Art & Perception

Now that I am over much of my computer issues and can focus on art I came across a couple of photos (hidden on my PC) that I had forgotten about. Over the last ten years or more I’ve had an opportunity to be taught creativity by pre-school young people. When I am around a bunch of kids, I learn all over again that art like life is to serious to take seriously. There is so much joy in watching kids paint flying dogs for Valentine’s Day or green hearts for Mother’s Day

When ever I get an invitation to work with young people, I say sure, why not, I’ll be there. Then I experience an unimaginable fear as if I were meeting the Queen and I wonder why I did I say yes. The answers comes within two seconds after meeting the kids.

I was planning on posting this anyway, apropos of leaving on vacation with my wife, Robin, today. Then I saw Steve Durbin’s entry, and realized it would be the perfect follow-up. It’s a piece she wrote for my blog last year, but I think only 30 people saw it at the time. Her advice deserves a wider audience.

Advice to photographers’ significant others:

• When on a shoot or on the road, always bring food, water, and a book. If the light becomes “perfect” (usually early or late in the day, or if it’s overcast in just the right way), your photog will be captivated by it. Do insist on your right to go to the bathroom, be dropped at the hotel before the light comes in, or have your basic needs taken care of.
• Don’t take it personally when he says, “The light is beautiful on you.” You could be a rock, or a stump, or a wall. But he probably loves you anyway.
• Don’t take it personally when you become the “foreground element”. It’s not about you. You’re just the one that’s there.
• Do take it personally, in the best way, if you become the object of many studies. Photographers connect with the world through their cameras. It is another way of being known.
• You don’t have to like all of the work, if you like the photographer. Doug has one body of work that is too visually complex for my brain to process. None of this work is in the living room. If your person needs you to love every picture, send him to therapy. If you think you need to love every picture, go yourself.
• Get used to schedule changes. Your photog might find out on Tuesday that he’s going to Ireland for two weeks on Thursday. Have friends to fill in the gap. Accommodations I figured out included putting in a watering system for the garden, hiring people to do some of his tasks, and letting myself be pissed about the changes, until I’m not.
• Keep in contact. In most places in the developed world, there are local cell phones for sale. Speak often. Email. Whine. Say endearments. Listen to whining. Support. Ask for support. It’s good glue. We talk almost every day. I especially like to bask in Doug’s excitement when he’s on a shoot and it’s going well. He does bliss well.
• It’s okay to demand that the geek speak stops, when you’ve run out of patience for it. Especially if they’re talking about digital workflows. It’s rude for people to speak in a language not shared by others.
• When he comes back into town with 4,000 images to process, make some dates to connect, but don’t expect that he’ll be fully there until the images are on a disc and sent away. Then you can have the coming-back fight and really connect.
• It’s OK to play the wife role, whatever your gender, on occasion. I do this at openings and print sales and during the big post-shoot image processing. Other times, be who you are, more than wife. Doug is the wife at my conferences and book signings and when I’m writing. It’s OK to be flexible. Don’t get caught up in the role. It’s not a full enough identity for anyone.
• If you’re traveling together, don’t think you have to be joined at the hip. Pursue your own interests, then meet later. Do ask your person to leave the camera in the room or in the bag for a meal or an evening. Suggesting that making contact with you might allow your photog to “get lucky” can help this occur. It works for me.
• If he’s been gone for a long time, and you’ve had the house to yourself, expect conflict on re-entry. It’s normal. It’s predictable. Just have it. He’s invading your space, after all.
• Dont worry about the “Bridges of Madison County” scenario. You know how he really is.
• A story: Several years ago, outside of Banff, after a full day of shooting, the light changed and Doug became enchanted. I was really hungry. After 45 minutes, I demanded to be driven into town for food. Reluctantly, Doug packed up his gear, and we drove to a 2nd-floor sushi bar. I was facing the window. The light was magical. We ordered anyway. Before the fish came, I saw a rainbow over Mount Rundle. I said, “Doug, get your gear and get out there.” He did. 20 minutes later he returned. Three minutes later, the second rainbow appeared, arcing over the other. “Get back out there, now!” The waiter didn’t know what was going on. He kept asking if everything was alright. He didn’t understand my explanation: “My husband is a photographer.”

Robin’s blog (on therapy issues, for other therapists–you think photographer’s use geekspeak?) is at Trauma & Attachment.

Reflections inspire much of my work, both in my photography and in my writing.  I’m much more intrigued by the subject’s reflection than I am by the subject itself.

Mirrors

My maternal grandmother Luba Abramanova (made Lilly on 1922 Ellis Island) maintained an uncomfortable truce with mirrors  and cameras, anything that would reflect her image.  Mirrors served an occasionally necessary function and were to be barely tolerated.  Shop windows and reflecting pools were easily avoided. Cameras were–in her estimation–nothing more than mirrors that rudely captured a permanent record of the reflection.  We’ve all heard stories about primitive tribes and their superstitious notion that cameras can steal the soul.  And then of course we have legends of vampires and their inability to even cast a reflection.  Jews have no depictions of humans in their art for fear of violating the Ten Commandment’s prohibition against “idolatry”.  Narcissus couldn’t free his own gaze from the reflection in the pool and now he lives in flower pots. Medusa, rendered powerless by her own reflection, was easily slain by Perseus. The mirror defeated the Gorgon.  Lilly was clearly on to something important.

Other than the customary bathroom cabinet mirror, the only other mirror in Lilly’s home was a huge Venetian smoked glass decorative mirror hanging over her living room couch at an angle rather than flat against the wall.  The mirror was unapproachable.  Tilting off the wall as it did, it seemed an odd position for such a big and ominous slab of glass and as a child I often wondered when it would come crashing down on the sofa and some foolish shortsighted victim. For that reason, I never sat on the sofa.  If all the chairs were taken at a family gathering, I would sit on the floor pretending to be an Indian.  Adults would buy that and think it cute.

Occasionally someone would comment on the Venetian mirror’s limited decorative role.  Why not hang a painting instead?  Between the odd angle, the couch that kept you at a distance from the mirror and the muted lighting in the living room, you really couldn’t see your own reflection in any practical sense.  It wasn’t until I was 16 that I realized that the mirror was deliberately angled in that manner so that Lilly could see the dress she was wearing, but not her own face.  She had hung the mirror according to her own height so that her reflection was effectively cut off at the head. more… »

One of my most powerful and influential muses both in my writing and photography is incongruity. I believe this is the case for two reasons.  First, growing up gay in mid 20th Century America means you daily face living in a state of perpetual incongruousness. Almost every thought you have is incongruous with your surroundings and the apparent thoughts of most everyone around you. Your self-confidence, self-respect and development as a human being depends on embracing and owning your state of incongruity.  As a child and especially as a closeted teenager and college student I was often called a non-conformist and an iconoclast.  That was unfair to true non-conformists and iconoclasts because I did  not choose to be so whereas they do.  What appeared to be non-conformity and iconoclasm was merely the manifestations of my incongruous condition.

The second reason for my creative relationship with incongruity is Manhattan,  my life-long environment. Environmentally, my home town provided a visual and cultural stew that celebrated and exploded with incongruity. As a child and closeted young man, I could swim in the waters of Manhattan with complete confidence and comfort. Who would notice my quirky little self in this ocean of intensely complex cultural, economic, political, racial and ethnic diversity and this visual cacophony and feast of discordant shapes, colors and textures?

So incongruity became my home and my muse.

I believe that New York is as important to the art world as it is because this city”s uniquely incongruous nature drives an unequaled atmosphere of creative energy and frenetic industry. I was recently asked why I “limit” my camera to New York. In fact, I almost never travel with my camera.  My inventory of Manhattan photography is vast.  And having traveled extensively throughout more than two dozen countries and countless cities and towns, I have but a few hundred old transparencies buried in a drawer somewhere.

The reason is that my muse is a very demanding mistress. Paris is a city of harmony and balance.  London delivers an abundance of quaint, stately and a touch of the eccentric.  Tokyo is an avalanche of uniformity and elegance. Bangkok is an ocean of golden spires. Amsterdam’s incongruity lies in the sexual antics hidden behind sparkling clean windows and compulsively neat little houses. But if I photographed these places I would feel like an adulterer.

For many reasons: Chance, the forces of chaos, competing cultural perspectives, subconscious manifestations of the city’s demographics–Manhattan’s is the queen of incongruity. My camera’s appetite for it seems never to be satisfied by the cornucopia of inharmonious diversity of architecture, styles and design.  New York never disappoints in that regard.  In most any direction you look in most parts of town, you will find bizarre, often inappropriate and jarring juxtapositions of lifestyles and perspectives that should make for one big jumble of chaos but instead it is in that brazen incongruity that the city finds an amazing visual harmony.

Tourists are often jarred by this as they discover that a wrong turn on a city block can transport you into an entirely different world after merely walking a few feet. Other than the city’s famous grid pattern, little else has been done in concert thanks to the egos and individuality of very wealthy men and the American habit of borrowing architectural styles and ornamental designs and decorative effects from several thousand years of human history which is no where more apparent than in this city.

On one city block you may catch glimpses of ancient Babylonia, Classical Greece, Medieval Europe, Art Nouveau Vienna, and Renaissance France.  Some of these will be bizarrely newish, some aged through recent neglect and other parts deliberately made to look weathered over hundreds or even thousands of years.  In fact, one of the most charming characteristics of this great lady with a passion for phallic symbols is that it is often impossible to differentiate between neglect and artful and deliberate antiquing.

I will be quite content to spend the rest of my life exploring this town’s details. I consider myself to be extremely lucky to have found a model who remains timeless, always changing and forever surprising.  My work is completely a product of my environment. Incongruity.  Except Manhattan is also the glue that holds it together, and I mean “it” in every sense of the word.

“Why haven’t you been writing much?” I asked a many times published writer friend of mine one time.

“I need time to breathe.”

“Breathe?”

“Yes. But you have to know what I mean by ‘breathe.’ I mean sail a boat across an ocean, climb a mountain in the Himalayas, photograph lions in Africa… Something of magnitude. That does the trick. Then I’m ready again. Then there’s no stopping me.”

“Ah. I do know what you mean. I think I need to catch my breath too.”

What do you do to rekindle your artistic energy?

“The greater danger is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”

Michelangelo

Just recently we had some discussion of New Year’s Resolutions. One of mine had to do with achieving some body sculpting goals. To accomplish that, I put myself on training regimen, but very soon, I noticed, “Well, I’ve done this before, and I’ve never achieved the kind of results I’m after. What’s it gonna take? What’s it really gonna take?”

So I started doing some research. I began with the knowledge that though I’ve been a jock pretty much my whole life, maybe, just maybe I did not know just exactly how to get “ripped,” and sure enough, I found that I had more than a thing or two to learn about reducing fat while increasing muscle. In fact, it was on a little motivational excerpt from one of my resources that I got the above quote.
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