Cypripedium acaule

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Figure 1 - the moccasin flower a wild orchid, Cape Porpoise, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Cypripedium acaule, the moccasin flower a wild lady slipper orchid, Cape Porpoise, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

It was a bit of a gloomy day. Still I thought that it might be rewarding to take a short walk through the woods in Cape Porpoise, ME. This was scrubby dense forest with lots of birches and hemlocks. It drew on by the loud cacophony of birds, perhaps crows, screaming deep among the trees. Well, I was rewarded. My eye was captured by a bit of magenta which turned out to be a wild orchid, Cypripedium acaule – so-called moccasin flower. And then I started looking and realized like magical beings they were hiding all around me.

As it turns out this is precisely the ideal time to observe these beautiful pink lady’s slippers. We must admire these wild beauties with a certain respect and reverence. They are essentially impossible to cultivate and yet seem to have a fairly easy time of finding just the right soil and conditions in these northern forests. Seeing them first hand offers a kind of peaceful serenity that befits the fact that the root of lady’s slippers has historically been valued for its sedative properties and used as a remedy for nervousness, tooth pain, and muscle spasms.

The moccasin flower has a symbiotic relationship with a soil fungus called Rhizoctonia. Unlike most seed these orchid seeds do not have the fuel to grow and require the fungal threads to break them open and share food, I suppose like a mother bird feeding its fledglings. Then when the plant is older the fungus reverses the process extracting nutrients from the roots.

The other fascinating aspect of the lady slipper is that it lures bee’s to its marvelous pouch where alas poor bee finds no nectar. Hairs within the pouch direct the bees to the only exit of escape where they must brush against the stigma to be coated with pollen to carry to another flower. This is Darwinian evolution at its most magnificent.

But I digress. I retreated the forest to locate my tripod and return to these beautiful orchids which I spent some time photographing. Figure 1 is one of the results. The blah-dee-blah may be of some interest, since it was heavily overcast and drizzling at times. I wanted some sharpness of detail on the complex flower and a reasonable amount of depth of field. In this particular image I filled with light from the on camera flash. ISO 400, -1 exposure compensation, f/11.0 at 1/25th sec, EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 140 mm.

Self portrait at the 1912 Cafe

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Figure 1 - Self portrait at the 1912 Cafe, Freeport, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Self portrait at the 1912 Cafe, Freeport, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 is an experiment in self portraiture.  Selfies today are generally taken with the front facing camera.  A generation ago the common form was to take a picture of yourself in the mirror.  Vivian Maier offers some wonderful examples of this genre.

The in-the-mirror photograph in general betrays a problem or fault with photography.  The photographer ceases to participate. That is why photography often appeals to the shy among us.  You don’t have to be part of events.  You can abstract yourself from them.  This self portrait, I hope, takes this abstraction to a new level.  There I am reflected in the window of the 1912 Cafe.  Perhaps the name of the cafe creates a sense of irony, emphasizing further abstraction, as the cell phone is totally antithetical to the simpler life of the early twentieth century.

With a cell phone you needn’t really look into the camera.  You could as well be reading an email.  You become totally abstracted from the act of taking the picture, even though in secret you are quite actively involved in framing the image.

I am also trying here to create a sense of the commonplace, to mimic so many photorealistic paintings of diners and people in everyday activities.  Of course, nothing could be more photorealistic than a photograph.  And also, the abstraction of the photograph to events pales in comparison to the pose of people on cell phones.  It is the ultimate ambiguity that in connecting with others we disconnect with those immediately around us.

The Old Gristmill

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Figure 1 - Gristmill at Longfellow's Wayside Inn Sudbury, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Gristmill at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn Sudbury, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 is an image that I took last weekend of the Old Grist Mill at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn this past weekend in Sudbury, MA.  The Wayside Inn Grist Mill was commissioned by Henry Ford and designed by renowned hydraulic engineer J.B. Campbell. The Mill ground its first grain on Thanksgiving Day 1929. In 1952, the Pepperidge Farm began operating the Mill, which it continued to do until 1967.  It’s image remains the logo of the company.  The mill remains in operation today grinding grain for the Wayside Inn.

So much for history.  I am ambivalent about whether my photograph really works.  I wish, first of all, that there was water flowing over the paddle wheel.  I was also initially ambivalent about whether it should be a color or black and white photograph.  But then I realized that what I like best about the picture is that it looks like a black and white image which has been hand-painted adding very vivid red and also some green.

A second element that I am pleased with are the struts that seem to attach the wheel to the wall.  It seems a strange point to notice. But my eyes continue to be drawn to them and I think this is because they seem to ground the waterwheel’s mechanism to reality – that is to the need to obey physical law.  The image is of a real functional machine, not an artifice of the designer’s mind.

Tree-huggers

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We spoken quite a bit about the intrinsic nobility of trees as a photographic subject.  One of the difficulties in photographing them is that they can be quite tall and capturing all that length causes you to tip your camera upwards to the sky often creating distortion.  In this context, I was impressed this week by a photograph by Narendra Shrestha of the EPA showing, well, a tree hugger. And people, there is no shame in being a tree hugger!    The tree-hugger in question is a student celebrating World Environment Day in the forest of Gokarna on the outskirts of Kathmandu, Nepal, on June 5. There were, in fact,  2,001 people simultaneously hugging trees for two minutes in an attempt to break the Guinness World Record.  Yes there is a reod for just about everything!  I have to admire both the express way in which the student’s hand portray a tender affection to nature and the way in which the photographer captures our eyes and in breathtaking speed takes them to the top of the forest’s canopy.

Earth tones

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.