Vernal water # 2 • click to embiggenI'll be in Amish Country next Tuesday-Thursday. It's work related - a press check - but I will have lots of free time.

It would be nearly impossible to avoid the Amish in Lancaster County or so I'm told. As many know, the Amish do not like to be photographed, especially so if an individual is recognizable in a picture. So, I am going to attempt to get beyond the beaten path (if that is even possible) and photograph the Amish landscape in a way that will interest me and not annoy them. If I knock on the door of an Amish home, I wonder if they might let me in to do a picture window photograph? Wish me luck.

I will be posting everyday. Stay tuned.

Spring in a marsh • click to embiggenSee the tree with the brokren trunk and a few straggly branches off to one side in today's picture? That is pretty much how I feel.

I've got way too many balls in the air right now. One wrong move and it might all come tumbling down. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel and it is getting brighter every day. If I can make it through until noon on Friday, I will be in the clear - not exactly finished, but most of the balls will be in someone else's court(s) and I can get back to my primary role of being a patron-ed artist instead of a hardworking graphic artist (with a minor in home renovations).

Despite it all, I have managed to make a few ku although my decay stuff - the stuff that's actually decaying - sits idly by. Unless I take it on the road with me to PA for my press check, it's going to be idle a bit longer, which might actually improve things, decay-wise. My only worry is that the wife might "accidentally" dispose of it while I'm away.

Vernal water • click to embiggenSorry for the late entry. It's been one of those days.

Spring is springing out in earnest. Grass is turning green. Buds are on the trees. The ground is turning soggy as everything has thawed. We even had a run of 80 degree days. All in all, it's quite pleasant. That despite the fact that, while I was in a meeting in Lake Placid this AM, a decent snowfall was happening.

Part of the reason that this was "one of those days" is the last minute hustle to get out a 200 page book to the printer - no, not a photo book, an Adirondack tourism piece. Next week is press proofing in Lancaster, PA. Any one out there in the neighborhood who might like to get together, drink some beer, and talk about equipment and stuff?

Hazy Spring view of Whiteface above the Au Sable • click to embiggenI recently read an interesting comment by the esteemed photography critic, A.D. Coleman, from a piece he wrote about Emmet Gowin:

Most photographers working within the snapshot aesthetic have gone the way of intentional incoherence, and have adopted the arrogance necessary to defend this posture. Emmet Gowin is one of the few who have accepted articulate communication as the obligation of the artist, and he has taken from the snapshot those qualities which increase the accessibility of his message rather than those which obfuscate it. (ed. emphasis added)

The idea of "articulate communication as the obligation of the artist" runs rather contrary to oft-voiced expression of, "I'm doing it for me. As long as it pleases me, I'm happy." - to which my response is simply, "That's nice." Apparently, this attitude is what Coleman refers to as "arrogance".

However, I hear that attitude much more as a response to a criticism, not of incoherence, but rather of a dumbed-down attempt at "pictured" coherence which is little more than an appeal to a base or simplistic emotion - a picture with high-impact visual appeal but with little or no intellectual / emotional content. I don't read this attitude as arrogance, rather, I see it as ignorance, or, perhaps more accurately, as a withering defense of a photographer's inability to create an "articulate" picture.

Personally, my preference in pictures runs towards the complexly articulate end of the spectrum. Although, as I have stated many times, I like pictures best when I can have it, at least to some significant extent, both ways - illustrative and illuminative.

A question for you - how "articulate" do you like your photography? By "your photography", I mean the photography that you make and the photography of others that you like.

Scraggy pine at dusk • click to embiggenFYI, the "test" ends later today. So far, there are no exact answers.

However, there have been a few interesting remarks:

Markus Janousch asked; "Interesting. What is more "faked/staged": bringing the bucket into the kitchen, setting up a kitchen around a bucket in the garden or merging two pictures taken at different locations and times into one?"

Ron Tom stated; "The Joy is fake because anybody who chooses to impose creative limitations on an artistic medium doesn't really know how to experience Joy."

These remarks are definitely related. Ron's statement is pretty much on the mark - anyone is free to do whatever they want with a given medium - obviously, that includes "faking it" with photography. That freedom, of course, does not preclude anyone else from liking or disliking - and so stating - what an artist has created with his/her artistic freedom.

Markus' question, regarding different forms of artistic freedom - photography-wise, raises interesting questions. Ones that are much on the minds of many in the photo world. IMO, bringing an object into the kitchen or creating a kitchen set in the garden (much more ambitious than the aforementioned set up) are both tried and true still life techniques. A still life picture is traditionally thought of as a picture of a "staged" or "manufactured" arrangement of things. No one really questions the truth or realness of the pictured referents. There is nothing new at work here.

Merging two pictures taken at different locations and times into one, when the intent is to create a picture that would be the same as that created by the aforementioned traditional still life methodology, is, IMO, merely a modern still life methodology that differs from the traditional only by means of process. In other words, the resultant pictures looks exactly the same no matter how they were created and they all possess and project the same level of truth and realness.

However, that said, we all know that merging two pictures (or more) taken at different locations and times into one can create a picture which creates a 'new' reality simply because separately pictured elements can be merged in ways that defy or differ from the "real" - in the case of my decay pictures, I could photograph a rusted car and placed it on a plate on my kitchen counter and the result, if skillfully created, could be a new reality along the lines of Jerry Uelsmann.

Hmmmm ....

Monument Falls on the Au Sable • click to embiggenI haven't quite figured it out yet, but I have a growing unease(?) / dissatisfaction(?) / question mark (?) / something or other (?) with my "pure" ku picturing.

It seems that pure natural-landscape pictures aren't doing it for me right now. Without some sign of humankind as an element, the pictures seem somehow "incomplete" or "empty". Despite this, I am still "seeing" ku possibilities whenever I go out to picture but I think it will take a bit of continued picturing to sort this out.

Part of my uncertainty most likely can be explained by a comment made by Christof Hammann on my recent Pictue window - less is more entry; "I think Robert Frank, and I concur with him, laments the influence that this deluge of pictures has on the perception of everybody. Every single visual experience, be it direct or representational gets steadily devalued and diluted in intensity. This is physiologic adaptation at work."

In short, too many cameras and too many pictures leading to a visual information overload - in my case, too damn many natural-landscape pictures. They're everywhere, they're everywhere and the overwhelming bulk of them are rather uninteresting. I think that my angst, whatever it is, is a general feeling of a "it's all been said" kind of thing rather than a particular feeling about my own ku.

Maybe. I think. Or, maybe not. I just don't know. Any thoughts?

Then again, re: "it's all been said", every once in awhile amongst all the visual babble, some pictures of note emerge and capture my attention - check out Nature/Disorder pictures from Mary Dennis - and lift my spirits. While it may be true that it has all been said, it seems that there are still those who manage to see things that are well worth seeing.

Spring # 3 • click to embiggenJust to lighten the mood a bit, here's another glimpse Spring.

While I was busy absorbing the delicate colors of the sea of emerging buds, the wife spied some delicate lace-like ice on the small stream. But, one of the most intense signs of Spring is the emergence of those signature Adirondack dark tannic-brown streams. They're still very cold but, nevertheless, a sure sign of warmer times to come.

It finally seems that Spring has come in earnest.

Spring? # 2 • click to embiggenAnother sign of Spring? from Friday's all-day snowfall.

To be honest, these pictures were created at the higher elevations of the villages of Lake Placid and Saranac Lake. Some of the lower elevations don't have quite as much snow on the ground, but that is not to say no snow. Far from it.

Even though I'm a Winter guy and love the snow, I'm ready to break out the golf clubs - we were playing golf last year at this time. James' memory about last Spring is correct - it was early and very Summer-like in fact.

In any event, there's no use complaining. I'm just taking it one day at a time.