Tag Archives: Still Life

APRIL 13, 2015

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Characters

I went to  some antique fairs during my time in Provence and found myself drawn to these odd forms and sizes. It’s something I don’t really understand very well since I never was a ‘collector’ of things. I have so many photographs from my 50 years of shooting that I never wanted to have ‘things’,  but now that I started making still lives I am surprised by what I find fascinating.

I created a little stage for them to behave on.  I am not really interested in making beautiful arrangements of forms and then lighting them so that each object is a thing of beauty in and of itself; unlike the way that much of the history of the still life plays out.

I like the oddness and the used-up quality of these things whose function, in some cases, is hard to guess. And I had the feeling that my years on the street would tell me what I needed to know in order to play with these new characters. In fact, thinking of them and responding to them from that point of view, as characters, would be the way this new work would develop. We’ll see what happens over time.

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MARCH 22, 2015

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7 in 1:

Announcement: I have to try an experiment this week. I am in the middle of preparing a set of 4, 20 foot high, 3 sided, triangular columns for the EXPO 2015 World’s Fair in Milan, which opens in 5 weeks. I have been given a whole Pavilion to install these works in. The theme of the Fair is “Feed the Planet,” and my Pavilion is dedicated to Cereals and Grains which translates, to me, as ‘Bread.’ So I have made 75 portraits of bread from all over Italy. These will be stacked on Totem-like columns. So I must, starting this week, post a weeks worth of my one-a-day images all at once, while I dedicate myself to finishing the work on the pavilion.

The week that I made these images took me to Lourmarin, near Bonnieux, and Bonnieux itself, then Paris, and after Paris on the TGV to Deauville, where Maggie and I were asked to do a commission about the town in Summer, but once we saw the place, we decided that it wasn’t something we were interested in doing, so back to Bonnieux we went.

I had the sense that the dogs in Lourmain (3/22) were ‘getting acquainted,’ and that these rituals are an interesting thing to consider, maybe even as a subject for a body of work. We see this in human beings all the time in the dance we do, the gestures we make, the knowing looks sent back and forth between people are all part of our subtle communication. Sometimes themes and ideas spring from surprising sources.

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The power of the tree in the landscape at this time of year is rich with suggestive force. The small shocks I get from these relationships of trees to the whole space never cease to please me and open me up to considering what makes a landscape photograph. Even with such minimal conditions as these something comes into play. That fountain-like tree in the distance and the groin of the tree in the foreground spoke to me of needs and surges that all nature’s things can express.

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In Paris (3/25-26) it’s always the parks and boulevards for me, where life is at its most Parisian and something always comes along, both the expected and unexpected. And lovers have arguments as well as making up, and an argument in public is an observable intimacy of the unguarded moment. Then, on a visit to the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, to see a great show of Howard Greenberg’s private collection, I found myself looking out the Foundation’s window at a scene that the master himself might have looked at, although this image certainly isn’t worthy of him. Nonetheless, the activity in the schoolyard below changed every few seconds and was fun to look at when seen with the running figure on the wall above the window. Later, while passing a shop, I saw this amazing 4 fingered glove. Eerie and mysterious, as well as a strong image all on its own, I asked the owner if I could buy it for my still life collection of objects with that kind of power. No deal she said! So, it’s just a memory now.

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(3/27) At 120 miles an hour on the TGV, things come and go in the blink of a second, yet every once in a while something lovely is revealed, plucked by speed itself. Here! and Gone! And all I have is the camera’s 1000th of a second to save it from oblivion.

3/27 From the TGV03-29 L1027187

(3/28) The beach at Deauville, while wide and clean, had behind it a town that was developed by rich Parisian merchants early in the 20th century. It was a holiday town for the well to do who wanted to get out of Paris, and as such it had no history, and it shows it now. After 30 minutes of walking around Maggie and I were dispirited and longing to get back on the train and head for Bonnieux. Yet the red, white and blue of the beach on that second day of spring, bitter as it was, did bring a moment of longing for those sweet summer days by the sea.

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MARCH 18, 2015

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Wunderkabinet

At a friend’s house I saw this ‘wunderkabinet’ of creatures. It fascinated me on several levels. On the one hand this is just a glass box with an owl and a rabbit and some woodland background, but looked at another way, which is what was so interesting to me, it is similar to a photograph. Someone made this! They brought all the elements together, they put them in a frame, they charged the whole thing with their own sense of mystery, value, color, form, context, reality, all in a search for meaning or beauty.

Isn’t that what we all try to do? Put a frame around a moment of time and try and invest it with all our feelings for the precise fraction of a second when we saw or felt something! Often we are not completely certain what it is that emanates from our observation, but the call is clear to us; make this moment count!

So, too, in this glass box of wonder. The effort here, by a taxidermist, or a hobbyist, or someone who just wanted to preserve something they found beautiful, is extraordinary and invites both speculation and wonder. Isn’t that what photography does.

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MARCH 16, 2015

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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.

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MARCH 14, 2015

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The Dummy

At a flea market I found this dressmaker’s dummy, probably something from the 1950’s, and to my surprise I found myself wanting if for the still lives I was beginning to make. In fact at first I had a strong pull toward it, then walked away thinking, ‘this is crazy, Joel, what do you want that for’? What was it about the dummy? Why was it so strangely appealing to me? In my life as a photographer, making table top still life work was never something that called to me. Give me the street any day with its unpredictability, chaos, radical light conditions, and the joys of timing, which always made me concentrate more fiercely.

Yet, there I was, going back to the stall and standing in front of this mysterious figure again and wanting to take it home to see how it played with the other objects that were finding their way into my life. How can I explain it? Maybe it was a Magritte-like mystery that presented itself, or another echo coming to me from the Dadaists and Surrealists, who I loved when I was an art student nearly 60 years ago. Whatever it was it was strong enough to make me say yes to it and leave the rest to chance. That part is like the street which is all about chance.

On this day I put it up on the ‘teatrino’, my little theater-like set, and added some other objects that also have found their way to me, just to see what would happen in terms of scale, color, the various forms, and whatever meaning might emerge from their encounter. I have no answer as yet, just some ‘records’ of what things look like. Now it is time to look and wonder.

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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.

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MARCH 4, 2015

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Trust Your Instinct

These fire roasted artichokes, ash covered and charred, were sitting on a plate in the kitchen where I passed them many times during that day, each time thinking. “I have to get to them, peel and quarter them, and cover with olive oil and garlic and some wild herbs.” I finally got around to it after first taking them to the studio and setting them up in a little corner I had just built.

This corner has played a significant part in what has happened since I made these first corner series images. It amazes me still that one can do something on impulse, like decide to build a corner and put things in it, and then have that innocent instinct develop into an intense new way of working. It’s like coming to the proverbial fork in the road and having to choose left or right, and whatever you choose determines the rest of your life. It just does!

This corner series (although not these artichokes) is something I am now working on for the EXPO 2015 World’s Fair in Milano, opening this May. I’m making four large, triangular, totem-like columns about 20 feet tall. And the images on them will be bread portraits from bakeries all over Italy. I have a Pavilion all to myself, well there are about 9 countries represented in the Pavilion, but the theme  – Cereals and Tubers (Feed The Planet is the Fair’s Theme) – is mine to work on, and because it’s a grain pavilion the work became about Bread. And all this has come alive precisely because when I made this image I began working in a new way.

It pays to trust your instinct.

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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.

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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?

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