Tag Archives: Interior

MARCH 16, 2015

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.

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.

MARCH 6, 2015

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MY BIRTHDAY!

Sitting on the breakfast table was this box, and a rose in a nest, a sprig of thyme, and an embroidered love note from Maggie. A lovely way to start my birth day.

Although many other notes were struck during the day, and they were fun filled, friend filled, and intimate, I remembered this one for its simplicity, honesty, humility and love.

FEBRUARY 26, 2015

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The other side of the camera

This is what it looks like from the other side of the camera. I was being interviewed and filmed by the BBC for a documentary on Vivian Meier. I had been involved with her work almost from the very beginning, because, when John Maloof discovered what he had bought, and began asking for opinions from a number of photographers about the quality of the work, he called me, and I said, “she’s the real thing’!

I contributed to this BBC version because a friend was the producer of the film and I couldn’t say no to him even though I had already been filmed by John. It all worked out in the end and John’s film has brought a lot of attention to the work, which is the best result possible.

But as I sat there facing them I had the impulse to make a record of the moment, since it was one of the parts of the day that seemed worthy of remembering. It’s a record, more or less of who was there, how the place served us, and what life in Bonnieux offered. It’s what photography can do in its simplest, most utilitarian way.

FEBRUARY 15, 2015

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Time As Light

When I began making these new still life photographs, in the year before this image below, I found myself working in a dark environment which was a strange thing for me to do since ‘Light’ was the phenomena that marked my photographs as mine. So why the dark? What was so attractive about that? These thoughts, and many more, are questions that rise up out of the chance events of our lives when combined with our creative impulses.

To tell the truth though, it was the weather! That summer the temperature in Tuscany was over 95 every day for 3 months – it never rained – and so searing was it that during the middle of the day it was impossible to be outside, so I retreated into the little studio that Maggie and I shared on the farm we had rented. The studio has never been my normal habitat.

Confronted with a dark corner there, darker than this one in the photograph from Bonnieux, I made many studies on different backgrounds, and over 2 to 3 weeks of work I finally arrived at this dark cloth as my sfondo (background). In fact I took this 100 year old piece of stained linen and had it printed with a dark tone I made out of a number of reassembled photographs of mine so that i had just what I needed to place my growing collection of dark objects on.

There is a story that perhaps some of you know, but which I heard from Ben Maddow, a friend of Edward Weston’s, when he was writing a book about him back in the 70’s. He told me that the famous image of The Pepper was made by placing it inside an old tin funnel (if you look closely you will see the curves of the funnel below the pepper) and that Weston put it far back in his studio away from the light in front. And that he told his sons, Brett and Cole, not to run around since the exposure was to be a long one and he didn’t want the floor to shake. Then he made an exposure (the stories vary from 6 minutes to many hours), letting the slow accretion of photons come to caress and build the light on the dark pepper set inside the dark funnel, in that dark corner of the studio.

This story always pleased me, and because I’ve used an 8×10 view camera since 1976, and know very well the generosity of the light, especially when time is used as light, I appreciated the strategy, and decided to adopt it to my new work. It has taught me more than I can say here, but perhaps as this blog continues, and these images appear, I’ll carry this inquiry further along.

FEBRUARY 9, 2015

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Now

Our year in Europe feels a little like we ran away to join the circus. Two older adults who left it all behind, packed 2 suitcases and some equipment and off we went. And who better to run away with than this woman! Maggie has enriched my life in indescribable ways. She is wife, lover, friend, consigliere, healer, business partner, co-author, and many more things to me, but always a joy to behold.

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t see her doing something intimate, or lost in thought, or writing, gardening, preparing something delicious, engaging with local merchants, so many minor, ordinary moments which are lifted out of the ordinary by the joy that emanates from her. And when she looks at me I am smitten once again.

So I make countless images of her, and the story they tell is our story, of love in the time when the years are fleeting, but joy is to be had in every moment of consciousness, that Now is the only moment we have. And every photograph is Now!

FEBRUARY 5, 2015

FEBRUARY 4, 2015

FEBRUARY 3, 2015

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!

ONCE MORE AROUND THE SUN

A photograph every day for a year