Bags & Boats

Yesterday I went out with my ‘Zero 2000’ pinhole camera and shot and developed a roll.  I left the tripod behind and tried finding  something on which to steady the camera whenever I came to a place I wanted to take some pictures.  

On a different note; there has been quite a bit of discussion about talent, and the meaning of photography, on several of the blogs I read.  There is a great Chuck Close quote on ‘Avisualsocity’.  Here is part of it:

“Here’s the dilemma and the strength of photography. It’s the easiest medium in which to be competent. But, it’s the hardest medium in which to have personal vision that is readily identifiable…”

I suggest you take a look at the whole post.

More digital thoughts….

In an earlier entry, I said “When I bought my first digital camera, a Sony Cybershot, I quickly came to the conclusion that now any idiot could take technically excellent photos.”

Today ‘A Photo Editor’ discussing talent in photography, says, among other things, “In the digital age where taking a picture requires very little effort and all the professional secrets are laid bare any advantage photographers had from marketing and execution is now evaporating before us.”

So, the challenge remains. I think it behooves us to give much thought to how digital photography impacts on our concept of photography, and how we can employ these innovations and developments to create powerful new images, that take advantage of the power of digital, and are not just repeats of what has gone before.

Just went through my ‘google reader’ and realized that this concept about what digital is and isn’t, seems to be in the atmosphere.  Here is a post from ‘Gallery Hopper’ that also addresses the issue.

Studio 1

All of you are invited to join Alexandria and me this Sunday afternoon, at 1 pm for our monthly opening reception.

Each month we have a reception for an artist who shows one piece for one day. One of my pieces will be up this month.

Our studio is here!

 

One Day
One Artist
One Piece

Please join us for the

Studio 1
Reception
featuring
Christian Harkness

Coffee will be served

Adventures in aluminum

As I had blogged earlier, I printed a couple of images on 13×19 sheets of aluminum. Now I have mounted them on Masonite. It worked pretty well. One image I mounted and bent the aluminum edges around the Masonite ‘frame.’ That did not work too well, the thin aluminum sheet did not bend as easily as I had thought – it tended to fight back, and the edges did not turn out as neat as I had hoped. Things worked better with the second image. Here I simply took a utility knife and cut the aluminum, following the edge of the frame. The photos show what things look like. Of course, the image printed on aluminum is difficult to photograph because of the reflection from the metal. I did not try to get fancy and build a light tent, or otherwise correct the photo.

The Last Picture Show….

My ‘Blurb’ book, The Last Picture Show …fine print arrived in the mail. Since I am the world worst proofreader, I only ordered one copy, and I am glad I did since it needs several corrections. Nevertheless, I am quite happy with it. I realize pulling some of my photos together and publishing them in book format is a wonderful way for me to organize and make sense out of my work. In this book, I am more interested in telling a story than I am in presenting perfect prints. Therefore, the quality of the reproduction works just fine for me. However, if I were publishing to show off my stellar qualities as a printer, I would probably be a bit disappointed. I have not researched the filed of ‘on demand’ publishing, so do not really know what kind of quality is out there and at what price.

I do find the concept of ‘on demand’ publishing extremely exciting and I am sure that as software and technology improve, this field will soar, even with fine art photographers. The blurb software, and as far as I know most of the other software programs of ‘on demand’ publishers, is a bit tricky to use, and I was quite frustrated at times putting this book together.

 

‘fl 32625′

Thanksgiving image from my ‘fl 32625′ suite.

Boonville USA

If you have not done so, take a look at Timothy Briner’s Boonville blog & ask him to send you a post card from the road.

Receive a Postcard!

Rick’s Bird-Dogs

 

Rick’s bird-dogs [boats] continue to fascinate me. I walk by his yard most mornings, and when I have my camera with me, and the light is right, I try to get a better image than the time before – so far getting the perfect one has eluded me. Photographing into the rising sun there are usually some fascinating light patterns coming out of the trees that are between me and the sun. This time I was not able to photograph them. However, since he had his purple boat parked there, I could not resist trying anyhow.

Womag

Earlier this year I had some photos published in the Turkish visual arts ezine WOMAG. It is a pretty eclectic, funky, and strange on-line magazine. You can click on the link, and it will probably get you to their site, but you may or may not be able to open the magazine. Their links seem to be in constant turmoil.

 

William Eggleston in the Real World

Thanks to Netflix’s ‘instant watching’ I am slowly working my way through the documentary ‘William Eggleston in the Real World.’ I often do that with Netflix movies, watch bits and pieces of them. Getting the chance to watch a full length documentary about a contemporary artist is a treat; even though I don’t ‘get’ Eggleston; no matter how I look at him.

Amanda Doenitz recently had an article – comparing the value of an Eggleston photo to that of one by Levitt – in Art on Paper. She examined the issue of the great price discrepancy in prints of their work. Her conclusion is that the whole thing has ‘little to do with the quality of the art and most everything to do with limiting editions and creating demand.’

Well, I quite agree that it has little to do with the quality of the art, but I do think it goes way beyond editioning or not editioning, right to the marketability of the artist. What makes a marketable artist seems to be extremely amorphous. In the November 12, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, Calvin Tompkins writes an enormously interesting article about “Jeffrey Deitch and the exuberance of the art market.” He postulates that now hedge-fund collectors drive the art market, and that the market is an industry.

So, I think I better continue staying ‘in my corner’ and do my work the way I enjoy doing it, without worrying about others. That does not mean that I don’t find looking at art stimulating and interesting, it just means that trying to dissect the appeal of some contemporary art and artist is way beyond my ability, and I profit most from new work I see by letting it stimulate me. Grousing about work I do not ‘get’ is counter productive.

Bird-dog

This is from my morning walk around Cedar Key. The boat is a ‘bird-dog’ – a type that is ideal for running in the shallow waters around here. The outboard sits forward in the boat, and the propeller runs in a tunnel, giving the boat the ability to operate in inches of water. I am struggling on how to use my digital camera in a way that does not duplicated what I do with my film camera. So, I am going to pursue this kind of image for a while, to see if I can make it work. If you are interested, stay tuned!

Letting go of the Camera

Picking up Brooks Jensen’s – Letting go of the Camera – I came across several ideas and concepts which complement some of the ideas I addressed in my post about digital and film photography. Brooks writes: As photographers, we are so often embroiled in endless debates about technique and tools. This is all a waste of time….If you are interested in photography as an expressive art, the debates over cameras or techniques have probably been boring to you for a long time. We had better get used to it – again. And, while the rest of the photographic world is debating….,perhaps we can spend the next decade making images and artifacts that rise above the bickering about how one should be a photographer.

WaterWomen-working – 2

Of scars and negatives.

I am not a particularly well organized person. However, my negatives and accompanying contact sheets are in pretty good order, and usually I can find what I am looking for pretty fast; In contrast, my digital files are a mess. Not only that, when I take photos with my digital camera, I usually discard/delete the ones I don’t like. If I did that with my negatives, I would not have this great treasure of old stuff, that becomes more valuable to me as time goes by.

This photo of Diana is a good example. It is one of my earlier WaterWomen photos, and Diana is showing me, and letting me photograph, the horrendous scar she got when she burned her arm in a clam processing machine. She had 3^rd degree burns on her right arm. To get to the hospital, she plunged her arm into an ice chest, and drove her pick-up truck 60 miles to the nearest hospital. She was pretty nonchalant about the scar & when I took this series of photos, I was disappointed when I developed them. Now I think they are pretty fine, and I will incorporate them into the portfolio.

Work in Progress

This image from my ‘Tarnished Mirror’ suite is not new. I have printed it several times before. HOWEVER, this is the first time I have printed on a piece of aluminum. It appealed to me because it was the closets I had come to printing on a mirror like surface. I am not quite sure how I am going to mount this. The image is about 12×18 inches. It sure does not want to be under glass; that would ‘destroy’ the mirror feeling of the aluminum. Well, if I get it to work, I will post the results. Hopefully the finished piece will go to my gallery in Atlanta.

 

Thoughts about digital and film photography

I am absolutely not interested in discussions of the supposed merits of digital versus film or vice versa. This kind of discourse brings to mind the photography versus painting discussions of the past. However, for my own purposes, I have to come to an understanding of what film and digital photography mean to me and how I have to react in my work to the existence of both. I grew up in a film world. When I bought my first digital camera, a Sony Cybershot, I quickly came to the conclusion that now any idiot could take technically excellent photos.

I realize that this is a ‘bumper sticker’ sentiment. However, I feel it does contain a lot of ‘truth.’ Thinking about the film and digital issue for a while, and working in both media, I came to the conclusion that we have not even begun to scratch the surface when it comes to understanding the impact of digital photography.Most importantly, it is not an issue of one against the other. They are really ‘apples and oranges;’ actually not even that, because those two are more closely related..

Film photography takes its characteristics, its end result – the print, from the physics and chemistry of its components. These components can vary a great deal: from the pinhole to the Zeiss lens and from the Daguerreotype to the Polaroid print. However, the result is still going to be an image on a surface. Not so with digital. Digital photography is a construct engineered to mimic [at present] a film photo image. Instead of resulting in a print, the output from a digital camera could just as easily be presented as a mixture of sounds, or laser formed objects, or numbers, or random colors, or written or spoken words; anything that a programmer could dream up.

Right now, among black & white photographers, one of the hot button discussions is which combination of digital hardware and software, combined with which inkjet paper will give them the print most closely resembling the most perfect print which the most perfect printer could produce from the most perfect negative, using the world’s best chemistry and fiber paper.

My feeling is that as the numbers shift more, and only an extremely tiny fraction of even ‘art photographers’ will know what a silver gelatin print looks like, and more importantly, how to make one, this debate will become mute. Photographers will cease being interested in trying to mimic an antique process, and become much more interested in having equipment and materials that will push the technical envelope, and respond more fully to their creative vision. Simply stated, the digital photograph will become something that we presently don’t even have.

My question remains: ‘where is my photography going’ now that, other things being equal, I can – most of the time – get a technically better print with an inexpensive, digital camera, printed on my Epson 2400, than what I can produce in my darkroom?

Introduction to Alternative Photographic Processes

Here is the official notice of my workshop at the Harn:

Introduction to Alternative Photographic Processes
Artist/Instructor: Christian Harkness
2 Saturdays, Jan. 5, 10:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. and Jan. 12,
10:30 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.
$85 ($75 members)
The digital negative and the cyanotype and vandyke brown print process will be demonstrated and participants will learn how to make their own digital negatives; construct printing frames; prepare the printing paper; and expose and process the paper positives. Bring a bag lunch or dine at the Camellia Court Café.

Juxtaposition 2

So far, pairing my images from the WaterWomen portfolio is making sense.  I have struggled for a while trying to figure out how to augment or complete the documentary photos of people I already have with scenes from the working and natural environment.  This exercise is getting me there.