Tag Archives: images

This is a toaster. Something so banal that in our ordinary lives, we hardly notice or look at it. Actually this is a picture of a toaster, which is a remove from the real thing. But then, so is the word “toaster,” which is also not the real thing, but a remove from the reality.

For most of us, most of the time, seeing something — like the toaster — means being able to name it and move on to something more interesting or more immediately useful. The image in the picture functions as a pictogram, or a different “spelling” of the word. We read the image as if it were the word.

Pictogram to “read” as teapot; teapot image as “seen”

It is how we respond to most images that bombard our daily lives. We name the item seen. It has been categorized, filed and forgotten. Our lives are too busy to spend any time remarking that the toaster is yellow, or made of plastic, or has rounded corners. These details are of no particular use when fixing our morning bagel, and so, they might as well be invisible.

Of course, being able to recognize things quickly is a survival skill, and humans have survived these hundreds of thousands of years precisely because they could point quickly and yell, “Tiger!” So, I’m not pooh-poohing that ability categorically.

But life is about more than just survival. The things of this world are bursting with sense data that gets ignored by reading rather than seeing the visible world. The toaster was designed to have an esthetic impact; the yellow was chosen to be pleasing to the eye; the curves were worked in to make the shape more inviting than it would be if it were all pointy edges.

We are embedded in a universe of things — a material world — and all of those things have physical and sensuous properties. They have shape, color, heft, texture, volume, solidity or softness, shine or roughness. And all of these properties make up the elements of art, and one of the jobs art does is to remind us of these delights we normally pay no attention to. Art reminds us we are alive.

Any life can be enriched simply by paying attention. To notice the yellow, the curve, the size and shape. In fact, to those awake to the world, it is all art — and the emotional richness that the awareness brings.

It is one of the things artists were doing at the beginning of the last century when they began making abstract art: art about the color, shape, texture, without a nameable subject.

Of course, artists have always paid attention to these visual qualities. Just because a painting is of a still life, and we can name the objects, doesn’t mean that the artist wasn’t obsessed with the sensuous truth.

And so, it is a worthwhile exercise to occasionally attempt to forget what you know and see the things of your life freshly, as if you didn’t know the names, but saw only the qualities.

Humanity is varied in its ability to see beyond the names. It takes an imagination — a way of turning off your rational mind to see only the vital facts and not their meaning or use. Some people have the hardest time: I remember one woman who was asked to close her eyes and describe what she could see in her mind’s eye, and her answer was “With my eyes closed, I see only black.”

But attempting to see past the names of things is deeply rewarding. The pleasure of colors, shapes, designs, apprehended primally enriches our lives immeasurably.

Certainly the natural world invites us with color and beauty. But it isn’t just the flowers and trees, the birds and the clouds. Everyday items can be appreciated for their roundness, plumpness, hardness, color, shape, even the feel under your fingertips.

Many eons ago, when I was teaching photography at a two-year college, one of the assignments I gave my students was to photograph something in such a way I could not tell what it was. I made sure they understood that I didn’t mean just out-of-focus, or so badly lit it was murk. But to see something from a different angle, or to find a meaningful detail and separate it out.

The purpose was to help them see without depending on what they already knew things looked like. To see directly.

For example, here’s something most people see almost every day.

Did you spot what it is? It is a view of your driver’s side rear view mirror as you approach the door to open it. A great big globular shape.

One of my favorite images is one taken by Voyager II in 1983 as it passed the (then) planet Pluto and snapped this image of its moon, Charon. And compare with the more recent, and clearer image taken by NASA’s New Horizons space probe on its flyby in 2015.

Actually, that’s a lie. The image on the left is a doorknob.

And so, here’s a little quiz. These photographs were taken to illustrate the shapes, colors and textures of ordinary objects, but seen in fresh ways. But they are still recognizable, if you can spot them. Can you tell what they are? The answers are at the end of the column.

Even when you are not trying to be tricky, it is good to pay attention to the physical properties of the things of the world. Those shapes make images more memorable. And there are shapes all around.

A doorway turned into a check-mark

A paper tissue half out of a box

A kitchen strainer

We are alive on this planet for such a short time, and there is so much to take in. With our five senses we are privy to such delight and can never exhaust the riches around us. But we must be open to them, aware of them, awake to them.

Learning to see is a part of art education. To see a picture of a giraffe and point, like a first-grader, and say, “Giraffe,” is not seeing. But take up a pencil and attempt to capture what you see on paper will teach you what things really look like. Paying attention is the great secret of life.

Quiz answers: 1. Paper plates; 2. Work glove; 3. Windshield wiper; 4. Measuring spoons and ceramic duck head towel hook; 5. Old Oxford cloth shirt; 6. Toilet paper; 7. Plastic mixing bowls; 8. Pop-open gas-cap cover for Buick; 9. Ceiling fan lamp fixture; 10. Assorted shopping bags.

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A green thought in a green shade

May 25, 2021

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The world at your feet

May 19, 2021

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According to European-Western tradition, there are four cardinal directions: north, south, east and west; and we mark them on a map by making the sign of a cross: north, south, east and west. Dominus Vobiscum. But Western culture tends to value a map rather more than the ground under your feet. If we take a larger view of it all, we should acknowledge two more cardinal directions: up and down. We live in three dimensions, not two. A map is only a diagram. Et cum spiritu tuo.

And when we make images — photographs, drawings, paintings — we tend to look along the flat plane of our cardinal directions, which means also, the plane of our standing vision. And if we photograph flowers, we tend to make our images like the identification photos in a nature guidebook. We look at them as if they were as tall as us, or we as ground-hugging as them.

The bias is to ignore the sky above, the mud below. I spent some hours yesterday attempting to break my own tendencies and see if a shift in perspective might give me a fresher look at the garden. And so, I made a series of photographs pointing the camera straight down at the flowers from the top.

The first image I made, when I put it up on my screen, reminded me of something. It took a moment, but then I had it: the Pleiades — the Seven Sisters in the night sky in the constellation Taurus. Here are the flowers:

Here are the Pleiades:

Looking down in the day was a mirror of looking up at night. Bunches of flowers, especially roadside wildflowers, often remind us of stars in the night sky. It’s why we name them cosmos, stellas and asters.

Certainly the flower that has meant the most to me, emotionally, through my life is the aster, named for the stars. I remember a day, some 40 years ago, driving with my then-soulmate (is there a sadder hyphenated word in the language?) near Port Jervis, N.Y., and coming across an abandoned field, maybe a couple of football fields in extent, that was crammed with asters, thistles and ironweed, so thick on the ground there was barely any green showing through. It was hysterical with blue, and I thought it was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. Since then, I have sought any semblance of that abundance. I’m not sure a single life affords more than one of those moments.

And so, I am walking through my sister-in-law’s garden in North Carolina and holding my camera flat parallel to the ground to see what these flower-stars look like from an angle we don’t normally see — or at least, think of them.

Over and over the star analogy shown through. Constellations of yellow or white against a sky of green.

Even the leaves themselves can be stars:

Patterns made: line-ups, triangles, squares, quincunx, spatters and grids.

There is a Medieval trope that everything in Heaven finds its analog in the sublunary world (much like the Renaissance idea that everything in the world is mirrored internally in the mind). And I certainly felt that correspondence strongly while finding my floral models to photograph.

It was the looking down that made the connection, the opposite of the looking upwards at the night sky. But looking down — straight down, if I could avoid my own clumsy feet — gave me more than that. I found that I was photographing more than calyx and petal, but discovering just how many distinct greens nature blares forth.

Historically, painters had a limited number of pigments to use when painting leaves and trees. They could modulate those hues with the admixture of others, but there was a limit. The trees of Claude or Titian are mostly monophonic rather than stereo. The artist who freed green from those confines was Paul Cezanne, whose paintings contain more greens and more blues than any artist before or since. His eye for tint and shade was phenomenal. I remember when I first came to appreciate the work of Cezanne. I had seen his paintings only in reproduction and always thought of them as rather dull, even muddy. But visiting the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., I found a wall of the still lifes and was knocked out by the glowing depth of color: color I had never experienced except under the influence of herbs. But those chemical-induced colors were vaporous compared with the earthiness of Cezanne’s greens, blues and yellows.

And so, there I was, camera in hand, looking earthward and seeing the exuberance of May in Piedmont, North Carolina, and the blistering variety of green that sprouts from the ground.

I walked around the property, head held downward, and finding such a joyous variety under my feet, that I wound up, in the space of under an hour, taking at least 100 usable photographs — images I would be proud or eager to share with the enthusiasm of a convert. The greens made patterns; the blossoms made patterns; the leaves were shapes to pleasure in; the colors were delicious.

The esthetic sense, however, awakens an awareness of yet a seventh cardinal direction, which we might call “center.” It is the inward direction that is privy to the other six and gives them meaning and purpose. North, south, east, west, up, down, and in. Each in some way a reflection of all the others.

I have traveled much in each of the cardinal directions, north to the Canadian arctic, south to the Cape of Good Hope, eastward to Europe and finally, the Pacific coast. I have gone up in aeroplanes and cathedral bell towers, and down in chthonic mine shafts and vast caverns, but most of all, I have gone inside of myself. The experience of nature — but also the making and partaking of art — expand the inner world, adding continents to the mental globe, possibilities of understanding, and depths of compassion.

Looking down at the humble soil and its profuse variety keeps one from becoming tired of life. Paying attention is, in some ways, coequal with life itself.

Next — perhaps in tomorrow’s rain — I will extend my interior travels by looking straight up to see what is there.

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The main thing

August 31, 2018

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“Which way to Millinocket?”

“Don’tcha move a goddamn inch.”

Maine jokes — an acquired taste, perhaps. So many of them are built on city slickers asking for directions. “You can’t get there from here.” (Say it with the accent: “You cahn’t get they-ah from hee-ah.”) Lost travelers always seem to find farmers willing to guide them: “First, you drive up a mile, mile-and-a-half maybe, and turn left where the old church used to be.”

“Used to be.” It is a familiar refrain in the more rural and forgotten areas of the state, and along the coast north of Acadia National Park, where few out-of-staters are likely to venture — an area known as “Down East.”

There is much that “used to be” in Sullivan, Maine, a small community on Taunton Bay about 15 miles beyond where the tourists turn off U.S. 1 to Mt. Desert Island and Acadia. With a population of about 1200 spread over half a dozen townlets between Hancock and Gouldsboro, it has been home to my best friends from college for about 30 years. Over that time I have visited them often.

They have an old farmhouse (I call it a farmhouse, although there is no farm) in North Sullivan along the road that parallels Taunton and Hog bays. Like much in the town, it is weathered and steeped in character.

Sullivan has changed over those decades, although you might not notice it if it were your first visit. It still looks quaint, as if it were some Down-East Brigadoon. But there are many things that “used to be.”

The Singing Bridge

For me, the most notable is the loss of the singing bridge from Hancock to Sullivan over the narrows between Frenchman’s and Taunton bays. The old bridge had a steel mesh roadway and every time a car ran over it, it roared like a banshee. That steel-truss bridge was replaced in 1999 by the “silent bridge,” made from prosaic concrete.

Taunton Bay

The singing bridge was opened in 1926, replacing, after many years, the original wooden toll bridge that was washed away by winter ice a few years after it opened in the 1820s. Between bridges, a ferry ran from south shore to north — a flat boat that held one carriage at a time and charged a dime for a crossing. The Waukeag Ferry went out of business when the singing bridge opened.

Stuffy

You get attached to something and then, it’s gone. When we first started going up to Sullivan, there was, just across the bridge, a small, wooden roadside ice cream stand called “Stuffy’s,” which also sold lobster rolls and the best lobster bisque I ever ate. We went back there for lunch many times. Of course, it is now gone.

Abandoned quarry

So are the granite quarries that used to support the town, and so are the silver mines that made the town viable in the first place.

According to A Gazetteer of the State of Maine, published in 1886, “There are now eleven incorporated companies owning mines in the town, most or all of them being operated. Work has been done also in five or more unincorporated mines. There has been completed in the vicinity a concentrating mill and smelting works for reducing silver ore.

“On the various streams there are two saw-mills, two stave mills, one shingle-mill, and one grist-mill. … A steamboat touches at Sullivan Falls three times a week.”

All gone.

The Native American name for the area was Waukeag. It was first settled by the French in the early 1700s, but was given to English-speaking settlers by the colonial government of Massachusetts in 1761, when it was called New Bristol. It was incorporated in 1789 under the name of Sullivan, one of the original settlers. At the time of the Revolutionary War, there were just 20 families in town. By 1870, the population was 796. In 1880 it was 1,023. It is not much bigger than that now.

Schoodic Mountain

As you drive north on U.S. 1 through Sullivan, you can often spot Frenchman’s Bay to your right, a vast tidal flat at low tide, a lake at full. In the distance to the south you can see Cadillac Mountain and Mt. Desert Island. Just north of the highway is Schoodic Mountain, 1,069 feet high, and Tunk Lake, where Rear Admiral Richard Byrd used to have a vacation home.

On the peninsula just south is Sorrento, a resort town a bit more upscale than Sullivan.

Reversing Falls

And at the mouth of the inlet, where Taunton Bay dwindles to the narrows that used to be called Sullivan River and opens onto Frenchman’s Bay, the tide creates what is known as a “reversing falls,” where the rising tide creates a dangerous rapids heading into Taunton Bay, and with a falling tide, creates the same rapids in the opposite direction. The current is fierce, up to 13 knots.

But it is Taunton Bay Road that is what I am most interested in. Just after the silent bridge, there is a left turn that takes you through West and North Sullivan along the eastern shore of Taunton Bay. It continues out of town along Hog Bay and into Franklin. The road is beaded with old homes, usually clapboard with front porches and foundations or stoops made from granite once quarried locally.

Across the water, Taunton Bay opens up into Egypt Bay and the town of Egypt, made famous — or notorious — by Carolyn Chute’s 1994 book, The Beans of Egypt, Maine.

Among other losses in Sullivan are Jerry’s Hardware and, while Gordon’s Wharf is still extant, the busy fishing business is gone. There are a few family cemeteries, an art studio where stone sculpture is made, and a ceramic studio.

This last time I visited, I attempted to make a “portrait” of this end of Sullivan, the way Alfred Stieglitz made a portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe — hundreds of photos that I hoped would, in aggregate, give a sense of the place. I can only share a tiny fraction here. You can find a more detailed portrait of a single house at (link here).

There are three reasons to photograph something you care about. First, simply to capture it so as to possess it, for the sake of memory, the way you keep old snapshots of family birthdays and vacations. Second is to create art, that is, to make an image out of shapes and colors in a design that has graphic interest. But third is to see.

We look over so much at every minute of every day, but seldom see it. Looking closely, paying attention to details, absorbing character, seeing relationships — these things come with seeing with purpose. Seeing is engaging. Engaging is being alive.

Wandering through Sullivan, I wanted to gather albumblätter for my scrapbook; I also wanted to make something that might be, in its tiny way, considered art; but most of all, I wanted to use my camera as a way of focusing my sometimes wayward attention on something I want to know more deeply. It is a way of expressing affection. Photographing, done this way, is a means of caring.

To collect snaps, or to frame art are fine in themselves, but using the lens to focus the mind and heart is infinitely more rewarding. It creates meaning.

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Georgia on my mind

August 23, 2018

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How many is enough? Beginning in 1917, photographer Alfred Stieglitz began making portraits of his new squeeze, Georgia O’Keeffe. But he soon developed the idea that a single image could not adequately express the essence of a person. Over the next 20 years, he photographed the artist some 350 times, making what to Stieglitz counted a single, all-encompassing portrait of O’Keeffe.

“To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of any person,” he claimed, “is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.”

As he took up the camera once more after several years of editing his magazine, he wrote: “I am at last photographing again. … It is straight. No tricks of any kind. — No humbug. — No sentimentalism. — Not old nor new. — It is so sharp that you can see the [pores] in a face — & yet it is abstract. … It is a series of about 100 pictures of one person — heads & ears — toes — hands — torsos — It is the doing of something I had in mind for very many years.”

The series went well past the hundred pictures he mentioned, and became one of the signature events in the progress of American art photography. The photographs were shown in galleries and museums and a selection of them were published in a book issued by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He photographed O’Keeffe nude, surly, playful, artsy and in snapshot mode. He seems to have had a thing for hands. There are a boatload of hands, all very arty. Certainly, they are expressive, but they are also a bit arch. And do they actually tell us anything about O’Keeffe, the woman who kept her privacy like a recluse, so that even when she seems to be opening up to us, she is really just assuming a simulacrum of candor? She simply doesn’t want us to presume we might know her.

But despite his intent, it is obvious that while 350 images may be more varied than a single portrait, it is no more complete. To achieve his goal, Stieglitz would have had to film every second of O’Keeffe’s life from birth to death and show it unedited. Attempting to capture a personality in any finite number of moments requires that some editing and interpreting will be necessary. Is Irving Penn’s portrait of Carson McCullers any less an accurate version of the author than Stieglitz’s O’Keeffe?

In fact, I might say that O’Keeffe, even photographed by her husband 300 times, is more reserved, and lets less of herself out into the frame of the picture than McCullers does in one single instant. There is infinite sadness in those eyes.

As a “control group,” we might include the three versions of Truman Capote made by Penn over time: First in 1948, then in 1965 and 1985. Does the grouping tell us much more than any of the single images? Only that Capote got old. We knew that.

There is some kind of naive innocence in Stieglitz’s attempt, that there is a possibility of “capturing” a person in an image.

The problem is that an image has a reality of its own, a separate reality, which may or may not partake of the person photographed. Irving Penn’s famous image of Picasso becomes a piercing eye, but then, so does the eye of Richard Avedon, also photographed by Penn. Or, for that matter, a portrait of Pam Henry I made in the 1970s.

The image carries meaning in and of itself. Consider that 1968 image of Capote, eyes closed, glasses carried lightly between his fingers. Both John Malkovich and Philip Seymour Hoffman have sat for publicity photos mimicking the Penn photo. The pose trumps the person.

Or take Malkovich trying on the 1948 Capote. Again, the image is instantly recognized, and if you were turning the page quickly in a magazine spread, you might just well assume you had looked at the writer rather than the actor.

Malkovich seems to have had fun doing this. He has mimicked many overly familiar images, from Hemingway to the migrant mother photographed by Dorothea Lange in 1936.

Avedon often said that all photographic portraits — including and especially his — are really portraits of the photographer. It is the version of the subject transmuted by the picture-taker, and made into a vision of how the photographer understands the world. You look at that lineup of Malkovich parodies and you can as easily — or more easily — name the photographer as the name of the sitter. Top row: Irving Penn, Yousef Karsh, Philippe Halsman, Arthur Sasse; bottom row: David Bailey, Alberto Korda, Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus. Each a distinct style; each a distinct image.

Surely many a celebrity has felt defined and constrained by the immutable image that has usurped the actual life. Could Norma Jean live up to the image of Marilyn? Either the Bert Stern, the Avedon, the Eve Arnold or the Cecil Beaton version (l. to r.)?

We run into the same problem we have with language. It cannot bear a one-to-one relationship with reality; it is rather a parallel universe, which can imitate our perceptions but never fully embody them. The image exists in another reality; we can name what we see, but the name is not the thing. The photo is not the person. Stieglitz’s attempts are heroic but doomed to failure. None of those 350 pictures of O’Keeffe is O’Keeffe, and the whole together is no closer to being her.

We are left to enjoy them, then, as works of art. The eyes of Carson McCullers are not her eyes, but the sadness in the photo speaks to us clearly. That has to be enough.