"The Artist"

My intent with these documents is to get out of the way and let these accomplished artists - Russ Warren, Megan Marlatt, and John Evans - have their say.

Thanks to CLW for her editorial suggestions.

looking elsewhere

Where does the time go? Some work, a lot of reading and viewing, some Steadicam training, a little photography, very little writing. The effort to focus on anything other than the physical world immediately in front of my person seems to become more difficult.

Nonetheless, it feels as if a barrier has finally been broken in the effort to edit the video footage I've recorded with old friend and artist John Borden Evans for the third in a series of videos about artists displaying at the gallery Les Yeux du Monde. We recorded some interview material back at the beginning of March. The seasons have changed, the northern hemisphere has become brilliant green once again. Despite my appetite this year for the barrenness of winter, perhaps I needed to come out of that cocoon to develop some new ideas. The material has felt thin. It needed something to bolster it. Without looking at it directly, and while reading about other films, thoughts were sparked that head in a new direction. I know these things need to get pushed farther out there - somehow. That's what I'm after.

No deadlines are set. But some kind of completion is going to happen in the next week or two.

russ warren video

I want to thank Russ Warren and Lyn Warren again for helping to make this happen.

another instance of my inability to conform

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This is a photograph that could benefit from an audio component. Or at least it would make the reality of its nature more immediate. But as I wrestle with what it is that I want to do with a motion picture capture device, it is fairly obvious that what "typically" works is not a collection of still images, even complimented with sound. The question that is posed by director Peter Watkins in his critique of the media and film making, is whether we can find other means of communication through visual media that transcends the hegemony of the three act structure of virtually all story telling.

This extreme crisis for global civil society AND for the environment, falls into six principal areas under examination: • the role of the American MAVM [Mass Audio Visual Media], with their disastrous impact on global politics, social life, and culture • the somewhat less obvious, but equally dangerous role of the MAVM in most other countries • the role of global media educators (encouraging young people to enter the mass media as acquiescent professionals, or to accept the mass media as passive consumers) • the role of film festivals and of film makers themselves • the complex role of the counter-culture movement • the role of the public.

Crucial to Watkins' analysis of the MAVM is his examination of the Monoform:

To explain to new readers: The MONOFORM is the internal language-form (editing, narrative structure, etc.) used by TV and the commercial cinema to present their messages. It is the densely packed and rapidly edited barrage of images and sounds, the 'seamless' yet fragmented modular structure which we all know so well. This language-form appeared early on in the cinema, with the work of pioneers such as D.W.Griffith, and others who developed techniques of rapid editing, montage, parallel action, cutting between long shots/close shots, etc. Now it also includes dense layers of music, voice and sound effects, abrupt cutting for shock effect, emotion-arousing music saturating every scene, rhythmic dialogue patterns, and endlessly moving cameras.

He proposes alternative ways of viewing (see especially this section of his statement), and that the entire process of media production become more democratic through subjects and audiences becoming involved and a part of the means of communication.  After all, the word implies some sort of two way process, rather than the simple passivity of a silent audience in a cinema or on the couch in the living room.

Can a lone landscape photographer find a way through this minefield?

being neighborly

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As flat as this composition might seem, there is a density to it that reallty draws me in. It says a lot about where we live. The four man made objects in the man made landscape attempt to exert their presence over the surrounding vegetation. But there is little doubt that those four objects and the infrastructure they represent have a limited lifespan that will require constant maintanence.

confusion reigns

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Better? Nahhh... Different... A whole lot of buttons and batteries. But I don't really want to write about camera technology. Of the thirty or forty exposures I took late this afternoon a week ago, trying to find what my 3 pints to the wind brain could comprehend, this one - at about the end of the series - is probably the best. Not too bad for being drunk. I don't usually combine drinking and photography, and I don't think I would recommend it, even to myself. But having a camera at hand was an interesting way to burn off some alchohol before I needed to drive home.

a brief foray

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Back to the purely descriptive view. Once again, the lab is having troubles with the E6 machine, so I'm "reduced" to showing the pea shooter output.

We don't have landscapes like this around here, so this view results from a quick journey to the capital of the Confederacy. It's not far from here, and I find these places far more interesting than the restored portions of town. But then I realized, driving past the train station, that its neighborhood - amidst a thicket of massive concrete columns that support I95 and I64 with an incessant roar of traffic 75 feet above - is a completely transformed landscape. Entire city blocks have been closed off to the sky, and the station itself is crowded in by the interstate span that crosses the James River, passing only several feet from the front elevation of this Rennaisance Revival building from 1901. On the ground, the city has tried to make the best of a horrible situation, with a maze of pathways through a darkened "park" that never quiets. Was this an additional, intentional insult, 100 years after the end of the Civil War? No wonder we're still fighting here in Virginia.

burn baby burn

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Kind of a cheap, obvious shot. But I like it anyway. This is after all what these machines are ultimately for.

This comes from a week and a half ago, but since I'm still practicing "slow photography," as Sam Abel once termed it, it takes at least that long for something to go through my brain, the camera, the lab, the scanner, image manipulation, uploading, composition, and who knows what else. What's the hurry, anyway?

limited success

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Another attempt was made last week to catch the moon rising over this landscape. All set up and ready to go at least half an hour early.  As the sun set lower, and it approached the time when the moon should have been coming up - about 5:15 local time - the clouds seemed to get denser, even though they were not really moving. Six o'clock came and went, the sun set, the surrounding landscape got darker and darker. The moon never came up. Damn. I knew it was out there, somewhere, but where? By 6:30 I decided to bag it and abandon any hope of seeing a rising moon. Once I got home and looked out again about 7:30 or 8, I could see the mostly full moon shining through the clouds.

Perhaps later this month I'll have better luck with the weather: March 29 @ 6:30 pm local time I'll be out there again with my Linhof attached to the tripod. Anybody wants to stop by and say hello, by all means do so.

What's the Story? or... Today's Rant

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From an unexpected source, I would imagine. This time I'm going to blame Apple, Inc.

If it hadn't been for the new laptop we purchased back in December, I wouldn't have found out about the ease of use of components such as iMovie and Garageband, bundled with the machine and which turn out to be more than merely functional. They are amazingly sophisticated tools that allow for a remarkable amount of user intervention. To the point that iMovie has rekindled the long dormant desire to make "movies," which back when I was still attempting such things we called "films" because they actually used long strands of film as the components in the final product. I gave up on that dream about the time Avid entered the marketplace with their high priced video editing paraphernalia.

Twenty + years later, "non linear editing" software combined with a simple laptop computer have become ubiquitous enough that without looking over my shoulder, I've gotten run over by the "video movement." Which is that everyone wants to make movies. In reality, the software/hardware manufacturers want us to make movies and succumb to our desires to tell stories. Look at the sales literature of the three 800 pound gorillas in the field of NLE software - Apple, Adobe, Avid - and then again at the literature of the dominant hardware lions - Sony, Canon, Nikon - and what they steadfastly insist is the reason for the dispersal of their tools is the need to tell stories.

I say fuck the storytellers, excuse my "French." Many of us are image makers who have refined the ability to tell a story with a single image, or evoke emotions or intellectual curiosity that don't rely upon the repetition of clichéd elements. I won't deny that stories are what captivate us, but as still photographers we've learned to show subtle qualities in a more economical manner than is possible with motion pictures. Movies are incredibly seductive. Given the opportunities, everyone would work on or make them. But the power of the still photograph is still immense. We read and experience them in a different part of the mind and soul. Perhaps it's a place of greater abstraction, one that requires less clarification. But it also empowers the sheer joy of seeing the world - which doesn't require a story or a moving documentary to explain.

Despite this tirade, no doubt I will continue to investigate the hardware/software knockout that has brought incredibly sophisticated motion picture capture tools within the reach of many of us in the comfortable, developed world.

Oh - and BTW, there is a man-made quality to this image: it's ice on a man made pond in a nearby development where we walk nearly every other day.

hither & yon

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There are always interesting combinations to be found. What is most remarkable about this sort of thing is the way the mind can put pieces together that are widely disparate, which may not have been viewed for months. Software only helped find the physical location of the pieces, and then create the combo. But it had nothing whatsoever to do with making the mental connection in the first place.

what was I thinking? (pt 54c)

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Some photographs are perfectly obvious upon viewing at any distance of time. The sunset was gorgeous, the animals were adorable, whatever. This one is more of a problem. What was the reason for the approach to the subject?

It wasn't the scenery I was looking at while wandering around in two feet of snow. The blanked out ground was erased from the composition, creating relationships between the visible elements that are not ordinarily evident. As mentioned previously, somewhat flippantly, I was most certainly attracted to the repaired crack in the concrete block wall, which signals movement of the ground beneath the corner of this building. It jags its way down the wall into the top of the fence, which leaves the two dimensional surface in an almost solid plane that turns 90 degrees and offers a barely opaque plane that disappears out of the frame, creating a tense imbalance. I think I actually saw all this while framing the view. And even more, that eludes me now, some three weeks after the fact.

For some other fascinating views of a walk in the snow, totally different from these, look at where Mauro Thon Giudici has been recently.

what was I thinking? (pt. 54b)

During our recent blizzard, despite my claims that I was never leaving the house again, the morning after my commutation ordeal I did indeed leave the house: long enough to carry a camera a distance of some quarter mile to observe whatever was (not) happening at the "center of town" and expose two rolls of film. On my way, there were some oddities that caught my attention. Looking at the exposures now, I wonder what I had in mind at the time. Maybe it was the cracks in the wall? Shapes in the starkness of the landscape? Or was it the snow on the fence? No, there's hardly any snow on the fence... It was the fence and the crack in the wall and the abstraction created by the two feet of snow. Yeah, that must be it. Whatever...

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I'd like to believe there is less of this sort of questioning going on as I do this photography thing longer. Surely if I can't figure out what I was after, there is little chance of demonstrating to anyone else what it was I was looking to display. Apparently I was "exercising my eye," but hadn't quite gotten warmed up yet. Ordinarily these kinds of exercises get edited out and shuffled into the contact sheet bin. Today I'm interested in the process of finding an image from a recent session that really works for me. We walk around and look and see, releasing the shutter any number of times, but only occasionally do we find subjects that really excite us. What is it that makes the spark?

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Better, but it's a fairly small crop from a 6 x 7 original. Couldn't get closer without trampling on the scene.

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Better still. But the spark didn't last, perhaps because I shortly after this went back inside, tired of struggling through knee high snow.