Tag Archives: France

JANUARY 20, 2015

1 Reply

Adding it Up

I came through the revolving doors into the warmth of the vestibule of the hotel, paused for a moment to take off my hat and gloves, and then caught sight of this kid sitting there like a little puppy waiting for his master. Something about the scale of the boy, and then the strangeness of the whole space; that room to the right, with the slightly underwater glow, and that crazy instrument from another era, circa 1900 I would guess, a piano roll, or reproducing piano I think it was called – look at the size of that thing! and think how far we have come and how we carry our music around with us today!

But what was really happening, as it so often does, was that all of it suddenly filled me with a quickening of the pulse and the mind, which made me stop and really look at just where I was!  Moments like that are expansive. Everything comes into play. I look all over the frame to make it register clearly, and out of that disciplined looking sometimes an interesting photograph comes.

Jan-20 L1025357

Back on the street I passed a cafe where a woman was drawing, and again an interior space made me stop. This time it was a more ambiguous space that caught my eye, but also the hard focus of the woman within, which made me take the moment and carry it off with me. It always astonishes me when themes arise, however loosely, on any given day, and connect disparate, non-events to each other, which then, sometimes, keep adding up.

Jan-20 L1025419

And so it goes.

JANUARY 19, 2015

Leave a reply

Exotic Birds

This unforgettable woman passed me on the street while I was being filmed for a documentary about my street work ( you can see the filmmaker in the background). How fortunate was I that she appeared just then?

She was lost in thought, glove dangling from her lips, extreme hairdo, like an exotic birds’, and an angular and chiseled face. I kept pace with her for perhaps 10 seconds of backpedaling on the crowded street, during which she never saw or felt me and my fascination with her.

In moments like that the street is still a wonder for me, mainly because we are all such exotic and mysterious creatures, and when instinct calls my attention to another human being, or the interaction between people, I simply accept and move with it as quickly and invisibly as I can. It’s amazing to me that I can still keep up, and that I still desire to see and know something about the moment.

This curiosity about strangers has been my passion for more than fifty years, and I am grateful to have learned the necessary behavior to be out there seeing it all and not bruising the situation in any way that might turn it from reality to something staged or predetermined.

Jan-19 L1025339-Edit

JANUARY 12, 2015

1 Reply

This Is Not A Pipe….”Ceci n’est pas une pipe“, Magritte

I came across this pipe (which?). It was lying innocently on it’s side among a lot of other lost souls in a stall filled with castoffs of all description. So why, as I passed by, did this unnecessary object call out to me,  a call which I barely heard amidst the din of all the glittering and shapely spent objects? It was a pipe. And I heard that long remembered Magritte line;”Ceci n’est pas une pipe“. But it was.

When I saw it in my own collection it fell in with this brass and copper pipe, something that once might have been in the mouth of a fish, or a face on a fountain. One pipe weighs nearly nothing and is silk in the hand, while the other has gravity and weight, and is cold to the touch though warm to the eye. They seemed to want to be together. That suggestion coming to me was so timid as to be just below consciousness, but I heard it, the Zen Bell I always hear when it calls me. I’ve learned to listen for it.

On the hand made background (more about that some other time) they came to life and played together, and something like a force shivered between them, and they continued to fall against each other until I found their balance and poise. The cloth added a note as well. I was in thrall to the light, and the dark, and the way their character, independent of each other, and together, emerged.

I was taken in.

Jan-12 L1000293

JANUARY 11, 2015

Leave a reply

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

JANUARY 10, 2015

Leave a reply

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.

Jan-10 St.L L1000277

JANUARY 9,2015

2 Replies

Being and Seeing

Living in a new place sends us spinning out into the countryside every chance we can. It’s fun to just get lost and see where we end up, and of course, along the way we see everything from the grand scale of the countryside to small notes of momentary significance. That’s part of the pleasure of being and seeing in a new place.

On the road to St. Remy this wall of of sunny stone holds a procession of London Plane trees, pruned in the manner of this part of France, which is always astonishing to see given how they reach and swirl their limbs toward the sunlight, and they never fail to make me gasp at their powerful forms. As I came to a halt at the light it seemed as if everything there pinged a red note at the same moment, and then we moved on.

Jan-9 FTC L1024996

While waiting for lunch in a restaurant in St. Remy, I watched the play of light on the wall nearby, the kind of distraction that comes when you are ready to order and the waiter is lingering elsewhere. Moments like this you could call, ‘filler moments’, my eyes wandering over everything looking for some hook to catch my attention, and often the most unexpected things call out to me. In this case the projections from a leaded glass window tumbled over the geometrics of the window frame which itself sat near an elegant old radiator.

When these kinds of collisions happen I always try to make something out of them, try to see in a different way, it’s more like play really as I juggle the elements in the frame to see how long I can stay interested. Sometimes it is just an exercise and leads nowhere, and other times a fresh breeze blows through my mind.

Jan-9 Interior L1025023

JANUARY 6, 2015

Leave a reply

Simple Things Say a Lot

Some days the images that stop us come out of our accumulated past. I see something that I know I have seen a thousand times; in this case the facade of a house, simple as the fact of its being. An honest exaltation of, “I am.” 

This ordinary house, along a canal in the town of L’Isle-sur-la sorgue is embroidered by Nature’s hand, which, now that winter has struck the shiny glitter of its ivy leaves to the ground, is showing me the unstoppable force of a single root which has taken dominion over the entire surface of this building.

I was stuck dumb with admiration for the complexity and sheer visual, graphic, beauty of this circulatory system, for surely that is what this is, a root dipping its toe into the waters of the canal below the house.

And isn’t this what we hope photography can reveal to us? A moment of innocent wonder at the gifts that nature, or mankind, offers us, and the power it has to set us free to simply take in whatever meaning this, or any other form of unexpected beauty presents.

Jan-6 House vines L1024962

 

 

 

JANUARY 5, 2015

1 Reply

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.

Jan-5 L1024904

Jan-5 L1024917

 

Jan-5 L1024923

 

JANUARY 4, 2015

5 Replies

Photography isn’t only about seeing something and then making a photograph of it. It’s also about movement, moving in and around as you feel the qualities of the place you are in open up your mind to the other possibilities the image presents; the what if… moment. For me that’s part of the joy of seeing. I love the expansive experience of recognizing the potentcy of even such small scenes as these two below.

What was it that drew my attention? A tinkling of sunlight on Christmas lights seen against a classic French village building caught my eye, and then they pulled me forward to look more carefully, and of course everything changes with every step one takes. 20 feet further on I looked up at the lights and saw them dance against the sky.

None of this is of any great significance in the larger scheme of things. But for a moment, once again, the world offers its bounty, and I am grateful.

Jan-4 L1024872

 

Jan-4 L1024877