Category: Musings

My Sandbox

I make things. I often use tools other people have developed, e.g., hammers (some people forge their own hammers, I don’t) and screwdrivers and saws; cameras (some people make their own cameras, I don’t) and printers and developing tanks; ovens and baking pans and measuring cups. But in the end, I use those tools to make things. I make things because I enjoy making (I also enjoy taking things apart, but that’s a different story). Sometimes the things I make are lovely and work well, sometimes they aren’t and don’t. It doesn’t matter. What matters to me (and I’m the only one who matters in this story) is I made them.

I don’t assemble things (unless I have to).

Urban #240309.1.

Perhaps that is why I don’t have a social media presence, why I don’t write on the many very beautiful and shiny platforms that encourage writing, why I don’t share my thoughts in 280 characters, why I don’t collect images I find online into a virtual scrapbook. Such fora are not tools for making something, at least not in the way I like to make things. They might let me assemble something, and that something might be slick and look remarkably like millions of other things people have assembled — the internet is a monotonous wasteland of polished similarity, like some vast 1990s housing development that’s not going to age well or, apparently, any coffee shop anywhere.

Urban #240309.2.

Instead, I have my little sandbox, where I build the things I want to build in the way I want to build them (to be sure, the tools I have chosen constrain what I can make — when that becomes a problem for me, I’ll find new tools). I don’t need anybody’s approval or disapproval, and I am not looking to start a “discussion” — if you want to chat, send me an email so we can meet for coffee. I don’t need anybody’s validation through comments or trackbacks. I take this position not because I have aversion to “someone else’s platform” or a fear of an algorithm or urge to be/build my own platform or worry about being the fodder for some other platform’s monetization scheme or worry my stuff will disappear. Those old chestnuts are still legitimate, I guess, but seem to privilege monetizing over making.

I just kinda like making things.

April 4, 2024
Books

I find physical books comforting. Each one is a statement, somebody somewhere saying “I was here. I made this.” Books are human. By almost any measure they are less convenient, take up more room, and weigh more than digital versions. They require shelves. They collect dust and boring insects. It’s not difficult to take one or maybe two with me, but more than that becomes challenging. Because of my own personal relationship with books, I don’t write in them. If I find something I want to remember, I have to write it down on paper. So I need a pen and paper or a notebook whenever I read.

Still life #240331.1.

I do not own a dedicated ebook reader. I can’t imagine ever owning one. Not being able to turn a page would drive me mad. I do read articles on a tablet. And I annotate those articles. I find it incredibly convenient and easy. I can take hundreds of articles with me anywhere I go — my tablet never seems to weigh any more no matter how many articles I transfer to it. Sure, I never need more than a couple articles, but since I can take them, why not?

Still life #240331.2.

Books and ebooks make me think of cameras and photographs. I can take thousands of pictures on my digital camera. I can take copies of every one of those pictures with me on my phone. It never gets any heavier. But somehow not being able to flip through photographs leaves me unsatisfied. Pinching and scrolling might allow me to see details I wouldn’t see in a photograph, but I don’t know that my experience has improved. I don’t enjoy holding my phone for other people to squint at, and I don’t enjoy squinting at other people’s phones.

Still life #240331.3.

I will not likely examine every photograph I print, just as I probably won’t read carefully and remember every book on my shelves. But I like having those books there on my shelves, organized according to my own idiosyncratic system, ready to pull down when I want. I like having boxes of photographs, organized according to my own idiosyncratic system, ready to sort through whenever I want. When somebody asks, I can pull down a book and point out something, or I can pull out a photograph and show that person something.

Still life #240331.4.

I also enjoy the process of making photographs, just as I enjoy the process of making books. Everything I make could never progress beyond some digital artifact — I always use a digital camera, I could compose on a computer, I could assemble documents that combined text and images, I could make PDF or EPUB files. But that would be, for me, unfulfilling. Some days, I use a film camera, some days a digital. Some days I confine myself to a digital process. Some days I stick to analog. Most days, regardless of how I get there, I make books or partial books and fragments of books. I have boxes full of books and possible books. Rumor has it that making things with my hands is good for my brain, but that’s not why I do it. I do it because I find physical books comforting. I do it because it’s my way of saying “I am here. I made this.”

April 1, 2024
Longing

I find the world unknowable and therefore fascinating, unfamiliar and therefore irresistible. I long for that space where life seems uncertain, where I have to revise or reject the comfortable assumptions and convictions that have structured my life.

Urban #240311.1.

I used to frequent a local coffee shop where I often saw a particular woman. Whenever she saw me, she would move to the table next to mine and start writing on whatever piece of paper she had available. After a few minutes, she would hand me the piece of paper covered in rapid scrawlings and signed AST, smile, and then sit silently. I don’t recall her ever speaking to me. I don’t see her any longer — the coffee shop has closed. I miss our encounters. I learned a lot from watching her and trying to understand her world, which was very different from mine. Now and then, when I’m feeling smug, I pull out those sheets of paper and look back over them.

Urban #240311.2.

A few years back, an incarcerated man sent me a couple letters outlining his critique of society. Pages filled with carefully hand-written words, each letter almost typewriter perfect. Diagrams drawn with draftsman like precision. In the upper left corner, in place of a staple, an orange thread pierced the pages and stitched them together. Another encounter with a world that is very different from mine. Those letters are in the drawer with the pages from AST.

Urban #240311.3.

These encounters with the absurdity of life give me energy. Some unanswered and probably unanswerable longing for the unknown drives me. That longing is the wellspring of all my creativity, which might turn out to be ravings of a lunatic, but what higher purpose can there be for creativity.

March 18, 2024
Of Bicycles and Cameras

Thumbing through a couple books recently — one a collection of photographs, one a book on improving your photographic skills – made something clear: Photographers commonly feel compelled to draw attention to their cameras and their camera settings, whether or not that information serves any purpose. I remain amused by photographers’ obsession with equipment; it reminds me of the ways cyclists sit around and talk about bicycles.

Landscape #230615.

If you end up in a trendy, upscale café on a weekend, chances are you’ve seen and heard the crowds of mostly guys, many of them older, sitting in lycra talking about the morning’s ride. An important part of that conversation revolves around their equipment, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes not so subtle. One might talk about what gears he used in the sprint or on the climb. Another might talk about the stiffness of his carbon-fiber frame. Another might mention frame geometry. Cycling computers are often topics of conversation. Somebody inevitably brings up a recent review of equipment or an article about some professional’s Tour de France bike. None of this talk improves anybody’s cycling skills or fitness. So from the perspective of getting better, it’s useless. However, a significant part of their enjoyment, it seems, comes not from riding but from sitting around and talking about their bikes.

Photographers seem to share this need to draw attention to their equipment. References to camera, lens, settings recall the cyclists talking about their gear choices for a climb. It doesn’t matter. You made it (or didn’t) to the top of the climb, just as you took the picture (or didn’t). What matters in cycling is: Did you make it to the top of the climb as quickly as you wanted? If so, great. If not, go ride more. In photography, what matters is: Did you get the picture you wanted? If so, great. If not, go take more pictures. And yet, in both the collection of photographs and the book on improving your photographic skills, captions include the location, year, camera body, the lens, the aperture, the shutter speed, and the ISO. None of that should matter, either for the viewer or the student.

At some level I think photographers know that their equipment and settings don’t matter. After drawing attention to their equipment, they rarely even try to explain how it has affected their photographs. Even the author/photographer of the book on improving your photographic skills never refers to the camera and settings. I would expect an “educator” to explain the relevance of such information, were it, in fact, relevant. I would love to see how the camera body mattered, as if it were a choice he or any photographer would make before taking any given photograph. Imagine the photographer who sees an interesting scene, then thinks: Would this be better shot with a Canon 5D mk II or a Fuji X-T2 or a Nikon D810. I would also love to see that photographer in the wild, digging through a massive bag of gear that included different bodies and different sets of lenses and perhaps flashes. No, the camera doesn’t matter. This educator, like most of us, probably grabbed whatever camera he was using that year or on that trip, i.e., the camera he had with him. Nothing more.

To be clear, I think we all find find equipment that for some personal reason we enjoy using. And because we enjoy using that equipment, it might help us realize our creative projects or help us become better photographers (if that’s our goal). Just as the old guys in lycra at the café don’t become better cyclists by talking about their bicycles, we don’t become better photographers by talking about our cameras.

January 22, 2024
The Tyranny of “Style”

Style has become both a fetish and a marketing device. We read or, more likely in today’s podcast- and YouTube-dominated world, hear and see over and over again that we have to discover our style as if it’s some buried treasure or a form of therapeutic self-realization (the alternative formulation, “we have to find our style” doesn’t change the point). The person telling us to find our style usually offers to help us do so, adopting a sort of guru or therapist role, or, equally often, offers to sell us a class to lead us along the path to illumination. All this focus on style seems to be, at best, misguided or, more likely, fraudulent.

Urban #230917

Style is now a commodity that people sell. In marketing pitches, they link photographic success to finding a style. They dream up exercises and techniques, not for taking pictures or making photographs or thinking about what interests you, but for developing your style. They talk about visual consistency. Although they are quick to say style is more than a set of presets, they then reduce style to a set of prescribed actions that enables you to achieve this consistency of look, as if homogeneity were a desideratum. And they promise to help you find your look. Free newsletters are gateway drugs to $150/hour coaching sessions. Free YouTube videos are infomercials for classes and one-on-one sessions. Some talking head teases the viewer with promises of fame and success, usually through tedious and dubious claims about the presenter’s own overnight economic success. Style is always reduced to economic success.

Never do we hear these people promise your photography will be more fulfilling or more rewarding or more enjoyable. They don’t say you’ll be better able to realize your creative vision, or that you’ll make more important photographs (here, David duChemin’s distinction between good and important is relevant here). No. They can only promise financial success. How often they deliver on that promise is an open question.

Imposing a style, i.e., a signature look, has replaced any expression of creativity or individual intentionality, has reduced photography to an iterative almost algorithmic task. Find a particular scene. Photograph it from a particular angle in a particular light. Process in a particular way. To paraphrase and repurpose Lear:

That way madness and homogeneity and boredom lie; let me shun that.
No more of that.

To be clear, I think that after doing something over and over again and with intentionality, a person will create a style. Klinkenborg’s comment seems appropriate here: style is the “fusion of your command of [visual] language and your commitment to your own intent.” Importantly, “you don’t need to think about style.”

Countless artists developed a style, but not by focusing on style. See, e.g., Lucas Cranach the Elder or Albrecht Dürer or Hieronymous Bosch or Giuseppe Archimboldo or Pieter Breugel since I’m in a Northern Renaissance mood. They produced lots and lots and lots of drawings, paintings , sketches, and engravings. Their style emerged, as Klinkenborg puts it, through their command of the relevant language and their commitment to their own intent.

No, the style gurus can’t teach style. They can teach rules. But rules are not style, as Mavis Gallant reminds us:

Working to rule, trying to make a barely breathing work of fiction simpler and more lucid and more euphonious merely injects into the desperate author’s voice a tone of suppressed hysteria, the result of what E. M. Forster called “confusing order with orders.”
M. Gallant, “What is Style?” in Paris Notebooks, 259–260

Gallant’s comment applies equally to photography, and probably every other creative endeavor.

January 18, 2024
The Sadness of Craft Fairs

A certain kind of sadness permeates craft fairs and art shows. Tables and booths filled with the creative efforts of some person, who is often left standing or sitting alone amongst all these works. Maybe some passerby will be interested enough to stop and look, or even buy a piece. The excitement creators bring to the process of making transforms into resignation.

Urban #230820.

There is a tension between expressing our creativity by bringing something we have imagined into the world, on the one hand, and commodifying that creativity, on the other. That tension seems particularly acute at craft fairs and art shows, where fabulously creative people, who have spent considerable time developing their vision and honing the skills needed to realize that vision, are reduced to vendors, who have rented booths and tables in the hopes of selling their work. These fairs encourage (perhaps even compel) people to consider their creativity in terms of the ROI — time, labor, effort, material and rental costs all need to be recouped.

And yet there is a hopefulness and resilence too. The visceral urge to create beautiful things brings meaning to life. Joy comes not from some ROI calculated in monetary terms but from the very process of creating. To be sure, like Plato’s Demiurge, we will fail to produce what we imagine. Our creations will be flawed and incomplete. Recalcitrant matter and our impatience will impede us. But, again like the Demiurge, we will rejoice in the impulse to create, in our striving to make something new in the world.

October 31, 2023
Schoenberg on Art

Arnold Schoenberg reportedly said:

If it is art it is not for all, and if it is for all it is not art.

This comment seems to call into question Karl Ove Knausgård’s link between challenging art and Protestantism, not because Schoenberg doesn’t agree that art is difficult but because Schoenberg clearly didn’t link art to Protestantism. Whether Schoenberg’s description of music, Calvino’s of literature, or Knausgård’s of photography, the idea that art is restricted to the enlightened few, the properly educated, the cultured, those with the luxury of time and money to appreciate it, explains why I don’t consider myself an artist.

Urban #231013.6.

I create meaningless things, sometimes those are photographs, sometimes magazines, sometimes books. I create things I want to see in the world. Those things might be sufficiently layered to invite different interpretation, or not. It doesn’t matter. If nobody likes them. That’s ok. If everybody likes them. That’s ok too. It’s not like I’m trying to make art.

October 17, 2023
Mirror, Window, or Smoke-Fogged Glass?

I wonder how much of the vogue for photographs to express some deeper meaning relates to Szarkowski’s mirror-window dichotomy? It seems to me there is a strong preference of late for a rather blunt or simplistic version of the mirror side of the dichotomy, echoed in the oft repeated disdain for “merely aesthetic” or “calendar” photos (I’ve mused about this before). Photographs that hint at the inner, psychological states of the photographer garner praise and elicit awe (usually phrased something like, “I don’t really get it, but …” or “I don’t really like it, but …”). Somewhat paradoxically, those same photos are rarely considered pretty. How often have I heard a person compliment a photograph but then say they wouldn’t hang it on their wall.

Urban #181230.2

I need to go read Szarkowski’s Mirrors and Windows. American Photography since 1960 and see how in 1978 he characterized the distinction. I suspect most photography falls somewhere between the two. It is, again I suspect, less a dichotomy and more a spectrum. I don’t make photographs that reveal or hint at or otherwise broadcast my inner states of being, at least not in a blunt or crude way. But the camera always points both ways, is always a mirror and a window, and so all my photographs necessarily emerge from my psychological space. So while the “calendar” photos I take are, I hope, “merely aesthetically” pleasing, they also do more than merely look pretty on a wall.

Landscape #230612

July 25, 2023
A Sense of Space

In A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time John Brinckerhoff Jackson reflects on the meaning of our increasingly urbanized and industrialized landscapes and how we interact with and live in those spaces. He is neither the first nor the most recent to draw attention to various aspects of the built environment, with a particular focus on vernacular structures, e.g., garages, mobile homes, parking lots. His book does seem to me to be more optimistic than many.

Interior #220226.1

Reading Jackson’s book made me think about the changing vernacular of interior spaces that permeates a significant portion of a new library. What sort of behavior and activities do these spaces encourage? What comparisons to the color schemes and lighting invite? How are different parts of the library marked by different interior spaces? How does it all differ from the former, dank and crowded and dark library?

Interior #220830

The different floors of the library are intended for different practices, embodied in the layout and decor and furniture on each.

Interior #220226.0

Nobody would relax in these chairs, with their wheels, rigid backs, and spare armrests they are clearly intended to be tools. Roll up to your desk, work, pivot if necessary, roll back. Built for labor not for comfort. Unsurprising to find these near the stacks of books packed tight in their compact shelving.

Interior #230106

Ascend from the bowels of the building to find comfort, warmer color palettes, and tables that invite leisure rather than work. Nestled in alcoves are comfortable chairs around a table where you can linger, perhaps read a book or chat with a friend. Whatever work occurs here, it is of a decidedly sort from that which happens in the floor below.

There’s a particular, almost poetic beauty to these different spaces. The limited palettes, the orthogonal repetition of the lower floor echo visually the rigid, tabular presentation of information. Down there habits and practices are structured and regularized. One floor up, the welcoming curves of the chairs, the table, the lamp, and soft cushions almost demand a different set of activities. Here conversations and work, insofar as that occurs on this floor, are less regulated. Just as Robert Adams found beauty in truck stops, generic houses, unadorned churches, and roads, we can find beauty in quotidian spaces, with their subtle efforts to shape our behaviors. We just need to pause and linger a bit, to look around.

May 9, 2023
Winter’s Passing

Winter never arrived this year. Except for a week in December, the winter months were balmy and snowless. Spring came early. The cherry trees had finished blooming weeks earlier than usual. While most people rejoice in spring’s colorful return, I don’t often join the festivities. I miss winter.

Landscape #230114.0

I enjoy the beauty in the stark landscapes, both large and small. The season and the bare trees and snow laden bushes lend themselves, I think, to quiet photographs.

Landscape #230114.1

Therein lies the key difference, for me, between winter and other seasons: winter is quiet, at times hauntingly so. Winter urges me to be quiet, prompts me to look carefully at the world around me, reminds me that I too shall pass.

Come, come thou bleak December wind,

And blow the dry leaves from the tree!

Flash, like a Love-thought, thro’ me, Death

And take a Life that wearies me.
Fragment, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Landscape #230114.2

Spring is here. Blossoms and leaves have brought color back to life. I lament winter’s passing but take comfort in knowing it will return.

April 30, 2023