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February 17, 2012: A construction scene that looked like a set for a modern dance performance...  Construction workers on the site of Tulsa's BOK Tower in 1973 seem to be dancers on steel. The 52-story skyscraper would be the tallest building to be found in any of the states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri, Arkansas and New Mexico at the time it was finished in 1975. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center, the building is a smaller look alike of the twin towers that were destroyed on September 11, 2001. This was a personal image made on 35mm film while I was out for a walk in downtown Tulsa. Later I would have several assignments to photograph various stages of the building's construction, but this one was prompted simply by my own curiosity. |
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February 15, 2012: When I have been totally out of my element.  During my career as a commercial photographer, I called myself a generalist, which meant that I did not specialize in any single type of photography. Though I worked for clients who were headquartered in more distant places, I relied heavily for day-to-day activity on the businesses that were located in my own back yard. That was in Tulsa Oklahoma, known for many years for its oil-related businesses. I did my share of work in the "Oil patch," but a successful studio operation in that part of the country demanded versatility and that meant being prepared to serve a diverse clientele. A typical week might start with photographing jewelry and end with an assignment to document construction activity on a new high-rise office building. I did a lot of advertising illustration and corporate annual reports, which required traveling extensively, photographing executives, shooting from helicopters, and doing product photography on location or in the studio. If the subject was the board room, corporate offices, manufacturing facilities, architecture, art, studio still-life or the natural environment, I was completely at home with my subjects. If the subject was food, I might have taken the assignment, but there weren't too many of those opportunities. I loved working with character-type models and I avoided anything related to fashion and that (at least to me) included dancers. But, in the early 1980's I was offered three opportunities to photograph ballet dancers, and I timidly accepted the challenge. I'm not a ballet aficionado and all I know about photographing the ballet I learned from a friend who had danced with the New York City Ballet and was kind enough to give me a quick course over one weekend. Ballet dancers amaze and fascinate me with their athleticism, their ability to withstand pain and the fact that if you look carefully at the legs of a ballerina, you'll notice the development of muscles you never realized were part of the human body. My first assignment was to photograph ballet student dancers practicing in the studio and I did that well enough that I was invited by Tulsa Ballet's artistic director, Moscelyne Larkin, to make publicity images during a rehearsal for a regular performance. Before doing that, however, I attended a scheduled performance of the company so that I could go into that session with some knowledge of the dancers and at least and idea of what was going to happen. In the end, it was a paid learning experience even though some of the results were quite usable. Subsequently, however, the advertising agency for the Oklahoma City Ballet gave me an assignment to make photographs, like the one above, to promote the company's second season under the direction of Edward Villella. Photographing dance in the studio when the subjects pose for you and the lighting is completely under your control is one thing; photographing a dance performance is another. It is action photography, but not like photographing sports. If you photograph football or basketball and catch an athlete not quite at the peak of action, or even in an awkward position, that's often permissible, but if you catch a dancer at one of those awkward moments, it's an unpardonable sin. And if you don't know what to look for, in the extension of a leg or arm, or in the position of a hand, what might look pretty good to you is likely to arouse expressions of disgust from a dancer or director. Perspective is also extremely important, for dancers dislike camera angles that distort the proportions of their bodies. When photographing during a rehearsal, I was permitted to take a downstage position near the orchestra pit. That allowed me to place my camera at a level that approximated the waist height of the dancers. However, I was allowed to use only the stage lighting, which meant that I had to use (in 1984) very fast film and lenses with large apertures. Fortunately, I've always had a pretty good sense of timing and an ability to anticipate the peak of action, because I was shooting with Hasselblad cameras and the motor drive wasn't a suitable "crutch." To help capture of the correct moment, my assistant and I both exposed images from approximately the same positions. And, we shot a lot of film. The results were satisfactory and the out-takes were many. I appreciated the opportunity to photograph ballet, and while I was able to satisfactorily complete three assignments, The greatest benefits to me were the valuable lessons that can be applied to other endeavors. The most important lesson was to never attempt an assignment without as much research on the subject as time will allow. You may not have time to become an expert, but you must take time to learn the things that will keep you out of trouble. The next important lesson is to be humble enough to accept direction from those who know what you obviously don't know. And, finally, when you discover that something really isn't your thing (and mine isn't dance) be honest enough to admit that and show respect for those who excel at it. I've been making photographs for sixty years, experimenting, studying and enjoying almost every minute. I figure I've made almost every mistake you can make, though I tried to make each one only once. Having said that, I'll only photograph dance again in the unlikely event that the subject is one of my grandchildren. In my next blog post, I'll show you a picture of a kind of dance to which I can comfortably relate. |
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February 11, 2012: Fantasy vs. reality... Remembering a visit to Reelfoot Lake thirty years ago.  In December, 1980, I accompanied my then mother-in-law, an avid birder, on a trip to Reelfoot Lake in the northwest corner of Tennessee. The lake was frozen and Mimi*, as she was affectionately known to all her family, wanted to see what effect the ice had on the bald eagles that were wintering there. And, she was hoping that the eagles would be easier to see under those wintry conditions. Not only was the surface of the lake frozen, but as you can see from the photograph above, the lower trunks of the bald cypress trees ringing the lake were thickly coated with ice. Traveling with Mimi always produced amusing stories. She was a diversely curious person who traveled widely and studied ornithology, botany, and photography with great intensity. She was also more than slightly opinionated, tending to accept newly learned facts only when they did not conflict with her own long-held presumptions. Therefore, much of what I knew about photography, nature and life itself was, during the early years of my marriage to her oldest daughter, Judy, generally viewed with suspicion. However, as both of us aged, she and I became closer and my comments were treated with a modicum of cautious acceptance. I recall that once, on a spring trip into the Texas Hill Country, as I was driving on a county road in the vicinity of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, Mimi saw a hawk flying above us . Thinking it might be a species she hadn't seen before (she was very attentive to bird shapes and flight patterns) she ordered me to catch up with the bird so that she could get a closer look. I obliged to a degree, but unlike the hawk's flight path, the road was straight, and I realized that it was going to take a good deal of luck to get really close to it. While trying to watch my moving target, and keep one eye on the road—which thankfully was free of traffic—I also was looking for side roads that might get me still closer to our objective. Unfortunately, I was not able to catch up with the hawk, and I recall that Mimi continued speculating throughout that afternoon about which species she was "almost sure" it had been. But, now we were off in search of bald eagles. We'd left Nashville early that morning and arrived in the vicinity of Reelfoot Lake around noon. So, before heading to the shore of the lake, we decided to stop for lunch at a rural roadside restaurant. We ordered at the counter from the owner, a woman who obviously had lost patience with tourists and became "testy" when questioned. I recall that the menu listed small and large hamburgers, but there was no indication of what small and large meant in terms of weight and Judy asked what the difference was. Sarcastically and without changing her facial expression, the woman quickly replied, "Size." Before Judy could respond, Mimi snapped, "I don't believe a daughter of mine could ask such a stupid question," and then posed a question of her own to the waiting proprietor. "With all the ice, is it harder to spot the eagles?" To which the reply was, "No, the ice is on the water; the eagles are up in the trees." That reply seemed just a bit too impudent to Mimi, who turned her back and proclaimed, just out of the owner's earshot, "That woman is stupid!" And I was thinking that it all depended on who was asking the question. The burgers were followed with a short drive to the shore of the lake where we did see eagles high above us in the trees, just as the woman in the restaurant had predicted. The binoculars came out and the objective was met. Not being a bird photographer, and having seen enough pictures of eagles sitting quietly on tree branches to know that I wasn't likely to add anything important to the body of photographs created by others, my attention was drawn to the roots and knees of the cypress trees. Coated with a thick layer of ice they appeared to me as the frozen feet of large animals, like something out of Maurice Sendak's imagination. I spent my time making black and white images of these fantasy shapes until I received notice that it was time to move on. Mimi and I went on several photographic outings together, during which she usually had an agenda different and far less flexible from my own. Her's was likely to be focused on a specific goal, so while she could be tolerant of my less purposeful approach, she occasionally could be impatient, dismissing my interests as trivial. For example, during my second stint as artist in residence at Colorado's Black Canyon of the Gunnison, in 1993, she couldn't understand my fascination with that place and midway through my month-long commitment encouraged me to go home. "I don't know what you see in that hole in the ground," was her comment during a long distance phone call. I stayed. * Miriam Kuhn Weinstein (Mimi), mother of my first wife, Judy, was an accomplished amateur photographer. She created a large and varied collection of color photographs between 1963, when she was widowed by the untimely death of my father-in-law, and 2001. One of her principal interests, which provided subjects for more than one exhibition, was finding and documenting carnivorous plants. Judy died from leukemia in 1996 and Mimi died just four and a half years later in 2001. |
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February 6, 2012: Remembering a visit with Roman Vishniac  I think it was 1982, but it may have been a year later. I flew to New York with a friend, while the two of us were working on the design for an exhibit for the lobby of the Tulsa Jewish Community Center. We were using photographs to depict the history of the Jewish people from the rise of the Third Reich to what then was present day Israel, and one of the images was Roman Vishniac's 1938 photograph showing Rabbi Baruch Rabinowitz in discussion with his students in the then mostly Jewish Hungarian town of Mukachevo. In 1944, all the Jews of that community were deported to Auschwitz. The highlight of that trip was our visit with Vishniac and his Edith in their upper west side apartment. We had arranged to meet with him so that he could tell us more about that particular photograph. More importantly, I had been very interested in meeting him since 1973, when I was fortunate to have had an opportunity to spend the better part of a day with Cornell Capa who raved about Vishniac's images. Although Vishniac's credentials were many, he has become best known for his photographs of pre World War II Jewish communities throughout Europe. His work in photomicroscopy and biology earned him almost as much recognition during his lifetime and he held several professorships and honorary degrees. Among photographers, many know him for his sensitive portraits, including a well-known image of Albert Einstein. I was surprised that Vishniac and Edith, to make sure we didn't go to the wrong apartment, met us in the hallway outside their door. They seemed very pleased that we had come to visit and graciously invited us in and offered us refreshments. I had expected this to be a short and perhaps formal meeting, but it was just the opposite—extremely relaxed and cordial. We talked about the image we had selected for our exhibit, or course, but the discussion extended to a variety of subjects and he gave me a tour of his workspace, where Kodak yellow boxes of 35mm slides were piled to the high ceiling. Though the appearance was one of clutter, I had little doubt that he knew the contents of every box. Early in the visit, while sitting in their living room, my attention was drawn to a tall breakfront cabinet filled with objects of oriental art. "What is your interest in Oriental art?" I asked a bit timidly. "I am professor of Oriental art at CCNY," he responded, and when I commented on the diversity of his interests he gave me a mini-lecture on the importance of continuing one's education throughout life. There was nothing condescending in his remarks, he was simply admonishing me to maintain an active curiosity. It is a concept I embrace fully. Vishniac told us stories about his travels around the shtetlach of eastern Europe, showed us a portfolio of exquisite prints and told us of a 16mm film he had made and attempted to send to the United States with a woman who had promise him she could see that it was shown in an effort to give American Jews an awareness of what was happening to the Jews of Europe as antisemitism was rising. That film, he said, was lost and never made it to the U.S. He didn't hear from that woman again, but he had made a second film from his out-takes and he offered to show it to us if we could take the time. Of course, we could take the time and he set up his projector and screen, brought a large reel of film from his workroom and we watched what he said was a film lacking the quality of the original. Still it was impressive, even without a soundtrack. Especially Vishniac's death in 1990, there has been criticism of his work as being absent of diversity (it concentrates heavily on the poor and on the orthodox Jewish communities) and as not being authentic in that he took considerable license in describing his subjects and the circumstances under which they were photographed. Some research has indicated that certain photographs were "staged," but little criticism has been made of the quality of the photography an the value of his work as an archive of a people who were removed from European society in the atrocities of the Shoah (or Holocaust). As for Vishniac the man, I can offer no more insight into his character and personality than that one visit produced. I can only say that he was generous with his time and information, and if the stories that he told me and my friend were exaggerations or fabrications to some extent, that is nothing to be unexpected among photographers, especially those whose travels and experiences cover a many years. If you read the autobiographical writing of William Henry Jackson, you will find it full of hyperbole, and I have witnessed much of the same in the tales told by my own contemporaries. Some day, I'm sure the same will be said about some of my own tales, though I have always tried to be factual as my memory serves me. Someone once told me that as you age, the second thing to go is your memory, and I've forgotten what the first thing was. The photograph above was made as our host was rewinding the film on his projector. |
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February 2, 2012: Taking a new and somewhat different view of an old and familiar subject.  A week ago, I had an opportunity to revisit one the locations of my October workshop (blog entries for November 11 through 19), the White Place near Abiquiu, NM. I wanted to go back to an area I felt I had "discovered" too late in the day and photograph it under better light, and I was able to do that. Then while wandering over the landscape alone, without the responsibilities associated with a workshop, and after the fascination with the newness of the place wore off, I began to realize how very monochromatic and almost colorless the place is. As I mentioned in the earlier posts, this should be rather obvious from its name, but then I often tend to see subtle variations and shadings from reflected light and imagine colors that the camera doesn't capture. I found occasional rocks with vivid color, but there was so much that was just shades of gray that the spots of color were completely overwhelmed. In an environment like that, one looks at the shapes of the formations and concentrates on light and shadow. And when the light levels fall and the shadows fade and the textures, though apparent, are less dramatic than they are when strafed by sunlight from a sharp angle, you find yourself looking desperately for something to give definition and a perception of depth to the scene. And sometimes, that quality—that something—just isn't there. Still the silhouetted shapes against the sky or dark foliage are graphic and the subtle folds of the earth's surface are tempting. You try to conjure a way to either bring contrast to the scene when processing the image or to interpret the image using an alternative process. Being more or less a traditional "straight photographer" I've never been comfortable altering reality with my photographs. On the other hand, to be honest, I've always been an interpreter of what the camera sees. I commonly used filters with black and white film to achieve desired contrast, and used the view camera's swings and tilts to "correct" the camera's perspective and to remove distortion. When printing, I lightened and darkened selected areas of the image to force the viewer's attention to fall where I wanted it or to create or emphasize a desired mood. But, essentially, the objects and landscape elements that are seen in my photographs are things that were there in front of my camera, void of manipulation and, in shape and form, recognizable to anyone who might have been looking over my shoulder. When I make a really good picture, there is normally an aha moment when I recognize that I've captured something that is excites my sensibilities. I didn't have such a moment that afternoon at the White Place and when I returned home I found most of my images even less interesting than I had imagined they would be. Many seemed simply dull, even after I had converted the colors to black and white. I considered throwing them out, but I decided to think about that for a while longer. After some thought, I began to wonder how they might look if I treated them as if they were a series of old William Henry Jackson prints or Edward Sheriff Curtis photogravures. What if they were printed in sepia or brown tone with vignetting to darken the edges and corners as if photographed with some older lenses? The shadows were soft and the contrast was flat. So what would happen if I made them look old? Nine images were processed in Adobe Lightroom (v. 3.6) converting them to black and white, applying split toning and a vignette and darkening the blue sky slightly. The process was rather simple and I didn't feel it was necessary to develop the images in Adobe Photoshop to alter them further. I began with the photograph above and then applied the similar but not the exact same adjustments to others. The principal difference between most of them was in the way curves were adjusted. Here are two more, and I will be glad to share more with you if you ask. This was an interesting experiment. I'm pleased with the outcome, but I'm not planning to make this a standard treatment of this subject. Other visits to the White place will offer different light and weather conditions and I'm sure to either discover new formations and textures to photograph, or new ways of looking at the familiar ones.
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January 16, 2012: Come with me and explore features of the Four Corners region in October.* From Tuesday, October 16 through Sunday, October 21, 2012, I will lead photography students on an exploration of the Four Corners area where the borders of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah intersect. Sponsored by the Santa Fe Photography Workshops (www.santafeworkshops.com), this event will give participants an opportunity to photograph incredible landscapes and archaeological sites before returning to Santa Fe where we will spend two days in the digital lab, refining our images and printing personal portfolios. During our time in the Four Corners, we will use Farmington New Mexico as our base, making day trips to places like Shiprock, and the Bisti Wilderness (the final list of locations is subject to changes and additions). *This event and other fall workshops will not be posted on the Santa Fe Workshops website until later in the year, but, I wanted those of you who follow this blog to be the first to know.  The photograph above provides a glimpse of one of many unusual and unique natural formations to be found in the Bisti Wilderness, 36 miles south of Farmington, New Mexico. My plan is to take workshop participants to places like this that they are less likely to find on their own. October has been selected as the time for this event because the weather conditions at that time of the year are generally more favorable—rainfall is minimal and the temperatures can be very pleasant. Between now and then, I will be scouting the area and talking with several of the regional authorities to ensure that we will be prepared to deal with then current local access issues. |
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January 9, 2012: Interesting juxtapositions  Late one afternoon, just before the new year, I was feeling a bit homebound and decided to get out and make a few pictures in my own yard. The sun was low in the southwest and it cast the shadow of a large apricot tree on the adobe wall that separates my yard from my neighbor's. What was most interesting was the way that shadow appeared to form a support structure for the branches of my neighbor's wonderful old apple tree extending over the wall. The juxtaposition of these elements created an image I'd not seen before. It was a delightful surprise to find this picture right outside my back door. For various reasons, most of us overlook the most accessible image possibilities. It's not that we don't notice them, but because we see them so often, they tend to seem too familiar and ordinary to be worth photographing. Someone else visiting for just a few hours, on the other hand, might find these subjects intensely provocative. If only we could regain the childlike curiosity that makes everything seem fascinating—the ability to perceive the same subjects differently as the viewing angle, light, time and other variables change. Did I say, "If only we could regain that childlike curiosity?" Let's be more positive about that. We can regain that ability. It's something I discuss in my workshops and there are exercises I learned years ago that help to retrain tired old vision. If you'll join me for a workshop, I'll share these with you. |
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