an appropriation or an homage - pt. 6

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David Plowden's fabulous images in A Handful of Dust are evidence of the changes taking place throughout our land, a country constantly in search of the "next great thing." His travels and photographs for this book concentrate on the  Midwestern states. One doesn't have to go nearly that far to find the same effects on small towns here in the east. In pursuit of my courthouse project, I've been through a lot of small Virginia towns, and many suffer the same neglect that Plowden documents in his book.

In fact on our main street here in Charlottesville, a pedestrian mall with $7.5 million in recent renovations, a quarter to a third of all retail space are vacant store fronts. How the ones that are active manage to hang on is rather a mystery. It's an area of restaurants and botiquey shops, but due to its inaccessibility there is nothing of actual necessity along its 8 - 10 block length. Instead it's become an entertainment destination.

But in fact, it feels like this is old news. It's a trend that probably began after WW2, as globalization and urbanization driven by the North American need for efficiency in all areas - agriculture being a primary one - has pushed people out of their rural communities into a WalMart conglomerate. The wars and suffering reported from distant lands are sad reminders of the human condition. But in our own land Plowden's pictures from the rear lines in our own personal war with commodification (of everything) are important reminders of an innocence lost.

a twist - no shouting

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What would our local luminary TJ, guide, hypocrite, and gauge in all things political, architectural, and human have to say about the current state of access to the building which he built and which this chunk of marble now stands?

Calling the requisite authorities to get clearance to photograph in the Rotunda at the University of Virginia, I was told I could carry a camera into the building, as any other member of the general public was permitted to do. But that I could not bring a tripod on which to place the camera, or an easel on which to place a book in order to continue my Landscapes in the Landscape project. The use of tripods denotes some kind of professional use of equipment, and there is no circumstance in which professional usage of the premises is permitted unless it has something to do with university programming.

This seems rather arbitrary, but of course it's one more instance of officials needing to control images created on premises within their spheres of influence, be they public or private. There seem to be three options at this point: 1) carry the Linhof in the backpack into the building, conceal a tripod and go outlaw anyway; 2) get to the point where I can use the Linhof hand held; 3) use something other than the 4 x 5 which can be more readily hand held.

Is this what laws are intended to do to us, make us into outlaws in order to control us against our own natures?

an appropriation or an homage? Pt. 5

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Jeff Wall's The Storyteller may have been the photograph that got me thinking several years ago about the problem of the "pretty picture." Others have articulated it far better in words than I am able, but it comes down to being truthful about the state of the world today. Which this entire site, devoted to the Man Made Wilderness, is all about.

I see that William Eggleston's "democratic" photographs are on display at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York and will travel next year. His influence is everywhere, is profound. Without it, would digital cameras have bothered to come into existence? His vision is that nothing in the landscape is more worthy of being photographed than anything else.

While I still find it difficult to let go of the ideal view of the landscape, Eggleston's viewpoint is much more obvious to me as I look around at my world and try to find a wilderness that we can live in.

an appropriation or an homage? Pt. 4

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Maybe there needs to be a concept for this? I'm not there yet, but the photos are coming along nonetheless. What is known is that it's important to get out there and do something, whether there is a fully formed concept or not. For now, I'll leave it at that.

BTW, this is from the same location shown in a earlier entry, which might give it a bit more context.

an appropriation or an homage? Pt. 3

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It wasn't much of a stretch to come up with this one. Struth's combination of images - Paradise & Dusseldorf - are probably more provocative than mine - putting his Paradise in my back yard. I feel like I'm still testing the waters with this "project." Which I'm giving the working title Landscapes in the Landscape. Certainly the 4 x 5 image created during this set up is rather different: more or less no depth of field in order to place the book appropriately and be able to distinguish what it is. The focus is on the book with the background a blur of color. Unlike others, I have little to say about what this is about, other than my love of photography books and making photographs myself. Why not combine them?

before the blue door

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This one's from directly across the street from the previous entry. Obviously too far away to see anything at all, other than that it's a "pitcher book." I'm still trying to figure out the range, how close I need to be to really see what's going on in the book's picture and still have a "meaningful" surrounding that I can select and capture.

As a gauge, Shore has three photos in Uncommon Places that are overtly of pictures, either painted or photographed. What is most interesting about them to me is the relative distances between the surfaces of the pictures he is photographing and the surfaces on which these pictures "hang." One is a billboard in a spectacular natural landscape. Another is a painting of a northern Italian landscape hanging on a plain white concrete block wall. The third is a painted mountain landscape hanging on a wallpaper covered surface printed with images of Native American artifacts. The latter is more interesting for the wallpaper the picture hangs on, so the image more or less pushes the viewer outside the frame. The Italian landscape is a deep well that you fall immediately into, even while still holding onto the block wall around it. And the billboard with it's blanked out text is also a surface that pushes the eye outside it's frame, to have you pay more attention to the natural surroundings in which the billboard has been placed.

an appropriation or an homage?

 

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And so begins something new. I'm always hesitant to broadcast much of anything about ideas for projects, being paranoid about other people taking an idea before I can do anything with it, or more likely it being a lot of hot air about something that never materializes. But it appears I'm going to make an exception this time. At least in the near future I'm going to see what I can do with some of my favorite photo books. The one I'm currently in thrall of is Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places. I might even experiment with the experiments here. See what comes of it. On the surface, the book is a collection of 8x10 photographs of Shore's cross country travels in the early 70's. I feel like some of us are still working the vein.

There's another way that an 8-x-10 photograph bears a funny relationship to time. I have a camera and a tripod. I can spend several minutes looking at the scene in front of me, I can pay attention to small details, I can see relationships in space that may not reveal themselves, and have all of this inform a picture which is then taken in very quickly by the viewer. So there is a kind of compression of time in the picture. That to be there and to see everything the camera sees could take minutes; but it can all be grasped at once on this piece of paper.

Stephen Shore Uncommon Places 2003