Postcards from the Creative Journey

755 - The Flame of Recognition. First Published 6/7/2015

Photographically, Edward Weston is one of my artistic heroes. Reading “The Flame of Recognition” when I was in college was the key event that made me understand photography could be much, much more than the snapshots I had been making. Weston’s “Flame of Recognition” lit my fire for creative photography (sorry about the word play) and his clean compositions (“the strongest way of seeing”) have been a guide for my photographic compositions ever since. I have fallen short of achieving his brilliance many times, but I continue to ask myself, “What is the strongest way of seeing the scene in front of me?”

What made Weston such a good photographer? The question was answered in the film, “The Photographer” by Willard VanDyke (a film maker and member of the f/64 group). In the film, the narrator ascribes Weston’s success to:

• An intense love for the world around him
• A sharp eye attuned to the values of the mind behind them
• Constant search for significant form, the need to find order in what first appears to be chaos
• The discipline of technique the painstaking skill of the master craftsman

In the handy list provided by the narrator there is not a single reference to anything specifically photographic. The characteristics are strictly mental and can apply to any art form. In fact, I would suggest that these four points are essential to living the creative life.

Here’s a link to the film on YouTube. Spend about twenty minutes and learn about a great photographer.     https://youtu.be/5sF8K1NfHnM

754 – Indiana Joe and The Curse of the Archives…(Cont’d)

In our last episode (see the previous post) Indiana Joe confronted archived images that had not seen the light of day in decades. After recovering from this face melting experience, the confrontation became real.

In discussing this experience with Brooks Jensen (of LensWork fame) he asked me about my “Printing Notes.” (See below for an example.)  In the olden days Printing Notes were the instructions needed to recreate a silver print. They were written down with pencil and paper and stored in notebooks. Nowadays all these precious instructions are recorded automatically in your LightRoom Catalog

The fact that I have not made a silver print in fifteen years, sold my darkroom equipment ten years ago and no one has ever, ever, EVER asked me to make a reprint are irrelevant. THESE NOTES ARE IMPORTANT!!!1!! (You have to hear that like James Earl Jones would say it and with lots of echo.) I MUST KEEP THEM.

Now, back to reality. I do not need them. They have no value to anyone. I emptied the notebook and put the paper in the crate of paper to be recycled.

The next task is to go through the boxes of prints and do a similar process. This is a resolution item for 2021.

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* For all you young uns' out there, this is what one page of my recently recycled printing notes notebook looked like. We have a negative number, a quick pencil sketch of the image to be printed (easy to see why I am a photographer and not a draughtsman), enlarger height (height of the enlarging lens from the printing paper), enlarging lens aperture, with exposure and development notes. There were also some experiments with enlarger light source (condenser or cold light) and which printing paper to use. 

 

753 - Indiana Joe and the Curse of the Archives - First Published 1/14/2018

Indiana Joe was a moniker hung on me by one of my co-workers when I showed up for work one winter day wearing my REI Expedition hat (a stylish fedora no longer available) and a brown leather jacket. (Trust me, this will be important in a bit.)

If you began photography in the days of the wet darkroom you spent an inordinate amount of time preparing and processing your prints to exacting archival standards. I know I did. I double fixed (with and without hardener), selenium toned, hypo cleared, washed and air dried my prints on my special sized Zone VI drying racks. I mounted my prints on rag mat boards with buffered interleaving papers and put them in “barefoot” polyethylene bags before storing them in Light Impressions Archival Storage Boxes. Not only did we process our precious prints via this sacred ritual, we discussed, debated (quite heatedly, sometimes), experimented and opined without end on proper archival processing techniques. Our photographs must be preserved for eternity! Serious photographic artists would accept nothing less.

As part of a long term project I went back into my stack of Archival Print storage boxes looking for an image from an earlier era. When I opened a box, this is what happened:

If there were ever any images that deserved to fade into greyness, my early photographs should be at the top of the list. What in the world was I thinking at that time?

Tune in next time to see how Indiana Joe escapes the Curse of the Archives…

752 The Quest for Originality

How do I make my photographs different? This is the fundamental issue surrounding art of any type; your art, my art, everyone else’s creations. Not just in photography, but painting, sculpture, cinema or whatever media you choose as your own. We try to make our art unique so we can claim to be the best practitioner of our chosen field. Somehow, we think that uniqueness is original. “Yes, I am the best left handed, freckle faced, photographer of the clay pots incorporated into the photographic images of the landscape printed as  gum bichromate over platinum encaustic prints in the Southeastern United States.” (If I have offended anyone by facetiously creating this description, you have my apologies because I had no idea your work existed.)

Relying on technical legerdemain for uniqueness will make your work unique for a short period of time. As soon as you exhibit the work, other photographers will quickly invade your territory and produce clones of your process

Originality is not found in technique, but in the substance of your artwork. It’s what you photograph, not how you photograph that is of importance. Vision, not technique is much more difficult to duplicate.

The Quest for Originality is never ending, frustrating and difficult. If it was easy there would be a lot of great artists.

751-The Old is New – Again First Published 11/17/2013

I was reading a social media site and the question came up about buying additional lenses beyond the zoom lens usually sold with a starter kit. I was amused when a considerable amount of interest and comments came from folks that espoused the wonderfulness of the “fixed focal length lens.” Pardon me? For those of us of a certain age, the fixed focal length lens was the ONLY type of lens available for many, many years. Of course it was the ONLY type of lens used by real photographers. Those new-fangled zoom lenses were only to be used by camera clubbing amateurs. No self-respecting photographer would consider using a zoom lens. (Well, golly, a real photographer used a view camera, so using a zoom lens didn’t really have an impact on us real artsy type photographers.) Now that zoom lenses are optically spectacular, I guess the only way to increase sales is to promote the single focal length lens.

I must admit that I am not the least bit interested in purchasing new cameras and such, so I don’t know if the manufacturers are ready to start promoting the “professional chrome finish” for camera bodies. If they aren’t already doing so, I think it’s going to happen real soon.

750 - Photographs With and Without Memories

There are some photographs you remember, there are others you do not remember. I like to think the photographs you don’t remember are the best ones because they come from a place free of thought, planning and rationality. This is the place we all try to get to when we are out there in the world camera in hand. These photographs just happen and when we find them in our LightRoom catalogs we are happy because we have come upon something of great value.

I have mentioned this before, but I am bringing this up again because it is an observation we all have made and I am experiencing this again as I dig back through stacks of old contact sheets (remember those?) in search of images for the first part of the “Fifty Years of Photography” Project. There are images I see reminding me of the places I’ve been and the people I have known and then there are the images that, for all I know, may have been made by someone else.

And before you ask, the photographs I don’t remember are sometimes much better than the ones I do remember making.

749 - Saddlery, Pioneer Village - First Published 11/7/2010

Another photograph from September 15^th. Some days are better than others, but they must all end sometime. Photography ends when one of two things happen – either your vision gives out or the light gives out. In this case, my vision gave up just after 4:00 pm on that date (that’s what the EXIF data says). It’s a sad thing, too. When the light’s good, you have great subject matter and everything is clicking (Why do photographers like puns?) you get that feeling that you are looking at the last photograph of the day. You try to postpone the inevitable, but you know that you’re done for the day. You look at the ground glass or look through the viewfinder and try to hang on to that last great photograph of the day, let it burn into your mind. You could go “try for one more,” but there’s the satisfaction of making the last one a winner so why take the risk? You pack it all in and head for the house and a cold one to toast the photographic muses and thank them for accompanying you on a good day of photography.

748 Kilroy Was Here!

I coined a new descriptive phrase during this year's photo safari defining a type of photograph. It’s a type of photograph we all make. It’s the “I was here and made a photograph” photograph. It thought of the WWII graffiti, "Kilroy was here" meaning simply that I was here and made a "record shot" of the surroundings. There is nothing wrong with making a Kilroy photograph because we all want to capture the memories of time and place.  I would venture to guess there are more of these photographs made than any other. The vacation snapshot would be the prime example of this genre. 

Since we all have a bunch of “Kilroys” the question comes what do you do with them?

“Kilroy Photographs” are the starting points for any project. Whether these photographs can transcend the initial “here’s a photograph of where I’ve been” to real art is the task we need to face.

 

747 - On The Street Where You Live - First Published 1/30/2011

Or some street close by. Last Saturday I noticed a building while I was driving down Chatham Street. It’s been there a really long time and I have wanted to photograph it, but the light has never been quite right for me. Well, the light was pretty darn good last weekend. I said, “If it’s sunny tomorrow, I will be back at this time and make some photographs.” Sunday afternoon was sunny and I packed up the photo gear and was headed out the door. On the way out, I looked at the thermometer. It read 34F. “Hah!” I sneered, “I’ve just been to Inner Mongolia in January and 34F is shirtsleeve weather.” Despite the bravado, I put on the thermal wear, flop top photo mittens (See the blog for December 27) grabbed my stocking cap and went out to photograph.

Most landscape photographers like to photograph exotic locations or picturesque places. I am inspired by Adam’s photographs of Yosemite and Weston’s pictures of Point Lobos. These are really beautiful locations, but we need to remember those are just “backyard photographs." for those photographers. Adams lived in Yosemite and Point Lobos was down the road from Wildcat Hill. Both Strand and Sudek photographed in their backyards so the thought today is, you really don’t have to head off to the outer reaches of the world to find something to photograph.

 

746 - One for the Show

If you put an 8’ x10’ print on a gallery wall you only get one image. If the photographs are 8” x 10”, you have to come up with ten to twenty photographs. That’s an order of magnitude more ideas and work to cover the same gallery wall. I think it is a much larger challenge to create a large number of smaller prints.

It takes a lot more talent, effort and skill to create a wall full of meaningful photographs. When I see a single huge photograph on the wall I wonder “Is that all they’ve got?” Do they have more images to backstop the single huge photograph as part of a complete project, or do they just have one image?

745 - Abandoned, Not Empty - First Published 7/19/2015

There is a difference between abandoned and empty. The difference as I see (and photograph) is hope. Abandoned means no one will come back. Empty means there is no one here right now. I don’t like abandoned. When we were in Alkabo, North Dakota I had an opportunity to photograph the interior of an abandoned house. I made a photograph of the outside of the house to “set the scene.” Then I headed inside.

About forty years earlier an immigrant bachelor died suddenly. No one knew his next of kin and there was no family. The town buried him and just closed the door to his house. The door was still unlocked on the day we were there. Upon entering, we were transported back to the day he died. Clothes hung in the closet, unopened mail sat on the desk and magazines lay on a table. This place was abandoned. I could not photograph in this place. This photograph set the scene for a project that never happened.

744 - It’s That Line Thing

There is always a line to be crossed or not crossed. Sometimes the line is straight, sharp, clearly defined and there is a definite difference on either side of the line. Sometimes the line is curvy, wavy, blurred and fades off on the edges so you’re not sure really what or where the difference is on either side of the line.

I was OK with Adobe’s cloud replacement filter. That’s just fine. We’re just doing something photographers started doing a hundred and some years ago.

Adobe has now announced Neural Filters for Photoshop. While this functionality is in its infancy, there is no doubt it will be fully functional and working really well really soon. Neural Filters use Artificial Intelligence to change the facial expressions of a person. You want the person to be happy? Turn their head? Change the shadows on their face? You no longer need to work with your subject to effect those changes. All you need to do is move some sliders around and what we used to do in the studio is now done in the computer. (The only good thing I can think of that will come out of this is that we will now be able to have a driver's license/passport photo of us that really looks nice.)

Now that line is now really fuzzy and meanders all over the place. I’m not sure if photographic truth is even possible any more. I have not believed any photograph since the dawn of digital editing, but now Neural Filters gave me a big whack across the back to remind me that the days of “photographic truth” are way, way, way in the past.