ku # 481 ~ the big 6 - 0

Rain swollen West Branch • click to embiggenStarting tomorrow, I, and most of those who are nearest and dearest to me, will be leaving for a week long sojourn on a small island on 6th Lake in the central Adirondacks where we will celebrate my birthday (which is actually today).

6th Lake is part of the Fulton Chain of Lakes (1st Lake - 8th Lake). Lakes 1st thru 4th are very developed with summer cottages. 5th thru 8th are primarily wilderness in character so things should be quiet and peaceful.

This week is especially meaningful to me because just a very short canoe paddle down
The Arrowhead • click to embiggenthe chain to 4th Lake and the tiny village of Inlet takes me to the place where my life-long Adirondack love affair began. It was here that I, my 2 brothers and my parents spent considerable time every summer at the now long-gone Arrowhead Hotel on the shore of 4th Lake.

So that explains why I won't be posting for the next week. I will be doing a lot of picturing and expect to return with pictures of a part of the Adirondacks that you haven't seen before.

In the interim, is there anyone out there who would like to quest-host The Landscapist for a week? I'm serious about this - anyone want the keys to the kingdom and an opportunity to speak your piece to the world?

I need to know asap so I can set it up.

urban ku # 80 ~ hobbit light

A very odd and eerie light • click to emmbiggenLast evening as the wife and I were discussing some family matters, my eye was caught by a small sliver of sky that was peeking through a bush outside of a window on the side of our house. What little I could see looked incredibly odd.

I jumped to my feet, headed to the front door and I was immediately struck by the sensation that I was looking through a tinted window. Even though I have only experienced it 3 or 4 times in my life, I knew right way as I emerged from the house that it was 'hobbit light'. I started yelling for anyone to hear, "Get out here, get out here. It's hobbit light."

As the wife, one of the college kids and I wandered about in a state of wonder, neighbors began to emerge from their houses as well. They too had been drawn by/to the light. None could recall ever having experienced it before - the entire landscape was bathed/saturated in a deep, soft, other-worldly reddish glow.

The entirely odd and disconcerting thing was that there was absolutely no visible sunset. The western sky was covered entirely (north to south) by bank of low dark grey rain clouds. The cloud bank also extended, west to east, from the horizon to cover about 1/2 of the sky. Well above this bank of dark clouds were more 'regular' clouds with a deep blue sky poking through. These clouds were bathed in the a soft and subtle warm light from the sunset (the sun must have been below the horizon) and it was this light that was reflected on the landscape.

I don't know if this phenomenom has a 'real' name. I call it 'hobbit light' because the first time I experienced it (many, many years ago), I was deep in the thrawl of one of Tolkien's books and there was a particular passage that involved a vividly described eerie light upon the land. So, it was dubbed 'hobbit light'.

PS - on a techincal note, some might suspect that I used the H/S slider on this picture and, in fact, I did. However, contrary to what you might think, I used it to desaturate the color.

Update on Thursday, July 12, 2007 at 10:27PM by gravitas et nugalis

Featured Comment: Timothy Kingston wrote; ... I've seen, what I'm quite sure you are talking about a few times ... Usually it occurs in the evening ,usually after or sometimes just before a thunderstorm. Also, oftem there is no wind, I mean even the trembling aspen are totally still ...

My response: Timothy - in my experience, always after a thunderstorm and, yes. you're absolutely right - as still and silent as death.

ku # 480 ~ what's new pussycat?

Rain, rain, rain, and more rain • click to embiggenRobert Hughes, when writng about how to evaluate Art, suggests that one standard is 'the degree to which it gives us a fresh intimation of Form.' (a reminder, Form is the coherence and structure underlying life).

Basically, what he is saying is that cliche (as he puts it - 'the ten thousandth camera-club imitation of a picture by Ansel Adams') just doesn't cut it. In his essay Making Art New, Hughes writes about the struggle/challenge Artists face when trying to create 'fresh' Art. In the end he quotes T.S. Eliot -

... Each venture
is a new beginning ...
... what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been
discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one
cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again ...

urban ku # 79 ~ into the sunset

A nearby view • click to embiggenEvery once in a while, an individual seizes a moment in time and bends it to his will. In recent times, Einstein did it, Dylan did it, and Ghandi did it. They, amongst others, took what came before and irrevocably changed it forever.

Beyond the shadow of a doubt, the single reason that we have the discussions we do here on The Landscapist is because of one visionary individual who took what came before and irrevocably changed it forever - 'it' being photography. That one individual, John Szarkowski, single-handedly grabbed the medium by the throat and elevated it to the status of Art. Period. End of discussion.

I never met the man or heard him speak but his shadow has followed me like a ghost throughout my photography life. While he never influenced me directly, the pictures of those he 'ordained' into the ecclesiastical hierarchy of photography certainly opened my eyes to new possibilities. So I was deeply saddened to learn of his death on July 9 at the age of 81.

An obituary can be found here.

I won't go into all his accomplishments as I am certain that much will be written in the coming days but I will leave you with this from his introduction to “The Work of Atget,” published in conjunction with a series of exhibitions at MoMA from 1981 to 1985 -

'One might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing, It must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others ... The talented practitioner of the new discipline would perform with a special grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we would be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from a pattern created by the pointer.'

ku # 479 ~ aesthetics

Rain and fallen birch on the forest floor • click to embiggenAesthetics - the dictionary says; 1. the branch of philosophy dealing with such notions as the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the comic, etc., as applicable to the fine arts, with a view to establishing the meaning and validity of critical judgments concerning works of art, and the principles underlying or justifying such judgments. and, 2. the study of the mind and emotions in relation to the sense of beauty.

Or, to simplify, a manner of thinking and making judgements about the concept of beauty.

In his easay, Beauty in Photography, Robert Adams suggests that Beauty is the beauty of Form, '... the coherence and structure underlying life ... [that] helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning ...'

Adams goes on to opine that if the goal of Art is Beauty (and he believes it is), then 'how do we judge Art?' His answer is that it should be judged '... by whether it reveals to us important Form that we ourselves have experienced but to which we have not paid adequate attention. Successful Art rediscovers Beauty for us ...'

Adams also believes that 'succesful' Art must be measured by '... the apparent ease of its execution. An artwork should not appear to have been hard work.'- a notion that he calls 'grace' in photography. As a counterpoint to his notion of grace in photography, Adams suggests that ... we need only to examine a copy of a mass circulation photography magazine (ed. - or a online nature photo forum). Most of the pictures suggest embarassing strain: odd angles, extreme lenses and eccentric darkroom techniques reveal a struggle to substitute shock and technology for sight.'

He goes on to point out that the work of most photographers of importance is 'usually marked by an economy of means, an apparently everyday sort of relationship with their subject.' Then, IMO, Adams lowers the boom - '... only pictures that look as if they had been easily made can convincingly suggest that Beauty is commonplace.'

As the poet Theodore Roethke wrote. 'I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.'

So, that is why, amongst other things, simple seeing, an everyday sort of relationship with subject, rediscoverying Beauty in that which has not been paid adequate attention are at the core of my asethetic beliefs.

urban ku # 78 ~ summer colors

Summer colors • click to embiggenSeems like it has rained everyday for the past week. Maybe that's because it has rained everyday for the past week.

The upside to that is that everything is growing like crazy. It is as lush a summer as I can remember. And the rain saturates everything including the colors of summer in my backyard - green, violet, orange and yellow.

civilized ku # 43 ~ dead end thinking

Sidewalk and shrubs • click to embiggenIt has been opined elsewhere that ... photography is about creating meaning from one fleeting instance, where all events preceding and following it are irrelevant ...

IMO, this fuzzy-headed statement is a rather succinct definition, probably an inadvertent one, of pictures which are created for 'entertainment' - i.e., as decorative art. Pictures which have no depth of meaning whatsoever other than what a fast and furious glance might reveal.

While photography certainly has a unique relationship with 'time' which differs radically from all the other visual arts, one which rips and isolates a single moment from the stream of time as we know it, to say that that one moment is all that matters is rather ridiculous. Why? Because, with a kind of cause-and-effect manner of thinking, much of the meaning and depth of a picture comes from its time-fragmented relationship to what has come before and what might follow its "frozen" moment and how all of that relates to what it means to be human.

This characteristic of pictures as Art (as opposed to decoration) works together with photography's other characteristic of framing (which rips and isolates a single fragment of space from the physical universe as we know it) to weave a spell of an implied/suggested relationship to time and space. In most cases, it is precisely what came before and what might come after the 'decisive' moment that a skilled photographer is trying to help us 'see'.

This is exactly what happens for those with an imagination and curiousity when they view a picture which is created to engage rather than deaden a fuller range of the senses and the mind.

Think about it.

Update on Monday, July 9, 2007 at 10:15AM by gravitas et nugalis

Featured Comment: Paul Maxim wrote; ... I would suggest that even the most mindlessly snapped image does have some context (although admittedly the "snapper" is probably totally unaware of it) ... Context. My point, I guess, is that it's there even when people aren't looking for it, or more importantly, even when they aren't trying to express it.'

My response: Paul, IMO, it is ever thus with photography because of one of its other characteristics - the one that distinguishes it from the other visual arts - its relationship to the referent, the thing which is pictured. With the exception of pure abstractions, every photograph has a context with time, space, culture, etc. This is true whether the maker of the picture, as you point out, is aware of it or not.

urban ku # 77 ~ two chairs

Two chairs on the 4th of July • click to embiggenHey, Joe, this one's for you.

On urban ku # 76 Paul Maxim wrote: "... On a lighter note, I loved your "left brain wall" comment in the previous discussion. I've been reading Adam's book for that very reason - trying to figure out what makes people take (or make) photographs. If photography is a form of visual expression, then those who make images must be trying to "say something", right?"

Right. Although, most rarely get by saying "wow" and "ain't this pretty" over and over again.

Consider this from an interview with photographer Robert Holmgrem (thanks to Joe Reifer) - We struggle to explain what what we see. Photographers observe what other photographers do and we see that serious work tends to get high-minded analysis that seems to suggest events outside of the frame. Sometimes this is expressed as social criticism, psychoanalysis or revisiting some historical period of the medium with new eyes. It gets to the point where you begin wondering if any value exists without the aid of art critics. I'm a fan of Garry Winogrand's pictures, but I have no concern for what others think they mean, nor do I believe did he. Winogrand famously said that he took pictures "to see how things would look as photographs". It was a model of plain spoken. The pictures did the speaking and still we struggle to explain.

PS - a word of advice from Holmgrem - "Never throw out your mistakes. I'm surprised to find out how good I used to be before I got better.

Update on Thursday, July 5, 2007 at 11:40AM by gravitas et nugalis

Featured Comments: Bill Gotz wrote (in part): "... Or for an example of how a left brainer can suck (I mean destroy) most of the meaning out of an image leaving only some critic speak words, see the chapter "How Do We Read a Photograph? in Graham Clarke's book The Photograph.

It is an interesting book, but he does fail to understand the visual language of design and the deeper meanings available to the connections available to right brain thinking. A few paragraphs of words just can't come close to the degree of meaning we can get in a few moments with our right brain and non-verbal understandings. (Or maybe a left brainer has no interest in the visual language and rejects it for only that which can be named.) ..."