Postcards from the Creative Journey

537 And Then It All Became Clear

 

A couple of months ago I was busily trying to get myself out of the comfortably incomplete stage of the “After the Memories” project when I finally figured out what it was all about. I had prepared all my statements about a sense of loss when historic buildings are destroyed and the finality of destruction.  But the meaning of the photographs was elusive.

What finally struck me is the project is about change. I can’t point to a specific thought process that led me to this conclusion, but at one point this thought burst through to my conscious mind. Creativity is like that. We have the answers to the artistic questions we pose to ourselves and sometimes the answer magically appears. We have obviously thought through the appropriate solution deep in our mind and it does take some time for thoughts to come bubbling up to the surface for us to find.  

If we look at the results of a change, there are three likely outcomes. The first outcome is failure; what we set out to do was not achieved. The positive things we thought would happen did not happen. In fact, after the change, we might be worse off than when we started. It happens. We don’t like to think about it, but things don’t always turn out as planned. The second option is no change. After spending much, time, talent and treasure, we are no better off than when we started. A lot of effort gained nothing. Finally, the third likely option is that of success. The changes we wanted to happen actually do happen. We are better off than before and we can call that change a success.

It was all there in front of me. The photographs of change and each of three possible outcomes were shown in the photographs; failure, no change and success. It was truly a revelation to me, especially at such a late stage of the project.

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Chatham Street, 1927 - 2018, still photographing from just about the same spot as last week's photograph. This time, I had to move to the middle of the street to make the photograph. Chatham and Academy Streets are still  busy streets and it turns out the best time to photograph was early on a Sunday morning. The morning was overcast so there were no long shadows in the picture.

Everybody's Store (last week seen as a white building with "Shopping Center" painted near the roof) as the key element to base the blending of the historical and contemporary image. 

The exhibit is coming down this coming week and then it's back to normalcy for a day or two and then it's off to the Oregon Desert with Brooks Jensen for this year's Photo Safari. I will be sharing blogs and images from the road as Brooks and I pretend to be Fine Art Photographers for about a week or two. 

536 Changes Along the Way

As I was creating the photographs for the “After the Memories” exhibit, I was concerned if I had enough of my vintage images to fill the gallery at the Page Walker Arts and History Center. That concern was resolved when I remembered how I selected images for the second version of the Labyrinth project. Labyrinth 1.0 was made up of single images, Labyrinth 2.0 was triptychs. The selection criteria were different for both projects. Some single images were in both projects, some images were only in one project and some images made neither project.

This change in selecting images was made much easier by giving me a broader set of criteria from which to work.

And then another change. As I was creating the images for this show, I wondered about the changes over a much longer period of time. I began to look at the historical images in Cary’s town archives. As I went through the historical images I knew I had the images to make the re-photographic project I originally envisioned. I decided I would place the historical images within a contemporary panorama to provide a modern context for the historical image. This became the second part of the project.

Keeping a mind open for inspiration as the project continued through its “work and detail” phase allowed me to bring my original vision to light.

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Chatham Street 1953 and 2018. The fun part about these blended images is the humor of seeing the old and new coexisting in the same frame. The "Shopping Center" building has been standing there since at least 1927 and is still being used today. 

Creating the layered images combining the historic and contemporary images was a fun part of the project. The historic images were adjusted for contrast in Light Room  and I applied a platinum toning to the historic images. Then, I made a series of exposures at the location of the historic photograph. From there it was back to Light Room to make the panorama. I exported the panoramic and the adjusted historic photograph. I layered the historic image on top of the panorama in PhotoShop. There was a lot of skewing, free transforming and stretching to make the historic images line up with the new images. Once the layers were aligned I added some "gradient reveal all" to soften the transition between the historic image and the contemporary panorama. It turned out that not all the current locations and the historic photographs were compatible. I only wound up with about ten or twelve layered images that “worked.” I wanted to give the audience a view of Cary that was both historic and contemporary. A view where both the past and present were displayed in the same frame. 

535 Off the Wall Photography

 

 

We photographers have been hoodwinked into believing the best way to exhibit our photography is hanging them on a gallery wall. If my photography is going to hang on a gallery wall, I really would like be there all the time and tell everyone who walks by about my photographs. Clearly this is not possible and creates a problem for those of us that would like to talk about what our photographs mean.

“After the Memories” contains my second attempt at a solution to this problem. The first attempt was a web site that accompanied my “Winter Day, Summer Morning” exhibit providing more information to the audience. That didn’t work well because I didn’t have a close connection between the exhibit space and the web site. I did leave a notebook with the same information as on the web site, but I had no idea how many people read the notebook during the exhibit.

“After the Memories” has two improvements on that effort. One is creating some short (approximately thirty second) videos made at the location of selected photographs. The second is assigning a QR code to each video and including the QR code on the gallery wall near its companion photograph. With the prevalence of smartphones I hope people will take advantage of the QR codes and see several short videos about the exhibition. Now I can be in the gallery whenever it is open.

Creating videos and assigning them QR codes were the other problem that did not live up to their anticipated difficulty (for which I am grateful). I created a single video a few years ago for another project and learned some basic editing skills in Adobe Premiere. For “After the Memories” I took a few hours of refresher instruction on the Adobe web site and then I completed that phase of the project is fairly short order. I had so much fun with the videos, I am wondering how I can include videos in future projects.

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This is one pair of photographs of 208 Academy Street. The house and yard that used to be there was bulldozed out of existence a few years ago. There was no warning or announcement of the impending demolition. The bulldozers showed up one morning and a day later there was nothing left.  The first image was made in 2001 and the second was made earlier this year.  The QR Code below links to a short video I made about this particular series of photographs. (And yes, I do know that I made a mistake on the address that I didn't discover until I was in post-production.) 

 

534 Reading Before Looking

 

In an earlier post (Interpreting Photographs) I mentioned I have gone to photographic exhibits and bypassed the introductory text to get started looking at photographs. In my current exhibition I had to figure out how to lay out the show to make sure the viewers read the artist statement as well as looking at the photographs. Rather than having a single introductory statement, I included short statements on each of the pairs of photographs. By making the text an integral part of the exhibit the comments are specific to each situation are more relevant than an overall artists statement. I hope the synergy with words and pictures helps the viewers understand the relationship between photographs.

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I will hang thirteen of these groups of text and images in my exhibit. These pieces incorporate a background layer of a 1920's era map of Academy street, showing not only the location of the houses, but names of the residents. Two of my images, one vintage and one contemporary image are placed on top of the map. The text relating to the content and importance of the two images is placed near the image. All three elements are necessary to show the story of how change has affected Academy Street. By placing all elements together, I hope the viewers will be engaged in the total experience. 

533 Disconnecting Time and Space

 

 

There are many different ways to approach a project and most of mine tend to be of a single place at a specific time. I know this because I often head out to a specific location (as part of my annual photo safari) and return with photographs of a specific place and time.

This seems to fall into a type of documentary/artistic effort creating stories about an experience which closely couples time and place. What if that link were broken? Suppose I photographed the same place at different times? Or, suppose that I gathered photographs together of different things at different times with the same meaning. By breaking this link between time and space, I can create a different type of project.

I’m in the final phases of completing a project that will be exhibited at the Page Walker Arts and History Center this week. It is an attempt on my part to break the specific time and place connection to create a different look and feel to this project. The project will be addressing the changes in a specific place over time. 

I’ve been photographing Academy Street in Cary, North Carolina for the past thirty years or so. Each of the folios I created was at specific time and a specific place. After thirty years of photographing, I thought I needed to break the cycle and show photographs of change made in the same neighborhood.

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The top photograph is the home located at 204 Academy Street in 2001. A few years ago, the house was cut in pieces and relocated down the street and around the corner. It was then supposed to be renovated. As plainly shown, the planned renewal has yet to happen. Photographing physical changes is easy to show, but the more difficult part of the project is to represent how the changes affect the community and the neighborhood. This takes a little bit more than photographs.