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Encountering Complex Symbolism
Continue ReadingDiscovering an exciting new English phrase in the wild. An advertising professional produced this wordplay: IN BRUNCH WE TRUST I found this intransitive declaration on placards appearing on every residential floor of a Las Vegas hotel, opposite elevator doors. Each of seven landings had an urban backdrop showing through floor-to-ceiling picture windows: views of rooftops, […]
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Concerning Formalism, Entry #3
Continue ReadingOnly the rusty hardware in our foreground — fastened to a rail along the Wisteria Canal near Mexicali — saves this image from a colorful but still sterile formalism. The implements have a zoological quality, almost-alive robot animals with their snouts held at differing angles, seeming to express various (imputed) personal attitudes. We find them […]
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Concerning the Integrity of the Subject
Continue Reading“The integrity of the subject should be maintained.” THE GOLDEN RULE “This is our Golden Rule which you should always refer back to if you are unsure on any particular process. Another way to look at this would be to say that: A viewer familiar with the landscape and photographic process should not feel deceived […]
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Entering the Phenomenological Realm
Continue ReadingPhenomenology — an extravagant word meaning the study of how things appear to us in our conscious — or lived — experience. Anger counts as this sort of phenomenon, while believing the sun will rise tomorrow in the East does not. Philosophers are fond of asking questions we might consider tedious, like: “Is there […]
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Black and White Purity
Continue ReadingIf you survey current, ultramodern monochrome photos you will find an abundance like mine above, where near-coal blackness juxtaposes with higher-valued tones without much progression in between. This captures a West African musician at the climax of his performance; however usually the subject is landscape, cityscape or architecture, made with equipment designed to produce […]
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Emulating Cezanne
Continue ReadingPhotographs taken with normal lenses naturally diminish the size of distant objects. In this image that Renaissance perspective has been defeated. Using electronic means, I have elevated and enlarged the mountain range by a factor of three, and likewise stretched the foreground trees and slope. This has organized space more explicitly into overlapping planes: foreground […]
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Imitating Another Man’s Process
Continue ReadingIt is fun and also instructive to imitate the style of a different type of photographer — in this case Garry Winogrand, a prolific artist who died with many rolls of film unprocessed plus several hundred thousand pictures developed but unedited, and still he passed on to us an extensive body of finished work. He […]
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Digital Cliché-Verre
Continue ReadingIn its original incarnation, cliché-verre (also called glass printing, or photographic etching) was a hybrid technique combining hand-drawing with printmaking and photography, but without using ink or camera. My picture above uses camera and computer, and ink too when it gets printed. It approximates the look of the earliest examples dating from about 1840. The […]
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