Category Archives: photography

v2.0 sent off to Blurb

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Montparnasse56

I’ve been revising my cemeteries/graveyards book, yclept Remembered, and just sent it off to Blurb for a test print. It’s the first I’ve composed with InDesign (and yes, I DID finally solve the vexatious Adobe/Amazon snaggle, by getting my “subscription” via Adobe, a deal with Lucifer himself… but not without many calls to Customer Service and much grinding of back teeth). Remembered v2.0 can be downloaded (it’s a BIG file, a pdf of 150 pages) by any enthusiasts out there. I’m sure it will be further revised once I can see it in print, and in the light of future skulkings in graveyards.

since mid-March

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So we went to France in late March, and spent a few days in Paris on either end of a week in Brittany—our third annual Progress in those parts, with the usual eatings and wanderings (the Brittany parts mediated by our dear friends Rob and Barbara). I was able to spend several hours photographing in Père Lachaise and Montparnasse cemeteries, and that provoked another Blurb book project:

Remembered cover

The v1.0 version can be downloaded (it’s a BIG file) here via a right-click and Save As. When we got home it occurred to me to look more closely at graveyards in midcoast Maine, and I’ve been busy on that front ever since. Later this week I’m going to Lowell MA to spend a day with members of the Association for Gravestone Studies, an organization I’d previously known nothing of. It turns out that the first 25 issues of their annual publication Markings are available at archive.org, and the several articles I’ve read have been fascinating.

Another Blurb book project escaped my desktop, a narration of the collection of photos I’ve taken of meals enjoyed at Home Kitchen Cafe:

Order Up! cover

and that book is also available for download here.

And as if that wasn’t enough, I’ve also put together a v1.0 of a project I’ve been working on for about 35 years:

Who Was Joe Wilner? cover

I’m still working on the cover, but the book itself is available for download here.

These books were all produced with Lightroom’s Book module, which is a bit confining (a restricted set of page templates), so I’ve just completed a week-long workshop at the Maine Media Center in Adobe’s InDesign, a vastly powerful program that should make it possible to make much more elegant versions of the six existing Blurb books and a bunch of others that I have in mind to do. Should keep me busy….

Picking up where we left off?

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It’s been months since I last posted anything to oookblog, but they’ve been busy months: some Blurb books, a bout of shop work, the usual flurriment around the holiday season. And here it is almost mid-March, and we’re preparing for a fortnight in France (a few days in Paris on either end of a week in Brittany) and contemplating other travels in the summer. A lot of material that I might have posted here (charting day by day encounters with stuff that piqued interest and comment) has gone into writing on paper instead, but I remain committed to the notion that it’s BETTER to put the quotidian flux where others might enjoy it.

The grandest accomplishment of the last 3 months has been a book of photographs and narrative drawn from the family archives that have been my responsibility for the last 40 years or so:


Forebears 3.0 cover

It’s now in its third revision/expansion, and almost ready for prime time release to its wider public, whatever that might be. The project has nudged me back into thinking about genealogical questions and the imponderables of Family, and it’s likely that I’ll pursue those subjects in the next few months.

And of course there’s photography to think about and work on. And the never-ending river of books to read.

Uelsmania

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The blog has been quiet for several months, not because I had nothing to say, but because so many things collided during the summer months, and writing happened in other media. The season seems to have been centered on photography and walking, including a pair of week-long Maine Media Center workshops that have nudged me in the direction of publication projects. Our 50th college reunion consumed a lot of psychic energy and turned out to be very interesting. There have also been trips (California, Nova Scotia), the usual array of summer visitors, and the consumption of many books, and of course many memorable meals. I’ve added infrared to the array of tools I’ve been working with, and I’m imagining a series of self-published Blurb books exploring various facets of my photographic archives. My Flickr photostream aggregates a lot of the visual byproducts of these activities, but doesn’t provide much in the way of context or backstory.

Yesterday I took a couple of iPhone photos that provoke some ruminations. I was crossing the bridge at Mosquito Harbor, near the end of a 10-mile walk, and stopped to look at a dramatic cloud pattern. I took out the iPhone and did a quick landscape shot:

Mosquito Harbor
That image captures some of the drama, in a landscape mode that’s quite familiar to me: distant horizon, something significant in the foreground. I lowered the iPhone to set its exposure in the foreground (to try to get more of the detail in the reflection), but inadvertently hit the button and captured the near foreground of cobbles, the margin between stone and rising tide, and the reflected sky:
Uelsmania
Note that this exposure was entirely accidental, composing itself in spite of what I thought I was doing. It wasn’t until I was looking at the results of the day’s shooting on the computer that I recognized the power of the inadvertent image. My immediate thought was that it was reminiscent of the marvelous work of Jerry Uelsmann, whom I’ve been following for 40+ years (see this profile), in which one order of reality glides into another. I got Uelsmann Untitled: a retrospective from the shelf and read Carol McCusker’s essay:

Interesting things happen on the margins of landmasses… his imagery, in which nothing is assured or known and layers of contradictory realities coexist… (pg. 8)

Uelsmann has always worked in black and white, and entirely with analog media (sandwiching negatives, performing a dance of movement among multiple enlargers, masking, dodging, burning…). I converted my color image to black and white:


UelsmaniaBW
and I can’t decide which version I prefer.

We’ve just bought an Epson P800 printer and are about to embark on fancy printing of some of our respective back catalogs of photographs. It’s not clear where this will lead, beyond the creation of portfolios of favorite images, but it does seem clear that we’re both putting more of our attention and energies into photography.

Dept. of Co-Incidence

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This marvelous photograph is dated ’07, but I can’t remember just where I bought it:

sincerely '07
The inscription: “Sincerely Madeleine Vivian Long”

The pose is quite “modern” for 1907, the furniture is pretty bizarre, and the lace snowflake is all but unprecedented in my experience. What tale can possibly be extracted from this material?

Well. The photographer (Levering) turns out to have been active in the Connecticut Valley in the early years of the 20th century, and was apparently headquartered in Northfield, MA. And sure enough, there’s a 1900 Census record for Madeleine V. Long, 11-year-old daughter of Russell B. Long, of Northfield MA (not The Kingfish Russell B. Long of LA). Now, Northfield is a pretty small place, the principal jewel of which was Northfield School, founded by Dwight L. Moody in 1879. Both of our children went to NMH, and Betsy’s grandmother (Elizabeth Parmenter, as she then was) was Organ Mistress at Northfield in the early years of the 20th century. So our Madeleine might very well have known Elizabeth Parmenter. Small world…

Wish I could discover more of the story of Madeleine, now that I know there is one. She turns up as a resident of Northfield in 1935, suggesting that she never married, and I fully expect to find that she has some connection to the school (alumna? teacher?), which is now across the river in Gill and fully merged with Mount Hermon (the Northfield campus was closed in 2005).

inversion conversion reversion

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I’m still processing our visit to the Qu’est-ce que la photographie? exhibit at the Pompidou, and looking forward to the arrival of the catalog (ordered via Amazon) and the challenge of reading the French text that accompanies the images.




Sometimes it’s a bit difficult to break out of preconceptions about stuff you think you know about –to see the familiar in new ways, and to find context and meaning for the unfamiliar. The Pompidou exhibit flung down just those challenges, and I’ve been exploring them ever since our visit. I’ll try to unpack some of that in what follows.

Consider two rather startling images, neither of which was familiar to me (and I’d never heard of the photographers either, which just goes to show my own insularity):


 


(see the Pompidou pages for Mulas’ Una mano sviluppa l’altra fissa and Rautert’s Sonne und Mond von einem negativ; and take a look at the website for Ugo Mulas (1928-1973) and a recent New Yorker piece on work by Timm Rautert (1941-))

Neither is quite what it seems at first glance, and the viewer struggles a bit before catching on.
Mulas inverts tonalities and flips horizontally: one hand becomes two. Rautert tweaks a single negative to represent two different celestial bodies.

It’s interesting to explore the notion that multiple renderings of an image can disclose things hidden or obscured in any one version, and the kindred idea that any photograph is potentially many photographs. Where does ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ lie? Is our perception of an image all subjective prevarication?

Digital tools put these questions at the ends of our fingers.

Inversion of tonalities and mirror-imaging are two techniques that are easy to play with using GIMP, and I’ve done quite a bit of that as I’ve explored tessellations of Betsy’s and my own images (see some examples and a few more). Is such manipulation merely a gimmick, or is there something more to it? This is a question that comes up often in the world of Art, and I’m learning to enjoy the ambiguities and widen my purview.

An interesting challenge came my way shortly before we left for France, as I read through the announcement of an exhibit that will open soon at the deCordova Museum in Massachusetts: Integrated Vision: Science, Nature, and Abstraction in the Art of Len Gittleman and György Kepes. Len Gittleman was our teacher in 1963-1964, and we revere him, but the description of the show brought me up short:

Gittleman’s Lunar Transformation portfolio is a series of ten vividly colored serigraphs created from black and white photographs taken during the Apollo 15 mission to the moon in 1971. Gittleman’s discerning use of color transforms the craters and crevices of the lunar surface into vibrant, colorful abstractions which aesthetically parallel the art movement of Abstract Expressionism. The serigraphs’ strong graphic presence reflects the awe-inspiring nature of their source material.

Wait a minnit, I found myself thinking, that’s not photography… and then I heard myself and had to laugh at stick-in-the-muddism. Of course it’s photography, just maybe not the comfortable and predictable sort that I know I like…

As I’ve suggested in recent posts, visiting the Griffin Museum and Florence Henri and Qu’est-ce que la photographie exhibits has been ramifying across my own photographic life. This morning I woke up thinking about alternative presentations of an image that’s been a conundrum for me over more than 40 years: Poor Alice G.. I remembered that I’d once scanned a slide of the photo, but happened to reverse it, and I thought well why not? …and so




I’m not sure that either bit of trickery illuminates the tale of Poor Alice G. any further, or that these renderings have any place in Nova Scotia Faces, but the exercise did get me thinking about how confining a straight-ahead descriptive take on that gargantuan project would be.

Remember to breathe…

Smacked upside the head

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Sometimes it’s a bit of text, sometimes a phrase in a tune, sometimes a (photo-)graphic, but the experience is pretty much the same: a brief guffaw loosed at the sheer excellence/audacity/brio of the thing. Case in point, this from the end of a piece by Charles Simic, from New York Review of Books, which just rolled in via RSS:

Here, to give you an idea, is the beginning of a story called “Water Liars” from a collection of [Barry Hannah’s stories] called Airships:

When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beers to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another. The line-up is always different, because they are always dying out, or succumbing to constipation, etc., whereupon they go back to the cabins and wait for a good day when they can come out and lie again, leaning on the rail with coats full of bran cookies. The son of the man the cove was named for is often out there. He pronounces his name Fartay, with a great French stress on the last syllable. Otherwise, you might laugh at his history or ignore it in favor of the name as it’s spelled on the sign.

I’m glad it’s not my name.

This poor dignified man has had to explain his nobility to the semiliterate of half of America before he could even begin a decent conversation with them. On the other hand, Farte, Jr., is a great liar himself. He tells about seeing ghost people around the lake and tell big loose ones about the size of the fish those ghost took out of Farte Cove in years past…

Having previously read the story and knowing what was coming, reading this far was all that was required for my purpose, which was to close my eyes and go to sleep with a smile on my face.

Maybe epiphany is a sufficiently weighty word to bear this freight of delight. I guess I could say that I live for such moments of glee, and this one sent me directly to Amazon to snag Hannah’s book on the Kindle.

A photographic example from the just-concluded trip to France is another suchlike, a scene I glimpsed for just a moment while ankling around in Pont-Aven (on the south coast of Brittany) and had the wit to capture:


Everything about this is just right: the apparent transparency of some of the figures, the dim reflection in the window glass through which I shot, the illusion of depth in the room, the moments of movement transfixed… I took a lot of pictures that I like in that fortnight, but this one seems to me the most glorious. I might never have seen the opportunity if I hadn’t just been to the Florence Henri exhibit at Jeu de Paume…

addendum: it occurred to me to try a bit of manipulation, inspired by the Qu’est-ce que la photographie? exhibit:

Photographic high tide

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Yesterday we visited the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester (the town in which Betsy grew up) to see the exhibit Photography Atelier 21. The photographs themselves were pretty inspiring, and the presentation was stunning, but the ‘artist statements’ accompanying the images were the real revelation for me. I’ve previously limited my image of such statements to introducing the photographer, rather than contextualizing the images, and the new perspective started me thinking anew about several of my own photographic projects.

I especially admired the work by Dianne Schaefer and James Hunt, both of which used infrared digital cameras (Schaefer’s Blurb book The Light You Cannot See really eponomizes the medium and technique).

We’re planning to visit a couple of photographic exhibits in Paris in the next few days: Qu’est-ce que la photographie ? at Centre Pompidou and Florence Henri at Jeu de Paume, and anticipate further inspiration.

I’ve just snagged Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus: Modern Photography Explained which looks like it will further enlarge my thinking about what I’m doing with photography.