Just Some Stuff

I’ve started to write this post several times and then deleted it and started over. I have a lot of ideas floating around, but I haven’t been able to form any of them into a coherent stream yet so I’m just going to throw out some ideas and do some housekeeping and see where it all leads in the next few weeks.

The show of my prints at the Image City gallery is officially over. After four weeks on the wall it was time to pull ‘em down, bubble wrap ‘em, and take ‘em home. I sold one print out of forty five and raked in a whopping thirty eight bucks and change. Unfortunately I spent maybe a couple grand in framing costs and sundry fees. So you can see that I don’t take photos for the monetary rewards. I did get many encouraging comments from the visitors and some cogent insights from other photographers.

I really didn’t expect to sell many prints. The economy of course is not good which puts a damper on things. Mostly though I think that people find my photos interesting and maybe thought provoking, but it isn’t the kind of stuff they would want hanging over the sofa.

My stuff tends to be low key, high contrast, small scale, and a bit on the abstract side. As nature photos go they aren’t picturesque – i.e. not a lot of bright colors, balanced lighting, snow capped mountains, or wide vistas of well known landmarks. That’s OK. I love a good landscape photo myself. That’s just not my thing – at least not at the moment. So I’ll just keep shooting the things that interest me and see where it leads.

Which brings me to one idea that has been in the back of my mind for some time – where is “photography” in general headed? What does the future hold? Is the digital age making photography better or is it trivializing it? Is the future in museums and actual prints or is it in Flickr and digital files?

In the past art and photography in particular have played a huge role in drumming up support for public wilderness protection. Still true? Myself, I’m not seeing it, but is it the fault of photography or something endemic to our society?

For the most part this winter was a bust here in western NY. I don’t even know how to describe it. It wasn’t especially cold although a lot of days seemed that way. It wasn’t especially warm either. It always seemed to be snowing and blowing, but there never seemed to be any good snow around for building snowmen or for sledding.

Winter is lingering too. Here it is nearly the end of March and it still doesn’t feel like spring. Sure we’ve had some warmish days, but not the kind where you wake up and think woo hoo spring is finally here – the birds are singing, the sun is out, everybody is in t-shirts, riding bikes, eating lunch at the park, etc.

I went for a walk the other day at a stream I know well. I expected to see the usual spring chaos; water everywhere literally flying off the tops of the waterfalls and thundering down into the pools below - like giant fire hoses opened up full blast.

Well there was water flowing, but nothing exactly wild. The nights have still been well below freezing and the days luke warm so that the woods are clear of snow and are all brown and dry while the streams are still burdened with a fair amount of ice cover. The ice shapes are interesting and I spent a lot of time studying them and photographing them, but it just wasn’t the same. We’ll see how things go as Spring struggles onto the scene. I’m looking forward to apple blossom and then wildflower time.

Another project that I have been working on is self publishing a book. I created a book based on my gallery show through the Blurb service. I’ll be doing some future posts on the steps it took to do the layout and how the final results turned out.

I have a few other ideas, but this post is already too long and aimless so I will let you go.

MDW

Nameless

As I mentioned in my last post, I am the featured artist of a group show at the Image City Photography Gallery. Thanks to all the gallery partners for their help in putting this thing together. Everyone is very friendly and encouraging and they are accomplished photographers themselves.

I decided to title the show “Nameless”. I wrote up an artist’s statement that explained the idea behind the title and thought I would reproduce it here.

As a bit of background you should know that each print has a little title card mounted next to it, but the titles are relatively non-descript like “Water #23″ or “Wood #2″. The cards also list the location of each print, but not too specifically like “Yates County” or “Pennsylvania”.

NAMELESS

“…to see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.” – Claude Monet

Humans are inveterate namers, categorizers, sorters. We are uncomfortable with any thing that is different – anything that we cannot name and shove into the box where those things go. Things that we cannot slap a label on slow us down, confuse us, frighten us.

We identify the people we meet by the color of their skin or what they do for a living or where they live. We think that we know them by the labels that we apply and the groups we lump them into. How unfortunate.

We like our nature to come complete with labels too. Time and again I go looking for waterfalls and I find them with little wooden name plates screwed to the rocks nearby. Why? What difference does a name make when I am there looking at it? It is water, the stuff of life. It flows and splashes, it roars and babbles, it wears down the rocks, it freezes my bones, it smells clean and fresh, it sparkles in the sunlight – it doesn’t need a name.

We walk through a wood and see a leaf on the ground. We know leaves. Next! Here is a tree. It is like all the other trees. Next! Once we put a name to something, we dismiss it and move on. We stop seeing the thing and just see the label.

“By these labels we recognize everything but no longer see anything. We know the labels on all the bottles, but never taste the wine.” – Fredrick Franck, The Zen of Seeing.

And so we come to art and photographs. Here is where we should allow ourselves to be free. We should be free to experience new ideas and see new visions. Isn’t that what art is? Instead even here we want labels. We want the artist to put a title on every piece in order to tell us what we should see and what we should think. We fear “getting it wrong”.

Labels and titles and names are difficult to shake off. I preferred to display my photos with no titles at all or at least just with arbitrary numbers; hence the “Nameless” thing. However, the logistics of putting on a gallery show like this one required some sort of labeling for each piece.

As you look at the photos, please do not look at the title tags – they won’t help in seeing the images. Look at the textures, the colors, the shapes. Don’t be surprised if the part of the image that you find most interesting is not the main subject or that it is different from what someone else likes – I do it all the time

“We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there, we have been conditioned to expect….but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs.” – Aaron Siskind

MDW