Tag Archives: Bonnieux

JANUARY 10, 2015

Getting to Know Them

I found myself collecting strange cast offs in the local flea markets recently. I’ve never been much of a collector of objects. Having so many thousands of photographs, stacked nearly floor to ceiling high on the shelves of my studio, I always thought I had enough ‘things’ already. But these old odd forms that call out to me are suggesting themselves as worthy objects to consider in some sort of still life way, still lives being something that never really were part of my vocabulary as a photographer until last year when the urge first came to me.

Since then I periodically find myself simply staring at some of these objects and turning them slowly around so that each new aspect of their form reveals another possible shift in my first or overall impression. It is as if their truest expression of their ‘objectness’, their ‘personality’, suggests that I stop and look harder – which is what I think photography is really all about – looking harder at what we may think we already know – and by doing that I get glimpses of their hidden sweet spot, and once you know where that is you want to explore it.

This image is more of an introduction to the new arrivals than a worked out still life. It’s what I do first to see how they stand, their relationship to each other, the way the surface holds the light, the sense of scale they emit in the space they occupy. Surprisingly, some small forms present a sense of scale greater than their real size, and it helps to know that about them for future use. It’s kind of like an audition where the cast of new arrivals struts their stuff for the director. Today the book and the pipe came home with me and we are getting to know each other.

JANUARY 5, 2015

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To wake up in another country, one you know you will be staying in for awhile, is an opportunity to try and slip into the life of the place in ways not so easy to do when one is away for just a few weeks.

So this little 6th century village of Bonnieux, with barely a thousand people in it during the winter, offers itself up for wandering through its’ streets, watching the inhabitants live their daily lives, and, perhaps best of all, to be taken in by the light, atmosphere, and freshness of all its sensuous pleasures. The process of discovery is not only of place, but of self.

JANUARY 3, 2015

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THE LINE

When Maggie and I finished our book on Provence we wanted to do a project together that might carry us through our year in Europe. Something that would give us an opportunity to step out of our roles as photographer and writer. The idea that first came to us (while sitting in the bath, actually) was; ‘let’s each make one line every day’, alternating daily, and where one line ends on a sheet of paper the next line must begin. This mute, meditative moment allowed us to choose whatever we wanted to use to make a line; paint, ink, charcoal from the fireplace, fruit, grass, blood, whatever was handy and felt right. In that way we could both collaborate and duel, respond and challenge.

We did it every day for a year! And it now stretches in one continuous line for 220 feet! This image was made as the 3rd line, Maggie’s turn, presented itself.

January 2, 2015

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Photographs made on the streets of a city like New York, or any dynamic urban place, usually require an immediacy and responsiveness that often leaves one somewhat uncertain of what the whole image might contain, or how it may ‘work.’ Of course this is part of the mystery and risk of making photographs.

So when I found myself in Bonnieux, a small village in the Luberon valley of southern France, a place where not much was happening, I realized that I must adapt to the pace of the locale and ‘feel’ out the temperament that was required to simply be there. I understood that I had to learn how to see what there was there that stopped me for whatever reason. I guess my first lesson was that ‘awe’ comes in many different, and unexpected forms, and will surprise me if I simply take the time to stand before it and allow myself to be taken in.

On a late afternoon walk around the village on the first day these small gestures; an accumulation of a few stones by someone’s hand, and the peace of an empty street at dusk, said to me, “this is where you are, make the most of what you have.”

ONCE MORE AROUND THE SUN

A photograph every day for a year