Wheat 2014

I am not home anymore but on a photo shoot.

Uneventful flight to Spokane yesterday, through Minneapolis. Picked up Budget rental and drove to Colfax, Washington where I'll be for three days.

Where am I? In the heart of the Palouse, the wheat, lentil, barley area in eastern Washington I've photographed in for almost twenty years.

Take a look at:

I missed last year as I was in Iceland.

Early July the wheat crop is about mid thigh level, high enough to be blown in the wind but not so high that it can't support its own weight.

There's no harvesting yet, but that will come soon.

There's a softness to the landscape this time of year and the Palouse is really at its best right now; rich and sumptuous, an epitome of agricultural richness and prosperity.

What's a day like shooting here in late June? Try to get out and on the road by 5 to 5:30. Head north or south, east or west; it doesn't really matter.This is literally thousands of square miles of hilly fields covered in mostly wheat, with Colfax in the center. Best is to pick an unpaved farm road, get lost and roam, looking looking, stopping to set up and shoot, usually right next to the car but sometimes heading off into a field, or climbing a rise for a better vantage point, packing the gear back in the car and driving again, sometimes just around the corner to stop again and sometimes for miles in an endless succession of stops, shoot, drive on and stop, shoot and so on until the light gets flat and bright by 9:30 or so. Back to the hotel, late breakfast/early lunch, download files, pass out and cruise for a few hours only to pack it all in the car again and do the same routine from 5 until the sun sets about 9 pm.

Sometimes, like today, I will shoot midday anyway, even though the light's not at its best. Today was just too good: bright clear blue sky with puffy white clouds.

I am apt to hyperbole about this place but it truly is spectacularly beautiful. Put it on your list of must see places. Not touristy and not flashy, no five star Michelin hotels, food that's nothing to write home about, but simply the best place I know.

Tomorrow I will shoot aerials for an hour or so in the early morning. A first is that I will fly in a Cessna 206. This is a bigger plane than I've flown in before and two side doors will be removed for the flight. Can't wait.

The Wall in Chelsea take 2

Conversation between two readers of the blog. One. relatively clueless and the other, in italics, a little more aware.

______________________________

He's going to subject me to these again?

Yes, he just did them.

Why would he do that?

Guy thinks he's got a hold of something, probably.

I wonder what he's thinking?

Maybe we should read what he's got on his mind.

____________________________________

I know, I just did these and then I just posted about them. Well, I've spent the past few days printing them and they have opened a few doors for me, so I thought I would share whatever perceptions I have about them.

First, an important point, hopefully one that is relevant for you too. This is something fairly new in the medium's history, I believe. I don't think we know much about the pictures we make when we make them. I hope you can follow my logic here. It is partly due to the fact that we are making more pictures now without cost or hindrance (in this our digital world). It is also partly that the devices we use to capture our pictures can be capable of truly astounding quality; meaning detail, subtlety, dynamic range, color depth, ability to make large prints, etc. What does all that mean? That, for the most part in the consumer photo world, pictures are made all the time with no idea of what's really contained in them. In the world I inhabit, the high-end world of "photo as art" presumably the final image is in print form and it is of high quality, with lots of detail, faithfully rendered in all its amazing subtlety. Do I know the picture when I take it? No, not completely. I think I come to terms with my pictures when they become prints.

Back to the subject here which is us taking another look at these:

which were introduced previously here. These ones, showing a chopped up side of a building like some collage, or mosaic, are the core pictures of the series and are what I've been leading up to with the preceding "pipe" pictures.

The series starts with this photograph used on the title page:

A hopeless, leaning-over-too-wide-a-lens-photograph. But it isn't really part of the series. What it is, is a map of the overall wall we are about to see broken down into pieces like a puzzle. I know what you're thinking: jigsaw puzzle box cover. Right? Yes, that's exactly what it is. This image of the whole wall, hopelessly distorted though it may be, is the guide to the pictures about to ensue. So, somehow, all the following 15 or so pictures in the series come from this one wall. With some being shot closer, some overlapping others, one even going vertical and rendered as a 35 x 24 inch print, composited from multiple frames:

So what's my intent? To dissemble and restructure our understanding of something by looking at its composite parts. Isn't this really what photography does? Make analogies and metaphors to larger things and issues? It takes a small slice of something and allows larger and more universal stuff to flow out.

So, if I can build a framework around the series it is this: the earlier ones (as in the two above) are contained by this stupid pipe that runs through them. This is my way of telling you that they are connected, that no image here rests on its own, that they relate to each other, not literally as I've framed them in a discontinuous way, but that one precedes the other, or that one follows another and so on. This then gives you a process by which you can begin to form an understanding of a pattern that would make up a whole in the next ones, which don't give you this guide of a pipe going through them. Make sense? I hope so.

Back to my original point. What did I know when I took the pictures? Well, honestly, not everything. I "learned" the pictures while I was printing them. This is another reason I believe in the follow through that is printing our pictures. Don't print and you don't know. Simple enough.

This finishes my breakdown of the dissembled series called "The Wall".

___________________

Ok. So now I've read it.

Does it make sense?

Well, certainly more than it did before. It did make me realize that there can be a lot more to pictures than just what they look like at first glance.

I think probably part of his point is that we all should be looking at things maybe a little harder, particularly when they are rendered beautifully and presented on a gallery wall.

Man, I can't wait to see the prints of these now that I've read all this stuff about them.

Well, he shows at 555 Gallery in Boston. I bet he's got the prints there.

I think I read somewhere that he's going away again and he is leaving these and some other portfolios behind at the gallery so that people can come in to see the work.

Guy gets to travel, doesn't he?

Yeah, and they all seem to be these photo trips he takes. Wish I could do that.

Heh, do you know the works of Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Piet Mondrian, Ellsworth Kelley and Aaron Siskind?

No, never heard of them. Rock band or something?

No, not so much. Forget I asked.

Ok.

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The Wall in Chelsea

The Wall pictures are new, as of June 2014. They are from Chelsea, MA.

These are in sequence.

Think they're good.

Wonder if you do.

Try these on:

First one just a placeholder, to orient you where I am shooting, not intended to be part of series. Will serve as thumbnail on title page like so:

Series starts here. There is some correction for convergence.

The ones with the pipe in them, the five below, run to six in the full portfolio. The pipe is the visual device intended to provide continuity through this sub group and need to be hung left to right in a single row.

But the pipe pictures really serve as the preamble to the core of the series which is these next three:

of which there are six in the printed portfolio (I have to hold something back), then to begin to finish here with the roughly center framed door.

Then to the last one, which is the only one that lets you out, the idea being that the negative space of the sky becomes surface much like those in some of the earlier ones that have panels that were also light blue.

And finally, there is a bit of back story. There always is.The day I shot these I loaded up my bike on the top of my car, drove over the Tobin Bridge, parked in an empty lot in Chelsea and rode throughout the city until I stopped here to make these pictures. After I did these I rode down by the water and made another series (that I am working on now). I rode back to my car to put the bike back on the car and walked over to Mystic Brewery, where I tasted a couple of very fine beers and took the tour of the brewery.

My idea of heaven on earth in a day.

Last Weekend MV 2014

Last week I went down to Martha's Vineyard for a couple of days after returning from North Carolina. I went to see Steinunn and Finur, my two hosts at the Baer Art Center in Iceland last summer, where I was an artist in residence. They had come to the Vineyard to experience it and were staying in a rental home not far from the airport. We had a couple of dinners together. It was wonderful to see them and to meet more of their family as well.

While waiting to board the ferry to the island in Woods Hole, I saw that that there were many antique cars waiting as well. They were from a MASS Antique Auto Club and were headed to an Oak Bluffs hotel for the weekend. I didn't think much of it, except to say to myself, "might be good to go over there and check it out if you have time."

The weather was terrible the whole time I was on the island, gray and wet. This turned out for the best as the day I was leaving I did drive over to Oak Bluffs in the early morning to see the cars. It was one of those summer mornings where the air isn't moving and everything is dripping wet. I got the camera out of the back of the car and it had the long lens on it, the same one I'd used for most of the Monsters pictures. Switch to a shorter lens? Put the camera on a tripod? No and no. A fateful decision but a good one, as it turned out. In sunlight these immaculately restored automobiles would be the same old same old but wet from the night's rain... well, you tell me:

Pity you can't see the prints as they are freaking amazing! (modest aren't I?) But seriously: flat light, a very sharp long lens and these beautiful surfaces covered with a mosaic of water drops and painted these super rich colors...well, no hyperbole here but, really.

(These two, one above and one below, are with sincere apologies to my friend Elizabeth Ellenwood as she shoots wires and may believe that wires are her domain.)

Once again, if you look at these on your smart phone only you should be arrested by the "Image Quality Police" or, at least, fined.

I sense a little cynicism here, a little reticence to endorse these pictures and the second great coming that they truly are. Well, you can't really make an informed decision by just looking at them at 72dpi online, can you?

Want to see the real prints, the ones that I am saying are FREAKIN' AMAZING? If you're local, call up 555 Gallery (857-496-7234) and tell them you want Rantoul's new Car pictures there ASAP, please, and we will make that happen. I mean it. If you're not local to the Boston area, then plan a trip soon as you simply have to see these to believe them. If you don't get to see these prints it is simply your loss.

There. Done.

Marion, NC 2014

While teaching at Penland in North Carolina we took a couple of field trips. Three days after class started we went to Marion, NC to photograph and meet up for lunch. I had driven through the town on the way to Penland and thought it would be a good place for us to explore. We enjoyed the town and had a great lunch at Bruce's Fabulous Foods on Main Street.

I made a few pictures that day that whetted my appetite for more, so snuck away twice more, one on a slow afternoon when students were out working on their own and one other day after class was over.