dispatches

Frederick Sommer returns

Frederick Sommer is haunting me again. This is a good thing. His subtle influence on me and my work has taken 30 years to fully manifest itself. I think I’m just now approaching an age where I can start to understand him.

I just received an email from Charles Weatherby, who was in the same Frederick Sommer workshop that I was in, at Sun Valley, Idaho in June 1976. That would be thirty years ago this month. He was 33 at the time; I was 20. He claims that much of what Sommer said went over his head but, unlike me, he had the wherewithal to take notes. And now he’s sent me a collection of them.

Some gems from this treasure trove:

"Make an environment for yourself. Enjoy sleep, but don’t wake up to trivia. Work to eliminate trivia."

"Forget thinking about what you see. Take pictures and then accept the consequences of what you did take."

"Most photos fail—it’s a shock when they work out."

"You can get knowledge from someone else without imitating them. It’s impossible to make private art or literature. The degree to which a person finds a new cohesion with a personal touch—he will be interesting to others."

"Study the arts and their history for the purpose of broadening your base. You can’t go any farther forward than you can go backward."

And my favorite:

"Subject matter is harmless, but it can be charming to the point of distraction from other elements."

He also tracked down the workshop attendees, which is how he found me. There were 15 of us. Tina Barney was in the class, as was Peter de Lory (he was director of the Photography Department at Sun Valley Arts Center). It was great to see what happened to Julie Bruck, on whom I had an unrequited crush at the time. She is now a poet in San Francisco. Most everyone else is teaching art or photography somewhere. Charles is a retired social worker living in Marin County, California.

Photo by Charles Weatherby. Center, left to right: Frederick Sommer, Julie Bruck, Dennis Hearne.

Montlake Meld

I’m procrastinating again, because I don’t want to face yet another unbroken day at the computer. I have two pending tasks, one, choose the portfolio images for my website remodel, and two, prepare a Getty disk. I’ve spent this week archiving the last two months of work (making sure I had it all in one place, archiving the cr2 files on DVDs, converting to DNG and ingesting them all into Iview). For April I archived 4,800 images, for May, 4,400. I am so behind in captioning/keywording/catagorizing.

So I went out to take more pictures, and to look at some birds. One of my favorite spots for this dual attention is just down the hill from my house, at Montlake Fill. It’s an old garbage dump on the shores of Lake Washington that has grown up to be superb birding habitat inside the city.

I had my lightweight travel binoculars, and my 5D with a 50mm macro lens, which made that rig much lighter than usual. A female Yellowthroat scolded me from a willow. Red-wing Blackbirds called a bubbly chip call, not their full-throated territory song (they don’t need mates anymore, now there are kids to manage). Savannah Sparrows were singing (they sound like grasshoppers), White-crown Sparrows sang "Zwee, zwee, Zwiggy-zwiggy zwee." A woman was stopped on the path, staring into the bushes by the second pond. "These crows, they have a hawk pinned down at the bottom of this bush," she informed me.

I wandered off the path, into an area that burned last summer. These black sticks have pulled me their direction for the last nine months. Now they were nearly lost amid the tall green grass. Soon I was in that near-trance state I like to get into, where I begin to photograph from that place beneath my awareness. I lose the composing photographer’s eyes, and begin responding to the place from elsewhere in my body. I’m shooting a lot, but it is anything but randomly. I feel like I’m approaching the photograph that is somewhere in front of me, and I feel it inside my body. A part of me is watching the picture happen, and I’m only partly aware of a composition forming. This environment is too dense to structure it consciously no matter what, which is why I like to insert myself in these spots. It is as though the complexity swamps the familiar responses to organizing inside a frame, and I can access a deeper level of seeing.

I can’t stay submerged in this state for very long. After a few minutes I feel done. Somewhere down there a photograph happened, and it’s captured on the card. I’ll look at it another time. Right now I hear a flock of goldfinches flying over.