a multi-disciplinary dialog
The biggest recorded earthquake in Montana history (magnitude 7.3) struck August 17, 1959, causing a huge landslide that dammed the Madison River (coming from Yellowstone Park) and created Quake Lake. Some 26-28 campers lost their lives, most of the bodies remaining under the millions of tons of rock. To me, they seem connected to the much larger number of trees that were drowned by the rising water, but remained standing bare, half-submerged.
From The art of looking sideways, by Alan Fletcher.
I shut my eyes in order to see. – Paul Gauguin
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I paint what I know, not what I see. – Pablo Picasso
What you see is what you see. – Frank Stella
Seeing is not believing. Believing is seeing. – Robert Pirsig
In June of 1816, the ship Medusa set sail with three other ships to the Senegalese port of Saint-Louis, which had been given to the French by the British as a show of good faith to the reinstated French king, Louis XVIII. The ship held nearly 400 people, including the new governor of Senegal and his soldiers and 160 crew members. The captain was Hugues Duroy de Chaumereys, a 53 year-old man who had not been to sea in twenty-five years and had never commanded a ship before.
Wanting to make good time, the Medusa stuck close to the African shoreline and quickly outpaced the other ships. Unfortunately, it was too close to shore and inevitably hit a sandbar. Attempts were made to throw overboard extra weight in the hope of raising the ship out of the muck and floating out with the tide, but de Chaumereys wouldn’t allow the crew to get rid of the cannons for fear of angering his constituents back in France.
I’ve been continuing with my new project on horses, which has predictably wandered into a thicket of possibilities. I’m confident it will emerge at some point — though I daren’t say when — and when it does, it will necessarily be in some direction or other. Hopefully trailing a series with some coherence.
But at the moment, I’m taking many different kinds of pictures. The very few I’ve put on my web site are a motley and incomplete assortment, determined more by (lack of) time available than anything else. The experience has me thinking about the nature of projects.
In a recent post, Hanneke looked again at a year-old painting she had felt dissatisfied with. I’m not sure how common this is for painters, but for me and, I suspect, most photographers, it’s the normal way of things. Whether blessing or curse, we have lots of older images that were not immediately pursued. Capturing an image takes much less time than bringing it to the standard of a fine print.
There is one advantage to this state of affairs, namely the enforced editing that prunes the large fraction of images that are, at best, less good than those we spend our limited time on. There might even be psychological benefit: if it’s good to learn to let go, I sure have a lot of learning opportunities. On the other hand, if regret is bad, I’m in trouble.
A blog like Art & Perception is, in some ways, a substitute for the local café. The ability to discuss art with people around the world compensates, at least in part, for the loss of the immediacy of face-to-face contact. But it’s not a complete substitute. Direct interaction is still important for many reasons, and consequently there is a need for ways to facilitate it by letting people know about opportunities to meet each other, to learn, and to see art.
Few of us are so plugged in to our local art scene that we are aware of everything that’s going on in terms of shows, openings, talks, social events, etc. The newspaper may list major events, typically those for which an ardent volunteer or a motivated gallery has written a press release. In the case of my hometown of Bozeman, Montana, there are several places on the web that have listings, but judging from what is there, I suspect they are little known or used. Most of what is happening is invisible to the public. Sometimes that’s desired, though certainly not always.
But more important than the events themselves is the community that could potentially form around them. The past quickly slips into oblivion, and there is no convenient forum for the remembering, discussing, reviewing, proposing that might be engendered.
Another re-visitation in my recent tour was the Montana ghost town of Bannack, where I have photographed my Ghost Light series. Although I’m not sure a project ever really ends, it does go through phases. I feel this one is nearly dormant: I still enjoy the location, I find photographs I want to make, but there’s a sense of approaching completion. The initial vision was about spaces and light and the stories suggested there (someone wrote me she kept looking at one of the pictures while, in fact, writing a story). Now I’m filling out with additions that make a more rounded view of the place, but may not advance the key ideas much.
