I like to have a camera with me all the time and since about 2000 an old beat up Lomo LC-A is usually the one (or at least one of the ones). It's small, has a nice lens, and really takes a beating (you should see this thing, I can't believe it still functions).
I've been quite behind in my sorting and filing and am finally going through about 200 rolls of film. As I go, I'm identifying images to scan. I guess about one image per roll on average. That's a lot of scanning and it's going to take a while.
I like immediate gratification so in the meantime, here are a few images I've scanned so far...
I drove to Indiana this month to visit my parents and much to my surprise I shot almost no film. I took a car load of equipment with me but then just never got the urge to drag it out. I did shoot a little bit of film through my Diana toy camera though, mostly while wandering around in South Bend.
I like these four pictures, but they aren't really capturing the moment the way I hoped they would when I shot them. This next picture does though. As soon as I looked at the negative I knew that I was going to like it; but when I scanned it I loved it. I love the textures, the movement, and the color in this image.
This last shot was made somewhere in Ohio on the drive home. I hope that there will be many more scenes like this in the near future. I realize there are more than three windmills on the hill, but I guess the imagery from recently reading The Master and Margarita is still fresh in my head because I thought of Golgotha when I first looked at this negative.
My parents moved back to the midwest a few years ago after a 35 year absence in Florida. Tired of Brooklyn with palm trees, sick of hurricanes (they weathered three in one season before they left), or just responding to that human urge to return to their roots I'm not sure; but they packed up and moved to Mishawaka, Indiana.
I visited them for Thanksgiving that first year, and again a year later on the same holiday. During the two visits I shot a lot of film in a variety of formats and then put it all together into a kind of reflection on their transition. The prints are all four inches high but range between four inches and ten inches wide depending on the format they were shot in. They were carefully sorted and then matted, sometimes two to a mat, to display in a long linear sequence. Keeping everything the same height was designed to give the project a sense of visual flow despite the format variations.
Because it was so cold and snowy already, and because the cold was such a shift from their recent Florida home, I printed the project on a cold tone paper and then further toned it with gold chloride (an archival toner that creates a slight blue shift). The cold tone accentuates the mood of the project and brings out at least my feelings during those first two visits.
I recently completed the finishing touches on the project and engaged a friend of mine, Kevin Martini-Fuller to custom make a presentation box. The box design had to handle the fact that the mats are sized differently (and in non standard sizes) and I wanted it to make transport and presentation simple.
I think Kevin and I came up with a cool design. When the box opens it leans back onto it's lid and allows the front to fall open. The result is sort of like an easel leaned back at about a 15 degree angle that allows a viewer to lay each image face down as it is viewed. The lid is sturdy enough that the box doesn't tend to fall over backwards during viewing. The entire thing is covered in a beautiful textured midnight blue fabric that further enhances the coolness of the images.
I'm driving to Indiana tomorrow and am giving this first set to my parents as a gift so I only had time to quickly photograph it. I thought I'd share the design though despite the quick pictures because I'm really proud of how it turned out.
I had a chance for the first time in a long time to return to SEI Investments for a tour of the West Collection. The collection (and the SEI campus) has grown significantly since I left in 2000 but there were still some pieces that I remembered.
The tour focused on a few main areas as we couldn't possibly see the entire collection in only 90 minutes. First was the "Reality Check" exhibit in what appears to have become the main exhibit hall. There were a few pieces from familier names like Chris Jordan's large scale color photographs, Peter Garfield's exploding house models, and Philadelphia artist Alex Da Corte's bejeweled snake.
I was drawn to a manipulated photograph by Sangbin Im that was re-worked to create an out-of-scale sky line over an every day street. I also liked tiny jewel like mosaic's made with, of all things, broken up chips of cockroach wings by Fabian Pena Diaz.
The idea of cockroach wing mosaics is a bit repulsive, but the detail and tonality that the artist achieves with this simple material is amazing. This particular one is a mosaic on a light box. Others in the collection were on paper and included subject matter as diverse as a human heart and a butterfly.
Though the material choice is a unorthodox, the Fabian pieces fit right into what seemed to be a broad (though I would guess unintentional) theme within the collection; sort of an artistic OCD. Many of the works required such obsessive attention during their creation. Andy Yoder's massive constructions made from Licorice, Roxy Paine's lifelike mushroom patch, Drew Leshko's detailed reconstructions of Walker Evan's church photographs, Mark Lombardi's hand drawn conspiracy maps, Richard Stipl's carefully varied but repeated self sculptures,Yong Ho Ji's life size sharks made from strips of old tires, and Minako Abe's amazing paintings produced by layering one color at a time through templates.
Ok, it's not really fair to characterize it in terms like ODC since nearly any art requires that kind of attention and dedication. I guess it is more the sense of repeitition and pattern that seems to run through the pieces. Anyway, moving on...
The last part of the tour was the "Hot Hall." Since the collection is housed in the offices of a public company, this is the hall where the controversial pictures go to cool their heels until some brave team adopts a work for their own office area. There is at least one piece that has been there for a decade, trapped in sort of an artistic purgatory.
It might be some time before these two haunting pieces by Jill Greenburg make their escape as well.
In Camera Lucida Roland Barthes describes photographs in terms of the studium and punctum. Studium relating to the cultural connotations of the photograph while punctum is "... that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)." The emotional punctuation mark of the picture.
One of my challenges in making photographs is to develop a sense for the punctum as more than an obvious visual element. Another is to arrive at a punctum that is universal enough to have meaning to someone besides me, but not so universal that it becomes meaningless. It's not enough for me to be pricked, it has to reach the viewer too; but it shouldn't feel like a blunt jab.
I thought of this when I was going through some boxes of prints the other day and ran across this:
When I made this picture I was immediately struck by it and, well, I just loved it. She was very young when this picture was made, but when I look at it I sort of see the woman she'll be someday emerging from the image. The ambiguous smile, the way her jaw line is strengthened with the movement during the exposure, how her eyes are lost a bit from the blur, the way she is positioned powerfully near the top of the frame, the simple black sheath, ... I'm not sure exactly what it is, but those factors and maybe others conspire to express an agelessness or a wisdom beyond her years.
And for me, that is the punctum. When I look at this picture I feel the poignancy of her transition from youth to womanhood and all that goes with it. It's as if it already happened and I'm reflecting back on it with the blurred details of failing memory.
I don't think the picture works as well for other people though. For whatever reason that punctum seems to be only mine, with little of the universality that I hoped for. When I show this picture it's rare that others feel that same pin prick, or frankly, anything at all. It might be that I just have a sensitivity that is mostly my own that makes a photograph like this work for me. Or it might be that it's just a blurry picture and I'm looking too hard for meaning.
The first time I really felt something like that "instantaneous traversal of personal history as punctum" was with this picture, one that is completely specific to me:
You may have guessed from the title that it is in fact me. My Dad made this picture when I was seven (I think) and I found it in a tray of slides a few years ago. It stops me cold every time I see it. Something about the depth of melancholy that I see in my own eyes as a seven year old just freezes me up (even knowing that it is probably the result of a random moment, not the feelings that I tend to ascribe to that time and image all these years later). Or, maybe it's the realization that if I'd had a son he might look a lot like that. Either way, those are my own personalized reactions and ones that I wouldn't expect to be shared by anyone else.
More recently I made this picture, one where the punctuation mark isn't off-the-page in time, but is right there on the paper where you can see it. Those blue eyes just pierce out of the page. And because this photograph doesn't rely (very much) on any kind of sensitized interpretation, perhaps it has a better chance of "success" as a picture. Or,... maybe it's so general that it's as banal as a cute cat picture. I guess that's up to the individual viewer to decide. Personally, I love this picture but it doesn't bruise me the way "Julia" does.
When I photographed my Dream project the challenge of personal vs. universal was at the core. The work was "about" a very personal set of feelings and abstracted personal history. However, I wanted to photograph it in a way that other people could respond in their own way, expressing their own experience into the images while they viewed them.
Images like "I Would Make You if I Could" were designed with metaphor in mind that I hoped would successfully convey my feelings but also would leave room for viewers with very different lives to find their own poignant moments in it.
Ok, probably enough of this seriousness. I'm just going to close this post out with one more picture that I really like. I made this picture recently while enjoying some of the last batches of Polaroid film I'm likely to shoot. I'm not sure if this picture has a punctum with the emotional impact that Barthes described, but I like the way the Polaroid materials time shift our perceptions, the way one of the subjects is photographing the same scene from the other side (the scene within the scene), and the way Silona (in the middle with the Apple) is engaged in apparant observation while the others are carefree participants
