Coney Island, Baby

On July 18th, over 32,000 photographers around the world gathered at various locations and spent the next few hours photographing everything they could get their cameras on. This was the second year for Photowalk, an event inpired and organized by Scott Kelby, and based on the results of the photos I've seen taken on that day, it couldn't have been a more rousing success.

My brother Jacob to come down from Illinois to do the walk with me at Coney Island. At our location alone there were around 40 other participants and we couldn't have had a more beautiful day. It was an amazing experience for at several reasons. First, Coney Island. What an amazing riot of color and people and activity. Normally, I feel too self-conscious and invasive to take pictures of strangers on the street, but because Coney Island was so crazy no one even noticed if I snapped them. Of course, it didn't hurt there there were so many other people doing the same thing. It made what I was doing with the camera just background noise. The other photographers also made the day special by giving me a sense of community that is all together too easy to be without. Photography can be such isolating work, just you, your camera, and your computer. It was wonderful to be with other people just as obsessed with the visual world as I was. And oh what amazing images they created. I felt honored to able to be a part of the group.

For those interested, you can go here to see a stream of the worldwide photowalk images. If you want to see some of the images I captured at Coney Island, you can see my photostream here. As a part of the event, Scott Kelby is going to choose some photographs from the entire walk as prize winners. Below, I'm including my two entries. If you get a chance to go next year, I highly recommend it. You don't have to be a professional. You just need to have a camera and love photography. As Émile Zola said, "In my view, you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it." Take care.



High Cotton



Coney Island Cone

HDR fun

I just got Photomatix Pro because everyone seems to be having so much fun with HDR photography. It's early days yet, but here is my first experiment with it. It's an HDR version of a picture from the previous entry, so you can compare the two images. I was very heavy handed with this one, but it's got me intrigued enough to continue to experiment with it. Any thoughts or reactions from the peanut gallery?




Avebury Circle HDR

Good Shot

I've been playing basketball with a very interesting group of guys most Friday nights at a local Catholic school. We usually don't get done till after 11 and afterwards, a few of us go to a bar close by to complain about our aches and pains and enjoy the sunset of our athletic careers (needless to say, both "athletic" and "careers" need scare quotes there).

This bar happens to be next door to a run down old roadside motel called the Boundary and when we pulled up the first time, I told Jon, who is kind enough to give me a ride to and from these games, that I'd love to take a picture of the road sign for the hotel. He expressed great surprise and asked me why. To him, it looked like one of a countless number of motel signs not worthy of a second look much less a photo. To me, though, I had a knee-jerk reaction to capture it with my camera. At the time, I couldn't articulate to him why I wanted to take the picture; I just knew that it interested me. Jon got me thinking about a lot of things though and this post is a delayed answer to his question.

First, let's get a look at what inspired all this:



The Boundary

I finally remembered my camera one Friday and this is the shot I got. I'm not entirely happy with it. Night photography has never been a strength of mine and it was after 1am, about 20 degrees outside, and I was in sweaty basketball clothes, so I didn't spend as much time on getting it perfect as I would've liked, but I still find the image very compelling. The real question, though, is why?

I can certainly read the photo as it exists now and try to reverse engineer the process that led to my concluding this was a good subject. The worn texture and general shabbiness of the sign contradicts the promise of comfort and class promised by cable TV and HBO. Think about this hotel, probably opened in post-World War II America where travel and mobility promised romance and adventure on the road whereas the state of the sign and hotel generally as it is today suggest that it is only used for romance of a more carnal nature. Such Americana always draws my eye and certainly fits in with my interest in engaging with mundane objects that normally escape our attention as my artistic statement tries to explain.

However, that doesn't really answer the question or at least it only does so to raise another question. I certainly don't take pictures of *all* mundane things. I still have some kind of filter in place that helps me decide what I to photograph. Why this sign and not the last 100 motel signs I'd seen?

The question finally boils down to this: What makes a good shot? There are certainly rules that most people agree about in terms of composition such as the rule of thirds and questions of sharp focus, but there are as many exceptions to the rules and reasons to break them as there are rules. Plus, these are rules for what makes a good photo not a good subject for a photo, so Jon's question is still unanswered.

I want to say that, ultimately, what makes a good subject is a personal choice of the artist that can't be explained rationally. The reaction is the result of a gestalt of as many things as go into creating the individual's personality itself. Maybe it's one of the things that marks the artist as "artistic," this ability to hone in on what has potential artistic merit as a subject. The success of that artist would then be how many other people also respond on some level to the subjects s/he focuses on. Other people weren't attuned to the potential artistic worth of the subject until the artist "distilled" it into a work of art.

In this scenario, the artist him or herself doesn't have to be consciously aware of what specific elements go into drawing the artist to the potential subject. The draw, the unconscious pull, is enough. Let me give you another example. Here is a photo I took on my recent return to Charleston, WV:



Take a Number

It's a picture of the shelves at a local shoe repair shop. When I went in with my camera equipment, the workers were already giving me the fisheye and when I asked if I could take a picture of their repair shelves, they rolled their eyes, looked at each other and said "Knock yourself out." To them, it was only their workplace. Nothing but a place for them to practice their craft. What could I possibly find there of aesthetic value. They didn't come out and ask me the question, but it was there in their eyes. I don't know that I would've had any more of a satisfactory answer for them than I did for Jon. I was moved by the repetition of the bright yellow tags and big, bold black numbers. The way the bags are all shelved in a row, some straight and some askew suggest a real tension between organization and chaos, the age-old battle between entropy and enthalpy.

Pretty highbrow stuff for repaired shoes on old shelves, but if I look at the image now, read it as if I hadn't taken the photograph but am only a viewer, those are the themes I see at work. None of these thoughts were in my mind when I had the urge to take the photo, at least not consciously. I only knew that it was a subject I really wanted to capture. According to the principle I've been describing, this would be fine. As an artist, my only immediate need is to act on this impulse. Some of these urges will result in more successful photographs than others, but overall, the instinct to find a certain subject photoworthy is reason enough to capture it. The judgments and explanations can come later, by me or by others.

However, Jon didn't seem very satisfied with this answer which essentially is "I dunno why I find that worth taking a picture of" so I wonder if I am missing a step in the artistic process. Am I not enough in touch with my process or professional enough in my approach to my work that I'm missing some preliminary, preparatory stage where I should be able to articulate my interest before I pick up the camera? Am I taking the easy way out and not rigorously enough challenging myself as an artist? One flip answer I gave Jon was "If I could describe in words what moves me about the subject, I wouldn't need the camera to capture it." I think there is some truth to that, but I'm not sure it doesn't evade some very important issues that I've tried to tease out in this post. That's where I'm stuck in the thought process. If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions on where I can go from here, I'd love to hear them.

Well, Jon, that was a hell of a question. Thanks for the rides and the blog entry topic.

Modern Interpretations Show

Sorry for the long absence, but it's been a hectic fall. We just got back from a FL thanksgiving and I hope to have some pictures up from it soon. Until then, I thought I'd share the good news with you about a new show.

I just found out I had two pieces accepted to a new show at Tamarack called "Modern Interpretations" which runs from January 13th through March 16th, 2008. I can't say enough for the work Karen Lilly, the gallery director at Tamarack, has done to help create a wonderful showcase for West Virginia Artists.

I had a tough time choosing what to submit because I couldn't decide which of my pieces had "modern" sensibilities. Obviously, such a concept as modernity is subject to many interpretations, so I'm still not sure what the jurors used to make their decisions (and won't until I see the whole show), but after much agonizing, here are the pieces I submitted:


Any Questions?

Through the Looking Glass

These were the two images chosen for inclusion. The three that didn't get accepted follow:

Blevio

The Shape of Color

The Story of Tomorrow

I'm not sure what separates out the first two, but it was a very fun exercise--well fun in retrospect--to struggle with what what modernity means when it comes to photography, a rather modern art form to begin with. I'd love to hear any thoughts on the photos themselves or modernity in art generally. Take care and thanks for the interest.

RAV

Untitled

My friend Matt went to see the photography exhibit at Tamarack that has some of my photos--thanks for the support!--but he had an interesting comment to make. He thought my titles weren't all they could be. One in particular one he commented on was this one, entitled currently "Traffic Mirror":



He pointed this out as only one example of how I wasn't doing all I could with my titles. He said, "I can see it's a traffic mirror. Your title should tell me something about the image that *isn't* obvious to me." He suggested something even as simple as "Budapest, 2pm" would provide some extra-photographic information about the subject, provide an additional insight into the image.

It got me thinking about how I title my photos and what I hope to accomplish with the ones I choose. It was an interesting point and has got me thinking much more consciously about how I approach my work.

First, to provide some background, Matt is a poet. A fantastic, funny, brilliant poet. But don't take my word for it. Find out for yourself here or here. Obviously, Matt's creative work is much more verbal than mine is. Language is his focus, so of course he hones in on the only verbal part of the photograph: the title.

The question this comment initially brings to mind is what purpose does the title serve? Obviously, with any written endeavor, the title acts as a shorthand way to get a glimpse at the purpose of the overall piece of writing. Whether it's a 14 line sonnet or a 500 page novel, the title acts as a signpost to readers of what to pay attention to in the body of the work itself, even if it's only a repeated phrase from the main body of writing. The reader now knows to pay more attention to that line; they can be sure to read the whole piece with that phrase or image in mind. The title is very important tool to the writer for this reason, giving the reader a potential key to open up the piece of writing.

Obviously such a tool can be very helpful to photographers as well. It can, as Matt suggested to me, provide an extra-photographic signpost to help the viewer focus on a particular detail that s/he might not notice originally or provide some context which isn't available in the image at all. However, there is a very significant difference between photography and writing. The photographic image, by and large, is taken as a whole, absorbed all at once as a gestalt. Writing, whether it be poetry or prose, is alphabetic and must be read in a more or less linear fashion. You start reading with the first word and have to read them all in order to make sense of the piece. Obviously, I'm generalizing here and there are experimental writings out there that don't follow this strictly alphabetic ordering (I'm thinking of works like The Dictionary of the Khazars or even something as old as Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, but by and large writing is something that is intended to have a starting point and ending point and a set order of how to get from one to the other. Also, all writing, but especially poetry, has a visual element. How it is laid out on the page as well as the font used have an impact on the eye that is separable from the verbal content of the writing. This isn't true for such form poetry as Herbert's "Easter Wings" but for all writing. However, again I would say that the verbal aspects of the writing far outweigh the influence of the work as a visual artifact on the page.

Photography doesn't work this way. When you look at a photographic image, you see it all at once. Now, this doesn't mean that your eye doesn't roam around the picture, focusing on one detail and then another, but only that all the information in the photo is equally accessible and it doesn't matter what you focus on first. It's not alphabetic. Viewers will definitely "read" the image and come to understand the significance of different details as s/he focuses on different areas in the photo, but there is no set order, no set starting or ending point.

Because of how differently viewers of photographs and readers of poetry or prose access the information encoded in the work, I think titles serve different functions for photography and writing. Titles aren't as important to the photographer since s/he has already given up so much control over how the viewer interacts with the image since photography lacks the alphabeticity of writing. I think this is one reason photography as a field has such a strong tradition of leaving photographs as untitled or merely tagging images with such literal titles as "Tree in Field" or "Child on Sled."

Another reason for this history of "generic" titles is photography's long tradition outside of "artistic" fields, working in such areas as advertising, portraiture, and journalism. Poetry doesn't have a non-artistic tradition per se. Photography however has a lot of tradition from these fields where the image is supposed to be a realistic, accurate representation of the subject. According to these traditions, no interpretation is necessary, so there is no need for the title to act as a guide.

Lastly, photography has long been tagged as a technology that has the best chance to accurately reproduce "reality." A reader of a poem or a novel expects to have to do some work to puzzle out the meaning of the written word. Interpretation is necessary to uncover the purpose behind the work. Photography certainly also skews reality. When the photographer chooses a subject and frames the shot, deciding what to exclude, s/he is staging reality just as much as any writer does. The physics of the camera itself also alter "realty" as it transforms a three-dimensional subject into a two-dimensional image. However, the camera is seen as a much better tool for providing a truly indexical sign (at least as close as it can get) of what it captures than a pen. Just look at the weight a court of law will place on a photograph for example over witness testimony. This cultural valuation of photography as being closer to reality than a written description also plays into why titles aren't as essential to the image as opposed to a piece of writing. No signpost is necessary to find the subject if the subject is already readily accessible.

So much for the theoretical, abstract portion of the blog discussion. Let's get down to specific examples and my particular approach to naming my images. I think Matt is right in that I often tend towards giving my photos simple, generic titles. For example, this photo which I called simply "Boot":



Why such a generic title? I mean, Matt is right. Duh! A boot? No kidding! Hadn't noticed the big freaking boot in the middle of the picture! One reason I used this title was because it was easy. I needed to give it a title to send off to a show. Also, such a concrete, simple title makes sense considering my artistic approach to photography. As I say in my artist's statement, my photography "engages the mundane objects of everyday life, the things that have become invisible to us, and rescues them from the background into which they vanish." A title such as "Boot" only re-emphasizes the concrete, mundane object, pointing where I want the focus to be.

What else could I call it? Worn Boot? Boot Fence? Booted? They are all perfectly serviceable, but I'm not sure what they add to the viewer's appreciation of the image itself. Do any of these titles speak more fully to any of you? Do any of them make the picture more interesting or meaningful? I would love to hear about your reactions?

As another example, one that I am currently struggling to title:



I initially was going to call it simply "Legs." This would fall in with the titles I often use, but for some reason, this doesn't really satisfy me. Sure, it's a picture of legs, but that is not really the point of the image. These particular legs obviously have a historical and cultural specificity that the title "Legs" doesn't take into account. What would be more meaningful? Here are some of the titles I'm toying with: Crucifixion, Nailed, Weathered Legs, Patina, Les Pieds. This last has some interesting possibilities since the picture was taken in a Parisian graveyard and this title provides the extra-photographic information suggesting that origin. Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

One exception to this whole discussion of titles and photography are for images that have been so heavily manipulated that they have lost their indexical power. For example:



The viewer is completely unable to tell what the original subject was. It's been completely set adrift from the object in the original photo that I manipulated. Here is what I worked from, a photograph entitled "Bridge Warts":



The manipulation of that image removed it's ability to represent it's subject. Someone looking at the abstract manipulation would be hard pressed to realize what it is a representation of. In this case, a title becomes just as important to the image as it does to any piece of writing, perhaps even more so. Without the anchor of the image's indexical nature, the viewer can make real use of a title's signpost to suggest a direction to take his/her interpretation of the photograph. I haven't settled on a final title for this image, but am considering Spheres, Orbs, Mitosis, and perhaps my favorite, Division.

Thank you for reading my incredibly long rumination on titles. Especially thanks to Matt for making me think. Take care.

RAV

Doh!

I can't believe I made a blunder in my very first post! I wasn't crazy with the version of Switches that I put up in my last post, and David Burpee very kindly did some edits and sent me a version. Something sparked when I saw his version and I realized I'd uploaded the wrong version of the shot! This is the version that is up at Tamarack currently:



As you can tell, my earlier concerns have been remedied somewhat. The color balance is much better and the cropping on the right helps balance out the picture. I think, though, that I cropped it too closely on the sides so it feels claustrophobic for me, but it's a much better version than the earlier one I'd uploaded. Well, two posts, one mistake already. Hey, it's a process. Take care.

RAV

First Post

This is my first post on my first photo blog. I'm hoping it will provide motivation for me to work on new images and think out loud through new projects as well as a chance to get some feedback from others who are interested in photography. I have given up teaching English after 15 years in order to focus on my photography and graphic design work, and it sometimes feels isolating after facing roomfuls of people every day, so please feel free to let me know what you think of what you see here.

I'm going to start off with a couple of pictures that are currently on display at the gallery in Tamarack, a showcase for West Virginia arts, near Beckley, WV.




This photo was taken in the basement of the University of Charleston. I loved the repetition of shapes and of the textures in this image. I either need to go reshoot these switches or go back and re-edit the image though because I'm not very happy with my cropping of the picture. The switches are too hemmed in on the left side and it feels claustrophobic and a little unbalanced the longer I look at it. Thoughts?




This image is the other photograph I have at Tamarack currently and is my wife's favorite. I don't usually take a lot of landscape photography mainly because to take really good landscape shots that don't look like any postcard you could buy, you have to have great imagination, patience, and skill. A willingness to get dirty doesn't hurt either. Most of my landscape shots are lucky if they even reach the level of postcard photography. This one however, was twisted enough to really capture my eye. It's a reflection of a hillside in late afternoon in a mud puddle. I have turned the image 180º in order to make it appear as the landscape itself and not a reflection. It is very disorienting and unsettling until you figure out what the image actually is doing. I'm very happy with the composition and idea behind this photo. Straight landscape I'm not so good at; *surreal* landscape is more my cup of tea.

Thanks for checking out my very first photoblog. I will update as regularly as I can. I am going to Boston this weekend and hope to take some good photos there. If anyone has any must-shoot subjects up there, please let me know. Take care.

RAV