Tag Archives: France

MARCH 20, 2015

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Gritty

It happens to everybody, I am sure, that you find yourself somewhere and it seems to be blasted, brutal, boring, or ugly, and it’s easy to say, ‘there’s nothing here.’ I think that in those moments it is precisely the time to look harder, to try and see something, even  when your wish is to be somewhere else. And looking harder then may still not pay off, but one never knows.

I walked around this particular town looking for a place that I was told did metalwork, and of course those kinds of places are often in parts of town that are deteriorating, so when I came to this gritty spot with its hacked trees, crumbling steps, and failing masonry, I was ready to move on. But something in the physical space nagged at me momentarily and made me lift the Leica to my eye. Maybe it was just the relative scale of some of the forms, or was it the overall tonal similarity on this grey day. Who can say? But for some reason it called me to spend a few minutes there looking at the parts and absorbing the feelings the place gave off, before moving on.

It is that call to instinct that serves me even when an image fails to be a ‘keeper.’

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Nota Bene: Some readers pointed out to me that the Wunderkabinet image the other day had a Squirrel not a Rabbit and I realize that I saw squirrel and mistakenly typed rabbit. So thank you for being so observant.

MARCH 19, 2015

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Incidental

While waiting at the train station for a friend’s arrival I looked up and saw, once again, how something can come from nothing. It may not be something totally interesting, but it makes me react, think about whatever the prompt was, consider the way things work, or don’t, and add another moment of being present to the day.

These ‘incidental’ observations keep me tuned up and hungry for whatever may be next, while giving me a tingle of pleasure in the moment.

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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 15, 2015

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Sweep

Public spaces are interesting because we occupy them, often briefly or in passing, as consumers of their services; train stations, music halls, post offices, museums, and other places that function as a backdrop to our immediate needs. Many of these places don’t have the sweep and style today that they once were graced with in the era when grandeur was what cities or nations wanted to express about themselves. Not that there aren’t wonderful places still being built, but more often than not they are jammed with advertising and are made with a cost cutting and bottom line mentality.

So when I went to the TGV station in Avignon, on my way to Paris, I was taken in by the thoughtful design and simplicity of form of the engineering, and the way the light filled place made me feel. it seemed to me to be a pure expression of speed, and and speed is what the TGV is all about, And as I walked up the concourse ramp, not fast, but languidly, taking my time, I marked my admiration with photographs along the way.

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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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MARCH 12, 2015

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Monuments

Years ago when I was on a Guggenheim Fellowship grant I  toured America looking at the way Americans were living while we were in the middle of the Vietnam war. I was also interested in the way we were spending our leisure time, and how the culture was reflected in our monuments and tourist attractions, and I was curious about a lot of other attitudes of that period.

One of the things i noticed was that a lot of our military junk was finding its way into playgrounds, civic spaces, and intersections on highways, to name a few places. Old fighter jets, and missile launchers, armored cars and tanks, the rusting leftovers of the military-industrail complex that Eisenhower warned us against. What I seldom saw was the kind of memorial that The Great Wars of the 20th century produced, those valiant figures helping a fallen comrade, or standing firm against the onslaught, or looking toward the future with some degree of resilience and hope.

When I see these European monuments in small towns all over France I feel the tenderness that those losses addressed. Millions of young men were slaughtered by the incompetence of their war making leaders and the politics of their era. I find it hard to pass these empty plazas and not stop for a moment to read some names, take into account the ages of the dead, be surprised at how many were killed from some of these tiny villages.

On a day when the winter is giving up its bitter edge, human folly still shows its tragic face.

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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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