ku # 465

Yesterday's ice jam in the Forks is gone, so here's yesterday's intended topic - emerging.

It's the time of year when things start to emerge from under their wintery blanket and how refreshing it is, after being layered up for winter cold, to be in the woods, lightly dressed and smelling the earth again. Melt-out is a very short 'mini-season' with its own special delights, especilly considering that mud-season comes fast on its heels.

That said, it appears that we will have 2 melt-outs this year. Tonight's forecast is for a significant winter storm - up to 18 inches in some areas.
Emerging Erratic • click on photo to embiggen itI love snow, but I'm ready for Spring. And you know Spring is in the air when you step outside with 30-month-old Hugo (in his pjs), remark how warm it is and, without missing a beat, he responds with, "Can we play golf now?"

But, thankfully, the storm will be over sometime on Saturday. On Sunday Aaron and I drive to NYC to; 1) see the Jeff Wall exhibit at MOMA, and, 2) see the Rangers play the Pittsburgh (thankfully that's finally settled) Pens at MSG, where we will be hosted by ESPN in their 'corporate box' (complete with all the catered goodies).

ku # 464/civilized ku # 13

Diningroom window view • click on photo to embiggen it
Spring-like melt on day 1 of Daylight Saving Time • click on photo to embiggen it

Recently, I have become enamored of this window in our diningroom. For whatever reason, it seemd to offer more than a window on the world. As a matter of fact, it really isn't so much a 'window on the world' as it is a window on the bush-world outside of the diningroom.

The gnarly twisted cedar 'bush' that lives next to the house presses right up against the window and creates a kind of 'filter' through which light trickles and streams in broken shafts and pin-pricks. It also hosts rain droplets, ice and snow, as well as a few birds now and again. I swear that, as a weather indicator, it's more dependable and whole lot more enjoyable than the thermometer we have outside the kitchen window.

ku # 27

Fresh fallen snow and forest light • click on photo to embiggen itJust thought I'd throw in a non-urban ku just in case you thought I had given up that ghost.

You can probably tell by the number that this is a mouldy-oldy, but it is one of my favorites. For a variety of reasons, I just haven't gotten into the wild for a bit so my eye has been more attuned to the 'urban' than the 'natural'.

ku # 463

Is it still possible that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar? Was it ever possible?

ku # 462 - propaganda and death threats

Cracked ice on the Au Sable • click on photo to embiggen it"Culture seems increasingly colonized by an advertiser's version of a retouched world ... [p]hotography now looks less like a copy or trace than a total fabrication, or a "reality effect" that purveys a fictive world ... advertising and cognate publicity forms have assumed the central role ... these profoundly ideological images demand serious attention ... attention to the fictive constitution of photographs ... becasue the common-sense conception tends to see only the objects and people depicted in the image and overlooks both the interventions of the photographer and the specific character of the apparatus ... [t]he resulting conflation of photographs with the pro-filmic event leaves the viewer open to propaganda of all kinds." - Steve Edwards ~ Photography: A Very Short Introduction

So, this is the core of my distain for pretty landscape photographs - they are propaganda of the most insidious kind. Insidious because the bulk of the Tom, Dick and Harriets out there do not pay attention to the "interventions of the photographer and the specific character of the apparatus". Indeed, they see only the (fictive) places, the "idealized forms" of the photographer's propaganda. They seek a respite from modern times in these "advertiser's versions" of retouched Gardens of Edens.

These photographs deny and obfuscate the reality that virtually every square inch of the natural world is a repository for the deadly detritus cast off by the culture of consumption. Every pro-filmic Adirondack moment that I picture is polluted by "invisible" air-born particulates which eminate from my neighbors to the west. The entire Adirondack biosphere is severely impacted by it.

Ever wonder why I choose to frame my ku with a fictive black film-edge border? One reason is to create a "requiem-esque" conotation - it's part of my apparatus - because, although I consider most of my referents to be beautiful, I also want to temper that beauty with the notion that the referents are living with a death threat.

ku # 461 - Ansel Adams: A Renaissance Relic

-10F on the Saranac River #3 • click on photo to embiggen itI have received my copy of Photography: A Very Short Introduction by Steve Edwards (Oxford University Press). Some might not consider a 160 page book (full of words and very few photographs) to be a "very short" introduction, but, 28 pages into it, I'm going to issue a MUST READ alert. If you're "serious" about photography, get it, read it.

One interesting tidbit that has already captured my interest is this passage; "The art-photographer Ansel Adams criticized what is probably the most famous documentary project, the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration, which produced 270,000 photographs of American society between 1935 and 1943. Adams claimed that those working for the FSA (including, Arthur Rosthstein, Dorthea Lange, and Walker Evans) were 'not photographers' but 'a bunch of sociologists with cameras'."

Now I know that Adams came around, much later in life, to appreciate some of the photography of the so-called New Togographic photographers, but this statement by Adams puts him ever so firmly in the camp of modern Romanticist/Sentimentalist landscape photographers. As I have mentioned before, I appreciate Adams' photography within the cultural and photographic paradigms during which it was created. His Zone System was truly revolutionary and the prints which he created with it are things of undeniable idealized beauty, but...

IMO, the Zone System, was a pictorialist technique which, in its own way, was little different from the early pictorialist techniques that the f64 Group (of which he was a card-carrying member) distained and "revolted" against. It was his way of subjectizing his referent, consciously and deliberately arting it up, if you will. As Steve Edwards makes clear, as far back as the 15th century, Renaissance artists were taking great pains to "infuse their work with the explicit signs of mental effort ... the creation of idealized figures that were not copies of imperfect nature ...."

Adams was certainly mining/honoring a time-honored tradition of the art world - the distain for "mere" objective (a problematic word) documentation - the artisanal, and the embrace of broad, generalized and idealized forms = Art. To put it another way, Edwards opined; "Art was characterized by its distance from the contingent features of the actual world and in this way signified the presence of an active intelligence." (arting it up).

Which is yet another way of saying, detail (literally) = documentation/copying (lowly artsanal trade/work), whereas, mental labor employed in creating "broad and general effects and idealized forms" = art (noble and of the highest pretensions).

BTW, all of these distinctions of what-is/is-not-art were codified by academia as early as 1648 with the establishment of tha Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris, followed by the Royal Academy in London in 1768. Nice to know that some things never change.

In any event, back to Adams. I like Adams' photography much like I like my collection of bake-o-lite radios - very interesting relics from a bygone era, which have little or no relevence (other than historic precedent) to what's happening now. As objects, I think both possess incredible and timeless beauty.

The real pity is that, for the masses, broadcast music devices (and even the notion of "broadcast") have undergone tremendous changes while photography, for the masses and the "serious" amateur, has essentially remained rooted in a paradigm that is centuries old - the need to create photographs of idealized forms and infuse them with explicit signs of mental/technical effort.

Although, it's interesting to note that much of academia, while elevating the "signs of mental effort" almost to fetishistic proportions, has nevertheless rejected traditional notions of "idealized forms".

ku # 460 ~ mindset

-10F on the Saranac River # 2 • click on photo to embiggen itTwo recent discussions, one over at Joe Reifer - Words and one at Art & Perception, got me to thinking about mindsets photography-wise.

In the A&P thread, Steve Durbin remarked that "There are different kinds of photography, and this one actually feels completely different to me from most of my other work. I’m in a different frame of mind doing it, I’m looking for different things, and I do very different things in the later processing of the image."

Over at JR-W, JR wrote that John Pfahl is one of his favorite photographers. Pfahl is one of my favs also and both JR and I are especially enamored of his Altered Landscapes - on the linked photo, Blue Right-angle, what appear to be markings on the photograph are, in fact, pieces of carefully placed tape within the scene.

In any event, here's the connection between A&P and JR-W/Pfahl. One wintery night in 1981, I was just hanging out in my loft when there was a knock on the door and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a friend (professor of design at RIT's School for American Craftsmen) with John Pfahl in tow. She wanted Pfahl to see my then work-in-progress project of urban landscapes photographed with 8×10 color neg and contact printed. So I obliged.

Across the hall we went to my studio and out came my box of prints. Pfahl, I am quite pleased to say, was interested and intrigued. We had a nice chat. What I found interesting about the whole thing though, was how befuddled Pfahl seemed to be by being in my commercial photo studio (surrounded by prints my commercial work - glam fashion babes in RayBans, food stylized to a fare-thee-well, Ithaca shotguns in hunter-wetdream dioramas, etc.) and, at the same time, viewing Art which was created by the commercial photographer.

There was definitely a disconnect for Pfahl - more than once, while viewing my urban landscape photos, he said, "...but you're a commercial photographer...". Now, I took this as a compliment of sorts. Obviously, he thought well of my Art. I assume that he also thought well of my commercial work. He just couldn't seem to fathom that both were the products of the same person.

Apparently, John didn't see a future for himself as a commercial photographer because...he is a Fine Art photographer. Addressing Steve Durbin's point about the "different frame of mind" it takes to mine "different kinds of photography", Pfahl seemed to hold with the notion of one mind, one frame of.

That seems distinctly odd to me, but then, unlike John Pfahl, I am not part of photography academia.

How many "frames of" do you have?

ku # 457/58 ~ -10F views

2 views of -10F • click on photo to embiggen itOne -10F view along the Saranac River, one -10F view of the summit (4867 ft.) of Whiteface (the Lake Placid side). The good news is that heavy snowfall is predicted for a 24-36 hour period starting arounnd midnight tonight.