somewhere around the corner...

 

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This is how I'm feeling about now. While all is overtly working out well - near as I can tell, at least - there is some nagging feeling that I'm going about things in an awkward and round about fashion. But it could be that I'm spending entirely too much time at work, and not enough on photography. My own, that is, rather than reading about other people's thoughts about what is or isn't dead. You'd think there was another crisis in faith, ala the God Is Dead  revolution of the 60's.

Be that as it may, I need to go lie down. 

excuses

 

The weather for today turned out to be exactly as predicted: 100% cloud cover, but only a 40 - 50% chance of precipitation. The leaves are finally off the trees, for the most part. In other words, perfect conditions to work on my Courthouse Project. Yet here I am, still in the basement typing. What are the excuses for today's lack of desire?

• Could it be that I stayed up too late Friday reading and "experimenting" with VueScan and ColorNeg? I'm not sure my results are even worth bothering to write about at this point. But by the time I finally went to bed, I had already nodded off several times in front of the screen.
• Could it be that I woke up too early?
• Could it be that there were planned activities for the day - CLW dancing at the Paramount; dinner out with friends; retrieving CLW from her friends - so no rest was available for the missed sleep the night before?
• Could it be that by the time we got home and I had done a bit more reading it was "too late" to get motivated to empty the van, load film holders, and get my pack together for an early departure this morning?
• Could it be that I never looked at the past exposures of Amelia and Lunenburg counties that I thought I was reshooting?
• Could it be that after referring to the sun plots that I created with this cool bit of software, it looked likely that I would end up with the same results that I already have after driving two hours one way?
• Could it be that I'm having second and third and fourth doubts about this project, even though I'm only a little more than half done and it's already two years old?
• Could it be that the idea and design of the project are from a time when I was looking to do something specific with a view camera which I didn't have much experience with?
• Could it be that I was looking for excuses to stay home today?

Looks like I found my excuses.

Instead of driving for four to five hours, I walked around the house with the Mamiya and a couple of rolls of Delta 400. I almost - but not quite - even had some fun doing it. 

the truth of the matter is...

 

Let's play tag:

This article was reported here, and then questioned about here. So I'll put in my for what it's worth here.

Beckerman's article doesn't ask me to question what we photograph, as Colin has wondered, as much as it makes me painfully aware of the limitations of still photography. How can we hope to contain a lifetime in a single frame? Or for that matter, in even a series of stills? The cinema has a hard enough time even with showing us 90 - 180 minutes worth of still photographs that include sound to help paint the picture. Even then the standard Hollywood biopic usually gets it horribly wrong.

Where is the truth in this medium of manipulation? I tend to believe that this problem of exclusion is so much worse when portrait photography is the subject under discussion. Fundamentally I don't "get" this kind of photograph. What can I learn from a single photograph, even when it has the power of an artist such as Avedon, or Defarmer behind it? There are surface appearances which through accumulation and repetition - I think of Sander - give us generalities about the human condition. But never the specifics of a lifetime, even when they're as graphic as the photographs of Eugene Richards. I know I'm being a philistine about this. And it's why I photograph the landscape. The story of which can never be told in a photograph unaccompanied by words either.

Photography ultimately deals in surface impressions. There is not much weight, or depth,  to what it shows. There is really no substantive element to photography. It is fine for making a joke or showing black and white contrasts between opposing elements, either within the frame or within the consciousness of the viewer. But to tell me the "truth" about a life, I need biography or a passport to accompany someone through their life.

But I'll probably change my mind next week. 

photojournalism or still life cinema?

 

world's largest push-pin

While recently trespassing on some No Man's Land terrain, an activity that is nearly impossible to not do when exploring many places in the eastern United States if not in a public parkland, I was reminded of the kinds of imagery that used to strike my imagination when I attempted to create small cinema narratives. I was intrigued by a location and the potential for its discovery, as if coming upon it for the first time ever. In this case, it was emerging from the forest onto a large open earthen dam, a water retention declivity during times of intense rain run off. There are a number of visual elements in this location, and they certainly cannot all be contained within the scope of a single image.

What's really the best form for such an investigation? A static succession of still images that doesn't really give much of an impression of movement into the landscape? Or literally moving the camera in some kind of film/video POV forward movement? I've always been much enamored with the "reality" presented by the long takes that were choreographed for such films as Weekend, Touch of Evil, which is discussed by characters in a similarly long take at the beginning of The Player, and especially the end of The Passenger. Obviously the resources brought to bear for these films is unavailable to me for a rather random visual experiment.

So an alternative of some sort must be found. But it is the film La Jetee, a 1960's experimental masterpiece by Chris Marker, that most often comes to mind when considering how else to do something like this. A film that consists entirely of still frames - except for one exquisite moving image - this is the grand daddy of ways to tell a story with still images, and a voice over.

Since I know nothing about the history of the photo documentary style of story telling, I don't know what to draw on from that realm. It's not likely though to include investigations of the landscape, at least not in the specific detailed manner I imagine.

Well, I see I've lapsed into enough generalities during the course of the several hours it's taken to compose these few words, that the train of thought has petered out long ago. In essence I'm looking for a form to use to tell about discovering a new landscape location with a series of photos. Whether the experiment will get beyond the conceptual stage is another matter entirely. 

whose truth?

 

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Mark Hobson, at the Landscapist, seems to insist here that one photograph is more true than another photograph. It seems all photographs are true, to a certain extent. I hate to have to resort to the secular humanist's subjecivity, but here it is anyway. Can one photograph be "truer" than another? We determine the degree of truthiness of something by its degree of exclusion - what it leaves out - rather than what it includes, because it obviously cannot include everything. If we are asking a photograph to express the essentail nature of a thing, or a place, or a time, once again there is only the subjective viewpoint of the photographer.

My response to Mark's request for comments is at a later entry, here. 

a new hobby

 

 
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 I've decided that I'm going to learn how to do some trick roping. It's going to take some time. But that's okay. It's already - after some 5-8 hours of practice - become something of a meditation thing. Spin the rope over and over again, trying to figure out what is different about the few times that it works more correctly than the times when it hits my leg or the ground. Tonight it appeared as if I will indeed be able to spin a flat loop, the most basic of tricks. I got it to work quite a few times, and even accomplished rolling the rope over in my hand while spinning, so that it doesn't become hopelessly tangled.

It's been a long time since I decided that I would take something up that I know nothing about and determined that I am going to succeed at it. Of course the definition of "success" has to be measured in terms of low expectations.  The first two or three hours were pretty hopeless, and even now that it's going better, I can't say definitely what I'm doing differently. What surely is different, is the determination to accomplish something totally alien to most of my body of knowledge and accomplishments.

William Cronon

After I posted a comment yesterday about the influence that William Cronon is having upon me, Mark Hobson at the Landscapist quoted rather extensively from Cronon's essay. My statement has a quote from the essay as well. I'm not even going to bother to quote from the essay here. Go and read it for yourself by following this link. Or read Hobson's engaging commentary.