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.
Steve received an e-mailed picture taken by me during a recent trip and suggested that we do a collaboration around the theme of waterfalls, and do so in the form of two posts. In the first, I hereby display some images and describe my path to them. We then discuss a reworking of one of the images by Steve. This will be followed by another post where he displays and I perform a makeover.
My Images
Ohio is the home of the gentle cataract. The peculiarities of geology and topography promote a stepwise progression of falling water. We stand in awe of any fall that we look up to. In the White Mountains of New Hampshire the water responds differently, the result of a hard geology that wears with effort. This results in smooth transitions, punctuated with boulders of various sizes.
These two environments present themselves very differently. Here one looks across the water for the most part, the included image notwithstanding, while the perspective is more vertical in the mountains.
This post features images taken at Buttermilk Falls, outside of Cleveland, and the Flume in the White Mountains. The Flume is essentially a slot canyon formed by the selective erosion of a basalt dike. Water falls vigorously through a steep succession of boulders and slopes.
A word about my approach: the camera captures a multiplicity of detail that the eye would tend to weed out on the spot. Photo Shop is a quick and dry sort of dark room and it allows for a further shaping of an image away from the contingencies of the moment. I can dwell on a given shot and try to articulate more fully whatever prompted me to take it in the first place. Sometimes this process clarifies and condenses as when I am working on a portfolio image. It can also lead me away from specificity toward something more personal. Then I often find the image assuming a novel identity. At times it can seem that I am changing it to match an internal template, as though I am looking at my own mind.
Buttermilk
The photograph below is an example of this process. It was taken from a small bridge just upstream of the falls themselves, and is typical of the flattened stream beds in these parts. I was attracted to a kind of role reversal: a few feet further and the water is white and foamy as it falls over darker rock. Here the water makes it’s way in dark pools and rivulets and the rock itself reflects brightly. Furthermore, it is a welter of suggestive features and subtle details.
The first image is as taken, and the second as processed.
The scene did not satisfy me as taken. There was something there that needed to be shaped. I began the process by cropping the image. Then I erased small artifacts, like glints and leaves, that detracted from the overall quality. The magic wand and the stamp functions were used to isolate areas for more attention and to transfer colors and textures from one spot to another. somewhere along the line I began to sink into my work and the quality of mind matching appeared.
Flume
The waters of the Flume fan out over a ledge before assuming a quieter course down hill. The view had a lovely kind of breadth to it, but consisted of a patchwork of more and less interesting areas. I essentially transfered some of the better areas elsewhere in the image, creating what was for me a kind of dream scape effect: the view overall has a logical progression to it, but one which dissolves in places. The people on the bridges are insubstantial and perhaps wondering what just happened. Overall I feel a Westernized Orientalism in this piece.
The first image is the scene as shot; the second as modified.
The next example is heavily modified. I spent time moving water highlights around, darkening walls, removing leaves and generally trying to simplify. I feel that it might be wearing too much lipstick.
The Discussion
Steve’s thoughts
One thing Jay and I seem to have in common is an approach that involves continuing to learn from the image as we work with it. I found the “mental self-portrait” he uncovered fascinating. It’s a great example of what some might see as mere inanimate landscape coming to express something quite deep and personal.
One of Jay’s photographs that especially appealed to me was one of the Flume. Here is how I first saw it:
This image is probably most meaningful to Jay as shown here, not only an appealing picture but one recalling a place he enjoyed. But the memory aspect has little impact on me, since I’ve never been there, and in fact I am little interested in memory aids even of places I have been. But it did appeal to me very much in a more “abstract” sense, and I really wanted to see it in black and white, which often has the effect of decreasing the specificity and opening the door to further associations.
I like the result for its play of tones, especially on the wet boulders (note that because of the high contrast, these depend quite sensitively on your monitor settings). I like the top half and the bottom half separately, which set me to musing on the juxtaposition of low (earthly) rough turbulence and high (spiritual?) delicate stasis, separated by intervening darkness. The plants and ground cover in the upper half are reminiscent of brighter stars against the Milky Way.
Jay Replies
There’s an economy of coloration in the Flume. It’s as though every hue is hard won. I decided to accept what was presented, color and form. With the exception of some gardening in the upper portion and coiffing the rapid, I left the image pretty much alone. Steve’s version compresses the scene into a gray scale. At first his version bothered me until I re-read his explanation. While it is far more than a memento, the image for me has little symbolic value. Steve altered it to achieve a new synthesis to match his response. The water below and the string of foliage above are indeed in an evocative relationship. I would like to see Steve darken the intervening rock face to make it more of a void and give the foliage a more spectral and star-like quality. Also I think that the image would need to be re-shot on location in a larger format so as to allow for a much bigger print to be made. And the image seems to demand a sharper focus than I was able to achieve with my elderly Olympus.
We have been discussing appropriation on A&P, both in a practical and ethical sense. I accept appropriation in its many forms as being part of the overall compilation that we are here on Earth to perform. But this exercise did not go that smoothly for me. Everything in this collaboration was done with mutual consent, yet some instinct inside of me was growling at the intruder, come to snatch a child away. I believe that one best confronts an emotion like that. An effective therapy might be to have people modify my stuff in abundance, until my mental adhesions are Rolfed away.
Steve’s new versions
Since it is Jay’s image, I can’t do less than see what his suggestion looks like. Below, I’ve made adjustments that are not too dramatic — I’m not straying too far from naturalism — but have the effect of implying greater separation of lower and upper spheres.
That concept could be carried even further by separating the two halves while keeping them juxtaposed, along the lines discussed in a previous post.
My friend Tolla from San Francisco came visiting the Dunes. Driving to the Lakeshore, he alerted me to a hawk. At the beach, I started doing my usual thing, imaging textures of sand, water and sky
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.
Since I last checked in with Art & Perception, I’ve been exploring the synthesis of two of my most persistent obsessions: Manhattan and beatuiful men. I was partly motivated by comments on this blog questioning my lack of people in my city views and details. As a result of that, I have of late gone in a completely opposite direction.
Truth be told, I rarely enoy nude male photography, it leaves me cold. Too obvious. On the other hand the naked city in all of its hardness, rigid angles and cubist statements is to my eye powerfully masculine and quite arousing. So I wondered if I could use my camera to create some kind of visual and emotional communication between the stone, steel and glass architecture, textures and colors of my adored metropolis and the architecture, textures and colors of beautiful men.
I’m not sure I’ve succeeded quite yet, but I do feel I am on the right path. And I must confess–not surprisingly–the exploration has been great fun.
Perhaps the strangest part of this experience has been that the sexual and visual pleasure that I’ve been experiencing during this process of of exploration has been unique and extraordinarily intense in ways I had not imagined. Furthermore, the experience has given rise to intense personal feelings that I’ve not experienced during the actual act of sex. Partly, this is because–with one exception–I have not indulged in sex with my models despite the fact that one of the criteria I’ve used to select my models has been powerful sexual attraction. Limiting myself to the visual experience has opened the door on new sensations and much more powerful visual experience than I’ve ever had before.
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.
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.
