Tag Archives: France

JANUARY 31, 2015

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Cezanne’s Hat

I walked into Cezanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence and stood in awe of the space that he created for himself back in the 1890’s. Cezanne, I have always been in awe of. But to be in the real place, not some museum dramatization of his space, as is often the case these days, was to be in touch with whatever there was left of his spirit. And for me it appeared in the form of the grey color on the walls.

Why grey?, especially with all that light (or maybe because of it?). Today almost every studio is white walled, like a museum white box exhibition space. So the grey fascinated me, and a number of other thoughts rose up about what grey did for him in his search for the flatness of paint on canvas as opposed to the illusion of deep space and perspective. He was giving all that up and it is why he is considered the father of modern painting, because to break with that long tradition of Renaissance perspective, in favor of marks on canvas, was a huge leap into the 20th century.

On the shelves above his painting table I noticed many of the objects that I have seen in his paintings, I asked the director if I could take them down and look at them against the grey wall and then to photograph them, in an effort to better understand his reasons for the grey. She told me no photographs were allowed, so I gently pushed her to check me out on the web and see my seriousness of purpose. Surprise! She let me have my way with the objects. Now, after 3 visits there, I have photographed more than 70 of his bottles, coffee pots, ink wells, cans, pitchers, cups, basins, decanters, wooden models, and assorted rubbish found in some of the drawers.

Out of this study I have begun making still life grids with as many as 25 images in the grid. More about this another time, but for the moment we can look at Cezanne’s Hat. Which, when I put it on, came down over my ears! He must have had a huge head!

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JANUARY 30, 2015

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What Beauty

Again, a cold, wintry day, no one out on the streets of Menerbes, the light was gray, the town was ancient history, stones and more stones, and then, perhaps 30 feet away, I see a stain of acid-green leaking out into the street, a kind of luminous, neon-ish color that had nothing to do with anything in the town. This color is a modern artifact, and as such it defies naturalness.

So, naturally, I let myself be drawn toward the light, already feeling my openness and anticipation beginning to play with the ‘what ifs’ that might await me. And there it was! I cannot tell you what it was, as it only showed itself as a window, no store, just a space someone wanted to show this in. What was really fun was to stare into the room for 2-3 minutes and then turn around and look at the world. Everything was a glowing, electric magenta, which of course faded in 30 seconds or so, but was a lovely optical trip for the time it lasted. (you might want to try it right here on this page where, just a moment ago, I got the same flash of magenta on the screen when my eyes flicked to the side)

Let’s face it, photography is an optical trip too!

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On the way back to my car I saw the daylight changing and glowing in its own natural way, not to mention the lovely complexity of the layers, and I am sure that my response was in relation to that window I stood in front of a half hour before. The green! and the glitter of the light on the land, although less intense than the window, were nonetheless wondrous, as only nature can be. How many times daily do I stop and say, ‘what beauty’!

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JANUARY 29, 2015

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Swept Away

It must have been a fantastic January sale, even the window models lost their clothes! I see things like this on the streets of New York all the time since they change the windows a lot faster there, but to be in a small, French, agricultural town, on a back street no less, and to turn the corner, on a late and grey day, and come upon this window was quite a pleasant surprise – and let me tell you there was no one else on the streets, as is so often the case in French towns – where do they all go?

This kind of photograph is like shooting ducks in a barrel. It’s all there already, and all I have to do is stand in front of it and put a frame around it. And I probably have made more than my share of these kinds of ‘record’ photographs. But what do they record? And why bother to make it again and again.

Well, when I am out wandering and nothing much is going on, then anything that has a sign of life seems to be of interest. And in a way it’s a little like ‘priming the pump’, if I make a shot like this I feel somewhat freer, because something happened!  It feels good to be called out of the lethargy that can come over all of us when walking in strange, often quiet towns. It’s like a warmup, or a stretch.

So it records a moment of engagement for me, and it also records what this particular time, in France, in a small town, in the 21st century looked like. It is also a reminder that throughout the history of Photography this kind of image has called photographers to account. Think of Atget’s great photographs of windows with mannequins. Not that this has any bearing on his image, but whenever we connect with the past we keep the continuity of the medium going. And one never knows what might happen next because you stopped here to look, spend a few minutes thinking about what you are seeing, and then life resumes again and sweeps you away.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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JANUARY 23, 2015

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Wake Up Call

After 5 days in Paris the countryside feels good! Even when there is nothing of conventional beauty to see, particularly this late in a grey, damp and cold day with the light going and the sombre feeling drawing the energy out of the drive home.

Yet there is something to be seen; the way the trees, in their spare branches and woven asymmetries seem huddled against the season, or the diminished yet radiant tone of the colors of winter, or the flattening of the light lending a last, eerie, tincture of blue to the onset of nightfall. All this puts me in a reverie, and out of it I feel the freshening of my vision, the desire to look harder at what this moment of reality is offering me. Another call to wake up and see!

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JANUARY 21, 2015

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Coincidence

I was going through the work from the 21st for today’s Blog and what do I discover but a funny coincidence. In among the 65 photographs I made, here, again, was another young woman with a glove hanging from her mouth! What are the odds of that happening?  And it was even near the very same place as the one from January 19th.

Of course it is a wholly different image, less of a portrait and more of a general slice across the late in the day street hustle. Still, there are lots of small things to notice, like the 2 tiny heads above and below her hand, which, if you really are looking all over the frame, give up their small pleasures at being discovered.

However, it’s not a great image, just a workaday photograph made in an effort to stay sharp out on the street, which, in some ways, is just as important as making a really tough photograph, because keeping one’s instrument tuned up is part of the larger game of sight.

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