Panta rhei, we are told Heraclitus claimed, everything flows, everything is always in motion, always changing. Where, I wonder, does this stream flow? And where will it take these leaves? How long will that one leaf resist the pull?
I stood there in the dense woodland; a thick canopy of greenery blotted out the sky. The heat and humidity was oppressive. And yet, already hints of fall….
Flowers are powerful means of conveying emotion: condolences, loss, love, apology, friendship, thanks. Among the flowers commonly given, roses occupy a particularly important place, especially to express love. Yet, roses die quickly. Cut from the bush, placed in a vase full of fresh water, they last only a few days before petals brown and fall all over the table and the rose bud itself droops and becomes sad. A metaphor, perhaps, of the fleeting and fragile nature of romance.
Genetically modified and homogenized, grown in carefully controlled environments, today’s roses lack the variation, hardiness, and rich aromas of older varietals. 1867 and the tea rose. Today’s roses are standardized, like so many things in our world, even the ways we express our emotions.
And yet, if we look close enough, we can find variation and differences even in today’s roses, the shapes of the pedals, the colors of the stems, the peculiar way each flower decays. These two photos are form part of a pamphlet in a series of pamphlets on flowers, a sort of paper menagerie.
Zoom.Whiteboards. Smartboards. iPads. Tablets. Video. Flipped classrooms. Clickers. MOOCs. How much effort do we put into designing educational technologies? Who benefits from that effort? Rarely, it seems, the student (if the educational disaster of the last two years is any indication).
The blackboard was introduced into the classroom in the 19th century, and within a couple decades was ubiquitous. Since then pedagogues (and social critics) have praised and condemned the simple blackboard with its screechy chalk and dusty erasers. But there’s something dependable about its simplicity, and little evidence that the many innovations introduced since then have improved pedagogical effectiveness.
quid est nōmen tibi?
quomōdo tē vocās?
nōmen mihi est …
ego mē vocō …
canis
cattus
fēlès
je reconnais
il/elle reconnaît
recitāte
There is something almost poetic about the traces left on blackboards. Fleeting. Ephemeral. Momentary vestiges of teaching and resistance.
I did not know of Ray Johnson’s art before stumbling across information about the exhibit, “Please Send to Real Life” at The Morgan Library. I like the vernacular, collage aspects of his photography and art. It is not something to hang on a wall. It is not “beautiful” in any sense. But I really appreciate the immediacy of it, and its specificity. In the video introducing the exhibit, Joel Smith (the curator) describes Johnson’s work as:
Maybe the most salient characteristic of Ray Johnson’s art is its intimacy. He loved the idea of art as correspondence, as something that comes from one person and goes to one other person.
This description, “art as correspondence,” so neatly captures why I print and send postcards to random people, often unannounced, or leave small piles of them in cafes or on benches, each with some thought related in some way to the photo. Sometimes I open a map, point to a city, find some random address, and send a postcard to it. Other times I head out on foot with a stack of postcards, find a cafe, and write a bunch while enjoying a cup of coffee.
Often these postcards are just scenes that caught my eye, becoming an opportunity to imagine an absurd history that could describe what I see. Some postcards are more typical, postcard images. Either way, they are opportunities to enact art as a correspondence, from me to a single other person.
While I don’t think I’ll ever be a fan of Ray Johnson’s art, per se, I am a fan of his understanding of what art can be.
I make “limited edition” books, something between art books and photo books. They are often experiments that will never move beyond my work table, hence the “limited edition” label. I play with format, with layout, with folding pages or cut pages. Some are little more than pamphlets. I always learn something from these books.
This “Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022” is another type of book. This type I tend to make for somebody I know or someplace I frequent. In this case, I assembled photographs I had taken while at Ashford Farm, a local horse farm. Over the past couple years I had spent a number of days there watching the riders and looking around the farm. I had taken pictures of horses in their stalls, people riding horses, kids in the summer riding camps, and other parts of the farm that seemed interesting to me. These episodic books are “limited editions” insofar as I suspect only a very small number of people will be interested in them.
Like all such books, “Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022” went through a number of revisions in my head before I got around to printing a draft. For me, printing and assembling a draft is essential, even if the draft is small and printed on cheap copy paper. I have to see the sequence, thumb through the pages, test the folding pages and see how partial pages work.
When I’ve worked out the initial problems and arranged the pages the way I want, I tend to print a full-size draft.
I spend a day or so looking at this draft just to see how it feels, especially things like format and dimensions, and to catch the last problems or issues that have thus far escaped my notice. I also think about things like binding, covers, and paper. When I’m happy with the draft (or no longer unhappy with it), I print the final version and assemble the book.
For “Ashford Farm in Photographs, 2021-2022” I assembled 51 photos I had taken last year and this year. Landscape orientation with a number of fold-out pages seemed ideal. The pages would be large enough to accommodate both landscape and portrait photos, and the fold-outs would let me include some 16×9 proportion shots. I used a binding (often referred to as “Japanese Stab Binding” though also similar to the binding used on “Chinese-style notebooks”) and cover that echoed utilitarian notebooks. I used a smooth, bright matte paper for a couple copies and bamboo-washi paper for another. Each copy is unique — not only did I print them on different paper (my favorite was the Awagami bamboo paper, mainly because of the feel), but I also used different thread for the stitching and in one case different stock for the cover.
Here are a few more photos from this book.
In the end, I made three copies of this book, one for me, one for a friend, and one for the people who own Ashford Farm and let me loiter and take pictures. These episodic projects exist somewhere between creativity and art. I am happy to have made this book and need not share it with anybody, hence creativity. But it does something more when I share it with an audience that might be interested, hence art.
I might make another copy or two. I might not. If you want one, let me know. Maybe we can work something out.
History is filled with people who have decided to wander off, who have followed some call that most of us can’t hear. Some reappear; some do not. At times I think I hear faint whispers of that call, and I wonder ….
Sometimes I struggle to resist the lure of the forest. What would I see if I just wandered out into the trees? How far would I walk before realizing that I couldn’t find my way back? Sometimes I fight the urge not to get lost.
Four young people were already there when I arrived. They had, it seemed, spent the night on the beach. The beach was otherwise empty. Five people standing in a breeze thick with moisture and smelling of salt. Five people watching the sun rise as it has done a trillion times before. We are so tiny.
Alone on the beach I basked in the golden glow of dawn and listened to the waves crashing on the shore. Soon, I knew, the beach would fill with people. It was time to go.
I find something compelling about Bernd and Hilla Becher’s book, Typologies of Industrial Buildings. Juxtaposing numerous individual examples of industrial structures highlights their similarities and their differences. It also draws attention to often overlooked or ignored architecture, encouraging us to see design and aesthetic choices, to view these utilitarian structures as art. While each of their photographs, taken alone, is interesting, when taken together they are a sort of conceptual art, as well as a study in form.
The Bechers’ work lies behind my interest in otherwise overlooked infrastructure. Windmills, manhole covers, utility poles, high tension towers, bridge supports. These are all opportunities to focus on the mundane in an effort to find the interesting.
Manhole covers. Lots of people have found manhole covers interesting. Some people use manhole covers to make great prints. Other people have spent time photographing them. But what happens when we consider them in large numbers? Can we produce a typology of manhole covers? Sewer covers, storm drain covers, utility covers, and communications covers. In the process, can we see the traces of their histories? The imperfections, individual marks of fabrication, scars, and design quirks of individual foundries. Do they also reveal the history of industry, consolidation, and shipping? Local foundry names giving way to larger, regional foundries, which are then replaced foundries in foreign countries.
I don’t know. Maybe there’s nothing here. But maybe there is.
I returned to a place I’ve visited before — remnants of an old corral quite literally just off the beaten path. While not particularly remote, it does require driving down a bumpy, dusty road and hiking an hour or so across a shadeless cross-country route. The time and physical exertion required would, I thought, limit the traffic, and the general “take only photographs and leave only footprints” attitude shared, I had hoped, by hikers and campers would limit damage.
In two years, however, the beaten path has spread to include the old corral. For most people, there’s little reason to linger by this corral. It is not their destination and not really on the way. Yet clearly lots of people do wander over to it. So many that the vegetation no longer grows as it used to. And in addition to any photographs visitors have taken, somebody also seems to have taken one of the old corral posts.
I stood in roughly the same spot when I took these photos, exactly two years apart. Whatever else photographs do, they can make visible the passage of time and our deleterious effects on ourselves and the world around us.
My day had started early, before dawn. I drove miles down rough dirt roads to a trailhead. I hoisted my pack onto my back and cinched the straps. Without any real trail to follow, I headed off across the open country generally in a cardinal direction. A couple hours later, after setting up camp, I started exploring. It was a hot and stagnant afternoon. The sun blazed in a pale blue sky. I slowed a bit when the canyon narrowed and the sheer walls offered some shade. How do I track my progress: Hours? Miles? Steps? Salt caked on my brow?
None of that effort matters. The time, the distance, the effort, and the sweat are all irrelevant for the photograph. Yet for me, and only for me, they are part of the story. Some photographs are linked to the experiences surrounding them, both those experiences that preceded the photograph and those that followed it. Looking now at such photographs, I recall those experiences, the feeling of being there, the thoughts and ideas that moved me to take a particular picture. Not the effort expended to take them, but the intentionality in making them, that’s what matters. Photographs are waypoints, places I have paused. Together, they offer to chart my life. I take photographs to fill the pages of my atlas of living, each an opportunity to remember.