Tag Archives: Provence

FEBRUARY 6, 2015

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Under The Rainbow

I was in the car on the way to Barcelona airport, and as always had my camera at the ready. The day became a day of ‘from the car’ photographs because after I landed in Marseilles I was back in a car on my way to Bonnieux.

That part of the trip was a ‘somewhere over the rainbow’ experience because, as I entered the Luberon valley, the weather, moving fast behind a passing storm, exploded with rainbows, which appeared around every bend in the road. Rainbows are a little like shooting ducks in a barrel since you can hardly ever miss, but at 60 miles per hour the rainbow, and what it is seen in relation to, makes for a challenging set of conditions.

I love shooting from the car because there is a purity to the gesture of reaching for the image. The image is what it is, and I accept it with all its shortcomings, flaws, crazy tilts, fragmentary bits and pieces which fall in wherever they do, and in a way they refresh my seeing and remind me to stay open to the suggestive impulsive side of photography.

By the time I arrived home the sky, darkening then, flared up one last time in pure symphonic crescendo, and then went dark.

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FEBRUARY 4, 2015

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Out the Window

Some days just slip away, and I wonder, ‘where did the time go’? Interior days in the winter are perfect for dealing with the backlog of work that seems to accumulate so quickly now that we’re  in Europe, new exhibitions and projects which are time sensitive, and then all the catching up with the many things that computers were supposed to make easier for us.

So here it is nearly 5:00pm and I am called to the window by the last bit of sunlight doing its rosy golden number in the deep blue background of oncoming night, and once again – no matter how many times I have seen this – it never fails to make me drift into a reverie about time, and how I use it, and in these later years, how can I stretch it out.

Standing at the window I see that Maggie has lit the candles and the fire is dancing in the fireplace, and then I see the spatial illusion of near and far and behind, which has a surreal, Magritte-like quality; the overlap of the twin fires of nature and the hearth played out on the stone wall, and my reverie joins me to them, and the question of time goes out the window.

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FEBRUARY 3, 2015

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Light

Dear friends invited us for lunch. They are amazing antiques dealers whose eye for objects, furnishings, spaces, color tones, and the essential feel of a place, is incredibly satisfying. Whenever we visit with them in Bonnieux, in the apartment and studios they own and rent there, (by the way, if you are ever yearning for a vacation rental…) we feel immediately at home. You know that rare feeling too, I am sure, because it isn’t easily found when traveling. So when you come upon it, you get its message fast.

To enter their sun filled rooms, in a building that is hundreds of years old, and to see lunch being prepared, and flowers spilling color and energy over the table; the light reaching across surfaces, spilling down to the floor, sliding up the walls and then ricocheting off all of them, making a luminous sphere out of the rectangle of space. Light is our most expressive asset. Photographically speaking it is the source of what first wakes me up and lets me know I am being touched by a photographic possibility. I read the light. I trust what it is signaling to me, the now of it.

Even at its most humble light calls me out.

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FEBRUARY 2, 2015

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The Child in the Adult

Maggie was a dancer in New York back in the 70’s. She is a natural mime, and is always open to whatever impulses the world sends her way. Walking with her has been an adventure for the last 25 years, since I never know what unexpected, playful gesture or move she’ll make. This day for example; bitterly cold, a mistral blowing, but out we went for a walk up and down the quiet streets of Bonnieux.

She is just as likely to jump up on a wall and walk it like a tightrope, as she is to spin around when a gust of wind spirals the leaves across the road and around her feet. She was 15 feet ahead of me when I saw her interacting with the tree, and so lost in play was she that I was able to slide up behind her without her knowing I was there and make a series of images which speak to me of the child still living inside the adult.

I am reminded that our loved ones are just as crazy as the rest of the world, and that intimacy is no excuse to not see them as separate and amazing.

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FEBRUARY 1, 2015

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The Thing Itself

Every once in a while I see some pure organic form; a tree, a rocky outcrop, a body of water, a hillside, which makes me pause to regard it just for its own sake. I read the history it suggests, look at the scale it has achieved, or lost, over time, and during this consideration I sometimes get the sense that I am witnessing, “the thing itself”.

‘The thing itself’ is a wonderful photographic idea, one I learned about from John Szarkowski when he was director of the photo department at MoMA, where it came up a number of times in conversation and in his writings. It is the distilled essence of something, whatever it may be, that shows itself to us as yet again another version of the magnitude that objects may possess. This tree did that for me!

When I wandered into this ancient Roman church’s grounds I first was stopped by the sheer size of the trunk of this Plane tree. Maggie and I linked arms to see how far around it we could reach – yes, two tree huggers – and calculated that it would take five of us to encircle it. Now that’s a tree! And how long had it stood near that old pile of stone, probably just a fraction of the time the building has been there.

I felt again, as I often seem to experience, a sense of awe in the company of whatever it is that calls my attention, and maybe that is the deepest part of my photographic behavior; the willingness to give myself over to simple awe. Finally, as I turned from the tree I saw the figure of the tree not in the photograph; the arching limbs casting their shadows over the old wall. Again, a moment to really look hard at simple things; those dusty, burgundy buds promising a springtime of flowers while winter light warms up old stone.

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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 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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