Buttermilk Sky
Whenever I see a buttermilk sky I am drawn to watching its curdled passage across the heavens. It’s a harbinger of weather systems on the move I’m sure, but of exactly what kind I am not. Still, they make for great skyscapes and play well with almost anything they relate to, like these trees with their frail, wintery branches whose color, somewhere between gold and green, vibrates against the blue.
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.
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’!
Three
Trees
A Square Window
A Reflection
Live Stone Wall
Worn Color On Old Stucco
A Masonry Base
Nearly Dusk
Harmony
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.
Being and Seeing
Living in a new place sends us spinning out into the countryside every chance we can. It’s fun to just get lost and see where we end up, and of course, along the way we see everything from the grand scale of the countryside to small notes of momentary significance. That’s part of the pleasure of being and seeing in a new place.
On the road to St. Remy this wall of of sunny stone holds a procession of London Plane trees, pruned in the manner of this part of France, which is always astonishing to see given how they reach and swirl their limbs toward the sunlight, and they never fail to make me gasp at their powerful forms. As I came to a halt at the light it seemed as if everything there pinged a red note at the same moment, and then we moved on.
While waiting for lunch in a restaurant in St. Remy, I watched the play of light on the wall nearby, the kind of distraction that comes when you are ready to order and the waiter is lingering elsewhere. Moments like this you could call, ‘filler moments’, my eyes wandering over everything looking for some hook to catch my attention, and often the most unexpected things call out to me. In this case the projections from a leaded glass window tumbled over the geometrics of the window frame which itself sat near an elegant old radiator.
When these kinds of collisions happen I always try to make something out of them, try to see in a different way, it’s more like play really as I juggle the elements in the frame to see how long I can stay interested. Sometimes it is just an exercise and leads nowhere, and other times a fresh breeze blows through my mind.
ONCE MORE AROUND THE SUN 