dispatches

The last dance

I am at the climactic event of my dance gypsy tour of New England. It is the Peterborough Snow Ball, 12 hours of contra dancing to four of the hottest bands in the scene. I’m taking a break in the proceedings, one, because I’m not 30 anymore, and two, it is so packed on the dance floor—nine lines across a hall that comfortably holds six—that it’s more satisfying right now to listen to the music, which is eminently listenable, being that it’s Rodney Miller and Airdance. They represent the current state of the art in New England contra music, smooth, virtuosic technique, and a fusion of the musical styles of traditional New England style with swing and jazz.

I have photographed in this hall before, a sunny day like today, with beams of light cutting through the dance-propelled dust in the great ballroom. Last time I shot with color negative film, and in scanning the film I am able to extract highlight detail that, in digital, I’m afraid is forever blasted off the histogram. It’s not like I can multiple expose my way to an HDR merge when the highlights are on bodies in motion. I spent quite some time trying to find a compromise exposure, but this is a situation that may be better served to shoot on film.

I did a similar dance tour to some of the same venues in 2004. A difference I note, three years on, is how many more young people are dancing now. At this dance, compared to Concord, the "puppy" contingent is more integrated, and I’ve even had some of them as partners on occasion. It is a lovely indication of the health of the culture.

It has been a sublime trip, with many blissful moments on the dance floor. Robin claims I do bliss better than anyone she knows. I wouldn’t know how to compare, but the chase of those moments of bliss and connection has been a constant throughout my life. Contra is a dance form where you dance with everyone in the room. You do so in sequence, up and down the lines, but also in unison. There is something energetically charged about sharing a peak dance moment with 300 people simultaneously. I can only describe it as an ecstatic, nearly spiritual connection.

Tomorrow I head for Maine and a week-long workshop with John Paul Caponigro on black and white digital printmaking. Expect the tone of the blog to veer over to the geek side for the duration.
 

Traditional collision

Up to now my dances have been local and traditional, steeped in authentic New England old school. Tonight’s dance at the Scout House in Concord, MA, was the contra antipode to that. It signals where the tradition is headed.

The Scout Hall has a beautiful interior of exposed timbers and a slick, worn wooden floor. A sign on the wall says, "Please Do Not Dance in Street Shoes." This is a dance for the hard core dancers, the kind that the deep traditionalists moan and wail are destroying the old ways with their quest for target heart rates and nonstop swinging every contra. These dancers want it hot and fast, and the music (Latter Day Lizards) and the calling (Lisa Greenleaf) deliver.

But this scene has its own internal conflict. As David Millstone put it, it’s a case of "Be careful what you wish for," in this case the perennial question of, how does a contra dance community bring in fresh, young blood? This dance has been invaded by a massive contingent of teenagers. They dance wild and free, "like a bunch of puppies," one partner told me. They dance together, in their own line, and aren’t having any of this, We’re all in this together community stuff. They’re here to have a good time, and they don’t want no parent types telling them how it ought to be done.

But they’re really good, some of them. There’s a new sound on the dance floor these days, a fast, really loud, synchopated batter that a group of these kids will do during the balance step. You never know when it’s going to come, but it shudders the hall like a small earthquake when it does. Somehow the whole crowd of them signals to do it all at once.

It reminds me of, in Ireland, how I heard wailing and moaning about how the kids were just not obeying the set dance traditions. They were battering the floor too loud and, the worst of it was, the girls were the loudest. It was going to be the ruin of everything. Every living tradition has some conflict like this—it’s a sign things are alive and well. I can guarantee that in thirty years time the kids of these kids are going to be scandalizing their parents with the new moves they bring to whatever it is looks like contra dance then.

At the end of the evening a group of five kids got their Northumbrian rapper swords out, two foot long flexible things with handles on both ends, and performed a complicated dance to a jig, weaving in baskets and jumping over the swords and, at the end, lacing them symetrically to form a star. So this is where all these hot dancers have gotten their modern contra moves, from a 19th century dance from the north of England.
 

Winter tourist

I have been quite taken with the visuals of winter the last couple of days. Not that I would have had to leave Seattle for this—while speaking to Robin the other morning, she reported, visible from our front window, a downhill skier cutting curves on the street opposite her mother’s house. But Seattle has nothing to compare with the matchless sensation of exposed skin when the temperature hovers a degree above zero, Fahrenheit, and a light breeze is blowing. Tuesday morning’s walk, down in Nelson, felt balmy at 20 degrees, where I took the daily loop with Lisa and her friend Gwenn and a bouncy (is there any other kind?) brown lab. There the snow was ice-skating rink slick from the freezing rain the day before, and we walked mostly on the sanded roads, quietly enough to hear the nuthatches and chickadees, or across a grassy meadow, where we sounded like a herd of rampaging moose from the crunch of the miniature glass pinnacle forest under our Godzilla boots.

It is winter and the branches are bare against a white background, and I am making the kind of photographs someone who has never seen snow makes. They are probably old hat sort of photographs to anyone local, but they excite me, and I am heartened that I can manage all my camera controls with my thick gloves. I appear to have sufficient clothing, but venturing anywhere requires massive preparation to seal one’s self off from direct exposure to the atmosphere, which again is old hat, but I’m a tourist and I have license to remark on the unremarkable. I’ve lived in these conditions in my lifetime, but the narrow climate of the Northwest has softened me up.

I’ve posted a set of the winter shots on Flickr.

To dance or to photograph?

I am travelling through New England engaged in my two great passions, dance and photography. I have announced to the dance world that I am preparing a book of my contra dance photography. Nothing like going public with an idea to force one to actually proceed with it.

Here is one of the conundrums with which I am faced, and it goes to the heart of photography as both a descriptive and an abstracting medium. At dinner last night, David Millstone challenged me about what I wanted this book project to represent. Is it about the contra dance world, or is it about photography of contra dance? Is it a narrative description of a subculture I happen to belong to, or is it a series of solutions to finding resolved images in a complex, dynamic environment?

Mostly I come to dance, because it feeds my soul and my bliss. Because dancing is so close to my heart, it is a natural subject to turn my photographic attention toward. I know the feeling of dance, and the creative challenge is to make work that also has that feeling present. But I’m also responding to light and shadow, movement and expression, all those things that can make an interesting photograph. I stand back, and I want to work with what I’m seeing.

This challenge speaks to one of the great paradoxes of photography as a creative, interactive process. Our source material is the external world. We take a picture, which has a complex cascade of metaphoric and literal meanings and implications. Take it where? Take it from what, or whom? It implies a duality: there’s the photographer, then there’s the thing that the photograph is taken of, or from, if you wish to include the soul-snatching metaphor. Relationally, it brings forth the conflict of choosing between being a witness or a participant.

To master the photographic process requires a fluency in the sequence of chemical, or now, electronic processes that create an object with its own presence and reality. The photograph resembles something that we understand as a document of a given moment and place, but it is nonetheless a highly abstracted artifact of a lot of technology. My jollies come from being able to see from one end to the other of that tunnel of process at the very moment I am engaged in the intitial framing and exposure. And I choose to play with that process in a really complicated environment, a contra dance floor.

My resolution to the duality conflict—am I a participant or a witness?—is to not resolve it. I flit back and forth. When I want a break from dancing, I take pictures. If it’s a dance where I think bodily harm can be avoided, I’ll dance with the camera. I want those stances to be as close to each other as I can manage. I want both aspects to be present in the work.

I expect much of my job for the next few months will be figuring out just what form this project is going to take.

Dancing to chestnuts

I have been dancing for the last three days. I am at the Ralph Page Legacy Dance Weekend, a dance event hosted for the purpose of honoring the beleaguered traditions of old time contra dancing. It was the kind of dance where everyone lined up proper (men on one side), under the assumption that any improper dance (men and women alternating in a single line) would be the anomoly. It has been years since I danced a proper set at a regular contra dance.

With the ascendency of the urban dance scene and the popularity of a fast, athletic dance style, the New England tradition of a stately musical rhythm and dances of unequal parts for active and inactive is hardly ever seen anymore. Chestnuts that were a regular part of a dance evening when I started in the mid-80’s, like Petronella or Rory O More, are almost vanished from the scene.

But this was not the case here. The aging members of the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra, an ever shifting group of musicians who were the sound of contemporary contra dance in the early 1970’s, were the featured artists. Dudley Laufman, who was the singular contra dance caller of that decade, was present and honored as elder statesman and venerated curmudgeon. If there had not been a Dudley Laufman to take the torch from Ralph Page, and bring contra dance to the "unwashed hippie masses" back in the day, there would not now be vigorous dance communities in the likes of Seattle, Madison, Houston, or Juneau.

Here is the peak moment of the weekend. The caller calls, "Line up proper. It’s Chorus Jig. Do we need a walk-through?"

This room full of dancers did not need a walk-through. Most of them have been dancing Chorus Jig for thirty or forty years. It is a dance and a sound (Chorus Jig is danced to a tune called Chorus Jig, which is a reel, not a jig) deeply familiar and evocative to anyone with a history in the tradition.

The music started. I had a skilled partner, and I was surrounded by skilled dancers. We took Chorus Jig and danced our hearts out to it. We danced it to the edges of what you can do in 16 beats to a contra corners move, when everyone is spot on and knows in their bones how the dance goes. But we made it modern, in our own way. We played inside, outside, and all around the dance. We flung that dance against the walls with all our energy and improvisation. We danced with a joy so large that I danced through tears in my eyes. "Ralph Page is turning over in his grave," I said to my partner, after the double twirl push off from my inactive, after my jump and heel click on the balance. "I was thinking the same thing!" she said, grinning bigger than anyone possibly could.

County Clare has the Plain Set. County Kerry has the Kerry Set. New Hampshire has Chorus Jig.

Why is digital music so hard?

I’m leaving on a trip in a couple of days. I have better things to do. Instead, I am trying to learn how to load music onto my new Treo 650.

My taste for travel music runs almost exclusively to classical. It soothes me during my inevitable anxiety attacks in aircraft. Digital music formatting, though, appears to be oriented solely to the realm of the 3 minute single for someone decades younger than me. When I load my Bach and Mozart discs onto my computer, and then transfer them to my phone, they get sequentially reorganized by track number. The Well Tempered Clavier is all muddled up with the Art of the Fugue and the Jupiter and the New World.

At least on the Ipod ingest I had the option to consolidate tracks, so that a single CD remained as one unit. It’s still a mess, as the metadata for J.S. Bach is expressed differently in every disk, and my library is correspondingly a jumbled tangle that I don’t know how to fix. But it’s better than what Real Player or Pocket Tunes on the Treo has to offer. I wasted several hours today trying to convert my Ipod m4a files to generic mp3, downloading program after program that promised but failed to deliver. I’ve been using a great program, Anapod Explorer, that bypasses the ill-begotten Itunes interface and allows one to organize one’s Ipod as God intended, in a Windows Explorer format. But proceeding from there to a non-proprietary structure proved impossible.

Why is this so damned hard? Is this what digital photography feels like to a civilian?

Change or die

This was in the AGE Fotostock newsletter (they're one of the stock agencies that represent me) a few weeks ago. It's a call to arms for creative differentiation.

Stock photography, as we used to know it, is in decline…probably 90% of the people that have been living from it will be literally digested by a horde of new shooters that, thanks to the low cost of digital cameras, are shooting images at unimaginable and unbelievable rate and quality.

As a consequence, 90% of the so-called stock shooters are not showing in their photography today anything that their neighbor next door would not be able to do with a $500 digital camera on a Sunday morning. …Describing yourself as a stock photographer is becoming in most cases a sad euphemism if we analyse the phenomena from the perspective of what kind of images we see in circulation. …The digital world has made it very easy for many people to shoot pictures at a negligible cost and with sufficient quality from the market interested in using or buying them without the need of calling a photographer to do the job or submit an image from his/her file.

(Continuing to shoot) highly descriptive images of easily available places and other details is switching on a lethal mine that will destroy your efforts to differentiate your photography from the kind of images that are at the easy reach of the "User Generated Content" (UGC) practitioners. Threfore more than ever your attention must concentrate to develop a style that will make your images conceptually out of reach of your neighbor next door. Be aware, he belongs to this UGC digital phenomenon.

Everything old is new again

I dropped off my prints for Benham Gallery's "Give Us Your Best Shot" group show this morning. Marita was there, and we chatted. I told her I was headed off next week to Maine for John Paul Caponigro's digital printmaking workshop, but that these were silver prints. "From a dealer's point of view, " she said, "I prefer silver. Fewer people are doing it. It's getting more rare, and more valuable."

So, maybe I won't give up the wet lab just yet.

Day after day

Last weekend we were at the home of another couple. "Where’s your camera, Doug?" asked Mary. I have always had it with me when we’ve dropped by in the past. "I left it at home. I already got my picture for the day."

Oh dear. Did I really say that?

Robin’s been teasing me ever since. I posted one early this morning, after a dawn walk at my favorite birding spot, Montlake Fill. "You can’t pick up your camera now for the rest of the day. You’ve got your picture."

There are, of course, multiple motivations for my Daily Photo posts. Initially it was to get me fluent in a digital workflow. If I were to commit myself to processing and posting a photo daily, that would lead to a habitual fluency, and it has. The Daily blog has gone on for over a year and a half now, without interruption. I feel a sense of accomplishment and pride, and a determination to not break the chain. Even when I was sick over the holidays, I managed to keep it going.

It’s gotten me in the habit of taking my camera everywhere, to where it causes my friends to give me a hard time if I’m caught without it. I tried using a little pocket point-and-shoot, but it didn’t take. I disliked composing on a little LCD at arm’s length, and the quality was so beneath what I was used to. So I haul around the 5D everywhere—lunch, movies, grocery shopping. Except when I don’t.

Some days I’m just not inspired, especially when I haven’t left the house. It’s been raining, and it’s dark by 3pm this time of year. I’ve shot all the default household subjects to death, and my mother-in-law got rid of her cute white cats that were always good for a shot when I couldn’t find anything better. My cat rarely puts up with photography--she runs away, usually. Still, taking a break from whatever is so compelling on the computer has its own benefit, and it doesn’t take long to descend into that other kind of attentiveness to the world that camerawork can trigger.

Last night I was truly at a loss. It was dark and stormy outside. I wasn’t finding anything to connect to around the house. I went back to the office and saw the curl of a USB cable that’s been sitting on my light table for a week. There it was, the compelling object. I turned on the light table, and worked the shot. Of course, the first one was the best, the one I took before I messed it up by thinking about it too much.

Setting aside an interval to make a photograph, every day, is probably the closest thing I have to a meditation practice, and I’m sure it occupies that role in my life. It is a similar focus on my own internal state, but with a simutaneous attentiveness to the external world, and to the back and forth between the internal and the external. It literally feels like a clicking into another band of awareness, and doing so daily has benefits beyond the artifact of the image.

Though the artifact is also pretty compelling at this point. I just printed and bound a one-off book of all of last year’s images. I’m looking into how hard it would be to print it through Lulu.com, and actually sell the thing. Stay tuned.

Everything you didn't know you needed to know about DVD storage

I bet you've never known either what the difference is between DVD-R and DVD+R. For this, and the skinny on archival storage and what you ought to be using, check out Patrick McFarland's post on the subject.

My take on the whole issue is that our devices to read these disks are going to vanish long before the data. It's an issue worth paying attention to, but not obsessing over.