dispatches

Big print

It took awhile, but I finally allowed myself to make a Really Big Print with my Epson 4800. Wow! How can I make it so I can do this more often?

Why has it taken me so long? Quick answer: the consumables. I have barely used this printer, and all the ink tanks are verging on a quarter full (it takes half an ink cartridge just to charge the printer.) This is an expensive beast to feed. It runs about $500 to replace all the ink cartridges. Then there’s the paper.

I have been exceedingly reluctant to run but the smallest prints off my rolls of expensive fiber-like photo papers (the Museo and the Lexart). But Epson had a clever rebate program going with this printer. Buy $200 of media and get $300 back. Of course you’re going to spend several times the difference in ink to print on all that free media. Very clever. Epson isn’t in the business of selling printers. They’re in the business of selling ink. I’ve actually heard the Epson rep say this.

But the paper feels free, so I rolled out a 35" long panoramic print. The layered .psd file it came from runs about 800mb. But finally, I can see what’s going on in this image. I started with 10" wide RC prints that I had to take off my glasses and squint at to see, then I made some 15" wide ones off the inkjet (just 6" worth of paper with this format.) But these big ones. I like it. This is much bigger than anything I can make on silver.

Robin really likes seeing my dense "stick pictures" this big. "I can deal with the complexity when I can see it," she said. "Make some more."

Yeah, but how do I afford to frame them?

The International Photo Awards results

The 2006 IPA Awards have been announced. I’m not sure how the math works, but three of my photos got five honorable mentions in the Professional Division. I did quite well in "Other." I didn’t make any of the top three slots in any category this round, but I did in 2003 when I got a First Place in the Landscape division. I’ve had an Honorable Mention every year I’ve entered however--not a bad record for a contest that gets 30,000+ entries.

"Ice Skaters, New York," Honorable Mentions in "Cityscapes" and "Fine Art: Other"

"Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem", HM in "Fine Art: Other"

"Three Children in Window," Honorable Mentions in "People: Children" and "Editorial: Other"

The biggest edit

I am not a great multi-tasker. When I get on a project, I want to stick with it until I finish it oruntil it defeats me. The "Let’s Clear The File Cabinets" project started innocently, as something to occupy the last hour or two of the day. But in three days I’ve put about 20 hours into it, scything through my subject folders from A to N so far. I have harvested Agriculture, banished a lot of Birds, eviscerated Education, dismissed Dance, massacred Medical. What purpose does 15 year old medical technology serve in my files? I kept one or two for the historical archive. Families was one of my biggest files, at close to 4000 images. Not any more. I sighed and lingered at Nudes, old girlfriends mostly, from 15 years ago or more. I couldn’t bear to cull any of them.

This edit will be a record of my visual sensibility of a time and a place, judging the visual sensibility of a prior time and place. Work I might have thought marginal 15 years ago, one or two of which I kept anyway, becomes the work worth saving now, the best of the archive. What I kept twenty variations of at the time were mostly not worth the effort. I am diminishing the choices I will have available 20 years hence, but I have neither the fame nor the reputation required to keep those choices available for posterity.

The Dance file I put aside at first. This is a body of work whose status is active, and I hope it will be my next book. It is the section of my website that gets the lion’s share of hits. I have been documenting the contra dance scene since I began dancing in the mid 80’s. I have photographs of people I still see around now that I shot 20 years ago. It occupies a third of a file drawer though, and there are a lot of really bad dance photos in there. For historical archive purposes, I kept a light hand on the edit. Now, I know which are the keepers.

I really hope something distracts me soon from this project. My neck hurts from bending over a light table all day. I hear there are some cool migrant birds showing up in Wastucna, a little farming town in far eastern Washington. Maybe it’s time for another trip.

Throwing the past away

For the last week I’ve been spending about an hour or two a day going through my slide files and purging work. As in throwing it away. There is something almost sacriligious about tossing film, but I blithely hit the delete key to about a third of my take every day. With film, it is something tangible that I am throwing away. It feels a lot more significant.

I have files of images I have not looked through in months, or sometimes years. When my stock photography business was more active and I was making a lot of sales myself, I was in the files all the time. They were the reservoir of my creative and economic life, and my task was to dip into it to fulfill requests, and replenish it with new work. Since digital, the work has stagnated and has little purpose in my contemporary worklife.

I’m not tossing everything. Anything before about 1986 is sancrosant, unless it really sucks. Assignment folders are largely left alone. I am working my way through my hanging folders (organized by subject), pulling the keepers, and tossing the other 80%. I don’t need the 30 variations on a family scene. Five are enough. Sailboats against a 1990 Seattle skyline: maybe one is enough. I’m up to F. There are separate file cabinets for geographic subjects. I have 10 drawers of lateral files, bulging with slides. It’s probably about 60,000 images. With luck, I can draw that down by half and open up some floor space.

Until I get busy. Then I will ignore them for another year.

5 years ago

Here is what I wrote in "Dispatches" (my email proto-blog) the week of September 11, 5 years ago.

As it has for you and millions of others, my world has come to a near standstill. The attack on our country has shocked me, and probably has changed me forever.

Seeing those images, again and again and again, through the day. I couldn’t wrap my mind around them. The world had just tilted, and it would never be set right. Already I knew that the rest of my life, and my country’s life, would forever be in the shadow of this moment. I felt numbness and shock. By afternoon I was physically ill, and had to take to bed for an hour. I felt better only at evening, when a group from our synagogue gathered by Lake Washington to pray and share. Thoughts and words began to gather in me.

I feel despair at the hubris of those who act for the glory of God. The men who hijacked those planes were utterly certain in their belief that they were carrying out God’s will, and that they were acting against a titanic evil. Religious absolutism disregards any evidence to counter its absolute certainty, like the untidy notion that my enemy is human and feels like I do. And too, I am disheartened by our political leaders who are responding in kind. Our President says, this is an evil act by evil people, and we will hunt them and their supporters down. God, of course, is on our side. I fear we are going to respond to this titanic evil by bombing some poor country into the stone age, again. We seem unable to understand that revenge is not justice.

The only ones I can say were truly acting out God's will were those firefighters who headed up the stairs, against the tide.

Written in big chalk letters on the Greenlake jogging path is a third of a mile of peace aphorisms. The one I remember and take to my heart is this: "God does not grant peace to His creatures, it is a gift that we grant to each other."

Finally, I’m crying. The numbness, the shut-down feeling, the nervous energy with no outlet, it is passing. I feel terrible. This is good. There is no option but to feel horrible. My heart is open, and it is breaking.

I have not picked up a camera since Tuesday. Right now that work seems so trivial. The world cannot be put right again, and I am confused by my stance toward it. I don’t know what it will mean or how I will see when I do photograph again. I can only let this event have its way with me.

You can read more of my New York Dispatches in the travel writings section of my website here.

Not dead yet

On my trip to the coast a couple weeks ago I shot film. Black and white film in the Xpan. Confronted with contact sheets of dense, complicated material, I figured that the fastest way to see what I had would be to fire up the darkroom.

Think of the alternative. Scan each neg, process in Photoshop, but try not to get carried away (this is just to see what has potential), and use up a lot of ink and paper. It would be tedious work and would take most of a day.

The darkroom: 2 hours for about 35 RC work prints. By handling each negative I get the first look at what is in there that I can work with. I see which ones have the shadow detail I want, I spot problem areas that I will work on later. Learning what a negative requires takes time and multiple passes. It takes pulling a print, again and again. I have negs that have taken years to learn how to print.

In this case I wasn’t aiming for perfection, only an indication. These were work prints that are going to be posted on my kitchen bulletin board, the place where work-in-progress lives. It was so satisfying to be standing over a tray, and not at a damn computer monitor. I had the stereo blasting and, in the dark, I danced to the music. You can’t dance at a computer.

My name's in the newspaper!

Remember how I wrote about the Associated Press reporter at Philadelphia’s Rocky statue yesterday? She returned the favor—on the worldwide AP wire. See it here.

Thanks to my brother Cliff (who works for the Reading Eagle in Reading, PA) for alerting me to this.

The great heralded arrival of Rocky

I am in Philadelphia for a day, before I fly home this evening. Typically I would be writing about an art epiphany at a museum at this point, as that’s what I do when I visit cities. I go to museums and have art epiphanies. I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art expecting to have another one. Instead I stumbled upon an art culture war.

Apparently, what the Philadelphia Museum of Art is most famous for is the 72 steps that Rocky Balboa bounded up in the movie. Tourists come to run up those stairs today and, reaching the top, thrust both arms overhead in that championship winner’s mode. You won’t have to wait five minutes at those steps before you’ll see someone doing exactly that.

There is a statue. It was a movie prop in the third Rocky film. It’s an 8 foot tall Rocky Baboa, with arms raised overhead. The city wanted to put it at the art museum. The art museum huffed and fumed. "This isn’t art! Don’t disgrace our hallowed grounds with a movie prop!"

Which started the kind of class warfare fight this city thrives on. The statue is headed to the museum anyway, in a grove to the left of the base of the stairs. It arrived at the museum just as I did.

Rocky arrived on his back, his gloved hands wrapped in mover’s blankets and his neck nestled on a rigid foam pillow. His arrival caused a stir and drew a crowd. There were already three news trucks parked at the base of the stairs (there would be six within the hour), and a small herd of reporters and photographers. The moving crew took turns taking pictures of themselves, with their phones, in front of the truck, arms raised. A kid came up. "I’m a champion! I ran the stairs!" and stood in front of the statue, arms up in the air. A pile of tourists poured out of a van and surrounded the statue. "We’re from Greece, we’re flying back today. Did you know that Philadelphia is named for a Greek city?" Television reporters with microphone, tailed by cameramen, darted from person to person for reaction interviews.

"Who are you shooting for," the woman next to me asked. One benefit of carrying the camera I carry is that I can walk into any media scrum unharassed. "Oh, I’m just a tourist from Seattle." She was the AP reporter who started all this business, at least as a national story, and she started writing down what I had to say, which was, "I adore that this kerfuffle is the most important thing going on in this city. It’s a harmless folly where everyone, the cultural elite and the working class masses, can feel smug and superior."

I imagine something of the sort happened a century ago when some bronze horse and rider went up on a plynth nearby. "What, him? He doesn’t deserve a statue!" Back then, however, three news helicopters didn’t cover every moment of the installation. The Rocky statue, bad art though it may be (it’s something in the mold of a Jeff Koon piece without the irony), is going to become an immediate and beloved Philadelphia icon. Good for them.

Connecting

Today I finally feel I am on vacation. It’s been a trip of family visits until now; however beneficial and bonding that may be, it tends to mostly engage my sense of filial responsibility at the expense of feeling connected with a place and a moment. Now I am in another state and another biome from my central Pennsylvania origins. I’m in Maryland, on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake.

We’re staying at an elegant yet casual country inn, the Inn At Huntingfield Creek, outside of Rock Park in Kent County, one of the more northerly Eastern Shore counties. It is lush and beautiful, in a way different from the lush and beautiful of Pennsylvania. There’s a hint of southerness in the buildings, in the landscape, in the forest that I’m not familiar enough with to talk about in specifics, except that it feels different in some natal sense of what southern means to a Yankee. I’m not going to be here long enough to say anything sensible or cogent about the locale, but I can talk about my own immediate experience.

It has been pouring rain all night. In the morning I seal myself in Goretex and wrap my camera in a ziplock bag (holes for the camera strap and the viewfinder), and go out. The wind and the rain are to my back as I walk along the sorghum field to the row of trees bordering the bay. I stop to admire the row of spent sunflowers, and to identify the multitude of sparrows feeding on the seedheads (Field Sparrow mostly). Mockingbirds call in the distance. An Osprey crosses over with a fish in its talons, flying directly to its nest on the microwave tower in the next field. There is no quicker or surer route to the moment than through birds. Through them I sense my surroundings with heightened tension. There aren't a whole lot of birds around (it was pouring rain), so it is not hard to transfer this attentiveness to the camera.

It is maybe 300 yards from the inn to the water’s edge. It has taken me about an hour to cover the distance. Now I am at the forest edge, and then bulrushes and saltwater marsh. Chickadees and titmice call overhead, a flock of Cedar Waxwings flies through the trees. A Hairy Woodpecker calls, and I spy it after some searching. The air is tangible as a mass, full of water as it is, and at the edge of the land the gray of the water and the sky match in tone. Everything is lovely and very, very wet. I am finally feeling a sense of connectness with this landscape, after searching for that sensation for many days. It is almost tangible in the feeling I’m having as I make these photographs.

Photographing thusly, in the landscape, is both a means of getting connected with where I am, and a record of that connection. Yes, birds help, and I often bird without bringing along a camera and I feel quite content. But there is another order of intensity to the moment when I am able to engage it within this discipline of seeing. The conditions here are hard, I’m pretty much wet everywhere, the camera is hard to manage and keep dry (this is the first time I wish I had my old 1Ds Mark II with me—it’s pretty impervious to the elements), but I’m having a great time out here. When I look at the work (within the hour—isn’t digital grand?), except for the shots where the ziplock bag opening is in the frame, I can feel that I really got this place.

On the road

I'm travelling through Pennsylvania and Maryland's Eastern Shore for the week, making the rounds of family and friends. Keep an eye on the Daily Photos for what I'm up to.