Earth tones

Every week the BBC poses a photography theme for submission. Actually, they are kind enough to post them several weeks ahead.  Some of these are intriguing in that you wonder exactly how people are going to interpret the theme.

Well, this week it was “Gardening” and I found myself wondering exactly what were people going to send in besides brightly colored and boring flower pictures or other hackneyed images.  Well in the end I was blown away by a photograph by Ela Fraczkowska, which shows her 83 year old grandmother in her garden in Poland. It is, well, simply stunning. And most  captivating is the fact that Ms. Fraczkowska’s grandmother refuses to wear garden gloves.  Her hands and eyes and wisps of hair in disarray all betray an intimacy with the Earth.

There is a lot to be said for thematic photography, which appears to come in two flavors.  First, there is the situation where you fall in love with a photograph that you have taken and then decide to expand upon the subject with a series.  I have several such projects ongoing including: neoclassical American sculpture and frog ornamental garden decorations to name just two.  The other is the random theme, like the ones the BBC poses.  There is no surer way to cure yourself of the image blahs – aka “I have nothing to photograph!”  Such themes are a means of refocusing your art.

The photograph and collective conscience

Our discussion yesterday about photographs of the D-Day landings and how they enable us to experience what those individuals experienced got me thinking again about photographs as memes, but from a different perspective than we have considered in the past.  These photographs create and belong to a collective consciousness.  We know how to relate to the depicted because we are humans and share experience and the interpretation of experience with other human beings.  The photograph becomes a kind of glue that puts the events and understanding of events in a chronological context.  And it enables us to relate to our fellow beings.

In this context the role of the image is truly to bind people together and to create a collective consciousness.  This collective consciousness transcends individual consciousness, and that is an important element of what humans are, what we have evolved to. We are meant both to see collectively and to see individual.

While we can certainly perceive abstractions and have the plasticity of mind to accept a stylized painting as symbolic of reality.  The photograph, arguably, represent a maturation of image technology.  The photograph enables us to create images like humans see, to create memes that truly and directly map or relate to human vision.  There truly is a collective vision a fundamentally human world view.  We know how those people in the landing craft felt, because we have, through the photograph, become them.

War and peace

Figure 1 - Approaching Omaha Beach, June 6, 2014, From the US National Archives and in the public domain.

Figure 1 – Approaching Omaha Beach, June 6, 2014, From the US National Archives and in the public domain.

 

Today marks the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Europe.  Photograph brings us back to those awful moments as if we had been there ourselves. And the new media abound with historic images of the landings.  I have chosen one from the Army Signal Corps Archive at the US National Archives.  I have often wondered about these powerful images that focus on the seconds before all hell broke loose.  The fear, apprehension, even the nausea of the men on board the amphibious landing craft is still palpable to us seven decades later. You need to focus on the little detail, like the “No Smoking” sign on the door of the landing craft.  In such details lie the essential humanity of the photograph.

There are a number of before and after, then and now series of D-Day photographs from the news services.  I am particularly fascinated by this one from the Canadian National Archives.  It so vividly shows the contrast between terrible war and carefree peace.  In a way it defines what that generation was fighting for on that day.  The photographs and movie strips do not allow us to forget these denizens of that black and white world, and in truth we owe them so much.  They are part of us, but in part by virtue of the monochrome, they are before us – from the age of Titans before the age of Gods and men.

“And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front…”

William Shakespeare, Richard III, act 1, scene 1.

Eye of the storm

No discussion about photos of the past week would be complete without considering this insanely terrifying little video from the AP taken by Dan Yorgason as a tornado moved through an oil drilling rig camp near Watford City, ND.   This is really a far cry  from A. A. Adams’ first tornado photograph of 1884, which bears a certain nineteenth century after the fact abstraction.  A profounder reality comes from the fact that it is video and in color, not to mention that it is about as intimately close as one can get to a tornado without dying. The reddish brown is where the twister meets the ground churning up dust and debris and the white area further up into the pristine funnel cloud.  These images essentially look straight up into the vortex of the tornado.  It is a modern day Charybdis.  Odysseus had to choose consciously between Scylla and Charybdis.  It all happened so fast that Yorgason had no choice.  But having the presence of mind to grab his camera and photograph is pretty amazing.

 

 

A modern Discobolus

Although they have appeared in this blog, I am not usually an admirer of sports photographs.  However, I must make an exception again this week.  On the BBC I came across this incredible image by Miguel Medina for the AFP of Italian tennis player Camila Giorgi returning the ball to Russia’s Svetlana Kuznetsova (not pictured) during a second round match at this year’s  French Open.

The lines in this photograph are beautifully composed.  There is a complex construction of the rule of thirds between Ms. Giorgi and the lines on the clay court that act visually as a puzzle that creates an enigmatic dynamic tension appropriate to the a sense of power and motion.  The grim determined look on Giorgi’s face is riveting, and the relative positions of her legs and arms are perfect.  This photograph is oh so reminiscent of the fifth century B.C.E. statue by Myron the “Discobolus” or the “Discuss Thrower.”  The Discobolus is the ultimate sports image.  It celebrates the perfection of the human body of youth, as does Mr. Medina’s wonderful photograph.

The ambiguous hippopotamus

I am thinking pleasantly back to the sweet time of childhood when in addition to a favorite color (red) and a favorite television star (Fess Parker) I also had a favorite animal (the hippopotamus).  Yes the “river horse” was my favorite, and nothing delighted me more than seeing him at the Central Park Zoo dine upon copious quantities of cabbage.

Maturity has led to a more studied respect for the hippo and an appreciation of his ambiguity as a gentle giant.  Yes, there were the dancing hippos in Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” – pure fantasy.  And there was the National Geographic Magazine showing photographs of a hippopotamus rescuing a disemboweled antelope from the jaws of an alligator and pushing the mortally wounded beast up unto the shore – I suppose to be devoured by jackals. 8<( And my favorite was an episode of “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” where they attempted to photograph hippos with their young underwater.  Finally, they resorted to using a very expensive remote camera.  All goes well until momma hippo is alarmed by the sounds of the camera’s mechanism.  She leaps out of the water and crashes down on the very expensive camera, flattening it like a pancake – Momma Hippo meets Paparazzi.”

All of these cobweb memories ran through my head yesterday as I was looking at Pictures of the Week on BBC News and came upon this lovely image by Mel Evans for the AP showing a little girl named Audrey Bruben at The Camden, New Jersey Adventure Aquarium posing with Genny a 4000 lb hippopotamus – all grins – or so it seems.  Wonderful, cute little girl and equally cute, albeit of ambiguous cuddliness, animal.

“Behold the hippopotamus!
We laugh at how he looks to us,
And yet in moments dank and grim,
I wonder how we look to him.

Peace, peace, thou hippopotamus!
We really look all right to us,
As you no doubt delight the eye
Of other hippopotami.”

Ogden Nash, “The Hippopotamus”

The dreaminess of pinhole photography

We have discussed the technical aspects of pinhole photography in the past as a means of introduction to how the camera works.  But we have not discussed the aesthetics of pinhole photography.  Pinhole cameras create: somewhat distorted images, in many cases soft out-of-focus images, and vignetting – that is a fading of light intensity as you move away from the center of the field.  Overcoming all of these distortions is why camera lenses cost so much.  But in the case of the pinhole image, all of this contributes to a sense of dreaminess and a sense of the antique.  If you want to create a picture that looks like it was taken in the mid-nineteenth century, this is certainly one way to go.

With all of this in mind, I was struck with a recent readers’ series on BBC News, a collection of pinhole camera images.  And to my mind’s eye the most strikingly dreamy of all was a wonderful image of a swan on a lake sent in by Daniel Ramsey.  Because this beautiful color image required a 30 second exposure the swan’s head and neck are blurred out as if captured in several positions, but in none really.  The distortion is four dimensional, encompassing all the dimensions of space and time.  It is truly a vision from a dream.

Pansies

Figure 1 - Pansies or Food for Thought, Sudbury, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Pansies or Food for Thought, Sudbury, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Sometimes it is the simple things, and the photograph is no further away than your own doorstep.  I love the simple beauty of spring pansies with their little pensive lion faces looking back at you and floating in a gentle breeze.  There is ever the sense of the coolness associated with not quite summer.

The English name pansy comes from the French word pensée “thought.”  It was imported into Late Middle English as a name of for certain violets in the mid-15th century.  Shakespeare has Ophelia remind us that these flowers are to be, along with rosemary, regarded as symbols of remembrance.   I can never look at them without remembering  walking with a friend (and reader) in San Jose some years ago and discussing Ophelia’s words:

“Look at my flowers. There’s rosemary, that’s for remembering. Please remember, love. And there are pansies, they’re for thoughts.”

There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow

Figure 1 - English Sparrow, Passer domesticus, Concord, MA 5/25/2014. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – English Sparrow, Passer domesticus, Concord, MA 5/25/2014. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

After all this time carrying my big lens around in hopes of getting good bird pictures, I was delighted this past Sunday when a English Sparrow (Passer domesticus) landed on a branch in front of me and in a sweet voice demanded to have his portrait taken.  I only had my EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens*, but was really delighted by the bifurcated lichen covered branch and at 200 mm at the soft bokeh of the background.

Yes, it is a common house or English Sparrow.  Still he has his own high highfaluting Latin name and as Shakespeare eternally reminds us:

“There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is ’t to leave betimes? Let be.”

*EF70-200mm f/4L USM Lens at 200 mm Aperture priority mode AE, ISO 800, 1/800th second at f/5.6.