decay # 15 redux ~ I never got a yacht

Cantaloupe with sunlight • click to embiggenYesterday, after waiting for almost an hour at the scene of what is now known as the lunch break incident for the State Police to show up and make an accident report, I walked home to eat my lunch.

In the kitchen, I found the subject of that morning's decay picturing right where I left it but it was now bathed in some streaks of direct sunlight. I liked what I saw so I pictured it again. What I like about the afternoon redux is that the light itself, independent of the quality of the light, becomes a compositional element. I also like, by the manner in which I divided the picture along a diagonal line, that a jittery unease is created by the competing areas of soft mellow tones and colors and that of the contrast-y tones and more vibrant colors.

I mention this stuff because this manner of seeing and picturing stands in stark contrast to that of my early commercial still life heyday during which the operative paradigm was a very soft single light source (no "fill" lights allowed) applied with a strong directional angle.
The Hawken, one of my "Marcos" • click to embiggenA technique that yielded a kind of "soft" high contrast with deep but detailed shadows and delicate detailed highlights - a very "romantic" style of light that mimiced that of early Flemish still life painters.

In the era before the digital darkroom, the challenge of this technique was to achieve this look using inherently contrast-y Ektachrome transparency film which had, and still does, in difficult contrast situations, a tendency to blow out highlights and block up shadows. This was difficult in the extreme to achieve in a manner that enabled a printer (printing press printer) to put that range of tone and detail on the printed page.

The acknowledged master of the technique at that time and the photog in whose photo-technique image I fashioned myself was Phil Marco. A measure of his success in the 70s (he still at it today) was his 49 ft. yacht which was aptly named "Ektachrome". Eventually, I was both pleased and delighted to have my still life work used interchangeably with his by select group of clients.

However, I never got a yacht. I've had to settle for 4 canoes.

Update on Friday, April 4, 2008 at 07:58AM by gravitas et nugalis

Featured Comment: Mary Dennis wrote: "Gee, I hope you have a compost pile. But if you did, we probably would have seen it photographed by now."

My response: The wife is quite certain that I am building a compost pile in the kitchen.

decay # 15 ~ what to do?

<Cantaloupe & scallions • click to embiggenHere's a question for you all - has anyone recently gone out on a limb, photography-wise? By that I mean, has anyone tried something new lately? You know, tried to get outside of your personal "box"?

I am fairly certain that most of you were/are drawn to The Landscapist because its focus has been (primarily) on landscape photography of one sort or another. So, my assumption is that most of you practice one form or another of landscape photography. That's not too much of a stretch, right? So, that said, has anyone tried their shutter finger with, say, still life or portrait photography, for instance? Or, maybe more to the point, have you ever felt the need or even the slightest inclination to try something "new".

I'm curious because I am considering something "new", which is actually something old mixed with something new - a return to film - most likely 120 color negative film, square format, of course. Film is the "old", digital darkroom is the "new". This possibility is on my radar as a result of my recent 8×10 color negative scanning. The unsurpassed dynamic range and smooth tonality of color negative is singing its siren song loud and clear. Or, should I say, soft and sensuous.

The trouble I am having with this is with the fact that I am, by no means, done with my Adirondack ku which is 100% digital capture. I don't dare start doing ku with color negative - the difference in picture characteristics would be far too great to mix together in a single body of work. Nope, I can't go there.

I am also fairly certain that I have neither the time nor the energy to strike out on something completely new and different. At least, not until ku appears to have an end in sight. There is the possibility of swithching from digital to film with my decay series. I still still have all of the decayed stuff hanging around and I could recreate my work to date without too much effort.

But, I just don't know how to scratch this new itch without over extending myself, photograph-wise. Maybe I should just figure out how I am going to do it, camera-wise and then just see what develops.

PS my thoughts, camera-wise, are to use my 120 6×7 roll film holder with one of my 4×5 cameras and my 90mm Super Angulon lens in order to have the convenience of roll film and the deliberative picturing process of a view camera.

decay # 14 ~ that was then, this is now

Spring is in the air • clcik to embiggenOf late, it seems that every time I turn on the tv, there's a documentary about photography and/or a photographer. Last night it was an Ansel Adams retrospective / love fest on PBS. The film has been around for a while but I had never managed to catch it.

Adams has often been referred to as Saint Ansel and this film adds another level of canonization to that Adams, the photographer, moniker. On the other hand, it puts a very human face on Adams, the person, by dealing pretty openly and honestly with his affair with a lovely young assistant, his near manic working style, and his party-boy drinking. I knew the man like to tip a few but I had never heard put the way it was in this film - he worked everyday of his life ... he never took a day off ... except when he was recovering from a hangover ... which was frequent enough.

I didn't learn very much new about Adams from this film but what I did learn was rather interesting. It didn't have anything to do with his pictures, per se, but rather his epiphany about life and Art as expressed by him in a letter to his closest friend, Cedric Wright:

Dear Cedric,

A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me ....

For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.

Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things....

Friendship is another form of love -- more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptances of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.

Art is both love and friendship and understanding: the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things. It is more than kindness, which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is a recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these.

Ansel

Much of what Adams expressed, re: 'what art (photography division) should be' - a recreation on another plane of the realities of the world, ... realities of earth and men, and of all the interrelations of these in order to turn out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit, in essence, gibes with my a lot of my feelings on the subject.

That said, why do I think that Adams' pictures - and the pictures of those who continue to toil in the garden of Adams anachronisms - are, in today's world, very out of place?

Adams' view of the world during that time in which he was most productive in achieving his desire to "put his experience of a place" into his pictures (instead of making geographic records of it) was typical of the prevailing paradigm of the "American Century". America had conquered its wilderness frontiers. The industrial revolution was spreading its wings and its 'wealth'. We had won a world war and, despite the lingering effects of the Great Depression, America was on the move to what appeared to be a future of limitless possibilities - the future's so bright, I gotta wear shades.

And Adams' pictures reflected that paradigm with their representation of America - or to be most accurate, his preferred piece of it - as a place of awe inspiring majesty and grandeur, truly and verily, America the Beautiful. A place of virgin and seemingly endless frontiers. And, ironically enough, he accomplished this visual slight of hand by ignoring his feelings about 'the recreation on another plane ... the tragic realities of earth and man' and concentrating on only the 'wonder-filled' realities of earth and man.

I think John Szarkowski, an avowed Adams fan, said it best when he opined that Adams' pictures were the ultimate statement in a genre that had reached the end of the line. The American paradigm that Adams and his photography subscribed to no longer exists. The pristine (so called at the time, even though we were, even then, dumping all over it) and limitless American frontier - geographic and cultural - no longer exists.

There are many new 'realities in the world', especially in the natural world that Adams frequented in his photographic quest. In light of those 'new realities', photography and photographers have moved on to newer 'recreations on another plane of the realities of the world'.

Would I, if I could, have an Adams original hanging on my wall? In a heart beat - his prints are not only historically significant - both culturally and to the medium itself, but they are also, in and of themselves, things of exquisite beauty. However, my appreciation of them would be a melancholy affair dominated by feelings and realizations about what America the Beautiful has lost.

Update on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 at 10:28AM by gravitas et nugalis

Featured Comment: James wrote: "At least twice a year, sometimes more, I travel to Las Vegas for work. Let me be blunt here...Vegas disgusts me. It is, in my opinion, the ultimate example of, to quote Mark, "dumping all over" America and squandering our resources. In August of '06 I stepped off my plane and was met by a glowing ad for "America", an Adams exhibit at the Bellagio. After my first day of work, I walked the length of the strip in 105 degree heat, a pilgramage of sorts, to see for the first time in my life not just one, but over fifty of Adams' original prints.

Set against the backdrop of one of the most extreme examples of indulgence and disgregard for the environment, I was left with a feeling best described as sadness for what has been lost. To steal from Mark's post, it was "a meloncholy affair" at best. Walking back to my room, past fake grass carpets and concrete cliffs in front of the Wynn and tourists taking gondola rides on a fake Riviera in front of the Venetian, it was one lame mirage after another in an America that looked nothing like the exhibit of the same name. I didn't feel better, but worse."

my response: yup.

decay # 13

Mice 'n beans • Click to embiggenHere's a quick follow up to last Friday's post, Decay # 12. The wife requested that I dispose of this specimen on an expedited basis.

Apparently, dried beans with mice turds has crossed over a line.

On the other hand, I find it interesting that the beans had been sitting around for quite awhile without any mouse interference but, right after one of their brethren died in opened bag of potato chips, they must have decided to seek out less salty fare.

In any event, the bowl will be scraped and loaded into the dishwasher this evening. All good things must come to an end.

decay # 12

Beans • click to embiggen...it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world ... Here's looking at you kid.

OK. Fine. I'll stop with the Rick's Café Americain quotes.

decay # 11 ~ truly or falsely

More decay • click to embiggen"'A mere transcript of nature' is one of the stock phrases of the art critic, and many artists of a certain school. The precise meaning attached to it puzzles us; were it not always used as a term of reproach, we should believe it the highest praise that could be bestowed upon a picture. What adds to our perplexity is that the phrase is generally applied by the critic to work which has nothing in common with nature about it: and is used by artists who themselves have never in their lives painted a picture with the simplest values correct, as though transcribing nature to canvas were a stage in the painter's development through which they had passed, and which was now beneath them. The critic must have but a very superficial acquaintance with nature who applies this term, as it is frequently done to work in which all the subtleties of nature are wanting. we have heard of pictures in which no two tones have been in right relationship to one another, in which noisy detail has been mistaken for finish, and the mingling of decision and indecision in fine opposition - the mysterious lost and found, the chief charm of nature - has been utterly unfelt, described as 'transcripts of nature'. Those artists who use the phrase, adopt it as a convenient barricade behind which they may defend their own incompetence." ~ T. F.Goodall

All photographers would do well to lay these remarks to heart. Instead of it being an easy thing to paint "a mere transcript of nature", we shall show it to be utterly impossible. No man can do this by painting or photography, he can only give a translation or impression, as Leonardo da Vinci said long ago; But he can give this impression truly or falsely. ~ from P.H, Emerson's Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art

Update on Friday, February 22, 2008 at 06:53PM by gravitas et nugalis

Mary Dennis, who has finally updated her website, wrote: I can't help it---I've got the voice of Rex Harrison as Dr. Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady running around in my head as I'm reading this. Arrrgh!

My response - I feel your rain, er, ahh ... I mean, pain ... on the plain .. in Spain ...

still life # ~ scallions, olives, and mold

Scallions, olives, and mold • click to embiggenLate yesterday, I had a hankerin' for green olives when I noticed a jar of them on the kitchen counter, where I had left them after the last time I had indulged my green olive fancy.

Upon opening the jar, I was struck by the evidence that the last time I had indulged my green olive fancy was at least 3-4 weeks ago. No problem, though. Just more fodder for the decay series.

still life # 7 ~ Peaches, garlic, and beans

peaches, garlic, and beans • click to embiggenI must confess to becoming increasingly seduced by and enamored of the beauty I am discovering as I continue to investigate decay. I am finding these still life pictures to be very rich in color, texture, light, shape, form, and unexpected and surprisingly alluring beauty.

In a recent NY Times piece, Well, It Looks Like Truth (about a show at International Center of Photography), The writer Holland Cotter opines that "Art ... is in the business of questioning facts..." - something with which I would agree.

And I must state that I am having fun questioning the facts of decay.