{"id":3408,"date":"2018-11-04T12:41:43","date_gmt":"2018-11-04T17:41:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=3408"},"modified":"2018-11-04T13:08:41","modified_gmt":"2018-11-04T18:08:41","slug":"perhaps-a-coloring-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=3408","title":{"rendered":"perhaps a coloring book?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some of my photographs and tessellations are just plain overwhelming, with too much going on for a viewer to parse without some sort of guidance to what <i>I<\/i> see that makes an image worth promulgating:<br \/>\n<center><br \/>\n<a data-flickr-embed=\"true\"  href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/blackmerh\/45705903091\/\" title=\"3xi18044\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/farm2.staticflickr.com\/1941\/45705903091_1f45462683_z.jpg\" width=\"640\" height=\"410\" alt=\"3xi18044\"><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>and<\/p>\n<p>\n<a data-flickr-embed=\"true\"  href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/blackmerh\/31806768968\/in\/dateposted-family\/\" title=\"god of the tidal margins\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/farm2.staticflickr.com\/1960\/31806768968_2e38a8434a_z.jpg\" width=\"640\" height=\"300\" alt=\"god of the tidal margins\"><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><br \/>\n<\/center><br \/>\nWhat to do by way of assistance is something I wrestle with, and betimes I suffer notions of what I might do to build explanations and on-ramps for my more enigmatic photographs.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/tao-of-digital-photography.blogspot.com\/2018\/11\/sun-and-stone.html\">Andy Ilachinski<\/a>, always worth attending to, quotes Vladimir Nabokov:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nI confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness\u2015in a landscape selected at random\u2015is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern\u2015to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.<br \/>\n<br \/>\nVladimir Nabokov (1899 &#8211; 1977)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>My eye went immediately to &#8220;<b>I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip<\/b>,&#8221; which seems apposite to my pleasure in mirroring images to find out what <i>else<\/i> they have to tell us [as Minor White might have said]. Putting aside the butterflies, or substituting <i>rock and wood<\/i> for &#8220;rare butterflies and their food plants&#8221;, the whole rings pretty much true, but of course what I like to do is <b>un<\/b>fold the magic carpet. And visitors are most welcome to trip.<\/p>\n<p>\nI venture out on a photographic adventure and <b>see<\/b> thing after thing, possibility upon possibility, line and pattern and design, reminiscence and allusion. Many of my digital captures only <i>develop<\/i> on the computer screen as I recognize unanticipated (or anyhow unconsciously expected) graphic elements, and some only mature once I&#8217;ve lived with the results for a while. That&#8217;s especially true of those I decide to try tessellating: few images are taken in expectation of their products once mirrored (that is, I rarely <i>see<\/i> the potential mirror image in the camera&#8217;s viewfinder), and I can&#8217;t often predict what the result will be until I try the old flip-copy-join recipe.<\/p>\n<p>\nAnd there a difficulty arises. <i>My<\/i> fevered imagination draws upon a lifetime of images seen and takes special pleasure in graphic analogy. I <i>see<\/i> things that are manifestly not there. Broot (adept as she is at the abstract) summarizes the difference between our approaches to photographic exploration, &#8220;you make something out of nothing; I make nothing out of something.&#8221; She also notes, sagely, that if she saw all those faces, she&#8217;d not be able to see the abstract. <\/p>\n<p>\nSo how can I convey what I discover in my images to audiences? The enigmatic or whimsical title, often alluding to something I draw from the image, is a happy affectation, but doesn&#8217;t convey its message very clearly to puzzled viewers. I know what I need next, but I&#8217;m not sure how to realize it. Herewith an outline, thanks to a book that rolled in a couple of days ago, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/0984195432\/\"><b>By the Glow of the Jukebox: The Americans List II<\/b><\/a> [Conceived and Compiled by Jason Eskenazi (Author), Jno Cook (Illustrator)]. This is just the sort of tiny-niche bit of bijoux fugitivia I love to discover and possess, but it needs a bit of explanation.<\/p>\n<p>\nRobert Frank&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Americans-Robert-Frank\/dp\/386521584X\/\"><b>The Americans<\/b><\/a> is arguably one of the most influential photographic books of the mid-20th century (first published in 1958), and is <i>still<\/i> making waves among photographers, still being discussed and influencing the work of new discoverers of its singular (well, multiple) views of America. Here&#8217;s the Amazon description of <b>By the Glow<\/b>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>While working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Eskenazi began to ask photographers he knew visiting the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.metmuseum.org\/exhibitions\/listings\/2009\/robert-frank\">Looking In exhibition<\/a> [2009] about Robert Frank&#8217;s <b>The Americans<\/b>, to choose their favorite image and why. In the years since he quit, as he himself got back out on the road again to shoot, he complied hundreds of photographers&#8217; answers in this unique book destined to become a classic in photography education&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I got the first edition of <b>By the Glow<\/b> a few years ago, and hadda buy the second. I was delighted to find Jno Cook&#8217;s spare but effective drawings of Frank&#8217;s photographs, which are just the sort of thing I need to convey to viewers what <i>I<\/i> see in my photographs and tessellations. Here&#8217;s one of Jno Cook&#8217;s renderings of an iconic image from <b>The Americans<\/b>:<br \/>\n<center><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/jnocook.net\/frank\/bin\/rf-2.gif\"><br \/>\n<\/center><br \/>\nI didn&#8217;t know it until a Google search just now, but am delighted to find that Jno Cook made <a href=\"http:\/\/jnocook.net\/frank\/rfcolor1.htm\">a Robert Frank Coloring Book<\/a> (now long out of print and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.abebooks.com\/book-search\/title\/robert-frank-coloring-book\/author\/jno-cook\/\">very pricey!<\/a>), so Kentlee&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=3384#comment-57691\">notion that I should make a coloring book<\/a> was prescient as well as brilliant.<\/p>\n<p>\nBut how exactly to proceed? How can I make the drawings that reveal what I see? The technology surely includes Layers in Illustrator or GIMP, and probably the Wacom tablet I bought a while ago with high hopes, but haven&#8217;t yet managed to tame to my purposes. And of course the skills to create a workflow that I can actually live with&#8230; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some of my photographs and tessellations are just plain overwhelming, with too much going on for a viewer to parse without some sort of guidance to what I see that makes an image worth promulgating: and What to do by way of assistance is something I wrestle with, and betimes I suffer notions of what [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,40,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-images","category-making","category-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3408"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3415,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3408\/revisions\/3415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}