Art & Perception

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.

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An admirer of my photography recently praised my clever ability to capture the spirit of the great Dutch painter Piet Mondrian in my work.  I was quite taken aback by this and without diminishing the genius of Mondrian, I felt obliged to explain to my admirer that he was putting the proverbial cart before the horse.  The only relationship I can claim to Mondrian is that our work benefits from the same model, the same muse.

In one sense, Mondrian did not create Broadway Boogie Woogie, rather the boogie woogie of Broadway inspired Mondrian.  Mondrian recorded and interpreted with his brush what I record and interpret with my camera: a unique energy fueled by verticals, horizontals and colors that is the visual signature of Manhattan and it’s relentless boogie woogie.

As a young man off on his first world adventures I was stunned by the revelation that many of the great artists I admired did not invent their mysterious landscapes, colors and visual signatures of China, Japan, Tuscany and Provence. Rather they were brilliantly capturing the unique moods, colors, light and shapes that nature had already chosen to create.  I remember gazing over the hills of Tuscany for the first time and thinking, “Oh!  So that’s where Leonardo got that.”  And I remember the day I realized the Van Gogh was “photographing” (through his unusual lens) the unique palette and landscapes of Provence.

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A while ago I got “fan mail” from someone regarding my portfolio of “stick pictures,” a body of work that I make in dense, brushy environments. She wanted some insight into my process, and I thought it would be illustrative to share the exchange here.

“Often I find that pictures of this nature look cluttered and pinched, but yours I find to be exceptionally emotive and contemplative. I was wondering about your mental and emotional approach to shooting these images. Do you focus more on the mental, with respect to composition, or is it something that you feel more so than see?”

My response:

“Thanks for the note. The “stick pictures” is where I do my deep work as a photographer. It is internal, it is visceral, and the question of why that sort of landscape is so compelling to me is not the interesting one. I’m grateful that there is such a rich vein for me to mine and that it has stayed so compelling for so many years.

“Though I’m sure it would be hugely valuable, I don’t meditate, I don’t do yoga, and I don’t have a regular practice to center myself or otherwise quiet the inner voice in my head so that I can pay attention to the moment. I’m actually an anxious fidgeter much of the time, and I’m forgetful and absent minded. Working with the camera, in the landscape, is the closest I get to a meditation practice of any kind, and it probably occupies that role in my life. I do know that, in those complex brushy environments, I am able to let go of the conscious attention to composition and framing and the sense that “now I’m taking a picture.” The pictures find themselves, and I follow. That part of the brain that is a lot smarter than the part that consciously knows what is going on is taking the lead.

“I have, though, been working this way for a couple of decades. The technical part is fluid and unconscious. I also take a lot of bad pictures when I’m out there. A lot of the work is attending to the results of a given shoot, and ferreting out the one shot that exemplifies the coherence of the moment. My method is to post proof prints in a place where I will see them in my peripheral vision for awhile, like my kitchen. Over time I take down the ones that bore me, and I see what survives. It is the spawning salmon method of photography. Most of the roe get eaten. Only a select few grow to adulthood and see the world.”

The link to the portfolio is here. I’ve fixed the code that seemed to keep non-IE users from viewing the page.

Are quick drawings and paintings artworks or just studies? Are they value at all?

A lot of drawings of old masters have an immense value nowadays but looking at contemporary artists drawings, are they such important?

Why don’t contemporary artists exhibit mostly their drawings and experiments, just their final masterpieces?

Scrying – pencil and chalk, quick drawing on paper

Drawing from imagination, pencil on paper

Spiritual, Mixed media on paper

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.

I am travelling in New England engaged in my two great passions, dance and photography. I have announced to the dance world that I am preparing a book of my contra dance photography. Nothing like going public with an idea to force one to actually proceed with it.

Here is one of the conundrums with which I am faced, and it goes to the heart of photography as both a descriptive and an abstracting medium. At dinner last night, David Millstone challenged me about what I wanted this book project to represent. Is it about the contra dance world, or is it about photography of contra dance? Is it a narrative description of a subculture I happen to belong to, or is it a series of solutions to finding resolved images in a complex, dynamic environment?

Mostly I come to dance, because it feeds my soul and my bliss. Because dancing is so close to my heart, it is a natural subject to turn my photographic attention toward. I know the feeling of dance, and the creative challenge is to make work that also has that feeling present. But I’m also responding to light and shadow, movement and expresion, all those things that can make an interesting photograph. I stand back, and I want to work with what I’m seeing.

This challenge speaks to one of the great paradoxes of photography as a creative, interactive process. Our source material is the external world. We take a picture, which has a complex cascade of metaphoric and literal meanings and implications. Take it where? Take it from what, or whom? It implies a duality, there’s the photographer, then there’s the thing that the photograph is taken of, or from, if you wish to include the soul-snatching metaphor. Relationally, it brings forth the conflict of choosing between being a witness or a participant.

To master the photographic process requires a fluency in the sequence of chemical, or now, electronic processes that create an object with its own presence and reality. The photograph resembles something that we understand as a document of a given moment and place, but it is nonetheless a highly abstracted artifact of a lot of technology. My jollies come from being able to see from one end to the other of that tunnel of process at the very moment I am engaged in the intitial framing and exposure. And I choose to play with that process in a really complicated environment, a contra dance floor.

My resolution to the duality conflict—am I a participant or a witness?—is to not resolve it. I flit back and forth. When I want a break from dancing, I take pictures. If it’s a dance where I think bodily harm can be avoided, I’ll dance with the camera. I want those stances to be as close to each other as I can manage. I want both aspects to be present in the work.

I expect much of my job for the next few months will be figuring out just what form this project is going to take.

I’ve gone further with this painting (which we saw at earlier stages before). I’ve been thinking a lot about your suggestions from last time while I was painting. What do I need to do to finish the picture? Any suggestions? For reference, the cloth is about 25 cm wide at its widest point. Here are some details of the picture: more… »