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 Healing Art of Photography

Lately I've been bothered by a space inside me that has developed as a result
of not knowing what has happened in the greater world since I went to "sleep" on Sept. 11th of last year.

I can feel this emptiness. It's a dark chamber within where a tiny metal ball is bouncing around.

Let's call the metal ball "frustration" and "anxiety" and "disconnectedness."

Recently, though, I went on a photo workshop weekend and made a discovery.

I found that I felt reconnected to the world every time I raised a camera to my eye. My empty space began to fill up with a sort of "news" I'd been overlooking. The news of shadow and light and shapes that are right in front of me.

The prescription goes like this: I look intently at nature or people or the things people have made. I snap a photo. I feel better.

I wonder why?

A Book to Spend Time With
Years ago my wife gave me as a present a book entitled God Is at Eye Level by a woman named Jan Phillips. Rather than a "how-to" book, it is a collection of Ms. Phillips' fine black and white images, quotes by famous people, and her own narrative of how she has profited from a life of making photographs.

She begins by telling how way back in 1967 when she was 18 years old she wanted to devote her life to God. She entered a convent. Two years later she found herself dismissed for "lack of a religious disposition."

The situation was handled brusquely. One night Jan's parents came to take her away. She was not allowed to say goodbye to anyone, and she was told she that hereafter she could not communicate with any of the sisters. The novice director ended with, "They will keep you in their prayers."

Jan Phillips first camera,
the humble Kodak Instamatic.

Nine months passed and Jan realized that the birthday of Lois, her best friend in the convent, was coming up. She couldn't write Lois a letter or send a card, but perhaps she could send her a present? How could she make it personal and still have it get past the order's superiors who were censoring all the mail?

Jan decided to make a photo album. The only words she included were quotes from authors she and Lois loved, songs they'd sung together, poems and prayers they'd shown one another.

As for the photos she used a Kodak Instamatic to take pictures as a substitute for the words she could not write.

She took a picture of her own footsteps being washed away by the tide and one of a collapsed sand castle. She photographed her body against a twelve-foot cross. She captured her shadow on the steps in front of a locked church door.

Each photo, including one of "birds soaring into a golden sunset," was a coded message about what she was feeling. The images were visual metaphors. They were signposts pointing to her emotions and her shadowed soul.

They didn't let her become a nun and that
led to a journey...

When Jan's photo album arrived at the Motherhouse the novice director called Lois to her office and told her to read it aloud. Lois did so without revealing the personal implicaitons which she very well understood,. Thus, she was allowed to carry the book back to her room.

Even more than this story of an artist's craftiness that allowed truth to penetrate the walls raised by implacable authority, I am impressed by something Jan says about what happened as she selected the photos and fixed them into the album:

     "Making that album was a healing ritual from beginning to end...
     As I glued each photograph onto the page, I was touched by its power,
     its ability to give voice to my silence, to shed light on my darkness."

An Eye Behind the Viewfinder
The subtitle of God Is at Eye Level is "Photography as a Healing Art." I've begun thinking of photography this way, too. Taking pictures heals some of the loss I feel at stepping away from the stories and developments affecting humanity. The pictures I take become my own coded messages to myself about what I'm looking for in this world that for me temporarily seems full of emptiness and echoes.

Sometimes my pictuers have surprised me. Three themes seemed to choose me, rather than the other way around, during my photoshoot last weekend.

1 - Craving Form:
Ah, to find structure and order in a sometimes chaotic, randomly arranged life!

2 - Loving Texture:
The varieties of bumpiness and smoothness and in-betweeness call out to the attentive eye ("I") .

3 - Desiring Peace:
In a world of troubles and a relentlessly fast pace, it's nice to be reminded that there are pockets of calm that yield quiet moments as the river of cares rushes past.

- 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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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

My Favorite Photos:
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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