Don’t ask me why but the hinge on this one really grabs
me. It’s the element that completes the
picture and without which the image would be lacking. In fact, that’s a design
concept worth studying, the idea that a single often small component can make
such a difference in a painting or photograph.
That component has been described as the “punctum”, a point or detail
that creates a connection with the viewer.
Sunday, July 28, 2013
Sunday, July 21, 2013
See forever sky
A lot of people ask why we moved to Taos and most who do are folks who have made the same mistake, I mean choice. Other than bad judgment, I tell them, we
couldn't find a house we wanted to buy in Santa Fe.
Then I recite a list of the real reasons that include better weather than
northern New England, a bugless summer that lasts more than three days, skiing
on actual snow, an honest to god art scene and that I, that’s the operative
word, had a hankering to get back west.
Peggy not so much.
But first and foremost it’s the endless vistas, the see forever
sky. There’s chest filling exhilaration as you stare in an oxygen deprived reverie across the chaparral with distant
mountains heaving upward. It’s akin to
freedom in some abstract way.
It 's no mean task to pick a couple of images that exemplify the eyes wide open desert. I hope that these photographs taken just east of Antonito last week capture the feeling just a little.
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Where you find it
It’s been said by many photographers that there’s a worthy image pretty much anywhere you happen to be. You just have to look or maybe the
word is “see.” So it was as we sat with
our good friend Jamie Hindman at Cora’s Coffee Shoppe in Santa Monica. Cora’s is a tiny mostly outdoor affair that’s
attached to its pricey northern Italian sibling, Capo. It’s misleading and unprepossessing moniker
masks some serious culinary intent and a large, brunchish menu that’s uber
Californian. Wagyu “Kobe style burgers,
rotisserie tacos de carnitas, steak, celery, arugula and parmesan salad,
crimini polenta, rigatoni with white truffle oil meat sauce, artichoke tarragon
omelet and Turkish breakfast with homemade simit ought to get you to the left coast
pronto. Cora’s and Capo proudly source
their produce from Santa Monica’s extraordinary farmers market. Goat’s cheese and wild sage honey anyone?
Both images today were shot in Cora’s leafy cafĂ© and were
taken from a sitting position with little more than a twist of the waist. I’m all about economy of movement. As a lapsed restaurateur, I think place
settings make great though scarcely rare still lifes and the simple fountain on
the wall behind me was a tasty bonus.
Both are everyday things that seen from the right perspective are artful
and full of mood.
Note to self, you have to have the camera with you to record
this stuff. As for simit, that's a Turkish bagel.
Sunday, July 07, 2013
By Design
A couple of nights ago my friend Elizabeth Daley, the
powerhouse dean of the film school at USC, said that she had particularly liked
last week’s photographs of the grain silos. That was, in more or less her words, “because
I like the ones that are designed.” Now
truth told every image I share has been designed or at least I think it has,
which is to say consciously composed. But
there must be a difference in the ones that seem obviously designed and all the
rest. Equally true is that I don’t know
for sure which ones pass the design test.
It seems to me that the abstract work is more likely to be seen
as designed. But then, the corrugated bin landscape last week is representational,
tells the whole story yet is “designed” in Elizabeth’s view. Is that because silos are inherently aesthetic
forms or that the composition works? Or
both?
Early on in my digital transition my images were entirely
about composition and I worried that they lacked emotion. Still do.
Even now, left to my own inclinations, I could easily design clever little
vignettes in the viewfinder and call it a day. Presumably though when design and evocative content intersect
you've produced a winner. “Am I right or am I
right?” as John Goodman's Walter Sobchak character asked in The Big Lebowski.
How many of you click on the email that you receive so that
you go to the actual blog? Please do so when you’re moved to comment. You'll see the images and copy in a more finished
form and can click on the handy Comment link below each post to leave your
pithy reaction to it. It has been
suggested that one of the reasons that there are relatively comments on the blog
is that a lot of folks don’t actually get to the blog and can’t comment there. I get about
three times as many email comments as ones that get published and I’d sure like to
see that ratio improve.
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