Guest Hand Towels
May and June light are amazing on the East End of Long Island; that is, when the sun comes out. Actually, the fog light has been pretty amazing as well, and it seems we've had a lot more of that than sunlight. Anyway, afternoon sunlight was pouring into my downstairs bathroom yesterday, and it splashed all over the guest towels. I was walking past the doorway with my little four-thirds panasonic in my hand when I saw this.
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.
Photographing Streets...Literally
Since 1980-1981, my point-and-shoot format has been 120/220 or better known as medium format. I've always been attracted to the square format as opposed to rectilinear, and 120/220 film size is substantially larger than 35mm so that prints from 120/220 offer better definition, and they have a quality unlike 35mm. The last 35mm film I exposed was 1992: before that, however, I made a lot of 35mm black & white negatives. With the exception of Polaroid SX-70, 35mm color slides where the only color photographic medium available to me. And what do you do with slides? Having said that, I've been burrowing into my 35mm black & white negative archive. I'm not sure what still works and what doesn't. These two were indicative of what I was doing in the late 1970's. I was purposely blurring images, shooting with Diana Cameras, and learning how to print negatives that often were grossly over-exposed. Both of these were exposed in Paris in the winter of 1977. I remember I was looking down a lot, and taking pictures of what was under foot.
A Whale of a Whale
I was rooting around in my New York City negative archives from the early 1990's. I came across a bunch of 4x5 negatives. I didn't realize how much street photography I did back then with an old hand held 4x5 Crown Graphic. Not much of the work stands the test of time, but I like this one. Aside from the graphic quality of the billboard, I like the two cabs waiting for their turn in the carwash. Like old movies where you can date the film by the vintage of the cars that appear in the movie, the same holds true for photographic images. Looking at the two cabs, you know you looking at something late 80's to early 90's.
A Black & White Self-Portrait
I'm considering putting together a portfolio of self-portraits. Periodically, I've made self portraits for as long as I've been making photographs. My earliest recollection of this activity was when I was, I don't know, eight or nine years old. My mother had just bought the first Polaroid Land Camera. I was fascinated by it; or rather, by the instant pictures it produced. I was home from school one day, and I purloined the camera, open it, and set it up on a table. I got a long thin stick, maybe a four or five foot dowel, and held it in my hand. I stood in front of the camera, posing while I slapped at the red shutter release button with the stick. Finally, I tripped the shutter, and I made the exposure. I wish I had the print today. I can vividly recall the process of making my first self-portrait, how it took me numerous taps of the stick on the shutter release button to trip it, but I don't really recall what the image looked like. It's as if it didn't get enough fix bath in my mental darkroom, and it faded long ago.
This self-portrait is my most recent...about three hours ago.
Hots Seats-Lake Titicaca, Bolivia
I've been looking at my body of color photographs which has a chair or a seat as the common theme. My first inclination was to set up a slide show in this post showing about a dozen or so of the images from the collection. Then, I thought I'd just show this one. Hot Seats epitomizes what really works for me with the chair/seat work: I love the seats themselves (I wish I had a set of four of these little numbers for my deck on sunny, summer afternoons). I really like the pattern of the re-bar grill over the windows. And, of course the poster of the two children which was pasted on the wall across the street, and becomes scaled just right in the photograph, is what makes this image exceptional for me.
I was going to get into where this was in Bolivia, how I got there...blah,blah,blah...I'll spare you...you know the old cliche...a picture is worth...
Alex in the Morning Sunlight
My 16 year old son, Alex, is home from school for winter break. I was about to step down into the kitchen this morning when I saw him sitting at the kitchen island about ready to have breakfast. The sunlight pouring all over his back from the glass wall was just too stunning to ignore. My little four-thirds cameras was lying on a table close by and I made this capture before he moved or I had to ask him to pose which he usually hates.
Everything is Snow Covered and Frozen
There's been a couple days' reprieve between weather events. Yesterday, it actually got above freezing for several hours, and today it was sunny and cold. January light can be so blue and crystal clear. Everything stands out in sharp focus. Some one told me that it hasn't snowed this much in Southampton since 1925. Anything on the ground is frozen and buried in snow and ice.
Walking down by the bay beach where I live, I found a small patch of water that wasn't frozen; it's part of a small inlet and because of the big tide, it has remained ice free so far. I really like the pattern of the duck's feet in the snow. It amazes me that they can sit and frolic in that ice cold water, happily quacking, and flapping their wings.
