Monthly Archives: October 2019

hmmmm…

I’ve spent this week in a Maine Media workshop on InDesign, super-intensive because there were just two students, and the other has been away for the last two days. Today is the last day, and I’m trying to wrap my mind around what the upshot will be. In short, I seem to be deciding that I’m too old to do this: too old to learn my way around complex software (I can bumble through but can’t retain everything I’m told), too old to find it character-building to feel frustration with my own limitations, too old to revel in challenges. It’s akin to how I feel about physical challenges. Only a few years ago I’d leap from rock to rock while hiking, but now I go much more carefully. And I find that I’m using my reading glasses more and more, where I used to pride myself on uncorrected visual acuity.

So I’m beginning to wonder whether more InDesign Blurb books are the right presentation medium for the hoard of photographs I’m sitting on. The photographs themselves give me as much joy as ever, and certainly keep coming. This being appeared on a stump just outside the Maine Media classroom, and I had the wit to capture it:


MMCstump2

I expect to have more to say about this general subject.

trifecta

The life of a photograph is pretty chancy: many never get processed from their RAW capture, some of those that do never make it to viewers’ eyes, and some are out there on Flickr but hardly anybody happens upon them. And a few have second and third lives after their original appearance. This one was an offhand grab as we walked along the shore of a pond at Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland:

GrosMorne002


Surely geography. I liked it for its ambiguity of scale (an aerial view of an island? a closeup of a mossy rock?), but it’s had only 4 views by Flickr users. And then this morning (2 months after it was taken) it occurred to me to mirror it, and lo and behold:

verdant owl wings

I see an owl with wings spread, perhaps closing in on a mouse. There are other possibilities too, of course, but it seemed to me that it belonged in my Flickr Album called A Catalog of Wings for Celestials.

And then I happened to look at the lower left hand corner and saw this mountaineer coming around a boulder:


ascent2

So many wonders…

Pullman, Purcell, Grandville

As is often the case, Chance is favoring the mind as it Prepares for a week-long project-centered workshop on InDesign (which I’ve used to construct most of my Blurb books, though clumsily). The first episode, a couple of days ago, was this fortuitous quotation that jumped off the page/screen of Philip Pullman’s just-published The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth:

You won’t understand anything about the imagination until you realize that it’s not about making things up, it’s about perception.

(Much of my attention in recent years has been pinioned by the polyvalence of Imagination in my photographic life).

And then I stopped in at Hello Hello Books, as I frequently do, to eyeball the Photography shelf for anything new, and found Rosamond Purcell’s Bookworm, a beautifully designed book of her collages, constructions, and photographs of books “inevitably invaded by forces of nature and decay.” The whole issue of design is one I hope to attend to in the InDesign workshop, and Purcell’s book is a magnificent example.

And yesterday’s email brought me a pointer from my co-conspirator Daniel to an essay on Grandville, whose work I’ve loved since discovering it long ago via a Dover book. The author (Patricia Mainardi) goes into some detail on a late and little-known book that Grandville inspired and illustrated, but which was never translated or republished after its first edition in 1844: Un autre monde. The subtitle seems absolutely on the money as a characterization of what I hope for my photographic work:

Transformations, Visions, Incarnations, Ascensions, Locomotions, Explorations, Peregrinations, Excursions, Vacations, Caprices, Cosmogonies, Reveries, Whimsies, Phantasmagorias, Apotheoses, Zoomorphoses, Lithomorphoses, Metamorphoses, Metempsychoses, and Other Things

This illustration from the book seems an ideal accompaniment to what I wrote two years ago in Reflection on my own Body of Work at the end of the Andy Ilachinski workshop:


The I is
playful, wry,
in search of
paradoxes, epiphanies, essences,
curiosities, ambiguities, amusements,
the occluded, the improvisatory,
stories.