Tag Archives: Light

MARCH 8, 2015

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The Diversity of the Moment

When I come across plain geometries in nature, like this simple square with a roof, a certain  pleasure arises immediately. How did the maker know to do it this way? Is tradition the simple form that drove the decision? Did whoever built it have an innate sense of Feng Shui? Was it the practical needs of farming and family that created this particular form for this particular house?

Whatever it was it is an undeniable gift to see Euclidean shapes amidst the rampant energies of nature. It makes me consider both the man made and the wild in a fresh way. And of course the light at this time of year has a new intensity as the earth once again tilts on its axis to lengthen the days and add warmth to the light.

I photographed this place by moving the square around in the frame, left, right, lower and higher horizon line, centered, then vertically, and so on. But when it came right down to it, keeping it centered had a logic as clear as the geometry itself. And 35mm, too, has its own beautiful dynamic of 2 to 3, or what Henri Cartier-Bresson referred to as the ‘golden mean.’ Which I imagine most of the world’s photographers work with since that is the basic format of  cameras today.

In that sense we all are working with the same essential vocabulary, and yet the diversity is amazing between how each of us might see the scene. I remember many times in workshops I have taught, seeing how 2 photographers standing nearly side by side, photographing the same space or event, have come away with such different results as to make it seem as if  they came to the place at different times. Photography holds the diversity of the moment.

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FEBRUARY 25, 2015

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The Presence

I had to run out to pick something up for Maggie from the pharmacy before they closed. I always take the camera even if I am just going around the corner, which is where the pharmacy is. What a moment! It may seem like an ordinary evening, and to the extent that nothing happened, it was. But we have to make the most out of what we have, the hand we are dealt as photographers is always a straight. It is what it is. The dull moments and the exciting ones, you never know what you’ll get.

But, in fact, it is our recognition of something special, to us, within the overall moments of life that puts us near the presence, the sense of necessity, that makes us gasp and say, Yes!

For me it was the hour, and the color of the street lights seen against that particular winter evening blue, and those shutters! Their blue off by just enough toward the cyan to make the last of the magenta in the blue of the sky seem even more radiant. These color events,these relationships, small as they are, are enough to bring a rising sense of joy to me. I stand in them, breath them in, linger, while my mind and eye let me know how wonderful it is to be alive.

This is what photography means to me.

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FEBRUARY 17, 2015

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Show Me The Way

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A beautiful day for a walk through the fields of Provence. Here they let travelers and hikers cut across what we think of as private property, as long as you are respectful of the vineyards and orchards, which are the main crops of this fruitful valley, it’s fine with landowners. They must have been pruning the vineyards recently because I came across piles of vines like these everywhere, and while there were hundreds to choose from these two had a quality and form that spoke to me. And besides, I had to carry them for a couple of miles, so they had the right heft.

I was thinking they may work in a still life somehow, but as yet I have no idea what role they’ll play or how I’ll use them. Might just be for firewood in the long run. Who knows? When I got back I placed them on the terrace floor and just looked at them. Sometimes the quiet study of what I have in front of me sends sparks through my mind, which, given room to catch fire, can send me on flights of imagery; aimless, loose, sometimes insightful, and even more often not connected to anything I’m involved in, which is the best I can hope for since it may open a door not yet known.

The light was gorgeous, but on the wane, so I carried the vine around like Liberace with a candelabra, looking for a place to see it separate from the other vine, and not as a still life object. This is not something I have ever spent time doing before. My photographic stance has always been; “the world gives, I receive,” don’t touch a thing! But this year abroad, and the making of some recent still lives, has allowed me – in some cases – to play in ways I never have before. Where it’s all leading I don’t know.

I’m just letting photography show me the way.

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FEBRUARY 13, 2015

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Glimpse

Friday the 13th. I already have had my bad luck day this week.

So the joy of seeing this chorus line of sprinklers dancing along the roadside in February lightened my heart. It’s a nothing image in lots of ways, but the reality of it, and the way it gave me pleasure, transcends the weakness. It seemed to me as if it was ‘light’ that was being sprayed across the fields. That momentary illusion, and the thoughts that trailed through my mind as it was left behind, were worth it to me.

I think that the stimulation the world so copiously delivers in its unbounded and random way, is what makes photography such a powerful medium for ‘ideas’. And for me, through all these years, photography, even though it is made of images, has really been about the generation of new ideas; ideas about life, time, place, relationships, or anything that comes up from that brief glimpse we catch, maybe even just out of the corner of our eye, that makes the medium so continuously provocative.

I feel so lucky!

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