and storyline. As I moved each object into the “suitors” stance each of them seemed to have a particular attitude; shy, bold, deferential, arrogant, stupid, clumsy, etc. I felt a little like a Disney animator casting my characters by their shapes and size, and then attributing other qualities to them. And the game became so entrancing that time just flew by.

Finally, the least of them all – the rusted and deformed exhaust pipe from a tractor – which I found in a field, came to bow before the Bride, and there it was! I had a feeling, what else can I call it! It seemed to fulfill those old Grimm’s Fairy Tale stories where the poor cobbler’s son presents himself before the royals and wins the day with his humility, or bravery, or other characteristics that show the other suitors to be the phonies they are.

Now where this came from I have no idea. But I went with it, and trusted that I was meant to see it this way.

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MARCH 14, 2015

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The Dummy

At a flea market I found this dressmaker’s dummy, probably something from the 1950’s, and to my surprise I found myself wanting if for the still lives I was beginning to make. In fact at first I had a strong pull toward it, then walked away thinking, ‘this is crazy, Joel, what do you want that for’? What was it about the dummy? Why was it so strangely appealing to me? In my life as a photographer, making table top still life work was never something that called to me. Give me the street any day with its unpredictability, chaos, radical light conditions, and the joys of timing, which always made me concentrate more fiercely.

Yet, there I was, going back to the stall and standing in front of this mysterious figure again and wanting to take it home to see how it played with the other objects that were finding their way into my life. How can I explain it? Maybe it was a Magritte-like mystery that presented itself, or another echo coming to me from the Dadaists and Surrealists, who I loved when I was an art student nearly 60 years ago. Whatever it was it was strong enough to make me say yes to it and leave the rest to chance. That part is like the street which is all about chance.

On this day I put it up on the ‘teatrino’, my little theater-like set, and added some other objects that also have found their way to me, just to see what would happen in terms of scale, color, the various forms, and whatever meaning might emerge from their encounter. I have no answer as yet, just some ‘records’ of what things look like. Now it is time to look and wonder.

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MARCH 13, 2015

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Glorious Monster

The French are brutal pruners of their trees in springtime. Not that I know much about the methods of pruners and what is right or not, although I am sure they are right since the trees live long and look healthy and produce well. This glorious monster had caught my eye countless times as I drove past, making my head snap to attention to catch a glimpse of its wild crown of thorns as I whizzed past.

On this day I had to stop. The tree had been given a Mohawk that really was fantastic to look at. I parked at roadside and waltzed around it for the 10 minutes or so it took to try and see where the image was at its best; where it sang its song, danced its dance, came into focus as an image as well as being just the tree itself. These exercises in limited situations (I couldn’t get behind it as the gate was locked) are fun to experience because they test one’s patience, inventiveness, and character.

Here it stands in all its grandeur, yet humiliated by the crappy sign, fence, and surroundings. I gave it all my attention but couldn’t rescue it from its fate.

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