February, 2008; Old Polaroid Camera; The mysteries of winter
Santa Fe, NM

February, 2008; Old Polaroid Camera; The mysteries of winter
Santa Fe, NM

February, 2008; Old Polaroid Camera; The mysteries of winter
Santa Fe, NM

Outside is the cold, the wind, the snow.  Another storm is brewing tonight.  Inside, this February I’ve been working on some of the more tedious tasks in photography: labeling and cataloguing negatives, writing grant and residency applications, spotting prints.

As a result the Charles Aznavour song Emmenez- moi has become a favorite.  The refrain goes:  Emmenez- moi au bout de la terre.  Emmenez- moi au pays des merveilles.  Il me semble que la misère serait moi pénible au soleil!  Translation : Take me to the ends of the world.  Take me to the land of marvels.  I feel that misery would be less painful in the sun.

January, 2008; Old Polaroid Camera; At the end of the day
Santa Fe, NM

January, 2008; Old Polaroid Camera; At the end of the day
Santa Fe, NM

January, 2008; Old Polaroid Camera; At the end of the day
Santa Fe, NM

Some of you may be wondering: This blog is called “On Photography,” but recently all you do is quote from various works of literature.  What’s that about?

Well, I believe that a firm grounding in an intellectual tradition is essential to the pursuit of any artistic practice.  Each artist can choose the tradition that pleases him or her: Buddhist thought, Confucianism, the West African Oral tradition, Sufi poetry, but I do believe that a deep grounding in that choice is necessary to know well the manner and content of what the artist is trying to say.

My choice is that old Western European canon.  This does not mean I ignore other traditions, but I realize I want a firm grounding in the intellectual history that most informs my upbringing.  Ironically, I did not really gain this in my schooling, in part because in the US we are no longer inculcated with the Western canon and in part because I studied Japanese literature, history and art while is college, not European.  So, here I am trying to catch-up, and I’m finding it a fabulous journey that I’ve deeply missed.  Missed, since it was last in high school that I spent so much time with the wonderful world of European literature.

Indeed, while on this subject, I have to give a shout out to Profession Robert Harrison, a professor of Italian literature at Stanford University who hosts a weekly radio talk show on which he invites world renown writers and thinkers to discuss their area of specialty on the show.  It’s a wonderful way to broaden one’s intellectual horizons, as it were.  On his next show he will be hosting Nobel Laureate Ohran Pamuk.  You can download his shows from i-tunes U or directly from the show’s website.

Maybe you don’t believe me: that artists benefit from being well-read.  So, in my defense I’m going to give you another quote.  This one is from an interview with Walker Evans from the April 1971 issue of Art in America, also reprinted in the book “Walker Evans At Work.”

Evans: “I think I incorporated Flaubert’s method almost unconsciously, but anyway I used it in two ways; both his realism, or naturalism, and his objectivity of treatment.  The non-appearance of author.  The non-subjectivity.  That is literally applicable to the way I want to use a camera and do.”

And some of you probably wondered how I could link Evans to that Proust quote a few blogs ago.  Indeed, now you know, both Proust and Evans are intellectual heirs of M. Flaubert.

December, 2007; Old Polaroid Camera; Car tracks in the snow
Santa Fe, NM

December, 2007; Old Polaroid Camera; Snow on a wall
Santa Fe, NM

December, 2007; Old Polaroid Camera; Christmas decorations
Santa Fe, NM

Happy New Year!

I hope the holidays went as well as can be expected for everyone out there.  In Santa Fe there was sunshine in the air and snow on the ground.

Of late, I tend to read about three to four books at once.  One is usually popular fiction.  Another is philosophy, and another is a history, or a more classical work of fiction.  This keeps me reading even when my attention span quickly wanders, and it often presents rather interesting parallels among disparate works.  For example, a few weeks ago I was noticing some parallels between Kerouac’s “On the Road” and Descartes’ approach to life when the philosopher left all his studies and “resolved to seek no other knowledge than that which I might find within myself, or perhaps in the great book of nature.”

So, what does all that have to do with photography?  Well, a lot.  But it mainly serves as a good introduction to the quote I want to give you from “On the Road”.  A quote which is, I think, a very good philosophy regarding the creative process, and the road to being and staying an artist.

“He came right out to Patterson, New Jersey, where I was living with my aunt, and one night while I was studying there was a knock on the door, and there was Dean, bowing, shuffling obsequiously in the dark of the hall, and saying, “Hel-lo, you remember me – Dean Moriarty?  I’ve come to ask you to show me how to write.”
            “And where’s Marylou?” I asked, and Dean said she’d apparently whored a few dollars together and gone back to Denver – “the whore!”  So we went out to have a few beers because we couldn’t talk like we wanted to talk in front of my aunt, who sat in the living room reading her paper.  She took one look at Dean and decided that he was a madman.
            In the bar I told Dean, “Hell, man, I know very well you didn’t come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except you’ve got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.”  And he said, “Yes, of course, I know exactly what you mean and in fact all those problems have occurred to me, but the thing that I want is the realization of those factors that should one depend on Schopenhauer’s dichotomy for any inwardly realized…” and so on in that way, things I understood not a bit and he himself didn’t.”

December, 2007; Old Polaroid Camera; Self-Portrait
New York, NY

December, 2007; First snow; Inwood
New York, NY

A few months ago a very nice person gave me an old-school Polaroid camera – complete with bellows.  He wasn’t sure if it still worked, as it had lain unused for many years.  On my arrival in New York I took it to those old-school camera experts at Photo Gizzmo and left it for repairs.  They converted the battery unit to work with double As.  The flash unit no longer works since the bulbs are no longer manufactured….but other than these minor issues, the camera works beautifully.  The first photo of this entry – self-portrait of me in mirror – was taken with this wonderful old machine.

Recently I’ve begun to wonder how I could have lived so many years without reading Marcel Proust.  How was this not obvious to those around me?  Didn’t my deficientcy stand out like a malignant cancer or perhaps, more fittingly, as a lack of vibrancy in my skin, or a dullness in my eyes or perhaps a flat tone that entered my speech at regular intervals?

Here’s a passage from “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower” that, as a fan of Walker Evans, I particularly enjoyed. (translated by James Grieve)

“the steeple by the dome, which because I had read of it as a stark Norman cliff braving the worst of the sea-weather, with birds wheeling in the squalls, I had always seen as being soaked by the spindrift blown from the tumultuous deep, now stood in a town square at the junction of two tramlines, opposite a café with the word Billiards above it in gilt lettering, against a background of houses with no masts swaying above their roofs.  The church impinged on my mind with the café, the passer-by whom I had asked for directions and the railway-station to which I would soon return; it was just a part of its surroundings, with an accidental look to it, as though it was a detail of a late afternoon in which the dome against the sky had the mellow swell of a fruit ripening its golden melting pink in the same sunshine as touched the chimneys of the houses.  But when I recognized the Apostles, whose statues I had seen as mouldings in the Trocadero Museum and who now stood to the left and right of the Virgin, waiting by the deep recess of the porch as though to pay me homage, I tried to close my mind to everything but the eternal significance of the sculptures.  Slightly stooping, with their kind faces, snub noses and mild expressions, they looked like choristers come to fill the fine day with a welcoming Hallelujah.  Then one noticed that their expressions were as fixed as those of the dead, not changing unless one stepped over to see them from the other side.  I stood there telling myself: ‘This is it!  This is the church at Balbec!  This town square, which looks as though it’s aware of its claim to fame, is the only place in the world which possesses the church of Balbec.  Until now, all I’ve ever seen of it was just photos of the church and mouldings of the Apostles and the Virgin.  But now, this is the church itself, the statue in person, the real things!  And the real things are unique – this is much more!

It was also much less, perhaps.”

March, 2006; Turning Path; Schonbrunn Palace
Vienna, Autria

So, as we have started up this blog again, I think it appropriate to continue its venerable tradition (since 2004) of presenting thought-provoking quotes.  I think many photographer will identify with the one below:

Vladimir Nabokov; "Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited"; Chapter 6

“I also found out very soon that a ‘lepist’ indulging in his quiet quest was apt to provoke strange reactions in other creatures.  How often, when a picnic had been arranged, and I would be self-consciously trying to get my humble implements unnoticed into the tar-smelling charabanc (a tar preparation was used to keep flies away from the horses) or the tea-smelling Opel convertible (benzine torty years ago smelled that way), some cousin or aunt of mine would remark: ‘Must you really take that net with you?  Can’t you enjoy yourself like a normal boy?  Don’t you think you are spoiling everybody’s pleasure?’  Near a sign NACH BODENLAUBE, at Bad Kissingen, Bavaria, just as I was about to join for a long walk my father and majestic old Muromtsev (who, four years before, in 1906, had been President of the first Russian Parliament), the latter turned his marble head towards me, a vulnerable boy of eleven, and said with his famous solemnity: ‘Come with us by all means, but do not chase butterflies, child.  It spoils the rhythm of the walk.’  On a path above the Black Sea, in the Crimea, among shrubs in waxy bloom, in March 1918, a bow-legged Bolshevik sentry attempted to arrest me for signaling (with my net, he said) to a British warship.  In the summer of 1929, every time I walked through a village in the Eastern Pyrenees, and happened to look back, I would see in my wake the villagers frozen in the various attitudes my passage had caught them in, as if I were Sodom and they Lot’s wife.  A decade later, in the Maritime Alps, I once noticed the grass undulate in a serpentine way behind me because a fat rural policman was wriggling after me on his belly to find out if I were not trapping songbirds.  America has shown even more of this morbid interest in my retiary activities than other countries have – perhaps  because I was in my forties when I came there to live, and the older the man, the queerer he looks with a butterfly net in his hand.  Stern farmers have drawn my attention to NO FISHING signs; from cars passing me on the highway have come wild howls of derision; sleepy dogs, though unmindful of the worst bum, have perked up and come at me, snarling; tiny tots have pointed me out to their puzzled mamas; broad-minded vacationists have asked me whether I was catching bugs for bait; and one morning on a wasteland, lit by tall yuccas in bloom, near Santa Fe, a big black mare followed me for more than a mile.”

October, 2007; Leash
Santa Fe, NM

Hello again.
For the last few weeks I have been enjoying the cold weather and creative atmosphere of a residency program in Vermont.  What a change from Timbuktu!

All this creativity in the air had convinced me to start up my blog again.  So, if all goes well, I’ll be making a new post at least once a week.

This is the first residency I’ve attended and I highly recommend them to any of you who haven’t tried out the experience.  I have a large studio and a darkroom all to myself…which I’ve never had before.  When I first looked around my big white, bare studio, I thought: what will I do with this?  (I knew what I would do in the darkroom)  So, I just started to pin my work prints and final prints on all the walls.  Having a large space to step back and see the images from a distance has been wonderful.  I can see more clearly the  themes and relationships among the photographs and get a better sense of how they work as a group.  In the past I’ve always edited by pinning the prints up on my bedroom wall – the only space available for my exclusive use – or by just looking at them over and over again on the computer.  Having a studio is a wonderful thing, the problem is that I have this one for only a month, and then I’m back to the walls in my bedroom.