I continue to be inspired by Mapplethorpe’s photographs of flowers. The quiet puttering around as I set up and move lights is a pleasure. The way the process encourages me to study the flowers and to see things I would otherwise miss. It’s quiet and contemplative in an otherwise noisy world.
Anyway, I’ve updated the Two Photos page with two new photographs of flowers, tulips this time.
“Flowers are too easy,” a friend cautioned when I mentioned my fascination with taking pictures of flowers. Apparently, anybody and everybody shoots flowers. I noted that Robert Mapplethorpe’s Flora was a beautiful meditation on flowers, reveling in their diversity and the many ways they can be arranged and lit. He seemed surprised that such a famous photographer would spend so much time photographing flowers.
I find Mapplethorpe’s photographs of flowers infinitely inspiring, as I do Josef Sudek’s The Window of My Studio. In both cases the photographer explores all the ways light and shadow play shape form and line and contours, while using only a very limited subject. I find the exercise at once meditative and challenging. When successful, I also find the photographs beautiful.
I find something peaceful about these photographs. Looking at them recalls for me the days spent wandering alone. Now and then, when I was close to the road or near one of the trails, I would see other people. I might even hear them. But head north west, toward the San Andres mountains and soon I was all alone. Wandering up and down the gypsum dunes.
After about an hour they all began to look alike. The sun is relentless and seems to burn from above and below. A hat scarcely protects you from the glare so much light reflects up from the ground. Everywhere is either white sand or pale blue sky. It is easy to lose your way. There are no trails, no posts to mark the way. I understand how people get lost out here and, tragically, die from heat and dehydration. “What will I find over the next dune?” I wonder as I continue deeper into the dunes.
I paused near the top of each dune, marveling at the sight. As afternoon wore on, the sinking sun started casting amazing shadows, giving the dunes texture and shape that they lacked when the sun was higher. There are no footprints. No evidence of the last person who passed. I might be only a mile or so from the road, but I feel like I’m a million miles from anywhere. Just me and these mesmerizing shadows.
For some people, lush forests are a paradise. They long for the sound of a creek or the wind through the trees. For me, these desolate, expansive, unforgiving spaces are more appealing. That afternoon no breeze disturbed the silence. No birds flew overhead. No water anywhere. And yet so much to see. The ripples and soft contours. The subtle shadowing.
I had been wandering for hours but had probably walked only a few miles. Time and distance are different here in this pale landscape of undulating dunes — both seem meaningless here. I could have walked for hours more, captivated by the stark beauty of the swells and shadows, but late in the day I turned around and headed back. Any trace of my passage has long since disappeared. What is left are these photographs, the memories they evoke, and the hope of maybe one day returned to that land of light and shadows.
Sometimes, for me, it is enough that a photograph is just what it purports to be. It doesn’t conceal some meaning or tell a story, doesn’t point to the photographer’s social agenda, and doesn’t reveal the photographer’s psychological anguish. It isn’t reportage or social commentary or documentary photography.
This, e.g., is a photograph of a flower. Just a flower.
Robert Mapplethorpe Flora is a lovely book that highlights the subtle and varied beauty of flowers. And while we can read all sorts of meaning into his photos, meaning most often it seems shaped by what somebody thinks of Mapplethorpe the photographer, in the end they are just beautiful photographs.
I don’t think every photograph has to tell a story or reveal the inner psychological states of the photographer. Sometimes all I want to do is look at a pretty photograph.
Everybody takes photos of flowers. Snapshots. Artsy black-and-whites. Bold colors against dark backgrounds. Everybody. They are a photographic cliché, though I confess I don’t know quite what the original meaning or significance was in taking photos of flowers and so I don’t know what the practice has lost. I suspect part of the draw is: flowers are dependable subjects. They are easy to find. They don’t move. They can be arranged as you please.
Some photographers are able to transform ordinary flowers (and vegetables and fruits) into sensual images, e.g., Weston or Mapplethorpe.
For me photographing flowers combines the pleasures of working quietly and methodically. I enjoy the slow, deliberative process. I also learn a lot about light and how to get the light to illuminate the flower in different ways. But I will freely admit: I also enjoy the photographs. I think they can be beautiful: the elegant shapes and curves, the rich, subtle tones. Photographs don’t always have to tell a story or make a point or reveal some philosophical truth. Sometimes, it is enough for a photograph just to be pretty.
Detritus (noun): waste or debris of any kind. Cf., discarded matter, refuse, litter, flotsam & jetsam, dross, chaff. Maybe sediment (noun): matter that settles to the bottom (usually of a liquid). Cf., dregs, lees, residue, alluvium. The difference, to me, is we can’t help but produce sediment. Just our being generates a trail of sediment everywhere we go. Detritus, however, is often a willful act of discarding, throwing off that which we no longer want. Cigarette butts are surely detritus.
I was asked to take photographs of the local area for a soon-to-be revamped community website (brynfordcivic.org). I wanted to do something different, something that captures the experiences of walking and living in the area, or at least how I see and experience living in the community. Here is some of what I see as I wander the streets and parks:
I am working on a long-term project to talk to the people who own and run local businesses, the people who make our community unique and real, and to photograph them at work. Rather than a set of portraits, I want to focus on their hands because they tell the story of their efforts. And I want to talk to the people, to listen to their experiences.
The last year has highlighted just how fragile our communities are, as we watch shops that have been around sometimes for years close and go away. I worry about what we are losing. So this project is very much one of preservation. An effort to record in words and images what we have before it’s gone.
In my mind I imagine a project that echoes the form of Dorothea Lange’s American Exodus. She paired photographs with words in a powerful way to capture the experiences of people heading west in the hopes of finding a better life. But I work more local. With people I know or want to know.
In the end I will produce a book that collects together these photographs and experiences, that joins words and images to tell a story about the community where I live. I will also produce photographs for each person/business, sometimes large format single photographs, sometimes collages or triptychs. They are free to do with those photographs whatever they want. It’s the least I can do for those who let me come sit and listen to them while they work.
Here is a small sample of some recent photographs, taken at a local bike shop while I listened to the owner talk about opening it and finding ways to keep it going over the past 14 or so months. I imagined them as a set of poster-sized prints for the shop.
It was a chilly afternoon, weak sunlight scarcely warming the few people sitting in the square or those walking their dogs. At the corner, two men stood across from each other engaged in a sometimes frenetic sometimes contemplative game of chess. In a flurry of moves their hands nearly collided as pawns, rooks, and bishops attacked and retreated. Then, like the kings they rarely moved, the two men stood still for minutes just surveying the board.
Whether moving pieces or considering the board, throughout the game the two talked constantly to, at, and near each other. A stream words tumbled from each man’s mouth. Now and then they responded to what the other had said, but most often they seemed to be sharing some internal monolog of strategy and tactics, of regrets for bad moves and compliments for good ones, of random thoughts that seemed to have nothing to do with anything.
When the game ended, they reset the board and started a new one, all the while talking without interruption. “We’ve done this a thousand times,” he seemed to say to me in answer the unspoken question in my head, “and he’s beat me most of them.”