Category: Art
Because I Still Like Black & White…
…this is an important test of the new camera. How well does it do without color?
There are so many controls built into the camera itself, that I can virtually forgo Photoshop—at least until I learn all the ins and outs of the device itself. But I did do this image in color and turned it B & W in Photoshop.
First Image
I’ve been dutifully reading the manuals for the new camera, even though in some cases it is high order calculus to my primitive mind. Still, I wanted to show something for the expense and the effort, so…here is the first image, from Saturday evening.
Whenever possible, I like to start with something DRAMATIC!
Biting Bullets
- Posted on
- – 1 Comment on Biting Bullets
Okay, so today was the day. The Day. After procrastinating for many reasons, both rational and just perverse, Donna and I plunked down our plastic and walked out of ye olde camera emporium with my new camera. I’ve been talking to people, some of them extremely knowledgeable (internet wave to Jennifer—“Thank You!”), and reading blogs and consumer reports and websites and agonizing and today it culminated in A Purchase.
Was a time, mind you, that this would have been the cause of a couple of days of decision-making. I used to be one of the Go-To people about matters photographic. If I needed a new piece of equipment, the only question was, could I afford it this week or did I have to wait a few more weeks.
But this was a chunk of change, an issue of moment, and on something of which I am less than qualified. After having dipped into as much printed material as I could stand, I ultimately had to go talk to a real live salesperson and Make A Decision.
Rob at Schiller’s Camera was very helpful a couple of weeks back. Salesman after my own heart. He answer my questions, didn’t push, took out camera after camera for comparison, and new his stuff. After a couple hours, we’d narrowed the field to two, and after going over all the relevant stuff afterward, I made my choice.
A Canon EOS 60D. My new machine. I’ve spent most of today reading the owner’s manual and playing with it. It will take a long time to master all the stuff this thing will do, but I can already take a photograph with it and this will only improve. (I’m an intuitive kind of guy when it comes to this sort of thing. Take it out and road test it, carry it as an extension of my limbs and eyes for months on end, snap away thousands of frames, learn the mechanism until I can make the necessary adjustments reflexively. Just there’s a lot more to learn on this than I’m used to—and it will make movies.)
I haven’t put up any new images on the Zenfolio site in a bit. It will still be a while before I do—I have to download the new software for the file transfers, get used to how these files work in Photoshop, and actually, you know, take some new pictures I think worth showing The World. But the next new gallery will be from this beauty. It’s an impressive camera. It feels right. I think it’s the beginning of a beautiful relationship.
Rewrites and Retirement
For the next several weeks I’ll be engaged in rewriting a novel, one I thought I’d finished with a few years back. One of the frustrating things about this art is that often you cannot see a problem with a piece of work right away. It sometimes takes months to realize what is wrong, occasionally years. You work your butt off to make it as right as possible and then, a few years and half a dozen rejections later, you read it again and there, in the middle of it (sometimes at the beginning, once in a while at the end) is a great big ugly mess that you thought was so clever when you originally wrote it. You ask yourself, “Why didn’t I see that right away?” There is no answer, really. It looked okay at the time (like that piece of art you bought at the rummage sale and hung up so proud of your lucky find, but that just gets duller and uglier as time goes on till you finally take it down with a sour “what was I thinking?”) and you thought it worked, but now…
This is what editors are for. This is what a good agent is supposed to do. This is the value of another set of eyes.
Anyway, that’s what I’ll be doing. And I have the time because last week I “retired” from the board of directors of the Missouri Center for the Book. I served for nine years, five of them as president. Per the by-laws, after nine years a board member must leave for a time. This is vital, I think, because burn-out is like that manuscript you thought was so perfect—sometimes it take someone else to notice that everything’s not up to par.
During my tenure as president, a few changes were made, Missouri got a state poet laureate with the MCB as the managing organization, and a cadre of new board members revitalized the whole thing. Look for some good programs to come out of them in the next few years.
What I find so personally amazing is the fact that I got to do this. I mean, be president of essentially a state organization. Small budget, sure, but it is connected to the Library of Congress and we do deal with the governor’s office and what we do has relevance for the whole state. I started out doing programming for them and for some reason they thought I should be in charge. Well, that’s a story for another time. Suffice to say, I have no qualifications (on paper) for that position. None. The first year I got the job I characterized my management approach as throwing spaghetti. Something was bound to stick.
It was an education. And I got to work with some very talented people and made some friends who are inestimable. My horizons were expanded and I was able to play in a sandbox of remarkable potential.
The timing couldn’t be better, though. I have this novel to rewrite and, as it is the first part of a projected trilogy, I thought I’d go ahead and finish the second book after I fix the first one. Yes, there are things in the offing which I shan’t discuss right now—as soon as I know anything concrete, you will, should you be reading this—and Donna has graciously cut me another several months’ slack to get this done. She is priceless.
Meantime, I may be posting here a bit less. Not much. But a bit.
Stay tuned.
Scene From A Frozen Moment
Winter is not my favorite time of year. When I was a kid it was different. Snow was fun (and we had a lot of it then—global warming deniers notwithstanding, a “normal” St. Louis winter used to begin with snow in mid December, between ten inches and two feet of it on the ground pretty much continually through the end of January, sometimes well into February; the last time we had something approximating a traditional St. Louis winter was maybe 1986) and I built snow forts and had snowball fights with the best of them.
Then I started driving and got a job. Not so much fun anymore.
But despite my curmudgeonly resentment of precipitate winters like this one, I am forced to admit that there is great beauty to be found and the eponymous Winter Wonderland has marvels to offer.
Now, if only it didn’t last so long…
Blind Spots
- Posted on
- – 5 Comments on Blind Spots
It’s almost sacrilege to admit to disliking certain things. People who regard themselves as culturally aware, artistically sensitive, aesthetically sophisticated must occasionally find themselves faced with work that has such apparent popular appeal among those they consider simpatico which they frankly do not care for or do not understand or both. Uttering their honest opinion can be the equivalent of farting in church.
So they suppress that opinion, perhaps nod politely and even go so far as to find some pseudo-intellectual way of understanding the thing disliked so they can at least be seen as trustworthy within their circles. It really is a case of the Emperor’s new suit.
I suppose what we’re talking about is a blind spot. Sometimes you just have a kind of aesthetic aphasia, you really can’t see (or hear) what everyone else is so on about. You could put it down to taste, but that’s a mild word, connoting a kind of passive difference of opinion. It fails to describe your true reaction or, more tellingly, the possible sham going on around certain artists.
Years ago I had a conversation with the artist Rick Berry, whose work I both admire and occasionally love, about one of my blind spots—Jackson Pollack. I gave him my opinion, that this is crap masquerading as art because by now a lot of reputations have been built upon the propagation of the idea that this is somehow Great Art. I look at a Pollack and I see squiggles. I watch films of Pollack working and I see advanced fingerpainting in action. I realize this is a kind of heresy and I’ve often received looks ranging from pity to revulsion for expressing this feeling.
Berry nodded. He said he’d felt the same way for years. Then one day, walking through a museum, past a Pollack, he glimpsed something out of the corner of his eye and ended up sitting in front of the painting for a couple of hours. Since then, he’s grown to love Pollack. I asked him if he’d come to the conclusion that Pollack was, in fact, a great artist, and he said “I don’t know, but I know I like it.”
That is unassailable. It is absolutely personal, it is absolutely subjective, and has nothing to do with any universal qualities in a given piece of work or possessed by a particular artist. I make a distinction myself between work I think is Good and work I simply like. They are often the same, but occasionally I like something that I can in no way defend as good.
However, I sometimes wonder at the adulation poured on certain artists for work that is simply mediocre if not an outright scam. Adulation that transcends the simple metric of “I like it” and goes on to become bodies of apologia, written by people who seem compelled to find a reason, a justification, for liking something that has little to recommend it except as an eccentric appeal. These people start the avalanche that eventually becomes part of the liturgy of cultural in-group vetting. To not think this or that is tremendous, brilliant, a work of genius is to be revealed as philistine, sub-par, suspect, common.
This morning I was reading an introduction to a collection of short fiction and the writer listed a string of what he considered geniuses in their fields as a way to place the author of the collection. Interestingly, I found myself nodding at every name listed—but one. And I thought, what the hell is HE doing in this group? John Cage.
I know he is the darling of a kind of avant-garde set, but come on. It’s noise. He even admitted he was not very adept at actual music. His “found” soundscapes, while occasionally interesting, lack, to my ear, even the virtue of clever arrangement. It’s cacophony, chaos, crap. That it’s frowned upon to point this out in certain groups does not make it less true. I suspect that in this case it’s not so much that I am failing to “get it” but that there actually isn’t much there to get.
Other blind spots? I already mentioned Pollack. My opinion of Picasso has changed over the years. He really was a very good, very talented artist, but frankly I think he became more a parody of himself over time and much of his work was a running joke, a game to see just how much the art world would take before it threw up its collective hands and declared the work garbage. I find many of the abstract artists of the second half of the Twentieth Century tiresome. Form has a function, after all, which is to make something comprehensible. Breaking rules is all well and good but I think you should know the rules and be able to use them before telling the world that they should be dispensed with.
I’ve written about my aversion to certain musicians, but that really is a matter of taste—I just don’t like the sound of certain voices, but that’s not a criticism of what they’re attempting to do. (But I draw the line at Tom Waits—the man cannot sing, period.) I categorically loathe Country, especially C & W, but again, that’s taste. I recognize ability, structure, form, etc, and can hear good musicianship—I just don’t care for the genre.
But there are composers I’ve frankly never understood the appeal—Charles Ives. Certainly a great deal of educated command of his medium, but to what end? A precursor to Cage? Noise.
The sculptor Richard Serra. Please. Rusted plates of iron arranged in clumsy assemblages and purported to be art? If nothing else, it all looks unfinished, like work begun and abandoned. But mostly, the art, I suspect, is in the selling.
In my own field, I will never understand the praise heaped on Kurt Vonnegut Jr. I find him tedious and, frankly, insulting. I do not read at a fifth grade level and I have never been able to get past the intrinsic condescension in his choice of style, which is to pitch his tone and vocabulary at that level. He managed the feat of becoming a best-selling writer while ridiculing (a) the genre in which he began (science fiction) and (b) telling his audience how stupid they were. The brilliance of his vision, of his stories, I can see in the films made from his novels, but they are not so wonderful to justify, in my mind, his approach, which undermines what he tried to do. At least for me.
The blind spot that has gotten me the most negative reaction is one that I have had since I first saw the work. Can’t help it. But when I say this, the reactions are often profound and sometimes horrified. How can I say this? How can I not see? How can I fail to recognize the genius? How can I not love that work?
Vincent Van Gogh.
To my eye, work done by a marginally talented four year old with fat crayons. Sometimes the claimed brilliance of color looks flat and lifeless to me. That he couldn’t sell any it in his lifetime surprises me not at all.
But the industry that has been built on the corpse of this unfortunate man since strikes me as nothing less than the perfect flower of aesthetic cannibalism. A marvelous job of selling has been done in the 121 years since his death.
(I’ve seen his early work, and his sketchbooks, and what I see is a man whose mental condition slowly robbed him of the skill and ability to do the work he should have done. I like some of his early canvasses and he clearly had the skill, but the late period work which everyone praises leaves me thoroughly unmoved.)
Blind spots. Maybe. My other big one is poetry, which by and large has no affect on me. Once in a while I hear a piece that strikes me as clever or moving, but the vast majority of poetry does not speak to me.
The thing that intrigues me, though, is this: the social phenomenon of elevating matters of taste to measures of status and worth. By this mechanism, people become trapped in conditions where they feel unable to express what they really feel if it runs counter to the current vogue.
It is true that art should be free to myriad forms of expression and we should be free to enjoy any and all of them. That something like the Paris Salon of the mid-19th Century ought not condemn artists to a purgatory of exclusion because they do something different.
But we should also be free to call nonsense nonsense, crap crap, and declare the Emperor naked and defrauded.
The above has been an expression of personal opinion.
Other Buzzzzzzzz
I am not going to go see the new Green Hornet movie. I knew that long before its release, when I heard Seth Rogen had been cast as the Hornet. I just knew it would be a waste of everyone’s time, money, and sentiment.
I’m sorry. Hollywood has been doing superhero movies now for decades and they’ve gotten a few of them pretty right. Except for a ridiculous semi-musical romantic interlude, the first Superman movie with Christopher Reeve was fine. Mostly this was due to Reeve and co-star Gene Hackman (who can save just about any movie), but they treated the material lovingly the whole way. Subsequent versions, not so much. In fact, by the fourth outing as Superman, Reeve must have been a bit embarrassed. Clearly, the problem with sequels is that we’re dealing with material that was born to be a serial, and the best medium for that is television, not big budget cinema. That said, a few of these aren’t so bad. It helps not being immersed in the comic books to begin with (for instance, I was able to enjoy all three of the primary X-Men films without getting all worked up over the liberties taken by the studio that incensed many dedicated fans—except for a Baker’s Dozen back when I was 13 or 14, I did not follow the comics), but I can more or less enjoy many of these outings. Have to admit, though, to date the Marvel franchise has fared much better.
But the Green Hornet is another matter and one of the things that Hollywood so often forgets is that the material must be taken seriously!
These were the guys I grew up with. Brit Reid and Kato as played by Van Williams and Bruce Lee, 1966 to 67. The car especially, Black Beauty, really rocked. Now, I saw these in first-run and haven’t seen them since, so doubtless they have dated and dated badly. But my imagination took the original viewing and went amazing places with it, and that is the problem with a lot of these films.
No doubt the film-makers took a cue from the Iron Man movies. There is a lot of humor in those films, but—the films are not humorous. Tony Stark is funny, but funny within context—and with a lot of credit going to Robert Downey Jr. for just doing a tremendous job in the role—and that’s something film makers fail to grasp time and again.
For instance, the best Three Musketeer films ever made were the Salkind productions in the 70s with Michael York and Oliver Reed. Great films. And funny! But funny as a consequence of the action within context—the characters themselves were not jokes, they were serious. Much later, a third film was made, Return of the Three Musketeers, with the same cast, but something had been lost—they were turned into buffoons in order to artificially inject humor rather than letting it arise from the context, and it is painful to watch.
Long ago now Tim Burton made a Batman movie and cast a comic actor, Michael Keeton. A lot of people probably moaned, fearing the worst. But Burton treated the material seriously and Keeton played it straight. Likewise in the sequel, but when Burton lost control Keeton bailed, and good for him, because the studio starting injecting jokes, much as had been done with the James Bond films, and taking the premise much less seriously, until they produced a truly foul film (one of the few I have been utterly unable to watch more than 15 minutes of).
Keeton, however, had done serious films before. He had a reputation as a comic actor, but more in the line of Jack Lemmon than Seth Rogen, who has gone from one slapstick dumbshit vehicle to another, and apparently the studio opted to play to his strengths in that regard here.
I don’t like movies or television that rely on stupidity to carry the story. That’s why I no longer watch most sitcoms. Stupid is not funny to me. The great comics knew that good comedy was not to make fun of people’s stupidity but to derive the humor from stupid situations. Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp was not stupid. Lucille Ball’s character was not stupid, either, she simply never knew enough to follow through effectively on her schemes, and the situation tripped her up.
That said, superhero stories walk a fine line between significance and the absurd. I mean, really, these people are improbable at best. It is all too easy to paint them as ridiculous or such utter fantasies that no real drama could result from their stories. It’s difficult to write sympathetically, not to say powerfully, about people who are so much more than average. And the scenarios!
But that’s what makes them iconic, because they achieved that balance and then some. So you have to be careful when translating them from one medium to another. In this instance, they clearly didn’t get it.
Now back to our regularly scheduled day.
New Gallery
I’d intended leaving the Zenfolio galleries alone for a while and just upgrade some of the images in them, swapping out less wonderful stuff for more. But digging around my various storage boxes this last week I found a cache of negatives and transparencies that represent some of my better work from back in the day. So I’ve been working all week to put up a new gallery—here.
As I’ve said elsewhere, my main thing in photography is black & white, but apparently I did quite a lot more color work than I remembered. Odd, that. You do the work, you’d think you would remember. Most of these images are from 35mm, a mix of Kodachrome and Ektachrome. The last four images, however, in the gallery are from 4 X 5 transparencies. Like this one:
What I love about this format is the detail and the lushness of color. But there’s something else about it that has in the past been problematic for me.
It requires patience.
When I learned photography, my father understood something about it that I failed to appreciate for years. He understood that to learn any craft well, you have to go at it constantly, and make myriad mistakes. To get it down right, you throw out 90% of what you do. More. So he fueled me with film and paper. Heedless of cost, I blazed away, roll after roll, print after print, gaining ability gradually by virtue of producing a great deal of garbage. You can do that with 35mm and, to a lesser extent, 120 roll film. I would go out on a “expedition” and shoot ten, fifteen rolls. Most of it forgettable trash. (I heard Ansel Adams comment once that he was good in direct proportion to what he never let anyone see.)
I’m not as disciplined as I would like to be. I have no patience. My friends know this and sometimes shake their heads, both at my lack and by the curious fact that it hasn’t prevented me from doing quality work from time to time. Everything I’ve ever tried to do has required exactly what I do not naturally possess.
4 X 5 enforces patience. The equipment is ungainly and heavy. Setting up a shot takes time. Raising a 35mm SLR to ones eye and snapping off half a dozen shots takes little effort, but framing a shot with a view camera cannot be done with that kind of speed or nonchalance. You get one sheet of film, maybe two. The handling and processing is necessarily cumbersome and it just takes time. After a few lousy shots, you find yourself (if you’re any good at all) slowing down, being careful, really looking at what you’re shooting. Gradually, glacially, you start developing an appreciation for the frame that, at least in my case, the smaller formats with their ease of blazing away never granted.
Curiously enough, the 4 X 5 image I’ve been reworking in Photoshop have been the ones requiring the least manipulation. I “got it right” on the shot.
I will probably do one or two more galleries and then see about exhibiting. There are over 400 images in my online galleries now, most of them some of my best work. I have literally thousands of more negatives and transparencies. I’m glad of the chance to display them this way, at least give people a chance to see what I’ve done.
Oh, a note about image quality. Maybe this is something I simply haven’t figured out, but it’s a technical annoyance, and I want to explain. I’m doing all my work on a standard monitor. The lab I’m using takes the file when I’m finished and makes a print and so far I have seen on the print what I see on my screen. But I’ve looked at these images on other screens and some of them, for whatever reason, come up very washed out. I’ve corrected some of them so get a crisper image on flatscreens, but it’s unpredictable. So any of you, if you’re looking at these and the picture looks flat or too light, please adjust your screen or take my word for it that a print would look marvelous. I’m still learning this digital thing and I’m sure I’m just doing—or not doing—something basic.
Thanks and enjoy.
More Images
- Posted on
- – 1 Comment on More Images
Since beginning to work with Photoshop, I’ve been doing some archaeology. Unearthing slides and negatives buried around the house. For so long I used whatever lab I worked at to produce images that when I finally found myself working entirely at home, I basically dumped my files wherever I found room. Now I’m trying to locate stuff.
Sounds horribly disorganized, I know. That’s me, though. Both my parents are methodical, organized, neat people. Me, not so much. I have never been able to maintain an organized environment for any length of time. I have to do major cleaning every so often. (Right now my office is a disaster, having been the place everything from upstairs has ended up during progressive cleanings of the main part of the house. And it’s winter and I’ve moved most of my writing upstairs to save on the heating bill.)
I’ve been trying to find several pages of 35mm slides now for months. These pages were once intended to be portfolio sheets, representing what I could do. In my imagination, the magnificence of the images was beginning to take on epic proportions. Well, I found them today and that magnificence…well, they ain’t bad.
They are quite suitable for manipulation, though, and I’ve begun the process of making them suitable for whatever may come. For example:
I shot that after dawn one day in September, about 1978 or so. I forget where. I just got in the car and drove and found some back roads. I used to do that a lot. Throw the cameras in the back seat, just tank up and drive, see what I could find.
I was never so much with people, at least I didn’t think so at the time, but I’ve done a lot of fair portraits. But I did like doing the occasional bit of narrative photography. Like this:
(That one wasn’t quite that vibrant in the original.)
This has been great fun and I think I’m getting inspired to try exhibiting again. I never pursued that enough. Maybe this time I’ll stick to it a bit more tenaciously. I’ll say this, with all the material I have in boxes I really wouldn’t need to take anymore photographs.
Not to worry. I don’t intend to stop seeing. Not by a longshot.