Tag: Still Life

One Thought Per Day

The vagueness of a daily photography project or the magnitude of a “365 project” has always put me off. A more finite, one still life each day for a month, worked better. Even that project, however, lost some of its appeal by the end:

However, I have largely disliked this project. I find it dull. I have fallen into the habit of thinking that making the single photograph (which I do each evening) is sufficient. As long as I do that, I’ve accomplished something for the day. Consequently, I find myself taking fewer photographs as I wander with my camera. As if I’ve replaced taking photos of the world around me with taking my daily flash photo.

The monotony was both too boring and not sufficiently compelling. As I said at the end of that project, maybe something more focused — my version of Micheal Beirut drawing his left hand every day, or Joseph Sudek photographing things in his window. An important aspect of such a daily project, for me, is prompting me to look at the world in new ways. Trying to capture that aspect, I have been working on a daily project this past month: “One Thought Per Day.”

The book I made in which to record one thought each day. That thought becomes the seed for that day’s photograph.

I made a little booklet, a sort of diary. Early each day I write a thought, sometimes a question, on the day’s page. From that thought I generate a single word. That word guides me as I look for a scene (I don’t get to stage it — I must find it) that relates to the day’s word/thought. I get to take one picture.

The thought I had for April 16, which guided me when I took that day’s photograph.

The page above shows the thought for April 16, 2023. Posturing, pretending to be something I am not, was the thought that I sought to find as I went through the day. I found, standing on a windowsill in the department lounge, a small articulated mannequin (why an IKEA mannequin is in the lounge I can’t imagine). It became the day’s photograph.

Still Life #230416

At the end of the month I will print the day’s on a page the precedes the day’s photograph, and then assemble them into a booklet (the same dimensions as the diary I use to record the thoughts). In the end, I’ll produce a small booklet, 2 1/2″ x 4 1/4″, of about 60 pages — 30 thoughts and 30 photographs, which I will hand bind.

For me, the combination of thinking, writing, searching, and photographing has been really productive. Guided by an idea or thought, I have looked at the world around me for scenes that somehow capture that thought. I have found that I spend more time thinking about the world as I move through it. I don’t know if I have taken more pictures because of it, but I think that I’ve put more thought into most of those pictures.

I also just love making things, material things. I enjoyed making the little booklet in which to record my thoughts. I am looking forward to making the booklet filled with those thoughts and the photographs they generated.

As with most of my projects, I will likely make a handful and leave them places, cafes, Little Free Libraries, benches, wherever. I’ll probably send some to random people as well. For me, that is an important part of my entire project. Casting whatever I make out into the world (Nick Tauro Jr.’s version of this is brilliant — if only I had an old newspaper box).

April 26, 2023
The Tyranny of Tools

Despite considerable handwringing, a species of photographer seems insistent on drawing attention to the equipment used to make photographs. I am amused by how many electrons and how much ink is spent saying some version of “gear doesn’t matter” by people who are themselves focused on cameras and lenses. Whether it is a “film photographer” (a term I don’t like but seems to be important to a certain group of people) is explaining yet again that “film slows me down,” while loading film, taking a shot, and winding the crank on the side of some vintage camera, or it is a “large format photographer” setting up the tripod and camera, screwing in the cable release, inserting the film holder, and taking the picture, or it is a person with a digital camera boasting about whatever gear some company has “lent [them] to try out” as they pull it out of their bag, the camera plays a starring role in the performance. The camera, its settings, or the film stock — all that is irrelevant, as many of these photographers will, in other instances, remind us. Rather, it is the image and the message or story or emotion or moment it evokes that matters. The camera, the lens, the film, the processing are all just tools a person uses to produce a photograph.

Photographers are not unique in this obsession with cameras, deflecting our attention from the photograph to the tools used to produce it. People I would describe as “photographer-adjacent” reinforce and encourage the habit. Audiences continue to watch videos that foreground cameras. Exhibitions highlight the equipment used on panels describing shows. Publishers continue to draw attention to the cameras used. Over and over again book blurbs include statements like “photographing with an 8×10-inch Deardorff view camera” and “shooting with a medium format camera” and “everyday moments based on iPhone photographs.” Perhaps there was a time when photographers and the photography-adjacent didn’t draw attention to their tools, but if so those days are past.

Still life #230417

Imagine if we drew attention to the tools we use to accomplish other activities. I use a teaspoon rather than a soup- or tablespoon when I eat soup, one that was manufactured in the 1980s. It slows me down and forces me to appreciate the flavors and textures. Because my teaspoon is constrained by volume, I have to choose where to put it and what to scoop up. Each mouthful costs more, both time and calories, so I am more careful with each spoonful. It takes me longer to finish my bowl of soup. Metal spoons are better than plastic. Their weight causes a reassuring sound when they strike the bottom of the bowl, and if you’re eating outside the metal spoon does a better job weighing down the napkin.

April 23, 2023
My Office Window

The boundary between me and the world is about 12 inches wide. But in that 12 inches there is another, if smaller, world. Shadows cast by light falling across various things sitting on the window sill. Shadows that shift and change over the course of the day, the weeks, the months.

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Two eggs from the neighbor’s chickens. Hardboiled. Lunch if I remember. Now and then I glance over at them, like small sundials tracking my time here on earth. Empty glasses and coffee cups, evidence of having done something. Bottles of different sorts. Strangely, no flowers or plant life, for reasons I can’t explain.

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Some cups get repurposed, a tiny coop that keeps an egg from rolling off the sill and onto the floor. I see now how Sudek was able occupy himself with nothing more than a window and the things around him.

November 12, 2022
The Window of My Office

I often feel trapped in my office, looking out at the world having fun. The tree blowing in the breeze, the sights and sounds of kids playing, the occasional snippets of conversation between people huddled beneath my window talking about something they hoped to keep secret. The window faces west. Lovely warm light streams in through the blinds each afternoon. Sometimes I raise them and look out. Sometimes I don’t.

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I am not, of course, trapped. I can come and go as I please. But I work here and so spend most of my day in this office. It’s a comfortable space, filled with books and gadgets and notes and pens and old prints and scientific instruments. But always the outside beckons, especially in the afternoons when my motivation wanes. I stand at the window and look out.

Still Life #220925.1

The window becomes the interface between me and the outside world. Not a barrier but a liminal space where light meets shadow, a space where possibilities await. I linger in that space.

October 5, 2022
Roses

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.

#2200903.1: Study of Flowers 14.

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.

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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.

September 3, 2022
Study of a Flower

The value, for me, in coming back again and again to similar subjects is finding what I do and do not like. Maybe in the process I improve my technique, but that’s less interesting to me than watching how my aesthetic sensibilities shift. I seem regularly to return to flowers.

#2204208: Study of Flowers 13.

May 5, 2022
A Meaningless Photo

Karl Ove Knausgård is suspicious of photographs, or any art really, that he likes for primarily aesthetic reasons. A profound Protestantism, he thinks, rejects anything that comes too easily, that doesn’t require effort and work. He worries that he must contemplate a photograph in order to discern its meaning and therefore its significance. Only such photographs that demand such reflection and analysis can be art. This assumption, whether explicitly linked to Protestantism or not, seems common amongst both photographers and people who talk about photography (and also seems to justify, at least in part, the ubiquitous “artist’s statement”). To be art, a photograph must contain but conceal some aspect of the photographer’s identity or philosophy. Often, photographs are mechanisms of self realization and self expression. They must have a real intention.

Today, amongst real photographers and connoisseurs of photography, few compliments are more damning than “beautiful.” Art, it seems, is not beautiful or even pretty, but is meaningful and revelatory. Art demands that we acquire the knowledge to appreciate it as art. Pretty pictures are dismissed as “calendar” or “hotel” art.

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I find such an approach limiting and elitist. I am perfectly happy for some creative expression (art?) to have layers of meaning that the sufficiently prepared viewer can disentangle and appreciate. But I am unwilling to imply that only such creative expressions are art. Insofar as I care about other people seeing my work, I would rather thousands of hotel guests looked at one of my photographs as they walked through a lobby than a handful of visitors pondered one while they stood in a gallery. This photograph has no deeper meaning. It is merely a photograph of a flower that somebody found visually pleasing enough to hang in an office. That’s good enough for me.

April 20, 2022
Study of Flowers

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.

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Anyway, I’ve updated the Two Photos page with two new photographs of flowers, tulips this time.

March 26, 2022
Calla Lily

“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.

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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.

March 19, 2022
Art of Photo of Art?

Some initial thoughts on “photography as art” or “photography of art.”

In some cases, it seems easy to say that a photograph is the art, e.g., when the photographer doesn’t manipulate the scene, stage the subjects, or otherwise interfere with the world captured in the photograph. For landscape photographers who search for the right scene in the right light and the right conditions at the right time of year, the photograph is probably the art. Similarly, photographers who scour urban or interior spaces for details, or a fleeting scene. But I wonder about instances where the photographer as intervened, arranged, manipulated the objects in the photograph. When does the staged scene become the art and the subsequent photograph merely a photograph of that art?

Series: Herbarium #211004

A portrait or a still life both require the photographer to intervene and stage the scene, and seem to be the space where this question of “Art or photograph of art?” becomes rather thorny. When producing the portrait or still life required considerable skill, time, and effort, perhaps we could more easily see the work as art: Titian’s portraits, or Bruegel’s still life paintings, or Dürer’s drawings. But today, when almost anybody can make technically sound photographs, the quality and execution of the work is no longer sufficient to make it art.

The ease of producing photographic portraits and still lifes displaces the art from the final product, the photograph, back to the staging of the photograph. Photography, in this mode, risks becoming mimesis. The art, insofar as art is related to effort or skill or talent or vision, is in the staging of the scene, the creating and arranging of props, the directing of people in the frame. The photograph becomes a sort of single frame from a movie. Perhaps that’s why we hear so much about cinematic photography these days, and why color grading seems to be mandatory, and why any photograph of a gas station at night shot on CineStill is considered art. Photography has become merely the means of representing art.

Series: Herbarium #211015

Photography has always risked mimesis, risked being little more than a representation of art: Weston’s peppers; Penn’s portraits; Mapplethorpe’s flowers. But there seems to be something different today, at least in degree if not in kind. Weston, Penn, Mapplethorpe seemed to try to find the beauty in something, tried to reveal the beauty that was there as opposed to fabricating the beauty. Photography was, it seems, both the means and the material of the art. Mapplethorpe’s flowers were beautiful works of art because they were photographs. The photograph captured something that Mapplethorpe could imagine but was disguised, fleeting, or indiscernible. The photograph added something, was essential, was more than simply a representation of what anybody would have seen if they looked at the flower. Increasingly, the photograph doesn’t aspire to be art so much as it is content to be evidence. Evidence of having been somewhere, eaten something, creatively arranged an assortment of things, artistically staged some scene. Evidence that art was made.

February 22, 2022