Tag Archives: Provence

FEBRUARY 28, 2015

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Emptiness

The end of February! An unusually warm day, springlike even. We walk through the fields        outside the town and realize how the sun adds a lightness to our step as well as to our sense of place. Coming back into town we cross the library plaza and suddenly the scale becomes theater-like, and Maggie’s caped form, bold in the hard sunlight, makes her seem like an actor on the stage, then she twirls and comes to rest laughing and blinded by the full on glare of the sun. It is an irresistible moment! I feel the hard blue of the sky, the hard sunlight, the hard black edge of her form, the hard edge of the frame above her head, all known in that moment’s grace after the twirl, and before she walks away. It’s as fast as that!

Emptiness is a condition of photography that I have come to cherish. And as you may know, I love the charged, crowded precincts of big cities where everything going on all over the frame has enchanted me since I first began making photographs. But now there are times when the simplicity of place itself sends its awakening call through me, and when someone I love is passing within the boundaries it makes it even more vital for me.

Feb-28 L1026404

FEBRUARY 27, 2015

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License To see

It breaks my heart every time I see a tree cut down in a town. This one was hollow to the core as I learned when I walked around it. But first I stood there for awhile – it was market day and I had bags full of winter greens and root vegetables that I was happy to put down – leaving me free to contemplate the body of the tree and the emotions that came and went.

Then the woman in the beret walked by, and for some reason a figure entering the frame made me think that it would take about 8 people her size to equal to the mass of the trunk of that tree, that is if you stacked them up like cordwood. Not a pleasant thought but one that came to mind momentarily, as these things sometimes do..

Part of the pleasure of photographing is the amount of speculation that races along in my mind when I am out in the world. Carrying a camera is like having a license to see, and also to think about the unexpected ideas that rise up in relation to wherever I find myself. I have always said that photography – even though it is made of images – is really about ideas. Our ideas about who we are, what we feel, what things move each of us to raise the camera and acknowledge any given instant, as if it is only we who can see this. And it is!

I feel that photography, even though the format is exactly the same for billions of people around the world, gives us a chance to say something about what we see in a truly individual way. We just have to figure out who we are so our identity comes through clearly. Photography can help to do that!

Feb-27 L1026377

Feb-27 L1026381

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.

Feb-26 L1026372

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.

Feb-25 L1026365

FEBRUARY 24, 2015

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The ‘Click’

That vine I carried home a few days ago has leaped up onto my still life table begging me to be seen instead of sitting by the fire trying to avoid being the next piece of firewood. I had been wanting to do something with it, but nothing was calling out to me, then today I found this flask at a local flea market. It’s made from a gourd and has some beautiful little dotted lines etched into it, and the cap screws on with a satisfying little ‘click’ a it snugs into a perfect, spiraled fit. A real craftsman’s trick, and probably the thing that made me bring it home.

It’s handmade, but since it was an organic thing, like the vine, I felt some kind of kinship was possible, so I set them up simply to look at them together to see if they had any kind of affinity beyond their origins as vine and gourd.

They’re a handsome couple – in their way –  but nothing is going on with them, no dynamic, no mystery, no fire, pardon the pun, nothing but their separate identities.They’re boring, like some couples you meet at a party!  But I’ll leave them up overnight and see what other objects might want to muscle their way in and bring some life to this static duo. To be continued, or not.

Feb-24 L1000680

FEBRUARY 23, 2015

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Hodge Podge

Feb-23 L1026328.

Sometimes a crazy, meaningless collection of objects, spaces, colors, light, and actions all come into play at once, and from it might come the call to pay attention to this hodge podge of stuff in front of us. I think hodge podge comes from an old Dutch or French word meaning a soup made from whatever was left lying around, probably meaning a hot pot, or something like that. In Amsterdam I once saw a Dutch historical painting where there was a hot pot made for the masses who were celebrating the Spanish defeat, or something like that. Anyway, as we know, sometimes a mess of a stew can be delicious!

And although this frame isn’t exactly delicious, it is interesting to me just how much it continues to hold its own and make me want to look at it again. A little uncertainty is useful sometimes as it presses the argument. First, there’s the sculpted figure on a marble block about the same size as that car, (not to mention that the figure seems to be an early prototype of the model draped over the car hood to show its curves, just look at that head and chest) and then around her head is the corona of the tree’s limbs which, when seen in relation to the crane’s beam and the lines to the light poles, both fill and fracture the space in provocative ways. And there is an interesting ‘read’ to the overall space through the way the figures – statue/car/couple – diminish on an angle all their own. I would bet that were I to print this at 60 inches the image would invite us to look harder and pay us back with interest.

It’s open-ended pictures like this that I believe help refine our sensibilities and enable us, in fact, urge us, to look more thoughtfully at all the spaces and moments we pass through. Let’s accept that there is nothing much going on here of note, but that it still has some kind of pull in spite of that shortcoming. I would rather make a flawed, but interesting to consider photograph, than a more successful image that uses conventional forms to tell its tale.

 

FEBRUARY 21, 2015

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Every Sensation

How many vineyards are there? It seems as if every road in the Luberon Valley of Provence is laced with endless rows of vines, and they are all beautiful in their way, whether it’s their sheer commercial production beauty and organization, or older, pre-mechanization vineyards that have a different spacing for their mature vines.

But every once in a while I come across one of these newer vineyards where the young plants have been collared with a plastic tube, something which sounds like it will only add an ugly note to the landscape, but which, at least here in this flat, but still backlit light, offered me something to stop and take a look at. I always trust my instinct when that tiny ‘Zen bell’ goes off in my head and says to me, “hey, what’s the hurry”.

Stepping out into the space is always a moment to take a fresh look! What’s here? Why do these dumb plastic tubes call out to me so strongly? Perhaps it’s just the pure color note they bring to the earth tones and the new green, maybe its their relationship to the veiled and slightly blue haze on the hillsides, generating a kind of ugly beauty which makes a new harmony. Or perhaps its their repetition and the visual mathematics of scale, with the neon blue buzzing as it diminishes in size all the way back to the horizon.

Whatever it is it tests the limits of what can make a photograph on any given day. So, on this day, this is the most memorable of my visions, and yet it is made of so little as to almost be without value. Yet I remember every sensation!

 

Feb-21 L1026188.

FEBRUARY 20, 2015

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Never Say No

There are roads in Provence that can break your heart. This road near the town of St. Remy is one I have traveled almost every time I come to the region, and in fact it is so moving to me that I published two pictures made along its course in our book,”Provence: Lasting Impressions”. In those images the trees are leafed out in the fulness of summer, and again when fall burnished their leaves a rusty gold.

Now, on a wintry day, with flawless sunlight etching every detail into my eye, the white bones of the trees are singing against the blue dome of the sky. I’m not stopping – as I have done before, to dance in the middle of the road and play in the oncoming traffic –  but I’m driving straight through and letting the windshield be my frame while the miles of trees fill and empty it as I pass.

I love this road and how I feel whenever I am on it. It always feels new to me, and yet it touches an ancient nerve where the definition of ‘road beauty’ lies in wait to be awakened once again. I remain susceptible to these quirks of mine and never fail to respond even if it seems as if I have had enough of them to last a lifetime. And I may have. But I believe in letting loose the arrows in my quiver whenever the impulse arises. That gesture, that Yes!, is my tipping of the hat to the spirits that have guided me to respond to the world for more than 50 years, and I never say no.

Feb-20 L1026278.

FEBRUARY 19, 2015

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Simple Things

Simple is good! This may be true for food as well as for photographs (even the complicated ones). But I have to say that on a day in February, when the temperature is 60, and the sun is hinting at springtime coming to my neighborhood soon; a couple of cappuccinos, some English biscuits, and some coffee ice cream, eaten in sunlight, sitting next to the woman I love, well, nothing could beat that.

I don’t equate simple with simple things. I think seeing the complexity of the world, in all its varied layers and movements, and its timings, is an amazing feat of observation. And as richly detailed and capable of multiple meanings as it all becomes, both in the reality of the moment, and later in a print, it can still be stated simply. Because if it was understood intuitively, and thus proposed in a direct way, the visual language at your disposal will do all the rest.

Photography is a language. That is something I have always believed. And it takes years of learning the ins and outs of that language, the intricacies of its forms and shadings, the expressive potential of energies that visit you while you are seeing something, which we build and learn over time, until one day you realize that you actually have your own private language. If you have made it a clear and elegant language, you will communicate with your visual voice to all kinds of people. And strangers will understand you, people will be moved by you, some will feel the feelings you experienced. The world will want to see what you have to say.

Isn’t that what we love about photography?

Feb-19 L1026246.

FEBRUARY 18, 2015

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Leo

There it is! The first tiny bud indicating that spring will come again. Maggie, the gardener in our life notices every change, even the slightest, which is how a true gardener perceives the world. Her glee, the sweet innocence of her discovery, moves me to delight. I see the child-like spirit, maybe even catch a glimpse of who she was when she was 10 years old. This brief morphing of the mature Maggie into the child is something all of us are lucky to see in our loved ones. Like seeing the original before the world gave us our lumps.

Simple as this is I like seeing the pairing of the trellis form and Maggie’s, and – only an insider can know this – I catch sight of the word LEO on the lintel, and Maggie is a Leo, so that’s a little playful aside, which tickles me. But who else knows and who cares? Me!

And as we know it’s only for us that we make photographs, but I put it out here now because of all the images from today this is the one that makes me stop for a moment to take it in, and to wonder how that small square of earth can support such a generous plant, which, in fact, goes all along the roof line in both directions and must be amazing to look at in summertime when it’s in full bloom.

Feb-18 L1026238.