A Transient Rumination

From an academic perspective I’ve always thought that dissecting color, even organizing it in wheels only goes so far. Fundamentally, color is an emotional response-you do indeed have to feel it-it is primal, and visceral. It can make you shudder in horror, or it can make you giddy as a school girl in June, but we all need to realize that our response to color is fundamentally emotional. The way that a photographer uses color is as manipulative as it can get in our medium. Our interpretation of color is rooted in our psyche’s is therefore hard to control-it is a response on a primal level, and we are hard pressed to actually control our response to specific colors. Just consciously realizing these things changes how we choose to use color in our photography and changes how we control our color palettes in post production.

Without a doubt, color is important-but for me the question has always been how much color needs to be in a photograph to make the image more evocative? Does it need to yell at the rafters that IT has arrived? Or can it be the smallest whisper, tickling that quiet place in the back of your mind? For me, color has never been about bold graphic statements or striking color fields, it’s been much more emotionally potent for me if color was used as a quiet wash throughout the image, a mellowing ingredient rather than an amplifying one. Much of my work has been described as black and white, because the color palettes are sometimes so subtle as to be misinterpreted as simply toned gelatin silver. Indeed some of my work is simply toned, but for me the quietness of a muted palette is surpassed by nothing at all-it is the best of both worlds. I don’t need color to fight for dominance in my own work because my work is not about color, it is about something intangible and introspective-therefore to me, color provides a connection to a certain mental state that the graphic and narrative qualities in my work support. Nothing more, nothing less.

Photography is unique in the visual arts. It requires physicality to function. It requires a presence, a thing, an object, a place. It requires a noun in order to become what it is. No other art requires anything except the mind of the artist. A photographic image cannot be made from memory. A painting can. A sculpture can. A photograph cannot. What does this mean to me as a photographic artist? Does it even matter?

The link to reality that photography needs in order to fulfill it’s function has been a stumbling block from it’s invention in 1839. At first people only wanted to record facts, places, and things. Fast forward 169 years and it seems that many of us are more interested in photographing from memory. I’m more interested in communicating what is in my head than what my eyes see. It seems to go against the very nature of the medium I have chosen to communicate through. Can it be done? What are the images going to look like? Where will they come from and how will they be made? Does technology get in the way of this desire to photograph from memory? Project our thoughts another 100 years into the future and where does photography find itself?

Original Post October 6, 2008

The genesis of my thesis work dealt largely with the physical body in relation to environment. Finding peace and deep understanding about this dynamically changing relationship caused me great consternation. Initially I was driven by a subconscious fear, a mostly undirected, vague, menacing sort of fear that I eventually realized was about the changes in my physical form and the process of figuring out how to be okay with those changes. 

My sense of self has been directly linked to my physical form, at least historically, and along with this link there has been the aforementioned unease simmering away. It was important for me to face this fear of the unknown and to come to terms with the reality of change in our bodies and the disparate relationship between our minds and the body that we inhabit. 

It was with halting steps that I began the journey of a two year project exploring various facets of identity, memory, and time. At some point along the way the morbid fascination with how my body was changing, growing older, and closer to death with each passing day faded away and I began to find peace with the realization that I am not a body. 

This post is probably going to appear nonsensical to the 2 people who may read it, but for me 2 years of work originated with a tiny seed of fear and doubt that led me a place of equanimity. I don’t think I could ask for any more from a project such as this. In the future I’ll be posting some fragments of the writing that helped me find my way.

Original Post September 30, 2008

What is it about the brain? It’s always ahead of our hands and our abilities. The wonderful visions that can be conjured up in a photographers mind-perfect light, perfect composition, a pristine vision of the most perfect moment…yet the reality always falls short, a mere shadow of the perfection in our minds eye. Does it always have to be like that? Is vision always ahead of our ability to execute? 

This phenomenon is something that has happened in my own creative life many times-and appears to be a common theme in most of my students lives as well. According to those who write about art and vision this is apparently usually the case, the brain is consistently more advanced than our abilities. Funny, because we are controlled by the very thing that controls our hands-so how is it that our brain can envision this perfectly rendered world yet all too often cannot convince our bodies to commence in the creation of that perfection? 

Why is it this way?

Original Post September 21, 2008

What a renaissance we are experiencing! Never before have we been able to control everything about an image. Never before have we been able to have ultimate flexibility with our workflow. And very soon we will be able to shoot 1080p video at unheard of quality with a $2700 camera. The Canon EOS 5D Mark II is upon us and it is indeed going to change the nature of what DSLR’s are capable of. Sure, Nikon recently released a D90 capable of shooting 720p video, but the new 5D shoots 21MP stills and 1080p video with some of the best lenses in the industry. From the murmurs on the grapevine those in the know claim it has some of the best low light performance of any video camera they have ever seen. 

I’m not sure how I feel about DSLR’s shooting video-but I do know that with such a capable camera shooting such fantastic video, photographers are going to be changing how they see the world. Will they stop shooting stills? Absolutely NOT! But what will they do with it? That remains to be seen. It is another fundamental shift in the capabilities of our tools and one that will reverberate through the industry.

Original Post August 28, 2008

There is much resistance towards writing, especially when it comes to the type of person who wields a camera. It is an unfortunate situation. Unfortunate, but one that as an educator I must deal with on a consistent basis. Time and time again I have found that those students who put forth the energy to write about their work, even informally, are the ones who know themselves best. I was recently talking with a friend about how we often think the words we put down are not worthy of seeing the light of day.  They aren’t perfect enough, or they aren’t neatly packaged.  Below is a a partial response to that conversation.

Words are not all powerful-they are just as ‘mortal’, just as imperfect as our thoughts. So put them down, let them be on the page. Words don’t need to be all lined up in tidy sentences. Words can indeed just be words. Thoughts are often fragmentary and incomplete. Glimpses of a crystalline idea or a diamond in the rough often flicker through my mind, and without some way of holding onto those thoughts-through the written words, rarely do they become photographs. Words can be the bridge between my imperfect mental process and my imperfect images. Through it all I become something new-something more than what I am right now. The process is fraught with imperfections and things that aren’t tidy, but life is sometimes like that, or rather it is usually like that. It has taken me so long to find this bridge. All too often in the past I neglected the process of writing, finding it too hard to put words down in nice neat packages. While doing this is important in the long run, initially it can be just about consciously articulating those random and incomplete thoughts. The most important thing is to put it down and let the words be what they are.

Original Post August 23, 2008

This is an excerpt from my journal written during a directed study with A. Minkkinen almost a year ago.

I believe it is not the markers in our life that define us. It is the time between the monumental events and how we interact with our environment and with the people around us.  The journey between birth and death is the interstitial space that I explore in my work.  We are always in transition, each day, each moment and each breath; it is here that we live.  My work explores the process of how these in-between moments are the harmony and chaos in our lives.  I explore moments of tension, conflict, and moments of clarity that are like rare gifts.  The places I seek out are on opposite sides of the spectrum-metaphoric environments that speak of quiet awareness and chaotic discontent.  There are moments of clarity in each space and moments of tension as well as frustration.  My work attempts to explore polar opposite and to create visual tension in the series that begs the viewer to confront their own interpretation of the human experience. 

This project [my thesis] goes to a place that is deeply personal to me.  It is the most personal and most intangible place-the mind.  When we step back from the crush of daily life we realize that the goals we set aren’t necessarily the most important things in life-it is the process of achieving the goals.  While we look to the future constantly searching for the meaning of life we sometimes realize that life is happening now right in front of our eyes and the future never arrives.  I am interested in visual resolution of this relationship.  My images attempt to contain or at least represent the past, present, and future of our bodies in relationship to the environment.  In many ways our bodies and minds are separate entities from each other-some philosophers believe our mind to be the definition of who we are yet our culture is so wrapped up in physical perfection that I find a contradiction in the reality that I am living.  The body expresses the state of the mind and I use my body as a portal in my work.  The quietness of a desert landscape contrasting with the decay of an old wall are activated by the presence of my body-both can be seen as surrogate for a particular state of mind. 

Original Post August 20, 2008

Critique is essential. For photographers it is a time to begin to understand how your work is viewed objectively and an opportunity to break down mental barriers between the work and your emotional connection to that work. A hard critique, one that challenges your understanding of the medium and your use of it can be compared to the process of turning coal into diamonds. 

For all students and artists critique should be seen as an opportunity for gaining greater clarity in your creative life. As cliche as it may sound no one has ever gotten better without periods of questioning and doubt about the validity and direction of a body of work. Critique is the catalyst for beginning to know yourself.

Original Post August 19, 2008

Photography, by its very nature, is unique in the visual arts. The camera shows us all too easily the thing itself rather than a personal vision of the individual wielding the tool. It is by far the easiest and most ubiquitous device to use and therefore it’s power is often diminished. A skilled photographer, however,  can show us something so much more than the thing itself-the world of the mind, of thoughts and of memory. Creating work that is deeper and more complete than what is represented takes time and dedication to the craft of photography and a desire to understand yourself and the world around you. The ability to use the physical attributes of a photograph to speak of the intangible aspects of life is a gift and a responsibility, one that I find ceaselessly fascinating.