Postcards from the Creative Journey

579 Empty or Abandoned?

I enjoy photographing old buildings and other objects that have passed their prime. While photographing the renovation of the Cary Elementary School it occurred to me the school was worn out and run down because generations of students had used it. The school building fulfilled its original purpose and was ready to be repurposed. This realization inspired me to consider how I photograph old buildings.

There are two types of empty buildings. There are abandoned structures and empty structures. The difference is quite simple. If a structure is abandoned, there is no hope and no one will come back. Empty structures are not populated because there is no one there right now. The people will return and the space will no longer be empty. There is the hope the structure will be used once again. This was the emptiness I found in the Cary Elementary School.

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This is a photograph from the Carpenter Portfolio. There are no people in the photograph, but we know that people have been there because of the worn wood on the bench. We know that someone was just there because they left their coat on the bench. They will soon be back to claim it and go about the business of the day. 

578 The Key to the Subject

Last week I talked about my Project Triangle and the characteristics of creating new projects. I have two little stories on that topic. My friend, Brooks Jensen (of LensWork fame) is obsessive about keywording his Lightroom database. He claims he has enough images keyworded to create projects for the rest of his life. The power of keywording automagically draws connections among images you would not have thought of and is one way of creating new projects from images you have “in inventory.”

One of the projects I talked about last week, “Passages and Portals” came about in an entirely different way. One day, after looking at some of my latest photographs my daughter told me, “Daddy, you are the best door photographer in the world.” Well, who can argue with their daughter? Especially if she is right. So, I went back and started looking through Lightroom and sure enough I found a whole bunch of door photographs. I stopped gathering images when I went way over a hundred door images. That’s how the project “Passages and Portals” came about.

While you can be inspired to create new projects by random comments from your family or other people you know, it is probably more reliable to depend on keywording your images.

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Passages and Portals in the Shoshone Building in Wallace, Idaho. A wonderful old building being renovated when the owner has time. The building also contained an amazing collection of old telephone equipment and switchboards from local businesses. This photo is from the folio on my website

577 The Project Triangle

My projects have three characteristics; Time, Place and Theme. Most of my projects have fixed all three characteristics because I went someplace at a specific time and photographed a single subject. If we let at least one of those characteristics vary we can add some variety to what might become formulaic.

Single place, time and topic. Look at “A Boy’s Dream” folios; one place and one subject all photographed in a matter of a few hours. ( Just like the image above.)

Single place and theme fixed. Look at “After the Memories, Part I.” Academy Street, architecture with photographs gathered from thirty years of photography.,

Fixed topic. Look at “Passages and Portals.” A single theme photographed in many different places over a long period of time.

Mathematically, there are multiple combinations for these three characteristics, but the idea is the number of characteristics you can play with when you are deciding on a project.

Go back and look at your projects and find your own project characteristics. Better yet, go back and look at your photographs to see if you can group some or your own photographs to make a new project.

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The ME-109 from the Erickson Airplane Collection in Madras, Oregon. Sometimes good images don't fit in the overall scheme of the project. This one didn't. It's tough to have to reject an image for a project, but sometimes a hard heart is required to make a project do exactly what you need it to do. 

576 Ya Just Never Know

Some projects just never quit and sometimes it is a struggle just to keep up with them. My Academy Street project just keeps chugging along. The hero image for the Change of Pace folio is the Pasmore House at 307 Academy Street. It was distinguished by two huge oak trees in the front yard. About a year ago a storm felled one of the trees in the front yard. After the mess was cleared up the owners left a fifteen foot tall stump. I thought that change in the look of a house on Academy Street was memorable and a worthy addition to my project but, at that time I was busy working on After the Memories project and never got around to photographing that change on Academy Street.

A few weeks ago I drove down Academy Street and the fifteen foot stump is now a fifteen foot tall wood sculpture created by a chainsaw wielding sculptor. I have the “A” photo and the “C” photo, but dang it if I didn’t get the “B” photo that would have been the key to a triptych.

Never put off that photo opportunity.

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Academy Street continues to call to me as a subject for folios. After completing the After the Memories Project, more historical and vintage photographs surface and I just have to incorporate them into the existing project. It's as if this project is a living thing that continues to need to be fed and cared for. I guess it is a "Pet Project."

The changes to the area were significant. For some reason, the City Planners thought on street parking was important. Now we can clearly see our parked automobiles rather than the interesting architecture of a historic street. Not a good thing. But, on the plus side, the Pasmore House is now the site of a craft brewery - with a really cool sculpture in the front yard. 

575 An Important Distinction

Sometimes you don't realize a significant change you made is significant unless someone else tells you about it. I was reading the other day where a museum curator made a distinction between image and photograph. The difference is that photograph implies a physical artifact while the use of image implies a virtual entity.

I like this distinction because it does draw a distinction between two important ways we have to see photographs; as physical artifacts or as pixels on a screen.

In looking back over my past blog posts I find that I have pretty much made this transition to the virtual world and referring to the photographs as images. I create stories combining images and words to share my thoughts with the world. The primary vehicle for this are my folios hosted on my website. Producing an actual artifact is an exception rather than the rule. Photography has made almost a complete reversal going from physical artifacts to virtual images.

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The Fisherman's Bastion in Budapest. I would have liked an opportunity to photograph this fabulous structure overlooking Budapest but the location was closed to the public because it was being used as a movie set. 

574 One Foot in the Past

Gallery shows are wonderful, a lot of work and tough to come by. The competition for gallery space is intense and the reward is fleeting and very often not financially rewarding. Yet, we still pursue this as a venue to display our art. There is prestige and honor to have our works shown in a gallery.

Yet, I see gallery shows as a thing of the past. We just don’t go out to galleries and museums as much as in the past. It is so much more convenient to see photographic images just about any time we want by visiting a website (or a blog). We are not required to go to a certain place at a specified time to see photographs. We can do so from the comfort and convenience of wherever we have our smartphone, tablet or computer. We see more photographs online than in galleries or museums by a factor of, what, a Billion or so? With the internet and a smartphone, we don’t have to make a special trip to see photographs. Photographic images are with us all the time, just a click or so away.

Instagram, Facebook and whatever the latest image sharing site is the latest rage are where photographs are going to be seen in the future. We will still have museums, but my guess is that museums will have photographs as more of a curiosity or historical artifact than anything else.

The transition from physical to virtual world should be a strategic effort for photographers. Participating in the virtual world is more effective in showing work to more people, more times and done with less work than having a gallery show.

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The Bishop and the Bicycle in Wurzburg, Germany. More street photography featuring bicycles in Europe. 

573 How far do you have to go to fulfill your vision?

I attended a photo gallery talk a few months ago and the photographer’s description of the difficulties encountered in making the photographs along with the complex technical processing almost made my head hurt.

The photographs were very, very good, the stories were great and the cleverness and technical prowess to complete the images was impressive. I went away with mixed feelings; impressed with the effort to make the images and the workflow to create the prints, (and the prints were both large and spectacular) but was wondering if the effort would be appreciated by people that weren't privy to the entire photographic process.

It struck me that “civilians” (that is, non-photographers) would only see the image and not be aware of the incredible effort that went into creating the images.

It’s good to remember that the audience is looking at the image, not the effort you put into making the image. The effort put into making the artwork is not relevant to most of the people viewing your image. The success of the image is based on the audience's response to the image, not to the effort taken to create the artwork. 

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Bratislava Castle Passageway. There was not much there, there, but when there's some nice light and shadows there is always enough to make a photograph. 

572 No, Wait. Photograph First, Then Write.

Here’s another thought on dealing with an artist statement. I think that most photographers will make their images first and then write that artist statement. I am guilty of that method of work, because I am a photographer first and writing is a struggle I postpone and hope to minimize.

Rather than spend a lot of time writing a long artist statement at the beginning of your project (as I suggested last week), spread your artist statement throughout your project. When I first started combining words and pictures I had lots of words at the beginning and the end of the project. Creating long artist statements really slowed down the completion of many projects. I had the photographs edited, sequenced and ready to publish, but was stuck because those pesky words just wouldn't arrange themselves as well as the photographs did.

Many times I started out writing statements, creating a sentence or two and found I wrote myself into a corner. I did not despair, I drew a line under the unusable text and tried again. I can't remember who told me, but the advice was never delete anything you write. Why? Because you never know when or if you might find what was rejected on this project might be wonderful in some other project. So, I don't delete. I just stop and move on. 

In reviewing all these dead end efforts it dawned on me that all these partially finished statements applied to a particular photograph or two. At that point I decided to combine these mini-statements with their images on one page. This change made the design of the folios a little bit more complex, but it was much easier to write that pesky artist statement in small chunks and that eliminated the hurdle of creating a long artist statement.

Here are two examples of the "distributed artist statement" approach; Adaptations and The Inevitability of Numbers. 

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Another Church in Vienna. It was abandoned. Closed, locked, fenced off and not accessible. All signage was removed from the premises. I loved the way it looked and spent about an hour photographing the exterior from beyond a chain link fence surrounding the parish grounds. A few months after I got home I started exploring Google maps and found out I  photographed the Church of St. Francis of Assisi. 

571 Write First, Then Photograph

I have written several times about creating artist statements. Here are a couple of more thoughts on that topic. The words don't have to be the last thing you create. Those pesky artist’s statements can be created most any time. You don’t have to wait until all the photographs are completed and impatiently waiting for you to write about them. Why not create the artist statement first and then go out and make photographs to align with your artist’s statement? Think of this as responding to a call for work. Juried exhibitions almost always have a specific theme or topic as a requirement for entries. You look for, or create images to meet the entry requirements, so you've already done this before. 

Why not do this for yourself? Create your artist statement first and then make (or find) the photographs to meet those requirements.

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Near St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna are some confusing signs. It's obvious you can't enter that way, but at least there's a helpful hand to point you in the right direction. 

570 Ah, the Sorrows of Old Technology

Some of the projects from my old website did not migrate to the new site, falling victim to the advance of Technology. Many images had a long side of 500 pixels at 72dpi. With high resolution monitors and smartphones, such small images would not look good. The world of digital imaging is very susceptible to advances in technology. I have film negatives and slides five decades old that can still be printed and shared with the audience, but a digital image that is only a decade or two old is so technologically obsolete it is not usable other than as a curiosity. Well, that and providing an example about how fast technology is progressing.

It was not the first time I've run into this problem. When I was working with the Town of Cary archives for the After the Memories projects the Town had a lot of important images, but they were scanned at the aforementioned 500 pixel width at 72 dpi, or they were of such poor quality they could not be digitized.

Here's one other observation on the woes of "old" technology. While assembling my new website several early projects left me quite puzzled. I had the raw files and unprocessed scans for the project. I also had the finished project as an acrobat file, but no intermediary work product. I have no idea where the missing files are located. It was like having an Oreo with no “stuff.” 

I will probably go back and make some new “stuff” and re-do those few early folios. I would anticipate these revisited projects will look significantly better based on the advances made in Adobe software and there might be small improvement added by a more experienced user. I'll let you know when some of these revisited projects are loaded on my website. 

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OK, the last one from Williamsburg - for now at least. The Governor's Palace also doubled as an armory for the colony's militia. The entry hall walls are jam packed with muskets and swords. But the winter light was so lovely, how could a photographer resist?

569 Ah, the Joys of Aging

In rebuilding my website, I had to locate “hero” images, something to entice my readers to download a project. In this search for images, I discovered a project I cannot remember creating.  I guess this just might be another sign of getting older. 

The amazing find was a pdf publication of A Sense of the Seasons, about the Heckman Farm and environs in Divide County, North Dakota. I combined all four projects into one document, published on a CD, sent it out to about thirty people (at least that’s what the mailing labels said). I even preserved the complimentary responses from the recipients. 

If you would like to take a look at the four folios from Divide County, North Dakota, they are in the The Archives of my website. You will have to scroll down about two thirds of The Archive Page to see these folios. 

I can’t remember creating a book project from the Divide County photographs. It really looks great, so I must have done it. The search also went from hero to zero. I did find some projects on my computer that made my eyes hurt. The images were poorly scanned, the photoshop editing was lacking, the project design flawed and the execution amateurish. How could they have been my work? Sadly, I did remember doing them.

Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

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Another photograph from Williamsburg, Virginia, one of the gunsmiths tapping a musket barrel. While in Williamsburg I continued the Made by Hand  project I began at Hart Square two years ago. 

568 Now About That Path to Knowledge

After I completed last week’s post, I thought a bit more about the Path to Knowledge.  (You could scroll down a bit and read last week's post first. I'll wait until you do that.) I made it sound like it was a linear journey to a destination. I assure you, it is far from linear. The journey is filled with dead ends, detours, construction delays, pit stops and manifold impediments along the way.  And loops; detours that take you off in an unexpected direction and then return you right to where you started. A recent experience illustrates that path.

I recently completely re-envisioned my website. As the primary method for distributing photographs and stories my website looked a little bit dated. (Actually my daughter said, "Daddy, the nineties called and they want their web site back.")

The biggest task was figuring out what my web site should do, what it should look like and how the audience should experience it. I really didn’t want to re-learn HTML to code the site, so I downloaded Adobe Muse and used it to layout the design and experiment with the functionality of the site. It took me about a week to figure out how to use this very clever piece of software. Then I was off and creating with a product that allowed me to quickly evaluate various designs and features of my web site. I did this right up until Adobe announced it was ending support for the product. Oh, well.

After a lot of whining, pouting and mental foot dragging, I buckled down and re-learned enough CSS and HTML5 and hand coded my website using the concepts I created in Muse. Now the website sports a responsive design and looks great on an iPad. The creative journey is definitely not linear and far from over.

I’ll keep in touch by sending you additional postcards along the way.

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The Apothecary Shop on Duke of Gloucester Street in Colonial Williamsburg.

On another note, if you haven't arrived here from my website, I have a new project on the home page. Here's a link to get there.