Musings on Photography

This looks like an interesting project:

I had a thought after I posted this image of Black Eyed Susans (and other flowers) taken yesterday on a Floyd County roadside. Here it is:

It would be neat for contributors from all over the country to offer their images to an aggregate gallery called Unplanted Gardens: America’s Roadside Bloomery.

All images would include in their composition a road of some kind, just to place it, and then the wildflowers that grow there unplanted. Hiway department wildflower beds don’t count.

Each image should be 72 dpi, max size of 800 pixels on the largest side. Information should minimally include the location, if possible some ID on the flowers, and any other pertinent or interesting information. 

Update here.

I think collaborative projects like this are pretty interesting.  So far, not much participation, so here’s your (my) chance to chip in.

I have a handful of interesting blog posts to point to:

• at Monster Crochet, a post which points to what sounds like an interesting TV show, and a wonderfully impassioned post about the importance of art-making, as opposed to art as objects.  She writes

You see, the process of making is more than mere object creation. It is history. It is the harbinger of both experience and wisdom. It is a transcendent force that connects we humans to one another as links in a chain from the present to the infancy of human history.

• At Chantal Stone’s New Words, a thought provoking post on the work of Magnum photographers, and focusing on the work of photographer Brent Clark, of whom she writes

I love photographers who have the ability to force the viewer to stay longer, and look into the picture. Brent’s photographs are more than just pictures of what something looks like, they are illustrations of an experience, of a feeling, of something familiar, something you want to be part of.

• at Julie O’Donnell’s Seeing, Thinking, Photographing…, an excellent post about the virtues of looking at a photographer’s work as a body of work rather than as individual photographs, even when the work has not been done in a project format.
• At Andy Chen’s What Andy Saw, browsing back through time landed me on a wonderful post on ‘re-enchantment’.

Looking at the blogroll I maintain for this blog, today I noticed that quite a few of those blogs seem to have gone dormant.  Some of them I’ve sort of lost interest in.  It seems that no matter how hard I try to keep it up to date and reflecting what I’m currently reading, it always looks out of date.

Thus, a new experiment.  The blogroll goes away.  In it’s place, I plan on making post at least once a week which includes links to the blogged stuff I’ve enjoyed the most over the past week.

The contenders for this round are:

• Paul Lester Photo has been on a run lately, with Paul making frequent posts about his book plans, his recent trips, some musing on thoughts prompted by the excellent book Art and Fear, dust, teaching.  It sounds like it’s all over the map, but it’s certainly held my interest.  Just keep scrolling backward in time.
• Frank Armstrong’s Pitchertakin’ is off on a road trip, which looks like it should be interesting.  He’s planning on keeping the blog updated as he goes along.  Could be interesting.
• Doug Stockdales Singular Images has been fascinating of late, with many posts as he works through issues surrounding his ‘Bad Trip - Sad Trip’ series.  Again, just keep scrolling back through the posts.  Good stuff.

I mentioned yesterday that the blogs that hold my interest in the long term are the ones where the writer/artist offers some insight into his/her process.  As luck would have it, one of the most eloquent and thoughtful writers who shares glimpses into his own process, Doug Plummer, has just last night put up another of his excellent posts about his fairly intuitive process of making photographs of dancing.  This entire category is worth reading, in fact.

After you’ve read that, go and read this post.  What impresses me is Doug’s complete commitment to being open to the moment, no matter what it is and no matter how he might feel about it walking in, so that he can get the photographs that reflect it.  It’s not easy to do, and it’s not easy to share it on your blog, either.  But I’m sure grateful that he did.

Martin Doonan has an extremely interesting post on the behavior of the histogramming of a Canon EOS 20D meter as various controls are adjusted, over on his blog Doonster.  Check it out.

There’s an excellent post comparing the tonal rendering of 28mm lenses that can be mounted on an Leica M8 over on Siliceous.

And, if that wasn’t enough, there’s more on Photostream.

Check it out, it’s well worth reading.  I project that tonal rendering of lenses is going to be the next wave of thinking about lens characteristics, in the way that ‘bokeh’ was.

In response to my comment that “I’m not a post-modernist”, Christoph Hammann asked “What then would you call yourself?”

Well, that’s been on my mind, on and off.  On because it’s one of those questions for which you feel you ought to have a ready answer.  Off, because I think it’s one of those questions like “What is Art?” where you find that having the answer wouldn’t change anything.

So I pondered it briefly but stopped when life intervened, like when my wife asked me to figure out why the paper kept jamming the laser printer (it turned out to be 8×5″ x 11″ paper in name, but more like 8.6″ x 11.1″ in practice, a fact I discovered after fiddling trying to get it to feed in BOTH laser printers), and felling a Big Leaf Maple on the stream side of the house.  Big Leaf Maples often have multiple stems; this one had five, and felling the first four went without a hitch, with them landing one atop the other in the neat row I had planned, right where I wanted.  The fifth stem, though, started twisting as it came down, jumped off the stump in a fit of pique (missed me by about four feet, thanks for your concern) and leapt sideways to land atop the trellis on the patio after sending my wife fleeing.  Trellis was undamaged.  There’s nothing like a big heavy tree coming down on something you desperately DON’T want crushed to divert your attention from post-modernism.

So I hadn’t made much progress through the weekend, nor the first part of the week.  So I was delighted to wander over to Mark Hobson’s The Landscapist and read his most recent entry, which reads 

That said, it seems that there is an emerging middle ground out there where the two cultural paradigms collide and out of the smashed particles a new stew is being brewed - perhaps a kind of post-postmodernism.

Photography-wise, a place where neither intellectual concept nor visual referent reign supreme. A place where the skeptical/questioning gaze of the camera does not descend fully into the ‘end-of-the-line-everything-is-used-up’ paradigm of postmodernism but rather, it creates a glimmer of it’s-not-over-yet hope because, unlike postmodernism, the photographer actually believes that the referent matters.

A place where, even though the referent matters, the skeptical/questioning gaze of the camera never places it on an altar of idoltry that drips with sappy sentimentality. A place where the referent is addressed with a respect that preserves it’s authenticity but still allows the photography-observer to move well beyond the ‘actuality of the real world’.

A place where the denoted and the connoted co-exist on equal footing. A place where photography can both illustrate and illuminate.

In short, a place where I want to be.

I like his description of this place.  If I’m going to call myself something, I’d like to call myself whatever this thing gets called.

I think the name ‘post-post-modernist’ is not very helpful; I’d suggest that we instead just call people who are aiming for the place he describes as New Landscapists, because that’s what my bookmark to his blog says.  (The ‘new’ is there because I used to have a link to his blog at the old URL, before he moved it.)

So I guess I’m both an Art-is-a-Verbist, and a New Landscapist.

I’m a big believer in shamelessly quoting someone else when they’ve done a better job than I can do, so I’ve quoted rather a lot of Hobson’s post.  So here’s why you need to go over to the post and read it there - I really like the photo he’s chosen to go with the post.  Awesome.  Go over to his blog and read the entries for the last week or two - following Hobson as he threads the needle makes for great reading.

A few weeks ago I spent some time scanning prints for Dan Cautrell, an artist who lives in the Snoqualmie Valley (not far from my home) and whose work I greatly admire.  Our art collection includes several of Dan’s prints, including the now world famous Statement of Purpose.

One of the great things about scanning a broad selection of Dan’s prints was that I got a great overview of his work; I’m even more impressed now than I was before.  The goal of the scanning was to make it possible for Dan to get a web site of his work together.  It’s now online at http://www.dancautrell.com/.

Please take a moment to take a look.

Tracy Helgeson, an artist who from my pedestrian position appears to be deservedly fixed in the artistic celestial firmament, wrote in this entry in her blog;

In the interview, I prattled on about how going to art school was really valuable to me and how making many sacrifices, including time and income would probably be necessary, blah blah blah. While those things are true, what I really should have said was this:

Put your heart into your work. Period. Many other things are important, like an education, observation, talent, imagination and discipline, but learning how to be honest in my work has brought me many rewards. Not financial (I would have totally smirked here) although that is good, of course, but the utter joy of expressing myself and connecting with others through that expression. And the heart and the honesty is what makes that possible.

I love Helgeson’s blog.  I suspect we all subscribe to some degree to a romanticized notion of the artistic life, but she does a wonderful job of painting a different, more realistic view by just telling us about how she fits making art, preparing for shows, and the other tasks that face artists into a life that seems full to overflowing with home life, including kids, spouse, chickens and the rest of a fully lived, balanced life.

If you don’t read Colin Jago’s Photostream blog, you should wander over there and read The Grass is Always Beautiful. I had a similar post about 80% written but Colin has done a much nicer job than I was doing, so just go over there and read his. And then, at the end, add a line that says “Yeah, me too - Paul Butzi” at the end.

I’ve fallen in love with Tracy Helgeson’s blog, both because I think her landscape paintings are just awesome and because I think it’s really interesting to read how seamlessly she seems to integrate artmaking into a very interesting daily life.