Tag Archives: street

MAY 1, 2015

May 1st.

It was a travel day. We left Bonnieux early in the morning after 4 months living there, on the first leg of our year long experiment living in Europe. So we said goodbye to the baker where our daily intake of baguette had become a morning ritual. Boy-o-boy, were they good! It was to be an 800 Km drive from Bonnieux to Buonconvento, so we broke it up into an overnight stop in Camoglie, a seaside town in Italy.

Ah, dear old colorful, worn out, beautiful, generous Italia! Color! Like Italian opera. It is everywhere, and joyous to be in. Even though this blog is about one photograph a day, this kind of travel day is so refreshing in terms of stimulus, that I thought I’d simply lay down some of the eye candy that Camoglie offered on our arrival. Look at this! May 1, and they are already in the water!

As we walked down the seafront I saw this crazy structure on the beach and immediately Fellini’s imagery came to mind. What was this wooden scaffolding all about? And how easily it fit in and seemed normal.

This wall, part of the crumbling beauty of Italian cities struck me as something I might ant to use as a background for a still life. I found myself collecting a few ‘wall’ images that day for possible printing as a field to look at some objects on. Just instinct talking, and I always follow instinct and try not to second guess it.

And then came the giant Frying Pan. Another Felliniesque motif leading to the surreal landscape of Italian life.

Sitting at dinner in the lovely hotel dining room on the sea, the long day coming to a close, a really good Italian seafood dinner in our bellies, the sun slipping into the sea, gave us a kind of perfect end to a long day on the road. More adventures on the road to Buonconvento to come.

APRIL 6 -11, 2015

1 Reply

Seeing the Light

I look out the window never knowing what I’ll see that may be of interest. Will it be the weather? The landscape? Street activity? Even if we are familiar with our window’s frame, expecting it to show us the same old scene just altered by time or season, we can be surprised. The frame can move our attention just as we move the camera in front of our eye. On this bleak day, with a light rain falling, the delicate tracery of the cypress trees on the water, and the subtle coloration of the pool’s structure, made me feel as if I was seeing lavender in the overall aqua that I wasn’t sure was there. There was no lavender in the grey sky. Yet the grey bands in the pool delicately resonated with color. My feeling was that all that aqua produced a lavender echo in my eye, and on the sensor. And it is that magic of color seeing that has always seduced me.

April 6

Carrying the camera always makes me interested in something along the way, and thus I am always having to catch up to family or friends who are already ahead of me. But sometimes it pays off if even in small ways. Seeing Maggie and our friends ahead of me as we hurried to the cinema made me appreciate the now lengthened hours of the day, and the lovely mix of last light and lamplight in this old town’s narrow alleys. I had that jolt, as I so often do, that, “I am Here, now!” And the recognition of the meaning of being in every moment becomes ringingly clear. April 7

Nature takes hold wherever it can, it is, after all, nature’s dominion that we live in. So when I stand in front of something as simple as an ivy covered wall, naked in this season, I see the vivacious complexity of it all, and thrill to the marvel of it once again in yet another form. I imagined a print of it at 8 or 10 feet, and see how something so simple can also convey great power, depending upon its scale.

April 8

I pulled into an empty lot to turn the car around and swung into line with the back wall of a cemetery filled with crazy topiary bushes and trees. But what really called out to me at this late hour of the day, was the enormous pile of stones banked near the wall. There was something so funereal about the pile and the way it was stacked and ordered, that i got out to walk around it and take it all in. The scene became more mysterious as the light faded and the stones emanated a ghostly radiance. I guess it was just right for a cemetery.

April 9

What a riot of color this restaurant was! Earlier in the week I was taken with the barely discernible lavender tones in a green pool, and was questioning color’s way of working in a subtractive or additive way. But here, the mix and bounce and reflection and blending of colors was a whole lesson in primaries and complementary colors, and the wait for our food to arrive was taken up with the beauty of how light transforms wherever we are and what we see.

April 10

With all the various kinds of light this week presented, when it comes to feelings of intimacy there is nothing like candlelight. That old touch of primitive fire, flickering and dancing the shadows on the walls, making moods and mystery where electric light would elaborate the harsh details and leave us looking at the repairs we need to make rather than at the beauty of the moment. The cameras of today do very well in low light situations, and in fact have advanced our ability to see into the dark in ways that film struggled with. I am grateful when the technology of our times adds expressive potential to our ideas.

April 11

APRIL 5, 2015

3 Replies

Vocabulary of Signs

It’s often hard to know what to make of almost anything we see in the world at large. Garry Winogrand, with whom I daily walked the streets of Manhattan, LA, Paris, and elsewhere for a few steady years in the mid 60’s, used to say that when he photographed someone on the street with their mouth wide open it was difficult to know if they were screaming, laughing or yawning, and it was that ambiguity that made it an interesting photographic moment.

Here too, the ridiculous angle and action opens the frame to suggestions of a violent nature, as well as just thoughtless family teasing. These unknowns are part of the photographer’s vocabulary of ‘signs,’ which indicate something of interest is happening right here! But will it yield a photograph? Only the photograph after the fact will tell us if it amounts to more than the sum of its parts.

MARCH 12, 2015

1 Reply

Monuments

Years ago when I was on a Guggenheim Fellowship grant I toured America looking at the way Americans were living while we were in the middle of the Vietnam war. I was also interested in the way we were spending our leisure time, and how the culture was reflected in our monuments and tourist attractions, and I was curious about a lot of other attitudes of that period.

One of the things i noticed was that a lot of our military junk was finding its way into playgrounds, civic spaces, and intersections on highways, to name a few places. Old fighter jets, and missile launchers, armored cars and tanks, the rusting leftovers of the military-industrail complex that Eisenhower warned us against. What I seldom saw was the kind of memorial that The Great Wars of the 20th century produced, those valiant figures helping a fallen comrade, or standing firm against the onslaught, or looking toward the future with some degree of resilience and hope.

When I see these European monuments in small towns all over France I feel the tenderness that those losses addressed. Millions of young men were slaughtered by the incompetence of their war making leaders and the politics of their era. I find it hard to pass these empty plazas and not stop for a moment to read some names, take into account the ages of the dead, be surprised at how many were killed from some of these tiny villages.

On a day when the winter is giving up its bitter edge, human folly still shows its tragic face.

MARCH 9, 2015

2 Replies

State of Play

Sometimes the liveliest things on the street, especially in a small town in Provence where no one ever seems to be around, are the vestiges of inanimate things that suddenly appear. My way of working is to respond to whatever comes up for me out of my passage through time and space. It could be nearly meaningless, ordinary, dumb, or unlikely to be of greater interest later on, it doesn’t matter, it is the only thing that is speaking to me at that given instant, and that is what I have to work with.

Anything that makes me pay attention, even for just a moment, is one more moment of consciousness, and once again a trickle of playful energy occupies my mind. It is this willingness to make something of nothing that primes my senses for whatever may follow that moment. I find that if I do not play when something calls to me then I lose my edge, soI let myself be taken in, and I play. And by doing so my innocence is capable of being prompted by the unexpected when it next shows up.

And we know that as we get older the innocent joy of discovery gets whittled away by all the other responsibilities that life throws at us, which distracts us from that state of play. So a moment of open ended curiosity, and the freedom to see in a care less way, is a gift we must not turn away from.

MARCH 7, 2015

1 Reply

Like This

Before cars and people came down this street, before roads and houses were built, before walls were mounded up for defense or boundaries, the stones themselves felt water rushing past. I never cease to wonder when I stop here, about the marks grooved into the stone, and how many millennia of rising and falling waters have passed since this was part of the sea bottom or shoreline of what is now the Mediterranean Sea.

The courses of stones and the courses of the smoothed ridges blend together in a stony harmony that delights my eye, and I always seem to find a reason to lift my camera and try to make a photograph that describes what it is I see. This image, made at the end of day, when the light was flat and had the faintest lavender cast to it, may (or may not) work, because it doesn’t depend on the glory of sunlight, or the drama of some action, to set off the place from the rather ordinary seeming place that it is. It is just its unmediated self now.

It’s the rocks that first produce the ‘beat’ that means something to me and makes me stop, so I need to reconsider what it is I want to say about them. Fortunately I had time here to look again and again, since I walked this way every few days. It’s a little like solving a math problem in one’s head, and by going over it again and again the meaning may resolve itself.

Once, when I was around 15, I saw Albert Einstein walking the back streets of Princeton, while I was on a day trip there from summer camp, and had slipped away from my group. He was on a back street; tree lined, quiet, nothing to mark it as special from the next one, and as I watched him from a hundred yards away, he stopped and stood for a long time doing nothing, head tilted slightly up, possibly watching the leaves trembling, or listening to the birds. Perhaps he was following a line of reasoning that was out there in the universe of his mind’s embrace. Of course it was impossible to imagine then, as it is now, what anyone else thinks about, but standing still, and taking it all in, like Einstein, is part of the photographic act at certain moments. And certain moments are what photographs are made of.

Like this one.

FEBRUARY 27, 2015

4 Replies

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!

FEBRUARY 16, 2015

2 Replies

Proof of Interest

For many years now I have seen dispossessed chairs hanging out wherever chance has tossed them, like old souls left on their own after a long and faithful service. Like us they have backs and arms and legs and feet and definitely bottoms, some even have a head of sorts. All of which, in some way, may make them so compelling. I have also photographed chairs within more noble or comfortable circumstances; thrones, Cardinal’s chairs, cushy corporate ones, and in nearly every imaginable location.

In fact, during my time working inside Ground Zero, one of the most surprising first sights was the unbelievable numbers of chairs that had been thrown from the buildings and remained intact upon landing! These chairs became the bleachers from which the exhausted rescue and recovery workers watched the amazing daily drama while taking their breaks. Every chair you might conceive of, from the most elegant to the most humble, found its way back to being useful once again.

How did I begin to notice ‘chairs’ as a subject? If I remember correctly it was while working on the light box (remember the light box?) when one day, while I was editing for something else, I noticed some funny chair pictures and tossed them to the top of the box, and then as others appeared I found myself becoming aware that this was a theme that I had not really known I was interested in. But the proof of interest was in the pictures that were appearing. And so I began looking out for them while editing and being more aware of them while out on the street.

I believe that it’s important to be open to the suggestive impulses that emerge, either from the world, or out of the work, for these clues have in them the clearest indication of our natural, instinctive responses, our identity even, and also some sense of the consciousness we may be overlooking when we act in more premeditated ways.

JANUARY 30, 2015

5 Replies

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!

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’!

JANUARY 29, 2015

2 Replies

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.

ONCE MORE AROUND THE SUN

A photograph every day for a year

Tag Archives: street

MAY 1, 2015

APRIL 6 -11, 2015

APRIL 5, 2015

MARCH 12, 2015

MARCH 9, 2015

MARCH 7, 2015

FEBRUARY 27, 2015

FEBRUARY 16, 2015

JANUARY 30, 2015

JANUARY 29, 2015