September 3rd, 2010 by mark
I’m getting sick of picture-perfect pictures. Slickness is not a virtue. When I was an undergrad and studying photography, I had perfection and rigid rules rammed down my throat. It was like being a goose whose liver was being fattened for foie gras. There we all sat, young and impressionable artists, while they stuffed this and that down our gullets. It pretty much ruined me for photography for about twenty years. I’m just now recovering.
SFMOMA currently has a photography show that, when I saw it a couple weeks ago, significantly affected me. Called New Topographics: Pictures of a Man-Altered Landscape, its roots were in a show of the same name that was held at George Eastman House, in Rochester, NY back in 1975. That was when and where I was studying photography, learning how to make the picture-perfect picture. I remember this show when it first debuted. I remember being befuddled by it, not understanding how it was changing photography. Sadly, I was stuck in the paradigm of advertising, fashion, and portrait photography. For me, it was the status quo, the classic structure of the academy vs the avante garde. In my world, the avante garde was losing. The academy had me by the throat.
No longer under the spell of the strutting, tenured professors of my youth, seeing the show at this point in my life was a revelation. This was photography on the edge of something new. It was the end of the classical, structured theme, and the start of Conceptualism. The images are still fresh and vital some thirty-five years later, so much more interesting and provocative than the photography we see on a daily basis.
There is this tree in our local park that I photograph regularly. Each time I look at it, I try to see it in a new way. After viewing the New Topographics show I realized that the tree and I were in a rut. I needed to look at it from a new perspective. I needed to go to the other side. So, I walked away from it, far away from it, and looked back. The result is not picture-perfect and, today, it is just what I wanted. It really has nothing to do with the theme of New Topographics but that show broke something wide open for me. It showed me a new way to see. That’s what great art can do for us.
Tags: Black & White Photos, Daily Walks, Trees
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September 1st, 2010 by mark
A sneaky, little heat wave is sinking its tendrils into our neighborhood. These nasty things barely announce themselves. The change starts off with an imperceptible shift in the breeze. The branches of our weeping birches go this way instead of that. Or they swirl around indecisively until they decide that the ocean air is no longer welcome. Like a songbird being stalked by a raptor, suddenly I look around, head darting from side to side. “Shit!” I hate heatwaves. Give me a drippy, rainy, foggy, gloomy day anytime. I look at anyone who says they love the heat with bemusement. I just don’t understand it.
Just a few days ago I was cheerfully adding layers to shivering torso as I ascending into the headlands fog. I was wrapped in a cocoon of cottony silence. Moisture condensed on my camera lens, coalescing into big drops that ran from top to bottom of the glass, ruining every photo until I noticed them and wiped them off. No matter. Photography in the fog is so glorious it is worth risking a lens or two.
One can hear other hikers before seeing them up there in the foggy headlands. The fog muffles the chatter into the kind of murmurs one hears in a small church. Encounters are brief as these specters emerge and disperse back into the swirly universe of white essence. I try to photograph them at their points of departure, to see if I can click the shutter at the moment of their disappearance.
Back to the new heatwave. My mind snaps to present as a hit of stale, valley air comes into the studio. In a few hours it will be 100 degrees. No fog anywhere near these parts will save the day. The cats, particularly the black ones, will find a cool, tile floor and lie low and still. Cats are generally smarter than I am so I’ll follow their lead. We’ll all lie low together until the fog graces us again. The headlands will have to wait for me.
Tags: Black & White Photos, Daily Walks, Fog, Heat Wave, Hiking
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August 31st, 2010 by mark
I love photography but walking around with a camera is hardly a comfortable thing. It’s starting to cause a tingling feeling in my upper shoulder. The damned shoulder strap, made of some puny, little, sponge pad digs into the nook that forms the junction between neck and shoulder. I think its starting to create a permanent ridge.
But, that’s not the real problem. It’s not in my neck, it’s all in my head. I am a self-conscious person doing a self-conscious thing when I carry my camera. And my camera is bigger than I’d like. Big cameras make people look like dorks and since the age of 14 I’ve tried hard to avoid dorkiness. And when I point a big camera at people they hardly ever respond in a positive way. A world of terrorism, suspicion, Facebook photos, and Google Street View has made us all paranoid. Dorks pointing cameras at people doesn’t help.
Over the years I’ve become more unobtrusive with my camera. It’s not easy when the shutter click sounds like thunder and the lens protrudes a foot into the personal space of my subjects. But, I’ve learned lessons from my myriad cats and I can stalk my prey with the best of them. However, all this makes me tired.
So, I’ve taken to photographing my reflection. Unlike my real subjects in the real world, I am a willful participant in my odd world of imagination and creativity. I don’t care anymore if I look good in my photos. Sometimes the worse I look, the better the photo is. There are so many stiff snapshots of me smiling with my family at Christmas, Easter, and summer vacation that I can hardly add anything more to that collection of toothy veneer. So, I just point the camera at my sneering self and click the shutter.
I figure someday I’ll gather my collection of reflection self-portraits and figure myself out. It will be a moment of profound insight and revelation. Until then, I’ll walk around town, permanently stooped by the uneven weight of my Nikon, looking for photos of myself and maybe others. I wonder if Robert Frank ever felt like a dork.
Tags: Color Photos, Crankiness, Daily Walks, Reflections
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August 30th, 2010 by mark
Short and nasty. A heatwave hit us here in Northern California last week. The summer had been the coldest I can remember. It was fog for weeks, maybe months. After awhile the days blur together into a diffuse mass of whiteness. Then, in a moment, everything got hot. Very hot. A few days later, just as quickly as it came, it was over. The fog whipped in and the whiteness once again prevailed.
As soon as the fog returned I had a sudden urge to hike right up into it. Fog can energize me that way. A few hundred feet up a trail and the world turns to white magic. The most mundane things become beautiful. Alone in the mist I can touch the clouds.
The world becomes mine.
There is a trail near here that was once destined to be enormous, planned community. But, a few people with vision and a love for red-tailed hawks stopped it. The dirt roads that would become avenues are now trails. The remnants of the bulldozers slowly erode as do most ambitious plans of men. This trail as at its best in the fog and so on this day it was the only place for me to be.
A string of high-voltage power lines are, oddly, among my favorite things on this trail. They hum as one approaches them. They are alive with potent and ominous energy. They are stoic reminders of what might have been up there—thousands of homes were to be built along with a hotel exactly where the hawks nest. In the fog you can hear the hum before you can see the poles.
I photograph the poles most every time I’m up there. The hawks are elusive. But the poles are always there. Always humming. Always reminding me of man’s ambitions and things that could have been.
Tags: Black & White Photos, Daily Walks, Fog, Hiking, Marin Headlands
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