Tag Archives: Bonnieux

FEBRUARY 7, 2015

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Standing Still

Some days it might be the simplest of things that moves me; like the smokey yellow tone glazing the horizon, seen in relation to the russet underbelly of the cloud superimposed on the delicate celeste blue of the sky.

The poetics of the moment cause me to stand very still and watch the trio of colors slowly dissolve into a colorless wash of grays and blacks. It’s good training to observe something change right in front of my eyes. The long slow phase of one mutation into another. I always find it fruitful to search my mind for precise names of the colors that I see. The more precise I am the more I sensitize myself to where I am, and what is actually happening right then.

Stillness and taking in are two states of being that have always nourished me, particularly in the countryside where the tempo of life supports that kind of tuning in.

Feb-7 L1026007

FEBRUARY 4, 2015

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Out the Window

Some days just slip away, and I wonder, ‘where did the time go’? Interior days in the winter are perfect for dealing with the backlog of work that seems to accumulate so quickly now that we’re  in Europe, new exhibitions and projects which are time sensitive, and then all the catching up with the many things that computers were supposed to make easier for us.

So here it is nearly 5:00pm and I am called to the window by the last bit of sunlight doing its rosy golden number in the deep blue background of oncoming night, and once again – no matter how many times I have seen this – it never fails to make me drift into a reverie about time, and how I use it, and in these later years, how can I stretch it out.

Standing at the window I see that Maggie has lit the candles and the fire is dancing in the fireplace, and then I see the spatial illusion of near and far and behind, which has a surreal, Magritte-like quality; the overlap of the twin fires of nature and the hearth played out on the stone wall, and my reverie joins me to them, and the question of time goes out the window.

Feb-4 L1025828

FEBRUARY 3, 2015

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Light

Dear friends invited us for lunch. They are amazing antiques dealers whose eye for objects, furnishings, spaces, color tones, and the essential feel of a place, is incredibly satisfying. Whenever we visit with them in Bonnieux, in the apartment and studios they own and rent there, (by the way, if you are ever yearning for a vacation rental…) we feel immediately at home. You know that rare feeling too, I am sure, because it isn’t easily found when traveling. So when you come upon it, you get its message fast.

To enter their sun filled rooms, in a building that is hundreds of years old, and to see lunch being prepared, and flowers spilling color and energy over the table; the light reaching across surfaces, spilling down to the floor, sliding up the walls and then ricocheting off all of them, making a luminous sphere out of the rectangle of space. Light is our most expressive asset. Photographically speaking it is the source of what first wakes me up and lets me know I am being touched by a photographic possibility. I read the light. I trust what it is signaling to me, the now of it.

Even at its most humble light calls me out.

Feb-3 L1025808

 

 

FEBRUARY 2, 2015

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The Child in the Adult

Maggie was a dancer in New York back in the 70’s. She is a natural mime, and is always open to whatever impulses the world sends her way. Walking with her has been an adventure for the last 25 years, since I never know what unexpected, playful gesture or move she’ll make. This day for example; bitterly cold, a mistral blowing, but out we went for a walk up and down the quiet streets of Bonnieux.

She is just as likely to jump up on a wall and walk it like a tightrope, as she is to spin around when a gust of wind spirals the leaves across the road and around her feet. She was 15 feet ahead of me when I saw her interacting with the tree, and so lost in play was she that I was able to slide up behind her without her knowing I was there and make a series of images which speak to me of the child still living inside the adult.

I am reminded that our loved ones are just as crazy as the rest of the world, and that intimacy is no excuse to not see them as separate and amazing.

Feb-2 L1025803.

JANUARY 27, 2015

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The Humble Stuff

Some days just get away from me. I spent a good part of the day working on exhibition planning and a book layout, and I made a few still lives, though these were not speaking to me so I let them go. It was chilly and the fire inside was keeping me close to home. Then, suddenly, I realized that before the day disappeared I should go out and see something, keep the one-a-day work ongoing.

Frankly I was so caught up in the museum work that I was kind of flat and groping for somewhere to take myself, but it was getting late and it was bitterly cold, so I walked around the garden looking for a view or some play of light, anything that might spark my interest, and whaddya know, right there in front of me, on the grounds of the house we rented, was a kind of formal arrangement that I found oddly pleasing.

In a way – let’s be honest – it’s a little like an accounting of objects; trees, deck, stairs, wall, etc., but it also had its own rhythm, and a simplicity that grew on me the more I stood still and allowed myself to enter its particular expression of ‘place’. “This is where you are!” it reminded me. Sometimes a photograph is just about that; a sense of place, and your place in it, a place  where the mystery emanates from.

So I let myself be taken in by it, by the colorless hour of the day, the stepped stone wall and the wooden steps, the paring of the chairs, the pacing of the trees, the point of view from below the deck that brought it all into being for me. It’s good to look hard at the humble stuff, because, in truth, most of life is like that. And once we accept that we do not have to be in the exotic to be turned on, we have much more to look at.

Jan-27 L1025720

JANUARY 26, 2015

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Free-For-All

I am reminded that all situations are fair game for making photographs, even the ones that seem most conventional; like sitting around with friends, watching family members living their lives, casual moments at home, or anything that is merely quotidian.  These unexalted events are the things that become invisible to us, while in fact they are as potentially potent as anything else out there in the free-for-all of life on the streets.

I can think of wonderful images made by Robert Frank, Elliot Erwitt, Garry Winogrand, and lots of others who were open to looking at the abundance of their own family’s private life. This image is not significant in terms of art, but its moment of shared good will and human warmth, the lovely gesture of the woman on the couch, the quality of the ambient light in the room, all remind me of how engaged I was by the feelings swirling around the room, and how it made me want to reach for it the only way I know.

Jan-26 L1025695

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.

Jan-24 L1025627

 

 

JANUARY 11, 2015

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Focus/Locus

There are times in the life of a couple when one observes the other in an unguarded moment, like this image of Maggie at her studio table, lost in the process of feeling her way around in something she is working on. At a moment like this I feel radiant with love for her!  I see the child-like concentration, and the adult’s expansion of the moment. This elasticity of focus is the state of mind that produces interesting answers to the question being posed, as well as the next question.

Jan-11 L1025063

Earlier in the day we walked to what has become a new locus for our casual rambles around the village; a lavender field bordered by cherry trees with Bonnieux in the background holding onto the hillside as it has done since late Roman times. A long time ago, when my family was young I made photographs of them that were separate from my so called, ‘tougher’ street work, but then I learned that family life needn’t be treated any differently than the everyday world. In fact one has to look much harder to see into our intimate lives.

Jan-11 L1025080