For all of you Transformers lovers or parents of Transformers lovers, this week marked the gala opening in Hong Kong of the new transformer movie. My son was never really into these toys, But who can resist their very clever metamorphosis. And this was complete with a full size, or at least huge, replica of Optimus Prime. In this wonderful photograph by Felipe Lopez for the AFP he is shown majestically set against the Hong Kong skyline, with the intended and successful effect of making him look even bigger than he actually is. Pretty marvelous in my view, And I love the light and the vaporous atmosphere that mixes with the skyline to create a futuristic other worldliness. It all is metallic silver on metallic silver. It is a world where transformers might actually exist.
A photograph every day for a year
Our discussion yesterday about how every day the light is different reminded me of how when my son was small I took him every morning to day care and would have to drive by a lake, Every morning the atmosphere and view were different than the day before. The light was different, and I used to think that it would be interesting to stop each morning and take a picture from exactly the same spot with exactly the same camera angle. Needless-to-say, I never did it.
But there are, of course, people who start their year with a New Year’s resolution to take a photograph every day, to create a photo-journal. It seems to me that this is not narcisim. As Socrates pointed out “the unexamined life is not worth living;” so there is value to this kind of nonverbal journal. At the same time you can do it through a dedicated site like that of the 365 Project and, guess what, you are connecting with people all around the world. Yes that’s through social media, but also you are connecting through pictures, participating in a greater community of photographers. I feel the same about the various art photography groups on social media. The whole point is getting involved, doing what you enjoy, and connecting. Finally, the whole process of “forcing” yourself to find a photo-worthy subject every day and figure out how to express your thoughts is good for your artistic soul. It is a challenge and by rising to this challenge you expand your photographic self.
Behind Dock Square – an infinity of image possibilities
Figure 1 – Behind Dock Square, Kennebunkport, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.
The central square in Kennebunkport, referred to as Dock Square is pretty, but also pretty innocuous. Many of the shops and restaurants have been around for a very long time: The Colonial Pharmacy, Compliments, and Alison’s. However, it all gets really interesting from a camera perspective if you go behind the buildings to look at the water. There you are greeted by a photographer’s paradise of wood white-washed by harsh weather. As you can see from Figure 1 there are all sorts of angles and parallel lines to be contemplated and framed into a photograph.
What intrigues me the most is that I am constantly called back year after year to photograph the dock and the tidal mud flats behind the bridge. The light is always different, and you invariably bear the scars of the failed photographs of the past and the hope that this time you will be successful. But even success is a fleeting chimera because the reality is that when you come back again, the light will be different, raising the very really possibility that you can still create a better photograph. There are an infinity of possibilities.
Seeing double
Well, I guess that after all the fuss that I’ve made about tornado photographs, about tornado hunters, and Helen Hunt, I really don’t think that I can pass up on images taken of Monday’s double tornado in Nebraska. While not unherad of, such phenomena are very rare, occurring once every ten to twenty years, and dare I say it double trouble – in this case destroying the town od Pilger, Nebraska.. This devastaing storm was photographed by Eric Andersen for the AP. There is something at once beautiful yet terrifying about such images. The light is other-worldly, reminiscent of quiet silence before devastation.
Minimalism Series
Figure 1 – Minimalism #1, Kennebunkport, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.
One of the projects that I worked on in Kennebunkport, I refer to as the “Minimalism Series.” It was inspired by the video documentary “Herb and Dorothy [Vogel].” The Vogels were prodigious collectors of minimalist art, which might be a piece of string arranged on a board or a few dots on a piece of paper. Interestingly some of these can affect you profoundly. Two years ago, on a previous visit to Kennebunkport, I was struck by the simple yet intriguing patterns made by strands of seaweed on the sand.
My visit then was marred by the realization that the second party lens that I was using just wasn’t up to the task of sharpness. It was an important issue learned. So I returned this year with my 18-55 mm IS Canon lens, and the results were significantly better. There is lot of work to be done to work-up the thirty or so images from this year’s photo-shoot. But for now I thought that I would post Figure 1, which is a prime example. It reminds me very much of a petroglyph, perhaps a deer or bison hunted and killed with a spear to the head. At least that is how the image speaks to me. EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM lens at 51 mm, ISO 400, uto focus, Aperture Priority-AE mode, 1/500th sec at f/9.0, +1 compensation.As real as a photograph
I apologize but I need to digress. Last Wednesday I posted a self portrait taken in the window of the 1912 Cafe. When I was sitting and contemplating taking that photograph the light reminded me of a favorite painting; but my brain and Google failed me. I have finally remembered that it is the amazing painting by American Realist Painter Scott Prior entitled “Nanny and Rose” (1983) in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Nanny is the beautiful woman, Rose the dog. Prior says of his work: “Nanny and Rose and the subsequent paintings… are very personal. To me they are like large snapshot photos, and as a collection they have become a memory album of my life. It has been my belief that the painted intimacies of ordinary life must be recorded and celebrated.” This is really the appeal simple, compelling beauty in everyday things and events. That was what I was thinking about when I took that selfie.
Whenever I marvel at Prior’s work my brain hurts. I wonder about technique, how painstaking it must be to create a painting so like a photograph. I have come to realize that I may have it backwards. First, there were paintings not the other way around. Maybe the first were cave paintings. And paintings ran, and still run, the gamut from pure abstraction to absolute realism. In some sense photography emerged as an attempt to paint in an absolutely realistic way with light. But oil and tempera were its predecessors.
Photography is a combination of chemistry and physics. It emerged with the limits and virtues of its science. It was Fox Talbot’s “Pencil of Nature.” Early photographers sought to emulate painters. They pushed the new medium to sharp realism.
You look at a painting like “Nanny and Rose” and you realize that nobody could have posed long enough for that to be painted in such stunning and precise detail. In some sense it had to be posed and constructed, even perhaps aided by a camera. But the same is true of the photograph. Many are spontaneous and candid. Others extensively set up and posed. But as in all art there is inevitably a significant component of artist construction. For the photograph this occurs first at conception and then the image is born again in the dark or light room.
Fathers’ Day, a time for rosemary
Figure 1 – Hyman Wolf with the camera at The Cloisters c. 1930. (c) DE Wolf 2014.
Today is Fathers’ Day; so I thought that I would share a couple of photographs with you. The dapper young man in Figure 1 is my father Hyman Wolf around 1930. His mother called him Hymie and his friends called him Hy. The joke, of course, was always: “Hi Hy.” New Yorkers will probably recognize the location of the photograph as The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park.
My father took my sister and me to museums just about every weekend, and The Cloisters was one of his and our favorites. He had an amazing encyclopedic knowledge of things especially the nature world. He was a gifted and inspiring science teacher at Charles Sumner Junior High School 65 in Manhattan, for most of his career. Often at the American Museum of Natural History we would find that we were being followed by other families listening in to my father’s explanations. I credit my father for teaching me to ask why.
I have to apologize for the quality of the photographs. My father took his photographs with a beloved Ciroflex twin lens reflex camera that was 2 1/4 ” by 2 1/4 “. He made contact prints or had contact prints made. So they stayed that size and looking at them now, they really aren’t very sharp.
I also wanted to share Figure 2. It shows my father again as a young man here in recital on the piano. He had a great love of music that lasted all his life.
Taken together the two figures here illustrate an important point about the role of photography as documents in our lives. We have spoken about how they transverse time and give us a glimpse of how people were then. But it is always significant to recognize that it is ever a construction. We are not seeing people how they really were but as how the photographer saw them, or in some cases how the subject wanted to be seen.
I have chosen these two photographs because I think that they would have made my father smile. They represent, I think how he would have liked to be seen, as he saw himself.
I owe a huge debt to my father. When I reached college, we would discuss physics specifically quantum mechanics and relativity theory for many hours. My father just wouldn’t follow or accept it. Somewhere along the way I had passed him, at least in these subjects. It felt strange like the first time that I beat him at chess. I never knew if I really beat him or if he allowed me to beat him. I do know that in my father’s library there was a little John Dent edition of Ivan Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons.” I took it down and read it when I was in college. Beating your father at chess is inevitable. He does it because he loves you. So today I plan on flavoring my meat with rosemary.
Figure 2 – Hyman Wolf in recital c. 1930. (c) DE Wolf 2014.
Monochrome Me
Figure 1 – Door and Step, Kennebunkport, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.
Needless-to-say “Monochrome Me” wants to have his say today. As I said, it is the black and white image that I strive for, perhaps with just a touch of sepia tone. In my book toning is the one activity of photograph production that was more enjoyable in the chemical days. I mean, what could be better than exposing yourself to toxic selenium salts?
While a beautiful black and white photograph is an admirable object, neither the name “monochrome” nor the name “black and white” get us off on the right foot. He has a “monochromatic personality – is one dimensional, flat, cardboard like.” He sees everything as “black and white.” You see what I am talking about?
Seriously though, there is tremendous tonal dimensionality to a beautiful black and white photograph. It is not just about form, but also about the range of tones. The goal is to have brilliant, but not overpowering, whites, deep blacks, and everything in between. While limited ultimately by physics and physiology, the range should seem infinitesimally graded. Look for the faint forms in shadow and highlight. Therein, lies greatness.
While in Kennebunkport’s Dock Square earlier this week, I came upon this wooden door with a glass window and a very eccentric sloping step. I was immediately struck by the beauty of the weathered wood, the grains, and the knots. I knew right away that this would “work” photographically. And when I was working up the image I found myself drawn to the little face, the pareidolia, in the grain on the wall, by the wood knot behind the window, and by the simplicity of the door stop. People must have thought me a bit crazy standing there with my monopod mounted camera photographing a humble step and maybe I am.
EF70-200mm f/4L USM Canon lens at ISO 400, aperture-priority AE 1/200th sec at f/8.0, Exposure compensation -1, Lens at 84 mm.
Polychrome Me
Figure 1 – Flowers and glass in a shop window, Kennebunkport, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.
The view that the photographer is one who observes, one who steps out of participation, has some intriguing consequences. You become a tourist in your own life. You are constantly in a quest for objects and events to photograph. The image becomes to the photographer: what game is to the hunter, coins to the numismatist, or antiques to the antique collector. Yes that is it; you become a collector of images, and each image holds its own memories.
OK, so accept it. Would it be better not to capture events and objects at all? Think of it as recording not collecting. You can think of it that way as long as you don’t become one of those people who record every meal on vacation.
So I am a hunter for images! And what I realize is that there are really two me’s. I truly love black and white images. That is what I strive to create. I am forever search for the forms and the light that will give me what I am looking for, that will translate beautifully with velvety blacks, creamy whites, and every marvelous grey level in between. And notice that I spell it “grey” not “gray.” This connotes a certain elegance and exoticism. But I also find that dichotomously hiding just below the surface of my consciousness is a “Polychrome Me,” a me that loves to exalt in color.
One of the great aspects of modern digital photography is that you can truly split your photographic personality without needing to carry two cameras. It is the same feature that enables what is essentially zone black and white photography without the need to change cameras. Expose well, and all the zones are there. The “Levels” and “Curves” features of Photoshop simply replace choice of film, developer, and paper.
So today I’d like to offer up two images by “Polychrome Me.” The first was taken of glass and silk flowers in a shop window. I love the play of light in glass. And I was thinking of Henri Matisse when I took this picture. Perhaps it is “Cala Lillies, Irises, and Mimosas.” The point is that the feeling here is in the brilliant colors and to me they are Matisse’s colors. And shortly after taking that image I found this mannequin in a shop. The world was orange, and I delighted in the little helices of orange ribbon. Do I need to say that I added the catch light to her eyes, because unlike the ghostlike alien mannequin of a previous blog, this mannequin seemed soft and beautiful? She needed only a magic sparkle in her eyes to bring her to life.
Both images were taken with my EF 70-200mm f/4L USM Canon lens at ISO 400 in aperture AE priority mode – the mannequin at 1/60 sec, f/8.0 at 131 mm, the glass and flowers at 1/100th sec, f/11.0 at 70 mm.
Figure 2 – Shop mannequin and her orange world, Kennebunkport, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.