Tag Archives: Bonnieux

MARCH 11, 2015

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Playmates

It was one of those spring days where everything seemed to be popping. Radiant greens along sun-warmed banks and walls, tiny buds pushing out of branch ends, grape vines beginning to look like miniature candelabras, a joyous day where I was aware of trees in a way that winter made me forget. When I stop to look at each tree individually their complexity and magnitude become astonishing, even trees that at first don’t seem to be worth the look, but then grab my attention because of where they are growing and what trials they had to overcome to survive.

I have probably photographed hundreds of trees in my life as a photographer, and none of them are just a ‘generic’ tree to me. They seem to me to be more like portraits of creatures who are extravagant in their proportions, structure, overall form, and, in season, their foliage. None of them are asking to be seen or photographed, but when I stand in their space I often get their message.

Here are some trees I encountered along the way, and what they suggested I do if I wanted to play with them, or watch as Maggie did.

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Maggie 4 trees

MARCH 10, 2015

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Time Machine

The camera is a time machine. It measures time in fractions of a second. It shows us the time of day. It describes the seasons. It reflects what kind of time we are having, if you look hard enough you might be able to see something of what the photographer was feeling, but that is open to discussion I am sure.

A photograph of a wall like this one tells me a lot. It’s not just about the colors – which are delicious – or the time of day it was made, but when I stood there what I saw was the passage of time etched into the life of the wall. The layers of color applied over different times of the building’s life. The wearing down of the colors and the walls themselves. The addition of a window, or a doorway, the closing up again, and other, invisible forces, too. For example; those arcs on the wall, how did they get there? They must have been from vines that grew over the wall and were strong enough to score the surface as the wind tossed them around, and like a protractor they left their geometry scraped into the wall.

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Time is told in this image by the sense of the freshening of the light. A spring urgency is just becoming visible in the newness of the grasses and in the silver glitter of the olive trees. Time is present to me in the way I feel on a day like this, when I wonder, ‘how many more Springs will I see?’

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MARCH 9, 2015

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State of Play

Sometimes the liveliest things on the street, especially in a small town in Provence where no one ever seems to be around, are the vestiges of inanimate things that suddenly appear. My way of working is to respond to whatever comes up for me out of my passage through time and space. It could be nearly meaningless, ordinary, dumb, or unlikely to be of greater interest later on, it doesn’t matter, it is the only thing that is speaking to me at that given instant, and that is what I have to work with.

Anything that makes me pay attention, even for just a moment, is one more moment of consciousness, and once again a trickle of playful energy occupies my mind. It is this willingness to make something of nothing that primes my senses for whatever may follow that moment. I find that if I do not play when something calls to me then I lose my edge, soI let myself be taken in, and I play. And by doing so my innocence is capable of being prompted by the unexpected when it next shows up.

And we know that as we get older the innocent joy of discovery gets whittled away by all the other responsibilities that life throws at us, which distracts us from that state of play. So a moment of open ended curiosity, and the freedom to see in a care less way, is a gift we must not turn away from.

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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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MARCH 7, 2015

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Like This

Before cars and people came down this street, before roads and houses were built, before walls were mounded up for defense or boundaries, the stones themselves felt water rushing past. I never cease to wonder when I stop here, about the marks grooved into the stone, and how many millennia of rising and falling waters have passed since this was part of the sea bottom or shoreline of what is now the Mediterranean Sea.

The courses of stones and the courses of the smoothed ridges blend together in a stony harmony that delights my eye, and I always seem to find a reason to lift my camera and try to make a photograph that describes what it is I see. This image, made at the end of day, when the light was flat and had the faintest lavender cast to it, may (or may not) work, because it doesn’t depend on the glory of sunlight, or the drama of some action, to set off the place from the rather ordinary seeming place that it is. It is just its unmediated self now.

It’s the rocks that first produce the ‘beat’ that means something to me and makes me stop, so I need to reconsider what it is I want to say about them. Fortunately I had time here to look again and again, since I walked this way every few days. It’s a little like solving a math problem in one’s head, and by going over it again and again the meaning may resolve itself.

Once, when I was around 15, I saw Albert Einstein walking the back streets of Princeton, while I was on a day trip there from summer camp, and had slipped away from my group. He was on a back street; tree lined, quiet, nothing to mark it as special from the next one, and as I watched him from a hundred yards away, he stopped and stood for a long time doing nothing, head tilted slightly up, possibly watching the leaves trembling, or listening to the birds. Perhaps he was following a line of reasoning that was out there in the universe of his mind’s embrace. Of course it was impossible to imagine then, as it is now, what anyone else thinks about, but standing still, and taking it all in, like Einstein, is part of the photographic act at certain moments. And certain moments are what photographs are made of.

Like this one.

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MARCH 6, 2015

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MY BIRTHDAY!

Sitting on the breakfast table was this box, and a rose in a nest, a sprig of thyme, and an embroidered love note from Maggie. A lovely way to start my birth day.

Although many other notes were struck during the day, and they were fun filled, friend filled, and intimate, I remembered this one for its simplicity, honesty, humility and love.

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MARCH 5, 2015

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Brands and symbols

The Mayor’s office is in this building. Why all the arrows? What did it mean, back whenever they built this place, to fill the void’s arc with arrows flying toward a sun? Why is it called God’s House? I know some of our French readers will let me in on the story, but while I walked the streets of Bonnieux I always found myself discovering these vestiges of the past that play differently in today’s world of symbols. And what will the future readers of our municipal leavings make of our logos and brands and symbols?

I don’t often collect this kind of imagery, it seems too static and perhaps too easy to pluck it out of the surround and stick it in the file, and then what? But on the other hand, sometimes these odd musings on time’s leftovers can lead the way to a fresh thought about something that may be there in a corner of our minds and we don’t yet know it. So I carried this away with me – it’s so light – and I remembered that once before, for Maggie, who’s a writer, I found a doorway arch just like this, and it had a lovely and elegant metal hand holding a pen!

I did add it to the file.

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MARCH 2, 2015

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IT

Every once in a while I find myself stopped by some indefinable sensation, as if a have just passed though a ‘locus point’, a zone of visual force that tingles in such a way that I look around to get my bearings. “What is here that is holding me”?  Usually we respond to things that can be defined easily, a space, a tree, some figures doing something, a whole range of sensations that we know how to organize. But when there is nothing as concrete as that how does one make a photograph?

I have learned to trust those ‘calls’. Learned way back when I was first using the 8×10 view camera and working on my St. Louis commission. It happened to me one day right in the heart of downtown St. Louis. Nothing specific, just a feeling that something in the zone in front of me was whispering my name, stopping me from moving on. I remember yielding to the instinct and setting up the 8×10 and waiting to see where the call was coming from.

The image here was pretty much the same thing. Nothing going on but the voluptuous mess of nature. No beautiful arrangement, or scaled relationships, or counterpoint between near and far. Just chaos. Just the indefinite, overall, layered, complexity of nature, as if it had a mind of its own which presented a thought that was purely natural, not within the bounds of the esthetics we have applied to it for centuries of landscape painting and photography, nothing but the rawness of IT.

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I would like to apologize to some of my readers for a confusion I may have let creep in when writing this blog about the year’s worth of photographs I have made. Sometimes my tense slips between past and present as it did the other day. So let me reiterate again that I finished this work a year ago and then let it sit while I worked on the accumulated days, and then decided to reflect on that passage of time, so perhaps my enthusiasm gets the better of my grammar.

MARCH 1, 2015

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Confetti

Our rental house comes with an old well (this was once a farm house) which is now filled with fish, and it’s been my pleasure to feed them every day. It’s gotten to the point that when I walk by they all surface and start following me, even when it’s not feeding time.

As I scattered the food today I saw that the casting of the flakes and the rising of the fish made for a confetti-like dazzle of energy and imagery, particularly because there’s that grille (probably so that the guest’s grandchildren don’t fall in and disappear) which adds to the buzz that made it all seem so abstract and delightful, like a mardi gras for goldfish.

What has been interesting to me about this process of a picture-a-day is the outcome of any given day’s seeing. Because, surely, that is all this is about. For example; if someone asked me, “Joel, what did you make a photograph of today” and I answered, “well…there were some goldfish….” it would, on the face of it, sound inane, and maybe seem as if I had abandoned my standards. But here is what this whole discipline is becoming for me, now that I have completed 2 months of it. It is an exercise in opening up the limits that a lifetime of working can impose on any one of us. And so for 5 minutes I stood there, still as a stone, and just let it all play for me, and the trance was hard to leave, but then I snapped out of it, leaned in, and made a photograph.

It’s become a way of looking harder at my quotidian comings and goings, and thus pushing me to make something out of what normally could be overlooked. My freshening sense is that like confetti, the random juxtapositions that daily looking offers may awaken some new idea that I might not have considered had this not been risked.

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FEBRUARY 28, 2015

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Emptiness

The end of February! An unusually warm day, springlike even. We walk through the fields        outside the town and realize how the sun adds a lightness to our step as well as to our sense of place. Coming back into town we cross the library plaza and suddenly the scale becomes theater-like, and Maggie’s caped form, bold in the hard sunlight, makes her seem like an actor on the stage, then she twirls and comes to rest laughing and blinded by the full on glare of the sun. It is an irresistible moment! I feel the hard blue of the sky, the hard sunlight, the hard black edge of her form, the hard edge of the frame above her head, all known in that moment’s grace after the twirl, and before she walks away. It’s as fast as that!

Emptiness is a condition of photography that I have come to cherish. And as you may know, I love the charged, crowded precincts of big cities where everything going on all over the frame has enchanted me since I first began making photographs. But now there are times when the simplicity of place itself sends its awakening call through me, and when someone I love is passing within the boundaries it makes it even more vital for me.

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