It's a Black and White World

I'd heard of Anselm Adams. Eliot Porter, yes.
Edward Steichen, of course,
but why not this man with the Leica?

It's as if I believed I knew a bit about physics and math and I'd never heard of Albert Einstein.

It's as if in the realm of the development of computer operating systems I was familiar with Bill Gates but not Steve Jobs.

Yes, that's how I felt after all these years of taking photographs and exulting over the exquisiteness of this art form whenever it is practiced at its highest level and then...

A friend came along and awoke me to the work of a photographer I'd never heard of.

What? I didn't know about Henri Cartier-Bresson?

Ce n'est pas possible!

HCB, as I prefer to call him for conciseness sake, worked in the medium of black and white film. As I've indicated, he is hardly an obscure figure. HCB, who died in 2004, has been called by some the 20th century's greatest photographer.

Yet it was only last year that the first full-scale exhibition of his work in the U.S. in nearly thirty years took place. 'The Modern Century" show opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (moving on thereafter to Chicago, San Francisco, and Atlanta).

So much has been written and said about HCB that there's no need for me to stir the pot further. I'd rather say what I've noticed about his photos and how they've impacted me of late.

Being Henri
HCB first looks with an eye that is drawn to an underlying order in the environment humans have surrounded themselves with. This order manifests itself in repetitions of lines, curves, triangles, squares, rectangles, etc. HCB's eye embraces tight geometry the way a sailor loves the wave tossed sea, a rancher craves the open range.

The other thing I notice is how HCB brings our eyes to bear upon a human subject who intrudes or leaps or freezes in the midst of the geometric feast. Spotting the person in the picture puts me as viewer in a unique position. I know something the person being photographed perhaps doesn't know.

First, the subject often doesn't know that his or her picture is being taken (many of HCB's most iconic photos appear to be taken surreptitiously from a distance). Second, they are not privy to the fact that they are standing in the midst of the geometric orderly arrangement the photographer has enclosed within his view finder. In this way, HCB places himself and his viewers in a special place of privilege.

In HCB's worldview, it almost always requires the human element to make the final piece of the geometry come together.

It's also possible for the human form itself to constitute the geometric moment of note.

When I look at a photo be HCB I find that he has gifted me with what I'd call a "god's eye." I can see the world the way the humans ordinarily can't. And it is good.

The 3-Minute HCB
So I was on this photo quest last weekend in a quaint little cowboy town where I was participating in a digital photography workshop. Toward the end of the day I thought, why not put away my digital SLR camera and switch to my compact point and shoot?

I had a further thought. I would set the camera on black and white mode and I'd rest my weary bones by sitting down on the curb and simultaneously try to capture the tourists as they passed by.

I would dabble in the genre called "street photography."

I held the camera at knee level pointing up so hopefully no one would realize that I was sitting there taking pictures of them.

It turned out that I only took three pictures. It was easy. People walked by, I squeezed the shutter release. I didn't really know what I had captured until I switched the camera from "record" mode to "play."

Okay. I'm no HCB. People's backsides, boring background. Nothing

too exciting or revelatory going on here.



Definitely better. Background much improved. I like the silhouetted

fingers, the clasping of the cup, the right angle of the elbow.

The slightly curvey body in contrast to the vertical of the pole is nice too.

But a tall, lean woman with half a head?




Ah! More like it! As the boy walks past he grabs the pole, and lifts his right foot off the ground. Why?

Because to a child "It is there, ergo I must grab it!" I didn't even know about this little moment until 

I downloaded the shot and examined it on my computer the next day.


On Not Being Henri
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a  giant. He took pictures that captured what he called "the decisive moment." In my puny case, the best I can do is seek the "haphazardous moment." That is, I hope by accident more than deliberate design to bring in something worthwhile through the lens.

But I don't think that should discourage me or anyone else. So I have to have many more tries before something emerges worth remarking upon? It's not an impossible approach. In fact, it could be a life's credo: take risks, live a lot, be willing to throw away much, especially our most foolish and mistaken behavior. Then, once we wash away the silt, we'll hope to find a few grains of gold sparkling at the bottom of the pan. - V.W.

The Joy of Pentax

 

Point, shoot! Van Winkle embarks on a photo quest.

One thing I've learned after all these months of being Van Winkled
is that living with proscribed access to what's happening in the larger world means that I have to make my own news and entertainment.

It's that or stare into an empty blankness until I wake up in September...

So one way I've redefined "news" for myself is that it's whatever I happen to notice happening in front of me, in real time, with my own eyes. There's an entire world of what some might call the "mundane" that unfolds before me each day. Like a faithful journalist, I try to notice it.

I've discovered something in the process. If a person really wants to make discoveries--some of them unexpectedly exciting--then he or she has to slow down and start to be more attentive. One way to do this is to pick up a camera and go looking for pictures.

Photo Ops

#$!*^%!! newspaper vending machine!

Last weekend my wife and I joined a photography workshop held in a small rural town that's close enough to a large urban center that it's become an attractive weekend destination. People shop for antiques or dance to country western bands inside the quaint old dance hall.

The whole package made for a nice getaway for the two of us--especially after I accidentally saw two words (out of several) in a newspaper headline.

...GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN...

This was almost unavoidable since the metal vending box for the papers was right outside the door to the bed and breakfast were staying at. I had to pass it several times a day.

Ignore that headline, Van Winkle! I was ready to spend two days in a more mature rewarding activity than shutting down the government.

CAMERA SHUT (TER-RELEASE) DOWN!

I would be working with a one-note, comforting soundtrack: Snap! Snap! Snap!

Street Shots
As I dusted off my camera and began pointing the lens around I was hopeful something good might happen. It was an advantage that our able instructors provided tips and refreshers on photography so we might get better photos than in the past. You know, the rule of thirds, lower the F-step to blur the background, remembering to check white balance.

After our first class meeting we were given an assignment. We were told to go onto the street and into some of the nearby buildings and see what we could find.

I sought a sort of visual poetry.

I wanted to find shapes and colors and juxtapositions that my eye fell in love with.

My attention was drawn to simple things that spoke of a multiplicity of human actions.

To the photographic mind the most important news is the arrival of the light...

And more light...

Sometimes I knew I had found what I was looking for because of how it made me feel.

The Eros of Photography
Though I've placed the brand name "Pentax" in the title of this post, I don't intend it as a celebration or endorsement of this particular manufacturer of cameras. Yes, it so happens that, for various reasons, I own a Pentax K100D digital SLR. So what? Nikons, Canons, Minoltas, they're all fine. The great thing, however, about pairing the name "Pentax" with the word "joy" is how it echoes the title of a book that once sold with panting urgency in the 1970s: The Joy of Sex.

And that's what I want to make manifest here. The "joy of Pentax" is what occurs when taking a camera in hand and raising it to eye level and placing within a frame a small portion of our world. This simple activity can result in a kind of intimate carnal knowledge of the animate and inanimate things that surround us. Squeeze the shutter release and...

Photo orgasm!

And that's how you love the world with a lens.

- V.W.

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Monsieur Van Winkle's Comedies


NEWS NOTE: This week, while driving our son to school, I've seen all the flags at half mast. In keeping with the goals of this project, I still do not know why. I can say, however, that it is disturbing. What exactly has someone done that leaves so many mourning? - V.W.

 





 

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In in lieu of keeping up with the news, I've lately been looking at the three-line news items that the Frenchman Felix Fénéon supplied to the Paris newspaper Le Matin in 1906. [See my post of January 11.]

These acts of brief reportage were called faits-divers and were collected in a volume, Novels in Three Lines, brought out by New York Review Books in 2007 .

I find Feneon's fait-divers not only historically interesting for what they reveal about early 20th Century life, but they are also prized specimens of a minimalist, modernist style in which a few, well chosen words are used to create maximum effect. At their best, they're like miniature poems in prose.

I noted, however, that what the newspaper considered newsworthy was (and this is still, for the most part, true today in our news media) invariably tragic. Sometimes the story told in ink is decidedly gruesome:

A corpse floated downstream. A sailor fished it out at Boulogne. No identification; a pearl-gray suit; about 65 years old.

Another Kind of Fait-Divers
Here at The Van Winkle Project, since we have no access to real news, we're not too shy to make up some of our own. In fact, we have decided it might be interesting to share a 21st Century version of faits-divers.

These updates of Fénéon's little three-line items are intended to deliberately reverse the original formulation. Instead of taking the view that the only news worth hearing about is tragic in nature, our fabricated news imagines a world in which sometimes things work out otherwise.

What follows then are possibly happy, maybe even dumbly sublime, outcomes, i.e., comedies, that likely will never be reported in either the print or electronic media if for no other reason than they never actually occurred.

But does this mean they're not worth reading? Perhaps even worth trying to believe in as we make our way through a world that too often seems darker than the one we wish for?

Without wanting to come off as a total naif, I dare to believe in the idea that because there are so many shadows, surely there must be shining somewhere a source of light. How else can the shadows we find all around us even be possible if there is not somewhere some semblance of light trying to break through?

Eight News Stories I'd Like to Read in Three* Lines
*or slightly more

1...


A father of four driving home on the Interstate. After midnight. An oncoming 18-wheeler drifting toward him, but then it moves back just in time and rushes on past.

2...

A little girl’s chocolate ice cream cone dripped onto her new sun dress. She laughed. Her mother would forgive her, wash the dress, and besides, the ice cream tasted so good on a hot day sitting outside on the porch with her bare feet touching concrete.

3...

The blind man did not receive sight. Instead he dressed up, attended a party where he met a beautiful woman. She took him by the hand onto the terrace and there, beside a terra cotta planter, she kissed him because she had always wanted her lips to touch those of a man who had no idea what she looked like.

4...

The woman made a batch of oatmeal raisin cookies, then she lost herself in the living room reading a home decorating magazine. A half hour went by, fifteen minutes, another five, and she realized she had forgotten to set the oven timer. She ran to the kitchen, opened the oven door, and took out the tray of cookies, which somehow, some way, emerged perfectly golden, nothing short of a miracle, and like all such things utterly inexplicable and delicious.

5...

The wind blew the dark clouds in so that the rain fell on the northern part of our city but not the south. In the north they parted curtains and looked out spattered windows. In the south they stood barefoot in the streets, looking at dark hooves running over the sky and then they began playing music and dancing.

6...

Rostikof and Dewey argued about God endlessly, Rostikoff a believer in the glories of Jehovah, Dewey, a virulent atheist. One day Dewey burst out that the two of them were getting old, but he hoped to hell there was a heaven so that someday they might continue their argument which gave them such pleasure without ever quite coming to blows. Both men laughed at Dewey’s contradictory vision, praised the wine, opened another bottle, and set to arguing again.

7...

The next door neighbor's dog started barking at three a.m. awaking the middle-aged couple. They lay there in bed listening to the dog provoke another neighbor’s dog and another dog, each taking up the barking which soon became baying and howling around the block, an unrestrained canine symphony. Then he reached out, she reached out, they found each other, and as they filled the room with their own tactile music they heard the dogs no more.

8...

A man picked up an orange and held the fruit in his hand, offering it to his eyes and nose, and for a few moments he knew, as a poet knows, that he would never grasp anything more monumentally, convincingly, lavishly orange. Then he ate it and went on his way.


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On Seeking the Color Red

"There's something stuck out there in the front yard," my wife said as she came in the back door.

"What are you talking about?" I asked interested, but not alarmed. After all my wife didn't sound upset, just a bit mystified.

"It's in the bushes," she continued, standing on her toes at the kitchen sink to see if she could make out the mystery object through the window. "I don't know what it is. It's impaled. It looked like a piece of paper."

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One can be assured that my wife is not a nagger or a composer of honey dew lists. So there will be no marital drama ensuing from her sighting in which she expected a certain response from me and I failed to perform it. She had simply noticed the anomaly in our brown-yellow winter landscape while pulling the car into the garage.

She wanted to share why this particular piece of ubiquitous windblown piece of garbage out of all the windblown garbage in our rather untidy burg seemed a bit different from all others.

"It's red," she said.

"I'll check on it," I said.

The "Thing" in the Yard
As I stepped out the front door the first thing I noticed was the wind. It was from the south, the one the Greeks called Notos, and it was blowing hard.

Wind is not unusual in these parts. Cold weather blows down from the north. Then nature reverses itself and the Gulf of Mexico forces warmer air up from the south. Or the Pacific has its way and blows its tempestuous tidings in from the west. The only consistency is that if you live here on the open prairie, more often than not, there will be wind. Lots of it. No gentle breezes these, they are gusty and laden with grit.

With the wind whipping at my back I headed toward the garden area beneath the trees. At first I didn't see anything. I thought, Hmm, perhaps the wind blew the red thing to its next destination.

Then I passed a tree that was blocking my view. Ah, yes. There it was.

The red piece of paper. Windblown. Snagged.

I retrieved it and headed into the roar of the wind. I didn't look at the paper to find out what it was until later.

A Search for Red
Lately this visual red note that the wind played  in my life has caused me to notice something that previously I remained unaware of.

Red is a relatively rare color in our home.

Once I started my inventory of colors I identified plenty of browns and beiges and whites and even some black among our possessions and decor. But red? It was not so popular. On the other hand, what little red I could uncover seemed, in its uniqueness, to really stand out.

Tick tock. Red resides beside the bed.

Red is in the "C" in C-r-e-s-t whenever I brush my teeth.

Reliable red light tells me we're ready for incoming calls.



Red leaps out in our Tlingit Indian-style carving
we brought with us from Alaska years ago.



Red espresso cup waits in the kitchen.



This red file folder for years has housed our "important papers."



Red envelope that is nearly always present in our household.

 

Red paper flower our son made for Mom on Mother's Day.

The relative rarity of red in my life is as I think it should be. The color red is about eliciting excitement which is counter to everyday domestic tranquility. In fact, the main occasion of red in our home occurs at Christmas when it becomes all right for emotions to amp up a bit in order to offset the gray days of winter.

Right now I can look around right now and see the depleted poinsettia plants still camped out in pots on the fireplace hearth and a ceramic Santa collection and a dozen red ornaments that going on two weeks after the holiday haven't quite found their way back into storage. As the new year slides toward the ordinary I have to admit that the holiday's residual red seems an off-key reminder of what is emphatically past.

Humans don't seem to be made to live with constant excitement. This could explain why we don't dwell in red cities and men don't wear red suits or red jackets (except Michael Jackson in the Billie Jean video) and women may use red lipstick but do not paint themselves with red eye shadow (or is Lady Gaga thinking about changing that?) and most of us don't drive red cars.

We hoard our reds and dispense them when we need a lift or stimulation.

The Red-velation
Eventually I took a closer look at the piece of paper I had brought into the house. It was, as the previous front yard photo shows, blank on one side, but flipping it over I discovered writing. I suspected it was an advertisement of some kind. Then I read it and was disabused of this notion.

What I had in hand was a special message blown forth on the wind. A message that had been fashioned, in part, by someone named "Kambree."

I have no idea who Kambree is. I have a feeling she's a little girl who is pre-kindergarten age and that's why she's obediently cut out pictorial representations of words rather than was asked to fill in the blanks with actual words.

I wonder about the adhesive tape at the top of the piece of paper. Was Kambree's handiwork once taped to a refrigerator door and then removed at the end of the Christmas season? Or was the paper taped to a front door and the wind blew it loose? Where does Kambree live? Down the street? Or in another city far from here?

These are questions your intrepid Van Winkled reporter is unequipped to answer. All I can say is that a red piece of paper bearing an age-old message chose to unexpectedly and brightly land in my front yard. In the absence of TV screens, newspapers, etc. an event like this is enough to pass for news these days. One more jolt of red? Why not? I think I'll hang on to it. - V.W.


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Never Mind the Jackson Pollocks, The Abstract Expressionists Were Here

While we were out of town and staying in a different locale for a few days I decided to pass some time by strolling behind our lodgings to see what might be available to photograph. At first it didn't look promising.

There was a wooden deck and a barbecue grill. Beyond that, the most interesting trees were stripped of their autumn color. True, someone had hung a rusted, valveless coronet from a branch, but as photogenic as this venerable musical instrument sounds, every way I framed it turned out unsatisfying. I might as well have been photographing a giant paperclip.

I lowered my view. I started looking at the ground which was covered with the following:

                           - Leaves
                           - Twigs
                           - Acorns
                           - Deer droppings
                           - Rocks

Hmm. Interesting. I bent lower. The camera shutter began making the satisfying ka-chik sound. At that moment an odd thought occurred to me about nature. On this day and in this place it looked like modern art.

The Importance of Being Wilde: A Brief Digression

In "The Decay of Lying," an 1889 essay cast in the form of a humorous dialogue between two slightly bored young gentlemen (Vivian and Cyril), Oscar Wilde offers to the world his, at the time, revolutionary views on art. Using Vivian as his mouthpiece, Wilde contends for the absolute superiority of art over every form of reality. He's tired of people saying, "Oh, that's just art," as if art in all its forms is a harmless and not particularly useful child's play or mere ornamentation.

Wilde claims (through Vivian) that art is so powerful that it influences life and how we live. And he contends for an ideal vision of life that art can give us to compensate for the "defective" offerings of nature, about which Vivian loudly complains:

"But Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects. Why, even Morris's poorest workman could make you a more comfortable seat than the whole of Nature can...[but] I don't complain. If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air."

Haven't you noticed all
the Turner sunsets lately?

According to Wilde, art does even more than turn out nice William Morris chairs or lovely houses. He says that nature is actually influenced by art and improves itself thereby. How so? How can a sunset be affected by a painter, for example? Because, as Wilde points out, we only know nature through our senses and perceptions and these can be shaped and informed by art.

Vivian/Wilde considers the case of the English artist J. M. W. Turner, renowned for his blasts of chrome yellow and orange over a maritime horizon. Vivian says that Turner sunsets are everywhere in nature these days. However, before Turner painted his sunsets, no one ever saw one.

Vivian makes a similar pronouncement about fog, a favorite subject of impressionist painters who were then the rage.

"At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them."

The principle is not so hard to understand. If we encounter something in art, we may start to notice it outside of art. It might be a certain way a garden of flowers reminds me of a Renoir. Or I watch Jersey Shore and later I see a woman in the checkout line who sounds like Snooki. Or everyone around me  starts peppering their conversation with a phrase popularized on YouTube or in a commercial. It's a paradox: Life and nature imitate art, Wilde says, not the other way around.

Enter the Abstract Expressionists
Until I went looking for subjects for my photos it had never occurred to me that modern art, especially the ultra-famous group called the "abstract expressionists," could prove the truth of Oscar Wilde's insight. These men, and a few women, who painted in the 1950s and 1960s were known for finding ways of applying paint to canvases so that it resembled nothing recognizable, much less the beauties of nature.

Rothko painting


Those who were dismissive of this school of painting, including the general public, were quick to fault it for its nonfigurative aspect. They said the painter had created in a random fashion and even a child could do that...or an elephant holding a paintbrush in its trunk! Please tell us, just what is that red Rothko supposed to resemble? 

Mark Rothko had his own justification for painting something that did not look like anything recognizable. He was painting an emotion.

"...the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point."

But a strange thing was happening to me during my photo shoot. Rothko was right, but at the same time he was wrong. Yes, much of the work of abstract expressionism was emotional, I'd always granted that, but for the first time it seemed to me that these paintings might have something to do with nature as well...because just as Oscar Wilde contended, nature had set out to imitate art.

No filtering or Photoshopping was required. As I strolled around the property I could clearly see the phenomenon through my viewfinder.

It was crazy, but the camera didn't lie.  Nature had "conspired" to look like an abstract expressionist painting.

Example No. 1
I was looking at this propane tank outside the house.


It's fairly nondescript until one goes in close and seeks out
Nature's "imitation" of abstract art.



Mark Tobey painting

Propane tank moss streaks

Example No. 2:
The bark on the trees was interesting. It seemed to be unwinding itself from the tree trunk and in some cases it hung down like a beard.




Barnett Newman painting

  If I zoomed in on the bark, I saw this...

Example No. 3:
The rocks in this area are pockmarked limestone. They resemble solidified sponges or frozen gray sea anemones.

Of course, one can collect rocks and build a wall and end up with something like this...

Jane Frank painting

Or it might look like this...

Or here's the same wall zoomed in...

Example No. 4:
The most famous of the abstract expressionist is Jackson Pollock, called by his detractors "Jack the Dripper." Pollack laid out a large canvas on the floor of a garage converted to studio and he flung and rained down paint as he moved around the painting in progress, being careful not to step into the wet paint, of course.

Jackson Pollock painting

I tipped my head to the ground and noticed the way the leaves and twigs had covered a backdrop of dark earth.

"Outdoor Floor No. 1"-  Action Painting by Mother Nature

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At this point I was seeing the "abstract" almost everywhere. Nature didn't conform to plans, designs. It was wild and free and energetic. I no longer needed an analogue from the world of modern art to discover, frame, and shoot nature's explosive expression.

Thrilling Conclusion
At the end of the day, as the sun set (behind the hills so I could not be sure if it was a Turner sunset or not), I was left with the powerful realization that without art I'm less aware and, therefore, less alive. If I had never seen an abstract painting, my photo shoot might have ended in minutes with me grumping, "Nothing to take a picture of here!" Instead, art had opened my eyes.

The point of art isn't to fetishize it and hang it on a wall and worship it or oo! and ah! at it in the museum. The value of art is that it gives me a way to see more deeply into the everyday world. It helps me realize that I'm surrounded by wonders and it leads me to override my habit of shrugging my shoulders and failing to notice any of it.

At its best, art helps wake up ol' Rip V.W. to another kind of "news," the kind that's surely worth being awake for. I must try to step lightly from now on because, believe it or not, for as long as I reside on Planet Earth, I seem to be walking on art. - V.W.


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