Photographing Fremont

(I wrote this post just after the summer solstice and put it aside until I got around to finding the photograph I wanted to use with it.  Of course, I promptly forgot about it until looking for something else today – sigh.)

 

 

I photographed at the Fremont Solstice Parade yesterday.  This hardly qualifies as a news flash since I do so nearly every year.  The photograph above, taken a couple of years ago, pretty much sums up the ecstatic, even manic energy of the event.  This mob, accompanied by boisterous music, broke into a full-scale, whooping and yelling charge for no apparent reason about fifty feet before they reached where I was standing.  Fifty feet beyond where I was standing they were back to a normal pace, still laughing and yelling.  There are a few photographs from the parade on my website, www.ronfstop.com. 

[Digression:  Just in case there is somebody reading this who is not from the Seattle area; Fremont is a Seattle neighborhood on the north side of the ship canal that connects Puget Sound to Lake Washington.  Formerly a blue-collar neighborhood of ship chandlers, boat builders, and mill workers, it morphed into an arts/crafts neighborhood and is in the process of morphing again into a high-tech live/work neighborhood.  This year was the 25th Fremont Solstice Festival -- an arts/crafts/music street fair and a wonderfully goofy parade.  The parade allows no motorized vehicles, no commercially-sponsored entries, and no text.  The entries all have a home-cooked flavor to them, whether a ragtag marching band, the entire student body of Salmon Bay School -- a Seattle alternative elementary school -- riding unicycles or (my all time favorite in the year that the theme was "fertility") an elaborate float that was a veritable mountain populated by a bevy of beautifully costumed and ostentatiously pregnant women.  The official start of the parade is traditionally but unofficially led by a posse of bicyclists wearing elaborate and beautiful body paint but little or nothing else.  Some even skip the body paint.  Here endeth the digression.]

I staked out a place on the curb about an hour before the parade started and struck up a conversation with the guy on my left.  Before long a youngish couple, man and woman, strolled up and joined us on my right.  The man was shirtless and, less expectedly, she was too.   I must have done a bit of a double take because she laughed.  I complemented her on getting into the spirit of the parade.  I sure meet some interesting people.

The festival organizers were expecting 20,000 or so visitors but I'll bet there were more than that present for the parade alone.  It was a zoo.  I'm a big fan of a huge, cheerful crowd but enough is enough, already.  If there were, in fact, 20,000 people there then about 5000 of 'em had one or more high-end digital SLR's, fully outfitted with oatmeal-carton-sized zoom lenses, strung on their necks. My friend Doug says that they are not photographers but PWC's (people with cameras).  They were everywhere, popping up like jacks-in-the-box or standing in the middle of the street filling up one memory card after another.  Even more numerous and intrusive were the camera-phone contingent, holding their smart phones above their heads and effectively occluding the view of anybody behind them. 

I took four rolls of film -- standing at the curb and getting in nobody's line of sight.  The parade organizers provide (for a modest fee) a "press pass" that gives you the privilege of being in the street with a camera.  Next year maybe I'll get one and walk the parade route backwards, keeping moving so I won't materially get in anybody's way – at least not for very long.  (But I digress once again.)

Of the 140 or so negatives I work-printed 14 and of those there are three or four that I will print.  That's pretty slim pickings partly because I have photographed the parade many times and it takes a pretty good image to make it into the boxes with the 80 or more that I already have printed.  The other issue is that the Fremont parade is the hardest situation I have ever photographed.  It must be a lot like photographing a sporting event from the sidelines -- you have to be able to anticipate the action and even then a lot depends on luck tobring the action down your sideline.  Even at that, in a sporting event there are usually pauses; there is a set of rules to help you predict where and when things will happen; and only the most foolhardy PWC will leap onto the field and block your line of sight.  The only rule at the parade is that the participants are mostly (but not necessarily) moving from west to east.  The only pauses come when the parade stalls and then you can guarantee that some impromptu performance will spring up.  Perhaps it's more like being a war correspondent without the explosions.   I love it but photographing it is very hard work.   I can hardly wait until next year.

"A beginning artist borrows. A mature artist steals."

I wish I could remember the source of that quotation.

Students of painting, drawing, and sculpture (at least those who are training in the classic tradition) spend a lot of time copying the works of the masters -- or at least the competent.   This practice obviously develops the student's skill with the chosen medium but it also forces the student to spend a lot of time looking at works that are deemed by somebody or other to be worthy of study.  They see, and hope to reproduce, not only how the work was executed but how it was organized and how the content was presented.   They are educating their eye as well as their eye-hand skills.

I wonder if budding abstract expressionist painters copy the works of Phillip Guston, Wilem de Kooning, et al?   If so, what are they looking for?  But I digress.

Here's a speculation.  Why don't students of photography do this?  Photography classes are rich in camera handling, darkroom or computer technique but short on looking at photographs and, especially, trying to understand how masterful (by some standard or other) photographs were made -- or how masterful works in other mediums were made.  Apart from the completely specious "Oh I don't want to be influenced by the work of other photographers." there are certainly some practical matters that legislate against trying to copy a master work -- if your goal is to copy Paul Caponigro's "Megaliths" then a trip to Stonehenge is in order.  However, studying how the light falls on the stones in Caponigro's print might be good start for photographing concrete pillars under a freeway.

This speculation floated to the surface after my second failed attempt to take a portrait posed and lighted in the manner of "The girl with a pearl earring."  I got closer the second time.

It's not easy.  In fact it's harder than I thought it was going to be.  It seems so simple -- place a pretty girl about four feet from a north-lit window or a big soft box with the camera at right angles to the window light, put a reflector behind and above her to bounce some light on her hair, ask her to turn her shoulder slightly beyond the camera's sight-line and turn her head and eyes towards the camera.  Bang!  You're done.  Or not. 

Yes, that makes a pleasant portrait.  No, it is not a convincing replica of Vermeer's studio light and pose.  Better luck next time.

This has been such a challenge and so much fun that I'm going to select several other portraits that I admire and try to reproduce the look-and-feel of them.  The next is Cartier-Bresson's portrait of John Paul Sartre on the Pont Neuf in Paris.  It's getting towards fall and we should have some foggy days shortly.

Composition once again

As I write this I am looking at a photograph that I really like -- taken by a little-known street photographer who is about my age. In it, a buxom young street performer -- acrobat or mime -- is seated on a low "horse", doubtless used in her act, with her right foot extended towards the viewer. She is in dappled shade but her face, turned to her right, is in sunlight. Her left hand holds a long-stemmed flower. She looks relaxed in the spring-loaded manner of a dancer or acrobat and her expression tells me that the sun on her face feels very good. I would guess it to date from the 70s.


The print shows deep, rich blacks in the shadows and the highlight on her upturned face sparkles. Depth of field is shallow -- her outstretched foot is soft and the background is deep into the bokeh.

Coincidentally, I recently read a longish article that examined a group of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson.  Since HCB was notoriously laconic about his process, the author attempts to verbalize how he used composition to achieve his wonderful photographs. In it, the author calls out five principles:

1. Establishing a strong figure to ground relationship,

2. Finding a likeness in disconnected objects,

3. Shadow play (using shadows as a compositional element),

4. The art of waiting, not hunting,

5. Understanding diagonals.

Some of his examples are a bit strained to my eye but he makes a pretty good case for all but #4 as being accurate descriptors of some strong photographs in that one or more of his principles are present in each one. "The art of waiting, not hunting." doesn't show in the photographs of course. Moreover, HCB was famous for always being in motion when he was photographing. Robert Doisneau was the famous "fisherman".

All of these principles are doubtless good attributes but they are descriptions of strong photographs, not prescriptions for what it takes to make a photograph strong. The same statement holds for the rules of composition -- golden spirals, rule of thirds (that the author of the article decries), and so on.

Just for fun I analyzed the street performer, looking for the attributes listed above and then by popping a jpeg of it into Lightroom and using the composition tool overlays.

Well it certainly has good subject to background relationship. Her dark figure is against a considerably lighter ground and her upturned face is against a conveniently much darker background figure. That's 1 for 4 (I don't count the "waiting" since that doesn't appear in the photograph.) In Lightroom, it is a complete strikeout against the composition tool overlays. Would it be stronger if, for example, her face (an obvious center of interest) were farther to the left to be underneath the golden spiral? I tried it and it didn't do a lot for me.

Analysis is fine. Analysis often gives you information about how something works -- but not much help on why. My formal training is in engineering -- mostly control systems. The same statement applies there. The mathematical methods used to describe the behavior of control systems are analytical tools -- not synthesis tools. Once you figure out how a system might work then you can use them to see if, under sufficient and usually unreasonable assumptions, it behaves satisfactorily. So the control system designer tries things and checks to see if they work. The so-called "direct" methods that do help with design only work for situations so simplified that they aren't difficult anyway. (Keep this in mind the next time you are on an airplane flying at 375 knots over the ocean at 45,000 feet.)

I know that there are photographers whose work I greatly admire that carefully compose their work, even by considering the formal elements of composition (and sometimes adhering to them). That's not what I do. However, I hold that both approaches are the time-honored control systems process of trying things to see if they satisfy the eye -- whether by formal analysis or just saying Arnold Newman-fashion "Well, that works."

And as for the street performer photograph, I still think it is a strong photograph and I like it a lot. In fact, I'm proud of it -- I took it two weeks ago at Seattle's Folklife Festival.

Artist? Says who?

I see more and more photographers self-identifying themselves as “fine art” photographers.  I doubt that it is intended as a comparison: fine art, good art, mediocre art, awful art.  Nor does it seem likely that it indicates a grade like sandpaper: fine art, medium art, coarse art.  I seem to recall the terms “fine art” and “applied art” – the latter being illustrations, magazine covers, etc.

So perhaps fine art photographs are those photographs made with no other purpose than to be regarded as art.  Would that disqualify the Karsh portrait of Pablo Casals,  Carier-Bresson’s “Little Parisian”, Garry Winogrand’s “Man in the Crowd”?  Odd, I’d swear I had seen each of these in a major art museum.

So I guess I haven’t a clue what “fine art photographer” means.  I’m not even sure what “art” means.  Art is what artists make.  Artists are people who make art.  No help.

Some years ago I was snooping through a gallery operated by the local (Chico, California) arts organization.  The blue-haired lady behind the counter asked if I was an artist to which I replied “I am a photographer.”  Her response was that they didn’t regard photography as art.  I usually think of something good to say about 15 minutes after it is needed but this time I got it out straight away.  “Oh I agree – but neither is painting or drawing or sculpture. However, some photographers and some painters and some sculptors are artists.”

In the circus jargon, a performer who is among the best – clown, aerialist, animal trainer – is noted by their peers as “great”, as in the Great Emmett Kelly.   It recognizes not only skill and talent but long-term achievement.  Moreover, it is a serious breach of etiquette to misappropriate or self-appropriate the term “great”. 

I believe that it was Robert Frost who said that “poet” is a gift that must be given to you – that you cannot claim it for yourself.  Like the Great Robert Frost, I regard “artist” or “poet” or “novelist” as sort of informal honorifics to be given not taken. 

So I am uncomfortable to self-identify myself as an artist.  If somebody else wants to identify me as an artist that’s just fine.  However, nobody can disagree that I am a photographer.  I make photographs.  Most of the time the result of doing so is rubbish.  Sometimes it is a product. Once in a while it may be art.  Nobody, not even a Great, always get it right.  I suspect that even the Great Picasso had a full trash can.  The Great Mark Twain burned a lot of his drafts so that nobody could pick through his rubbish after his death. 

How often to you need to get it right to deserve the honorific?  John Nichols wrote one terrific novel, The Milagro Beanfield Wars.  That’s all folks.  The second and third books of his hastily devised trilogy after its success were just awful.  Is that enough to earn “novelist”?

It’s easy enough to understand why a photographer would like to self-identify as an artist.  Photographers do have an especially ambiguous medium.  If you say you are photographer then the next question is too often “Do you do [weddings, bar mitzvahs, kid birthday parties ….]?”  Painters probably have the same problem.  “Interior or exterior?”  Sculptors not so much – that is a much less ambiguous word.  But I digress.

Who gets to decide?  There are no board exams to qualify artists.  The opinions about what constitutes “art” or the quality thereof are hardly consistent.  As I reported in an earlier entry, one reviewer dismissed my portfolio as (insert sneer here) “documentary”.  We don’t have (thank St. Ansel and St. Henri) the French or British academy to pontificate.  Well, we do have the Photographic Society of America with its point ratings and so on but who cares.

I had a very hard time getting this entry started and now I’m having a hard time getting it finished, too.  I’m not even sure if it went anywhere between start and finish.  Anybody want to argue?

Girl With a Pearl Earring (and friends)

Some years ago, I saw Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance and Lady Writing at the National Gallery in Washington DC and was dazzled by them. I read a couple of books on Vermeer and his work but concluded that getting to Vienna for The Art of Painting or to The Hague for Girl With a Pearl Earring weren't likely to happen. When I read that the De Young museum in Golden Gate Park was going to have a show of Dutch Masters from the collection of the Mauritshuis in The Hague, including Girl With a Pearl Earring, I was determined to get there to see it.

Barbara and I have been trying to get to San Francisco for several years. We've half planned a trip several times and each time some damn thing or another came up and we abandoned the idea. This time we were not taking no for an answer. We did, in fact, have a quite pleasant road trip with detours to Santa Cruz to see friends and to Carmel for some gallery crawling but the first day in San Francisco - it was to the De Young. We intended to spend some time with their permanent collection but got no farther than the Dutch Masters show and its companion splendid show of etchings and engravings by Rembrandt and his contemporaries. These were all drawn from their own collection and those of other museums in the Bay area. (but I digress)

The Dutch masters show was a treasure trove -- Rembrandt's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (a studio copy made either by Rembrandt himself or one of his students) a pair of portraits, husband and wife, by Frans Hals, a Cuyp harborscape .... Nearly every painting in the show was one that you see in the art history books. That said, by far the hit of the show was Girl With a Pearl Earring.

It is even more beautiful than I expected it to be. I was stunned. I was dazzled. I was mesmerized. I stood there and stared at it for about twenty minutes then had to come back later for a second helping. It was restored fairly recently so it probably looks today much like it did the day Vermeer finished it. (By the way, I cannot imagine the state of mind of the restorerers who working on it. How could you summon up the courage to begin removing the old, yellowed varnish from the surface of one of the greatest paintings of western art?) In the process of restoration, they found that when Vermeer painted the blue cloth wrapped around her head he laid the medium down on the canvas and then worked the pigment into the surface of the wet medium. That not only allowed him to use a bare minimum of the precious pigment but it lent a bit of surface texture to the cloth.

The painting was protected by a low barrier that kept the viewers a couple of feet from the surface. I looked at it from every practical angle from far left to far right. When I moved far enough to the right that I was looking straight into her eyes -- my knees literally went weak and I had cold chills. From that angle the lines of her nose and her right cheek are perfect! I expected her to blink. I am absolutely convinced that Vermeer painted it from that viewpoint. I excitedly hustled several other viewers (and one mildly puzzled museum guard) into that sight line. They all agreed with me -- perhaps fearing that I was dangerous.

David Hockney and an optical physicist, Charles Falco, recently proposed that Vermeer and many of the other painting masters used optical devices to help them with their works. I had the good fortune to hear a lecture by Charles Falco a couple of years ago and he makes a very good case. The notion that Vermeer and many others back to Van Eyck "cheated" (not Hockney or Falco's term) by using lenses or concave mirrors did not go over well -- in fact it generated a flood of invective from the purists. Hockney hotly denies that his theories represent any criticism of the heroes of western art; instead only an exploration of their methods. Personally, I don't care if Vermeer used a camera obscura, witchcraft, or black magic. The fact that he could paint like that is all that matters to me.

That said, going back to standing to the right of Girl With a Pearl Earring -- her left (near) eye and the earring are Leica-sharp, her right (far) eye is painted ever-so-slightly less sharp, and her left shoulder (much nearer the viewer) is painted less sharp. In fact, the information posted next to the painting notes that the shoulder is done with "looser" brush work. Looks like depth of field to me. Presume for a moment that Vermeer was using a camera obscura and noticed how pleasing that effect was. He was painting -- he could have chosen to paint every inch of the canvas Leica-sharp. (but I digress again)

There are only a handful of artworks that effect me as strongly as Girl With a Pearl Earring -- offhand: Gustave Caillibotte's Paris Street, Rainy Day, Marc Chagall's The Praying Jew, Lawrence Fink's Moses Soyer's Studio, Eugene Smith's Waiting for Survivors of the Andrea Doria, Willy Ronis' Rue Rambeteau and Nu Provence, Robert Doisneau's Lillies of the Valley -- but this may be the queen. For several days after seeing it this painting popped into my head every time my brain went into idle. I literally dreamed about it. I love it when this happens.

I would go a very long way to see something like that again.

I want to be like him when I grow up.

Yesterday we went to the Tacoma Art Museum to see "Beyond Books: the Independent Art of Eric Carle". Never heard of him? I'll bet you have. If you have children I know you have. So far he has authored or illustrated (usually both) over 70 children's picture books including the perennial favorite "The Very Hungry Caterpillar". TAM hosted a show of his book illustrations a few years ago and this companion exhibit shows the much wider scope of his work.

Mr. Carle was born in the U.S.A. in 1929 but his family moved back to Stuttgart, Germany when Eric was about six (bad timing). He endured ten years of "dismal" German schools, food shortages, and Allied bombing. As an aside, Stuttgart was the center of ball-bearing manufacture and the Nazis had buried the ball bearing factories deep under downtown Stuttgart. The allies correctly surmised that if they stopped production of ball bearings then the rest of the German arms manufacturing would literally grind to a stop so they went after the buried factories ruthlessly. When I visited Stuttgart in 1957 it was still mostly rubble.

After the war was over, Carle, whose talent had long been recognized, was appointed to the Stuttgart Academy of Art where he spent four years. His mentor there was so well regarded that clients came to him seeking his students for art projects. Carle's first commissions were for posters for theater productions and artwork for book covers. By age 23 he had "a pretty good portfolio and 40 dollars in my pocket" and decided to return to the U.S.A. In New York he quickly gained a reputation for book cover art and magazine illustration. His work for a children's book turned into a commission to do a picture book of his own -- and 70+ books later, he is still doing so.

Apart from his book illustrations, he does what he calls "Art-Art" -- work he does just because he wants to. Like his book illustrations, most Art-Art is paper collage using vibrantly colored, textured paper that he paints himself. His collages, even his seemingly simple, childlike book illustrations are carefully thought out and built using meticulously drawn acetate cells. He also does two- and three-color linocuts, huge brightly colored abstract paintings on Tyvek, and recently has taken up digital photography. He did a stage design and costumes for a production of Mozart's The Magic Flute. (The costumes were made from Tyvek also.)

At age 84, Carle looks a lot like somebody's kindly, hearty, vigorous grandfather. He has never made a distinction between his Art-Art and his commercial work. Both are important to him; both are genuine fun to him. Even painting the sheets of colored paper is fun to him. One of the videos accompanying the TAM exhibit shows him working with a group of children in the studio of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art (which he founded and partly financed) in Amherst, Massachusetts. It is very clear that working with children is fun for him, too. When he came to TAM for the show opening and book signing (Beyond Books: The Independent Art of Eric Carle, ISBN 978-1-59288-029-4, 2012) he asked that children coming to the signing bring art work of their own so he could talk to them about it.

When somebody asked Duke Ellington if he was going to retire, the response was: "Retire from what?" I suspect that would be Eric Carle's answer also. I want to be like him when I grow up.

Repainting the Word

I recently re-read “The Painted Word” – I do so every couple of years just to keep my perspectacles on straight.  (“The Painted Word”, Tom Wolfe, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1975, Bantam Books, 1976)

“Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory.  And given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial – the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify.”

This excerpt from a review in the Sunday New York Times of April 28, 1974 sparked the “aha!” that led Wolfe to write The Painted Word.  The very short time elapsed between the “aha!” and the publication by a major house (in fact, it was published in Harpers’ magazine a couple of months earlier) testifies both to the excitement that Wolfe felt about the subject and the chord that it must have struck with his publisher.

Wolfe states the major point of the book in the introduction.  In his not-at-all-humble opinion, art theory and criticism no longer play the role of “… establishing readable texts, in explaining obscurities and clearing up confusions in any art, in supplying background and context for the creations and creators that are difficult because of remoteness in time or place. ...of giving a jewel the setting it deserves.”  (Jacques Barzun writing in Atlantic, November 1984).  Wolfe states that art scholarship has raced ahead of the making of art to a degree that makes it necessary to establish theory (persuasive or otherwise) before the art will be taken seriously by the museums, collectors, and (especially) the critics – that the art exists to illustrate the text (thus the title of the book).

Wolfe spends the rest of the book explaining how this change has affected the art community.  He holds that it has moved the cutting edge of the art world from the studio into the hands of a relatively small number of critics and curators who play the role of kingmakers in today’s museum and gallery world.  Kingmakers who are constantly on the lookout for new movements, new faces with radical work and, especially, with passionately written artist’s statements about ways of seeing that are incomprehensible to the untutored eye.  The private collectors of art, he holds, have largely become followers of the kingmakers and the artists themselves forced, if they seek recognition, to strive for the unusual, the bizarre, the incomprehensible.

[Parenthetically, there is another artist’s approach to this situation.  The painter Od Nudrum has had at least two double page spreads in Art News in which he presents his manifesto.  He paints in the style of the Dutch/Flemish masters but uses the style to paint strangely anachronistic, not exactly surreal subjects.  In his manifesto, he appropriates the term “kitsch” and redefines it to mean what he does.  He then presents his case as to why this is the pure and vital form of painting.  He, in my opinion, is attempting to provide a persuasive theory to support what he is doing.  Perhaps he read Wolfe’s book, too.]

Wolfe then examines the course of modern art from the 20’s through minimalism to show how his ‘aha!’ explains at least some of the lurching about in the art world.  He ends with a cackle of glee that photo realistic paintings (a new wave at the time the book was published) was selling very well in spite of its lack of a persuasive theory and in spite of lofty disdain from the New York critics and curators.

I find this book compelling and much of his argument very convincing.  It also makes me feel a bit better about not being able to understand a great deal of what is written about art today.  Even if you do not agree with his sweeping generalizations (and they are sweeping, indeed) I believe that you will find food for thought.