Tag Archives: Tuscany

JULY 24, 2015

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Surprise

We had gone to the seaside for a couple of days of play, and while we were waiting for dinner on the first evening I decided to make a photograph of Maggie. We walked out to a little patch of ground surrounded by pine trees, and while Maggie was standing there a loud CRAACKK sounded, and this huge branch came tumbling down right near where Maggie was standing.

As soon as she recovered from the surprise she began to do her old mime stuff with it, and began rolling it offstage like some huge elephant dung ball. She’s funny that girl.

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JULY 22, 2015

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Penmanship

On the streets of Cortona with students in the workshop, I saw a few of those balletic moments of no great significance, but which keep the eye sharp and the appetite hungry. When I was a kid we were taught penmanship with a real old fashioned pen that was dipped into an inkwell. We had to make slinky-like spirals and other gestural swirls and swishes so that we would develop a ‘good hand’ and be ready at any instant to create beautiful letters.

Like penmanship, the attuned eye, following the rhythm of life on the streets, keeps one sharp and ready for when the moment arrives. These little toe pointings, and head tiltings are nuanced gestures that lead to a more watchful readiness and also to enjoying the rich, unexpected incidents that can happen when you pay attention.

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This image of 2 sisters, one already filled out and worldly, and for a moment taking charge of her younger sibling, filled me with the sense of what sexual development, or the lack of it, may offer in the way of power between people. Who knows what the hidden text of this picture really is? For all I know she was saying, ‘gosh, that’s hot, don’t you have a lighter top?’ But it also could be about the difference between being a teenager and not.

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JULY 21, 2015

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Jewel Box

I was asked to give a talk at the Cortona, On The Move Festival, and then teach a workshop the next day. I arrived at the jewel box of an opera house and was amazed to see this small but grand old theater which was full of students and visitors by the time I was ready to speak.

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Out on the street afterwards I was attracted to this couple, mainly the electric blue of her dress and the great pair of legs, and there was certainly a charge they both gave off.

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Later in the day, after walking around the whole town for hours, I made my way out to the piazza which offered a grand view of the valley, and there I saw the couple again, she wedged into him so close that it justified my response in the morning. It’s always a delicate situation to get close to people who are in an intimate and private moment. It requires a kind of determined boldness, but also delicate footwork, and body feints and deceptions, something I have learned how to do by being on the streets for so many years. It’s exciting too, to see just how close I can come and still not be considered breeching the space they need for their own sense of freedom.

Whenever I see this kind of intimacy in public, the way she has fit herself into him and the way it looks! I find it tells me, or at least suggests to me, something of their, hidden from the public life, and that kind of eros, it projects makes me pay close attention.

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Later I met up with the whole staff of the festival for dinner. We were twice as many as in this frame, but at some point I looked at that Renoir poster on the wall and felt that life continues as always and only the costumes change. Youth and energy, yearnings and life’s mysteries, spin us all through time so one day we can remember these moments of joy and freedom.

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Leaving the restaurant I saw this old woman out in the night, and immediately felt the sense of time as so fleeting; that from youth and love and wonder, we come to age, and it seems but a blink.

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JULY 13,14,15,16,17, 2015

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Vienna Bound

I’m leaving tomorrow for Vienna for the rest of this week to open my Retrospective exhibition at Kunst Haus Vienna. I’m fully scheduled for talks, interviews, tours, openings, and general PR and Press. I thought I should put up a few days worth of the blog so that I wouldn’t fall behind.

07-13  The Director of Galleria San Fedele in Milan had come down to the farm to discuss an exhibition that would be centered on the spiritual qualities in my work. San Fedele is a Jesuit organization. It was a lot of fun discussing it with him as he was a knowledgeable man and had a great eye for the spiritual quality of my imagery. He selected about 50 photographs and I knew he would find the right balance – and he did. He made a remarkable show from his point of view. It was a cut I would never have considered making with my work. It pays to let other people in – at times – to take a fresh look at what one knows so well.

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07-14  Late in the day, Gianni, Luana and Maggie and I hiked over the nearby hills, and as always we lost ourselves in conversation and time. Walking this land is a privilege that I continually feel grateful for. The curves and rolling roads, the colors and textures, the ever surprising, yet now familiar places, always fill me up with the sense of spaciousness.

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07-15  Portraits of Maggie are becoming a larger part of this summer’s work. When she is out in the garden and lost in her own thoughts and tasks, I see her looking like a big kid at play.

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07-16  We went to Bologna to have a look at Morandi’s studio in preparation for a future project I would like to do there. He was known for keeping hundreds of his objects stuffed into corners of the studio, lined up under his tables and easel, piled on shelves, and gathering the dust of the 60 years since he died. (To give you an idea of how long some projects take it was only a month ago, now, in 2015, that I was able to have 2 full days alone in his studio, and they were awe filled days. This is his day bed in the tiny studio where he made all of his paintings.

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07-17   Maggie on a chilly afternoon in July.

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JULY 11, 2015

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Seeds and Sunshine

Silvia, the farmer on whose property we live, has been coming by with whatever is in season in her orta ever since we started living here. On that day in this photograph she brought zucchini and melanzana, and as I often do I make a portrait of her and the gift, which seems an appropriate way of thanking her while keeping a record of what a farmer’s wife can look like in the 21st century. Silvia is gentle and sweet, yet strong enough to handle big animals, carry heavy equipment, and bear up under the stresses of gardening, raising  sheep, cows, pigs, chickens, dogs, and children, and weathering all the unexpected events that nature hurls at farmers everywhere.

Those zucchini wound up in this omelet about 30 minutes later. So it is in life on the farm; garden to table in no time, with informal still lives and portraits as memories. Then, when the evening cooled and the call to walk in it came, we took to the road that is always suggestive of adventure even when it is just along our familiar old road heading into town. It never ceases to please us and tell us exactly what time of the season it is.

On this date the Queen Anne’s Lace is lacily trimming the borders of the roadsides. In some way these offhand photographic notes on the seasons show me the constancy of time, the year after year perfection of seeds and sunshine, which results in a measurable and quantifiable experience of time’s passing.

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JULY 9, 2015

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Extravagance

Whenever I see architecture of extravagance; cathedrals, palaces, monuments, etc., particularly from 4 or 500 years ago, I give myself over to the experience of wonder that they produce in me. I love the birthday cake-like fantasía that architects in those days offered their wealthy clients, and that those clients, often the Church, would accept that kind over-the-top decoration, probably as a way to bring the paying multitudes in, grandeur being a seductive call or advertisement for the pageants produced therein.

Looked at today these places still hold up their end of the bargain, as one can see by the tourists regularly visiting these sites. For me though, it’s part of a continuing record I keep of the craziness of a past time, and I wonder what of our structures today might still be here 500 years from now.

We went to Lucca to hear a Leonard Cohen concert and the day started off sunny and bright, then dark and stormy, then back to sunny again, and on and off for most to the day. I always like being out in the weather, watching the way it clears the streets as everyone runs for cover. Sometimes it produces a photograph or two.

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JULY 8, 2015

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Tempus Fugit

Time is measured in many ways; seconds, minutes, hours, days, seasons, years.  There is camera time, sports time, heartbeat time, music tempo, it goes on and on. But in our new life in Tuscany we can see time’s progress through the accumulated, incremental changes that have taken place in the garden that Maggie has made on the stoney and sterile soil.

This picture, made 2 years ago while I was working on the photograph a day project, shows the granola-like rocky surface of the area, in which Maggie used pots of plantings to simulate a garden feeling in what was just a summer rental place to us then.

In the two images below you can see what time; garden time, growing time, pondering what will grow here time, looks like in real time. The photographs themselves are merely records, the original one made on a day when I was caught up in other things and probably made the photograph just to say I made something that day, and yet now, 2 years later, the ‘record’ is, for us anyway, invaluable as a way of seeing where the passage of time, and all our considerations, have brought us.

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JULY 7, 2015

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4th Dimension

Inside a local hardware store in the town of San Quirico d’Orcia I felt as if I was looking into the mind of the proprietor, an 80 year old woman, who has been in this shop for more than 50 years.

There was no room to walk more than 5 feet into the space, and then ask a question such as, ‘….do you have bar-b-cue skewers?’ or any other ordinary hardware store request;  you got 3 centimeter nails? measuring cups? freezer packs? and to my surprise she would take a stick and squeeze through some slot behind the counter and enter the 4th dimension, and come back with what I asked for!

It seemed worthy of making a photograph if only to remember what an incredible memory she must have.

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JULY 5, 2015

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Patterns and Standards

There was a run of days in the high 90’s that kept us indoors during the middle of the day. The old hay barn we live in was built with thick stone walls which kept the interior cool despite the blazing Tuscan sun. By late afternoon we’d saunter outside to sit under the dappled light of the Leccio tree, the only place where something like cool air could be found.

We had two, sling-like, canvas deck chairs, called sdraio which we slung ourselves into, and dazed from the heat stared off into space. Above me the tree became a Japanese screen with infinite brush strokes of black and green which shivered in the slightest breeze or eddy of heat rising from the baked and stony earth. On many of those late afternoons I daydreamed there, and often saw through the breaks in the tree, small celestial comments floating by, like the way atmosphere lends a pearly, pinkish weight to summer clouds.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed something like this and made a photograph of it (but then my inner voice says, ‘oh, Joel, but you have, and in many different ways’) but since this project began I have many times considered things that I might have let let slip by under other circumstances. It is part of the pleasure of this kind of daily shooting discipline, that modest, often overlooked moments come into play in this way. It’s good to shake up our patterns and the standards which we hold so dear.

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