Spanish Diptych
Photographing in Spain always brings out the BOLD in me. My first trip there was in 1974, and I ended up staying for a while with my girlfriend's mother on Ibiza during the late winter. I was just starting to make photographs; I didn't have a clue what to do with a camera other than push the shutter release. One image I made was of small hilly, mountainous island jutting out of the Mediterranean with the weak winter sun behind it. Later, back home someone saw the photograph and told me what an artist I was. I had never even considered the possibility of being an artist. Bottom line, that photograph plus a couple of others from around New England got me hooked on photography. A year later I quit my day job, I hopped on a Polish freighter, and I moved to Europe with all the accoutrements for a B&W darkroom (Those were the days). Once in France, I started to teach myself photography. That didn't mean I was a photographer yet, even by a long stretch of the imagination. But I had the bug, and I started to learn. During the year-and-a-half that I lived in Europe I spent a lot of time in Spain. And after I came back to the United States, I periodically returned to Spain to visit friends and to photograph. My most recent Spanish sojourn was for my wife's 50th birthday several years ago. It was one of my last trips using film as my primary photographic medium (although I was beginning to dabble with a digital point-and-shoot camera). From that last Spanish visit, here are a pair of Spanish images, bright in color, abstract in composition, intentionally painterly, and without manipulation.
Throwing a Heart in a Glass House
I saw this one on the North Fork on my way to Liz's "the egg lady" farm. It wasn't until I got out of the car and I was about ready to make the capture did I see the heart. (It reminded me of a small heart shaped piece of corral that I once found on a beach a long time ago: I still have it.) And just for fun, I used a real long focal length lens to flatten everything out. Interestingly, there were no clues as to what was being grown inside the greenhouse; maybe bouquets of love.
What Every Back Yard Needs
Here are several more personal architectural images from my pool shoot last week. They're from a small house in East Hampton. The owner bought the property for a quick fix and flip. It is a small, one story 80s vintage bungalow with a great, sloping back yard. Her architect designed a huge wooden wall in front of the house which is what you see to the left in my first image. My pool guy, Mikie, designed an incredible negative edge pool which took advantage of the back yard's steep grade. His mason used the same stone for the veneer of the pool's wall, the patio, and the house foundation's veneer. I like how Mikie picked up the wood theme from the house's front wall, and incorporated it in the back yard's retaining walls. This little Hampton's weekend getaway can be yours for a mere $1.75M.
Boston's Finest
While languishing on the Mystic Bridge in a mind numbing traffic jam back in the '70s, I grabbed this image by sticking my right arm out the passenger side while I was holding a 35mm camera. I really like the graphic quality of white stripes on the motorcycle cops' pants and the white line on the pavement. I also really like the expression on the cop's face who's standing to the right. I'm sure they could have cared less what I liked or what I thought. Looking at an image from that far back, I wonder where these guys are now: if they're still alive, I bet they'd like to have a print of this.
Isabella on the Swing
I captured this image of my friend's daughter, Isabella, last week. I was sitting up on a deck overlooking the backyard where Isabella was just starting to pump herself higher and higher on the swing. For once, I actually had a camera at hand, and I scurried down in front of her. It was twilight, and I purposely avoided using a flash while I made this capture. I mean, how great is the blue rope, her blue dress, and of course, her blurred red hair?
Alex in the Clouds
Yesterday was an incredible early July evening on the beach in Southampton. All of the Saturday's crowds had left by the time my immediate family and I arrived an hour or so before sunset. The brilliant white clouds were paint strokes on a pristine blue canvas. We sat in our beach chairs watching the clouds, the ocean, and my son, Alex, who is an avid skim boarder, sail across the wet sand and retreating backwash of hide tide waves breaking on the shore. After he came out of the ocean, he put on his T-shirt, and challenged all this family members to see who could be the best impromptu rapper. I photographed him as he listened to his aunt's attempts. I love the green of his T-shirt against the blue evening sky over the ocean, and I love him.
Moment2Moment
After taping my fifth 30 minute TV show on local public TV, I thought I would drop in the opening - the first image of my Polaroid book: A Couple of Stops Down at the Speed of Light. This past show and the one next week focus on my Polaroid work dating back to the mid 1970's, up until when Polaroid went belly up, and stopped manufacturing film. By the way, the name of my show is Moment2Moment...35 Years Behind the Ground Glass.
This post also includes the opening title to my show which I designed. Since starting to get involved in TV production and video several months ago, I've immersed myself in video animation, editing and special effects. Needless to say, this a daunting universe and the learning curve is big and steep. But I am surrounded by extremely talented and generous staff, who painstakingly answer all my newbie questions, and they tirelessly make available the TV studio's equipment as well as their own expertise.
An Easter Visual Meditation
I've been a grave yard lurker for a couple of decades; with a camera that is. I've photographed cemeteries in almost every country that I've visited. (One that escaped me was a barren rocky plateau at 20,000 feet in the western Tibet which was reserved for sky burials. A sky burial is where your earthly, dead corpse is left out for the birds (think big Asian vultures) to pick over, resulting in your soul's release and hitching a ride heavenward in the bird's belly. Periodically, someone comes along and sweeps the bone's over the ledge.)
Anyway, the image below was made in Alcamo, Sicily. It's the grave of a young Sicilian girl who died as a teenager, from what I'm not sure. The red flower in the fore ground stopped me, and I paused for a while before and after I made this exposure. It's one of my favorite cemetery images. Initially, I was going to pair it with the dog image from my last post because of the red blossoms, but the colors just didn't work for me.
Sicilian cemeteries are like Italian confectionary; they're in a class of their own. For me they are an irresistible visual overload. They're usually densely packed, often stacked high with mausoleums, ornately populated with statues, reliefs, photographic images of the dead frozen in ceramic permanence, and grandly carved monuments. And all of this is smiled upon by Christendom's grace, and blessed by the local priest's enduring promise of a throughly peaceful, eternal rest. I guess Catholics aren't very concerned about the prevention of their souls ascent or descent by several tons of stone sitting upon their mortal remains.
This cemetery is about as diametrically opposed to an ornate Italian cemetery as you can get. It was on Ambergris Cay off the coast of Belize. I call it sand burial. The Belizean coast is subject to nasty hurricanes. I can only imagine a storm surge coming up and over this little grave yard and wiping the slate clean. It would be kind of like a watery recycling of the dead.
And the last image isn't a cemetery at all. It's a Nepalese crematorium outside of Kathmandu. Most of the population is Hindu who rightly believe in cremating the dead. Their method of choice is a funeral pyre. When they have several pyre's going simultaneously, it kind of smells like Bar-B-Que with too much charcoal starter.
Anyway, Happy Easter everyone and think resurrection.
Just A Whole Lot Going On
I feel as though I have woefully neglected my photography blog over the past month. Well, actually I have neglected it. My attention and efforts have been focused on my foodblog: www.2gourmaniacs.com, and on two television shows that I am doing on local public TV. The first show, Moment2Moment: 35 Years Behind the Ground Glass, is a series of 8 shows, each 30 minutes long where I talk about various photographic portfolios and collections that I have produced over my career as a photographer. I will also have guests photographers and gallery owners who will talk about their work as well. I've taped two shows already, and I think I can say without fear of contradiction that to sit in front of TV cameras for 30 minutes without commercial breaks, and articulate intelligently even about a topic on which you are an expert is a daunting enterprise.
Another big time commitment is selecting my photographic images (50-60 per show and they have to be already digitally scanned, of course), formatting them, digitally sizing them and sequentially putting them in a specific software program in my Mac laptop so it can be later hardwired to an Avid system at the TV studio: that process (or workflow as it's now called) has given me the howling fantods (to quote D.F. Wallace) more than once.
And...and...Rosaria and I start taping our cooking show, 2Gourmaniacs, Crazy 4 Food, the last week of this month. Yipes. And, oh did I mention that I'm querying literary agents for a cookbook entitled The Hamptons' Home Cookbook. Right now, there just doesn't seem to be enough hours in the day.
So, I'll give you three images: 2 color images exposed on film, and a food capture from two days ago. The dog was photographed in Belize twenty years ago, and "Drinks" was photographed ten years ago on Mayreau Island, in the Grenadines. The food image was captured here in Southampton a couple days ago for a blog post about asparagus and stone crab claws....needless to say, they were delicious after the shoot.
Film Strips
What got me looking in my 35mm negative archives were what I call film strips. In the late 70's-early 80's I when I was exposing a lot of 35mm film, I'd bulk load my own cassettes from 100 foot long rolls of 35 mm film. Often, after re-using cassettes over and over, they'd tend to leak light at the beginning and the end of the 36 exposure length of film in the cassettes, typically when I opened the camera to load or unload the film cassettes. Sometimes, interesting things happened with the film from the light leaks. Back then, I printed some of the film strip sequences on 20"x 24" paper, and I liked them a lot. Recently, I scanned a couple of them, and printed them 17"x54". And, I got excited about the film strips again.
Besides their visual quality and uniqueness, I started thinking about the film strips as little movie clips, and I started to let my imagination fill in the space between the moments of each frame. I put a couple of them into Final Cut, and put them on a time line to see what they actually looked like as movie clips. And that game has led to some interesting reading, namely Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, and some Immanuel Kant. It's also brought me back to some David Lynch, Orson Welles, and Akira Kurosawa movies (I can't emphasis how great Welles's Franz Kafka's The Trial is.) Even more recently, I've started to put some non-linear narrative with my film strips. I'm not sure where all this is going at the moment, but I sure like the process, and what I'm thinking about. And I like the film strips as little pieces of my history.
