Back In Town

I’ve finally back in town after a week in California and a week in Chicago.

California was hot. Chicago was nice.

And that is about all I have time for now.

4×5s everywhere

Well almost . . .

When you use an 8×10 for a few years everything else just starts to feel a little small. It is like driving a dump truck all day then picking up a Tonka Toy. That being said, it is still good to be out seeing people using cameras with some umph to them. But it is funny when people talk about a Hass like it is sizable camera . . .

I was driving down Delaware Ave a few months ago, and there was a guy in the median with a 4×5, and I was like, “hell yeah! get some!” Then on Thursday I came out of Project Basho for some coffee and there was a youngish guy across the street with a 4×5. So I was surprised as hell when on Friday night at 30th St. Station, while I was waiting for the last train out of town, I saw yet another guy (maybe same guy) with a 4×5 a few platforms away. I wanted to go up to talk to him and just see what was going on, but I know how annoying it is when people come up to me while I am working asking me dumb questions about why I’m using such a big camera, or what I could possibly be photographing . . .

My best 4×5 sighting was during spring break in 2001 driving down PCH on a trip in Big Sur. She was young, blond, and standing on the retaining wall with the camera pointed down, looking into the ocean.

What is Success Really?

Amy Stein wrote in her recent post about Jill Freedman, “It’s great to see an artist get her due after so many years, but it’s disheartening to know you can have the goods and still fall off the art world map.” I don’t know if a show at a gallery no one has ever heard of and a Times article constitutes “getting her due.” I am certainly not saying that she is not deserving of the recognition or that I am not happy for her. It is always good to see people get the recognition they deserve (the photographers not deserving are the ones I have a problem with . . . but who am I to judge . . . )

I have to ask myself, what are the real motivations and goals of this new breed of photographers? By this new breed I mean every photographer just out of college a lot of energy and a blog? What is their idea of success? a show? sales? a book? a posting on Jorg’s blog?

For a paycheck (if you can call it that) I work for two photographers, both of whom have several books and are collected in dozens of major American and European museums. They are both represented in a few galleries (like that really means anything), and had work at AIPAD this year. They are also now in their sixties with no savings and no healthcare and are uncertain where the money is coming from after the next few months. I guess the most important thing I have learned working for them is that it is always going to be rough. And, while good things may happen—sales, shows, books—the only rational reason for being a photographer is the irrational love and necessity of making pictures. I can’t speak for everyone, but the moment, my only goal is to be able to continue making pictures.

Michael P. Berman

Whenever I get a little disillusioned about the future of photography (ironically, it is mostly by reading blogs . . .) I head over to Luminous-Lint, and always find something to connect with and which inspires me to keep on keepin on.

Today that find was Michael P. Berman. I had actually seen his book, Inferno, a year ago or so and didn’t recall his name immediately. I had to run to my bookshelf to make sure I don’t already have it before trying to order it tomorrow.

This is his from the introduction on Luminous-Lint from a series on the Gran Desierto.

The Gran Desierto is seven thousand square miles of desert on the western border of Arizona and Sonora. Sand dunes and a shield volcano rise out of the sea of Cortez and float into open basins and thin granite ranges. A single paved road cuts across the desert. The land is hot, dry and has one great natural resource – empty space.

Empty space is not a thing that is often left alone. For this reason, when I think of pristine landscapes, I think of the bombing ranges scattered throughout the American West, and of the fragments of wildlands along the border with Mexico. In these places the matrix of soil still exists; a tire track or footprint pressed into the earth remains there. This simple thing – intact soil – reveals a complexity I find nowhere else.

Printing color, Cowboys, Strip Malls, and the West

I taught myself how to print color last week and am now ankle deep in a 150 negative printing job (good thing it pays hourly). I think I am getting a little spoiled with no need to get my hands wet, and having three or four minutes of standing around waiting for the test prints to come out the processor. Needless to say, I am getting quite a lot of reading done—catching up on New Yorkers . . . I am also reading two books by Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest and Something in the Soil, about Western history. I wonder how my understaning of Western history, something not readily taught in school, is going to impact my work there. Despite what we were taught and how it seems now, the notion of The Old West is more than cowboys, miners and the railroad, and The New West is more than strip malls, housing developments, and golf courses.

Cadiz, California or The Sights and Smells of the Middle of Nowhere

There is something about the space in the West that is rare to touch when making a photograph. I am not altogether sure if this one is successful, but I know when I made this that I was dipping into that peaceful experience of being out in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but creosote, jack rabbits, and rattlesnakes for miles around.

Really, Where do we go from here?

Someone recently told me I need to think about how to make my landscape photographs fresh so they are kept from being seen merely as anachronisms. In a way, I am not even sure I know what to do with that kind of criticism. Is the simple answer to photograph in color? And then what?

I can’t help wonder what exactly is “contemporary” or “forward thinking” landscape photography, and who are the photographers pushing the envelope in that area? I am not even sure it can be pushed at all. How do you reach past the later Edward Weston photographs at Point Lobos or the Lee Friedlander photographs in the Sonora Desert? How can you push past the complexity of Jem Southam’s Painter’s Pool photographs.

This is a reoccurring subject for me, and I always come back to the same conclusion. They only way I can make these pictures fresh is by approaching the subject honestly, and without pretense. If I go out with the intent of creating something new, I will only succeed in creating something false. It is only in being completely absorbed in seeing in the moment that something altogether true can be created. I cannot perceive how anything I do will be seen in ten or twenty years, and at this point, I have to pretend not to care. With the constant pressure of “having to create something new” I might never make another picture ever again.

SPE and Portfolio Reviews

I just returned (sick) from the SPE National Conference held in Denver. It was great to have a chance to hang out with people I met last year, and there were some good lectures (although I did sleep through most of Edward Burtynsky’s talk—despite the fact that he is usually such a good speaker). Then there was the dance party. Even if I never picked up a camera again, and cursed everything remotely related to photographic education, I would still go just for the dance party . . .

Then there were the portfolio reviews. The formal waiting-list-only-20-minute-career-making/breaking reviews, and the informal grab-a-table-and-show-your-prints-(or iPhone)-to-anyone-who-will-look reviews. Unfortunately, both types are equally important when it comes to having your work seen these days. This isn’t the 70s and there are now far too many photographers in the world for everyone to simply call up the curator at anywhere and ask to show them work. I say unfortunately because the importance of these reviews is more on getting a job, show, book, dealer, etc. than getting feedback about how to make better work. Everyone wants to be Alec Soth.

The problem with reviews is the importance placed on the 20 prints, the photographer’s agenda, the spiel, and the marketability of the work. At the end of my second day at SPE I was tired of showing my prints, and giving my little speech. It became more about the idea or the project rather than the pictures, and all I wanted to do was sit down and stop talking. I was perfectly happy to answer questions, but I was tired of trying to justify what to me should have been obvious. At one point I actually told someone “these pictures came from nothing more than an unashamed response to beauty.” Surely a no no to some people.

Cara Phillips made a recent post about being rejected from the Review Santa Fe event, and the nature of the competition process. The juror is undoubtedly going to be biased as to what he/she thinks is good or undeveloped or derivative. Competitions, and even portfolio reviews, in general, are all a crap shoot, and you can never tell who will like what on which day. I’d rather save my money to buy a plane ticket and a box film. At least I know it will be going to a good cause—my own sanity.

Newberry Springs, California

The year I started photographing I ran upon this house out in Newberry Springs California that was slowing being swallowed by drifting sands. I later found it was the site of a brutal killing of a small boy by two dogs.

I returned on my most recent trip out West to find even more of the house engulfed in sand, and the memorial to Cash Carson Slowly being erased as well.

In 2001 the road led all the way to the house, but the dunes have covered the road with about four feet of sand. There is another house further south on the same road that was occupied at the time, with a back hoe and dozer to keep back the sands. Now that house is covered up to the second story, but a porch light is kept eerily on.

I am going to try frinding those prints and negatives I made back in 2001 and 2002. Until I get a chance to develop the films I recently shot all I have are these Instaxes.

Polaroid Induced Vertigo

I just found this in my saved but not published blog posts . . . it still makes me sad.

I’ve been photographing out on the West Coast for the last ten days or so, and the only internet access I’ve had was the few minutes at a coffee shop catching up on the important emails. I had a little more time today, and was reading up on the handful of blogs I check regularly.

Reading about the end of Polaroid hit me pretty hard, and I got that whole body disconnecting from the head feeling, the sickness in the stomach. It isn’t that my work is directly dependent on Polaroid materials, but when the aspects of my straight work gets overwhelming, a box of Spectra and the company of friends is something of a godsend.

I do have a Fuji Instax I got from Canada, but there is something about the Polaroid that makes it a Polaroid—something the Instax doesn’t have . . .  I think this might be the biggest Polaroid year ever as everyone goes on a shooting binge.  I know I will.