Offshore in Mexico
Middle to late November always leaves me thinking about being at sea. It's the season for southbound sailboat deliveries on the Atlantic coast of the US. Delivering a sailboat from, say, Montauk to Tortola ... is kind of like being a New York City cop. It's 98.5% of the time just doing your watch, fixing the mechanical problem of the moment, eating (DEFINITELY NO ALCOHOLIC DRINKING), reading, reading, more reading, cooking and bread baking (for me), writing, listening to Herb (weather guy @1500 hrs), sleeping, checking way points and keeping a weather eye on the radar and the GPS, and then .... the other 1.5% of the time can be sheer terror. There is no lonelier feeling than being at sea, especially on a sailboat less than 3o meters, out on the big bad blue, in the middle of a full blown storm: not a gale, but a rip snortin', I-want-to-make-you-puke, hear-it-in-the-stays storm. You feel very,very small and very, very alone. Over two hundred miles offshore, no one is going to fly out to rescue you; 500 miles or more offshore whatever happens, you're sticking with the boat.
The image above was from a day cruise across the bay off the coast of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, on arguably the nicest, finest, power yacht I've ever been on: the Machiavelli. The occasion was a good friend's 45th birthday. His bride, my good friend, flew 26 of their closest and dearest down for his birthday celebration from NYC. And without going into details, it was a glorious day. As we crossed the bay, whales were breaching, and the weather in late January was extraordinary. The inside of the vessel smelled wonderful: it smelled of well oiled teak, salsa, Mexican chicken, fresh green salads, perhaps a little of spilled tequila that we had for lunch, and of course the sea.
I made a lot of exposures that day. A couple of them were all right. My friend who was celebrating his birthday handed me his digital camera; I'm not sure what it was, I think it was a Canon, and I loved the instantaneous aspect of it. I became a shooting fool as we returned back to where we had departed that morning. I stopped and looked over my shoulder. I saw the mist filtering the coast astern, and I picked up my Hasselblad for one last exposure. Topside, it was getting chilly as the sun set in the west. Someone buddied up next to me, and he had a large pour of Tequila in one hand for me. I smiled, actually, I laughed, tossed it back and felt the warmth swim through my belly.
I watched the light change over the coast behind me. I thought about Edward Weston sailing to Mexico from Southern California in the mid 1920's on a slow tramp steamer with his 8x10 wooden camera and his girl friend Tina Modotti. I kind of nodded at the misty coastline behind me. And then I thought about my days and nights, and sometimes, weeks at sea delivering sailboats. It always feels good to have water under my feet.
All Saint's Day on 23rd Street
Not only was it All Saint's Day, but it was the first cold, blustery day in NYC this fall. Everyone was bundled up against the northwest wind, I heard a lot of grumbling about the weather. Actually, it was a crisp afternoon with a cloudless blue sky. The light was just perfect as the sun was arcing over New Jersey in the late afternoon. I never was all that interested in taking quick, little images of New York buildings until recently. I had just come out of Eataly on 23rd at 5th, looked up and saw the Fuller Building also known as the Flat Iron Building. I couldn't resist. I've looked at that building for years, both in person as well as in photographs, like Alfred Stiegltiz's 1903 image of it. I've always envied those who have offices right there on the "bow" of the building. The view has to be spectacular looking across Madison Square Park, up 5th Avenue to the left and Madison Avenue to the right. And I'd really like to take a close look at the statuary sitting on the roof.
Salisbury Beach
I've been thinking about E publishing a couple of my photography books. There are a bunch of options available: i'm undecided which format etc. to use. But while I ponder that issue, I've been revisiting the books and the work in them. One is tentatively called Off Season. It is a body of photographs taken over twenty years documenting Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts during the winter months. Salisbury Beach is a small ocean town who's heyday has long passed. Left are a collection of small cottages and two story houses which rent during the summer for very reasonable rates; and during the winter, some of them house a colorful collection of temporary tenants.
During the late seventies and early eighties, I lived south of Salisbury Beach, across the Merrimac River, in Newburyport. Though it might be argued by some that knew me then, that I, how shall I put this, misappropriated my time during those years, I, in fact, spent hours and hours photographing in and around that part of New England, and then after exposing negatives, I'd spend hours and hours making prints in the darkroom. It was during that time I became a real photographer and started to become a master printer. Early on I was influenced by Minor White who started the Visual Language Workshop at M.I.T., and later, by Harry Callahan who taught at R.I.S.D. Clearly, it was Callahan who set me off on my way to making photographs in Salisbury Beach.
On winter afternoons, I'd bundle up and drive over to Salisbury Beach. I walk around for a couple of hours taking pictures until it started to get dark. Then I hop back into the car, drive across the river, and go into the darkroom to process film. The next morning I'd make contacts and work prints. I repeated this process several times a week during January and February. I looked forward to winter storms which would lash the New England coast, and would sometimes almost bury some of the small cottages at Salisbury Beach. Every afternoon would be different there.
The other subject I worked with at Salisbury were the cars. What an incredible collection of old cars were parked there, abandoned or simply left to hibernate during the winter. I look at them now in the photographs and I still smile and shake my head.
I left Massachusetts in the late eighties. But I continued to return to Salisbury Beach periodically to check in and to photograph. In the nineties I started making colored images as well as black and white. By then, I had a state of the art color lab. Just like in the old days, I couldn't wait to return from Salisbury Beach, process film and print. It's been awhile since I've stopped at Salisbury Beach: it feels like I'm overdue.
Immediately below is the dust jacket layout for Off Season.
Below that, I've included a small slideshow of images from Off Season. Simply click on the "FS" button for full screen, and then the "SL" to start the slide show. When you're finished click on the ESC key to return to my home page.
Salisbury Beach
More From My Little Friend
October light is amazing on the Eastern End of Long Island, especially on cloudless afternoons. The day before yesterday, around four o'clock in the afternoon, the sunlight was bouncing and jumping on the water outside. I walked around and captured a red spike plant against the shimmering reflection with my four thirds Panasonic Lumix and the funky little "c" mount Cooke cine lens opened wide up. I love the little green"dust" stuff on the spike leaf to the left, the squiggly light thingie at the top of the leaf,and the big white bokeh "bubbles" center top. It's almost as though you're looking up at the sun from under water.
What's Up In Alto Jalisco?
At first, when I decided to post some images from a documentary job that I shot last summer in Jalisco, Mexico, I thought the common theme would be photographs of things that I had to look up at in order to photograph them. Then I started to tone map a couple of the digital files. And then I tone mapped this one.
It was my bed room at a hacienda in Arandus, a small agricultural town in Alto Jalisco. After a busy day of photographing how you make tequila, and then how you consume tequila, how could you resist sinking into the warm (hot?) embrace of this little number. It looks like Satan's guest room. Anyway, once I decided that this would be the lead image for this post, I dropped the looking up theme and included some other images which I tone mapped. Instead of saturating my post with the images, I set them up as a simple slide show. Just click on FS for full screen, SL for the slideshow to run and ESC to return to my home page.
Alto Jalisco
Say Hello To My Little Friend
I'm just getting into four/thirds. So what's a four third? It's a digital camera format developed by Panasonic and also embraced by Olympus. I recently bought a used Panasonic G-1 with a 14mm-40mm lens on Ebay for next to nothing.It's a small interchangeable lens digital camera producing a 12 mp file. It's tiny compared to my Nikon D700. The image quality is fantastic. Four/thirds refers to the size of the sensor. Without sounding like a spokes person for Panasonic, let me say the really cool thing about this camera is its ability to use almost any existing 35mm format lens; i.e. Leica M's, Nikons AI, Canons, through the use of adapters. The thing to consider is that because the G-1 sensor is small, a regular 35mm focal length lens is twice the focal length value for the G-1. In other words a normal 35mm camera lens would be a 50mm; that lens on a G-1 becomes a telephoto 100mm. Having said that, I found a Taylor Hobson Cooke 25mm f 1.5 cine lens and mounting it on my G-1 with a "C" mount adapter, I started shaking hands with a potentially great little system.
Consider this image. The swirling bokeh effect is the Cooke lens opened all the way up. I made three different exposures, hand held, each with a 2 stop different EV. (The G-1 does this effortlessly with a quick settings adjustment.) The files were RAW file format, and after downloading them into my computer, I opened them up in PhotoMatrix and let that application work its digital magic. While I was still in PhotoMatrix, I performed some tonemapping, processed the file as a High Definition Range (HDR). Sounds like a long way to go. It's really not. (I resisted HDR for a long time as being too gimmicky: but I must admit I've fallen under its spell.)
I was in Manhattan for several days this past week, and I used my G-1 for some street shooting. The first image is a reflection in a Jim Polshek building, The Cornell Weill Medical Research building on the corner of 70th Street and York Avenue. It's a straight capture using the 14mm-40mm lens that came with the camera.
The second image is an unmanipulated capture of a standpipe. You have to love the reds against the black. I think the resolution is great. i can't wait to see where my little friend and I go.
One Favorite Rowboat Photograph
A short while ago, I was down-east Maine, up on Deer Isle in Penobscot Bay. I was tucked away in a cozy little cottage right on the rocky Maine coast. It was in early August, the sky was bright, and the weather warm. And of course, the air was briny from the breaking Atlantic ocean on the rocks near by. There was a small floating dock with this rowboat hauled up on it. I looked at it for awhile, then sat down on the bank above it, and looked at it some more. I watched the seagulls wheeling overhead, and I imagined being at sea just off the maine coast. Then I look out my Hasselblad, looked at the rowboat again, and I made one exposure. In The Day Books, Weston talks about feeling for the exposure. I've always believed in that: more than just the exposure, though. I like to imagine the image before I make the exposure or the capture.
A Photograph from an Afghan Refugee Camp in Pakistan
As I mentioned in my last post, I spent some time photographing in the Afghan refugee camps in the northwester territories of Pakistan in the 1990's. At that time, I believe there were nearly seven million displaced Afghans living in Pakistan, many were in refugee camps. Conditions varied from location to location. There were a lot of children running around in the camps who had been fathered by Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, and then, of course, after the Soviets left, they were abandoned and ostracized along with their mothers.
The image below has always stuck in my mind. The boy's attitude and cockiness is so compelling, especially juxtaposed with the boy next to him: clearly his father wasn't Russian. I've often wondered what became of him. While reading The Kite Runner and The Bookseller of Kabul, this kid constantly popped into my head.
Stadium Spectators in Lahore
Certainly, the current American perception of Pakistan is not a particularly positive one. My experience in Pakistan was largely focused on documenting the making of high quality, hand made oriental rugs. I traveled in the Punjab, in the north, and the northwestern tribal territories. I stayed in Peshawar, I photographed in Afghan refugee camps, I went up the Khyber Pass to the Afghan border.
I was always treated with respect, and in some cases with warm, gracious hospitality. Having said that, there were some places you just didn't want to go as an American in particular and a western in general. I always wanted to travel to the extreme north in Pakistan, up past the Swat Valley, into the Karakorum (think K2 and the Hindu Kush). As it becomes more and more dangerous for Americans to be wandering around in Pakistan, it seems that ambition is on the back burner.
I made the image below one afternoon walking past a stadium in Lahore. As I've mentioned in past posts, I collect images in bodies of work: one of which is images of bicycles. What initially caught my eye were the bicycles with little pennants on the front fenders. Then I saw the white wall and the spectators. I still can't take my eye off the gentleman with the cigarette. I like the way he and the other man look right into my camera, right into my eyes.
My Big Phat Wedding Day Photograph
My daughter, Julia, spent a bunch of hours this past year rummaging through my Polaroid and work print archives looking for family photographs. When she found this work print, she told me how much she liked it. I hadn't seen it in a long time, and I never made a finished print of it. When she pointed it out to, I immediately thought of the Bruce Davidson photograph of the young girl fixing her hair in front of a cigarette machine with a mirror at Coney Island.
I made this photograph on my wedding day. That's my intended getting ready, applying mascara; and she just had her hair done in a style I've never seen the likes of since. I especially like the way the frame is divided in half by the back of her head. That's my grandfather's old Rollei which was my point-in-shoot camera at the time. When I went to scan the negative the other day, I found that it had suffered some serious deterioration including some kind of fungus yuck growing on a part of it. I'm lucky enough to have a Creo IQ3smart scanner which also has an oil mounting station. Simply put, through an oil mounted scan of the negative most of the yuck was minimized, and it required very little photoshopping. But, even so, the color is still out of wack, snd there is huge grain/noise in the shadow areas. For me, that's not a liability with this image: it gives it an old school quality. It's as if we could have been a couple of the kids in Davidson's photograph, now all grown up, about ready to get married.
