- Women in Photography is half-blog, half-gallery. A new "solo exhibition" showcasing a female photographer opens each month. Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis and the site is curated by Amy Elkins and Cara Phillips. There are a lot of women doing thought-provoking photographic work, and these two have chosen some great images in the past few months the site has been in existence.
- I find that I Heart Photograph is a little hit or miss: sometimes I find a real gem, sometimes I fail to be inspired by this site that posts copious amounts of photographic finds. However, I keep the RSS feed on my radar just for those gems it unearths from time to time, such as
- Crashed Cars of Kuwait. This documentation of car wrecks in Kuwait is eerie, unsettling, and wholly engaging. I think all our eyes experience a magnetic tug toward mangled vehicles like this because it's so easy to imagine ourselves in the drivers' place, and that is the spirit in which this photographer documents the wrecks. He acknowledges there is a certain morbid insanity to it but treats the subject with enough reverence to make this a stunning body of work. In later images he ventures into night scenes, a realm near and dear to my heart.
- Friends' blogs are always in my feed, and I'm always up for a few tales from the entertainment world via Hungry Filmmaker, which has a little bit of everything: job stories, a touching video marriage proposal, tips on working with limited resources, film theory, and some interesting thoughts on copyright/intellectual property in the digital age. Oh, I admit it, I also read this because secretly I want to work with film but haven't been able to come up with a good enough idea quite yet. I live (and struggle) vicariously.
- Okay, so I haven't been keeping up with Strobist at all because I haven't been doing much off-camera lighting. BUT. I feel I need to bring this blog to light because it a.) is written by a Baltimore Sun photojournalist, b.) has an excellent community of active readers and c.) does a great job of teaching professional lighting on a budget. There is a huge wealth of tips for making highly effective lighting gear on the cheap, with a focus of lighting off-camera using groups of remotely triggered Speedlights. If I were a photo professor, I would list this site as a required text.
I'm currently out of town at a conference, so the weekly post may be somewhat delayed due to scarcity of free internet access at our fancy hotel. If nothing else, I'll upload this week's post when I return home at the end of the week.
Though it's been difficult lately, I'm interested in keeping my heart in this self-help book, this time, because it seems to speak to my particular situation in a way no other has come close to doing.
For one, It's Hard to Make a Difference tries to debunk the myth that creative people, including visual artists, are inherently disorganized, their chaos somehow feeding their inspiration. This is a familiar image. The professors and visual artists I respected most in college existed in tiny basement offices, surrounded by dusty stacks of books, desks piled high with papers, old rickety shelves and file cabinets, student work mixed with their own and balanced upon any spare real estate they could find. Many of the most powerful role models in my professional life suffer from overwork and lack of order in their workspace, a plague that only serves to perpetuate the idea that visionary, influential people necessarily exist in a whirlwind of chaos.
For those of us who find this claustrophobic and stiling in their own space, there is hope. Organization does not always equal unoriginal, uninspired. For the first time, I am connecting leisure time and creative work with organization and neatness. All this time, I have blamed my busy schedule for my lack of initiative. As it turns out the problem is, as with so many things, that I cannot get my life in order.
After tallying up the financial, emotional, professional, and creative (new addition duly noted) toll of my inability to reign in my mental disarray, I'm ready to commit to change. It takes me months to deposit checks to my bank account, and I've misplaced them completely more than once. For someone earning 105% of the poverty line, this raises a big red flag. I feel I will never attain true direction or productivity in my creative work until I get organized. Every day I feel tormented by clutter, projects unfinished, plans never realized, and it keeps me from indulging in meaningful projects outside of my job.
Little by little, I am trying and working and making slow progress. I really want this to be the "once and for all" that begins a change in course. There have been many "once and for all" turning points, though, so I need to keep my optimism in check and remember to be a little hard on myself, knowing good intentions have never gotten me anywhere in terms of my disorder.
I will write on another topic next week, but expect this to be a subject revisited in coming Words + Images posts as I explore the relationship between creativity and disarray. Also, I am interested to know: do you feel a sense of chaos in your daily affairs and your workspace? How does this affect your capacity to reach your creative potential? Feel free to visit the comments section of this page to let me know what you think.
Frustrating days happen.
On this particular evening, I made a positive decision to quit stalking angrily around the house and walk to the library. Walking has always calmed me, mellowing my mood with each footstep I seal against the pavement. No matter what, a solid walk always injects a certain feeling of openness into my chest, drawing my breath toward the sky.
I've always loved to lose myself in the library, hiding away in a corner and running my hand over the uneven rows and columns of spines, delighting in the unlikely juxtaposition of subject matter in the nonfiction section: knitting, wine, bathroom remodeling, crafty handbags. Somewhere in this odd commingling of volumes my fingertips come to rest upon a book titled It's Hard to Make a Difference When You Can't Find Your Keys.
This title describes me in such an essential way I have to pick it up. It is full of language-based exercises such as making lists, thinking of life in terms of straightforward descriptions. I figure it's worth a try since I'm certainly not going to complete the series of visualization exercises in 4 Weeks to an Organized Life.
While I'm in the library my husband calls to ask what sort of soda he should buy at the store: root beer, cream soda, or berry lemonade. I debate sending a text message from the lobby after I've checked out this new book along with a copy of Stitch and Bitch, but think better of it. He can figure it out. I still need to walk.
My brisk yet meandering journey leads me down Union Avenue, past Formstone and brick and cedar shingle houses. The city possesses a nourishing beauty I can see and hear and breathe as my feet put square after square of sidewalk behind me. When I walk alone I see through the lens of Writer and Photographer, my mind constantly cataloging snippets of images, words, phrases. Rough, weathered brick; crumbling stone surrounding an archway of rusted steel; a clamoring bell urging railroad gates to lower into place as the Light Rail slides into the station; Dick Cheney's face in blue stencil on the sidewalk under the JFX; the cool, dark underside of the expressway contrasting the cars speeding along hot asphalt overhead.
Suddenly there is a young hipster girl in front of me carrying a green bike with one tire removed. The bike is carelessly draped across her back and she is walking briskly, her t-shirt soaked through with sweat. I tuck this away in my memory, too: her damp, almost-black curls barely held in check by her headband; her determined stride, powered by lean muscles concealed beneath the soft, milky skin of her thighs; the careless ease with which she carries the bike frame on her petite body.
Hipster Girl is still walking, starting up the hill toward Druid Hill Park when I turn toward home. I wonder where she is going with that half-dismantled bike, whether she is a figment of my imagination. Eventually I come up out of the valley and resurface on our street, my shirt damp from sweat, my feet passing under familiar sycamores.
I love where I work, but I wasn't altogether sold on the position I stood to apply for. While it would have given me a chance to prove myself and exceed my own expectations (as if, my expectations always stay one step ahead of me), it might not have been the ideal job for me.
So, where does that leave me?
It's sort of liberating to have that choice off my mind with no effort on my part, but now I must put out my feelers and eventually settle on a job. Yesterday I applied for perhaps the most exciting one, a position with Teach for America developing video and multimedia online learning opportunities for teachers. I love TFA and I love video, despite the fact that I'm slightly underqualified.
Most interesting is how I played up both my non-profit experience (with a focus on urban public education) and my fine arts background in my resume. Somehow, I found a position that utilizes the past several years of my life experience. For that reason I've become sort of partial to this job, and may actually be pretty disappointed if I don't get it. We'll see, and in the meantime there's nothing to do but keep looking.
Baltimore has a fun, active, and diverse indie craft scene. One of my coworkers, Christy Zuccarini, recently landed a gig with the Baltimore Sun writing the Baltimore By Hand blog. So far it has been extremely aesthetically pleasing in addition to being a great read. Plus, knowing another Baltimorean who blogs about art makes me feel part of a scene -- you should check out Christy's blog at http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/crafts/.
Nothing like a relaxing weekend at the beach, enjoying the company of six people crammed into a two-bedroom bungalow. Oh, and some ambitious photography projects on the side.
Predictably, I was somewhat disappointed in myself when I returned home with no pictures, but I'm left to wonder: do I beat up on myself too much? Like in every other aspect of my life, do my high standards hinder me more than they help?
In college, I had a professor who firmly believed visual art -- and painting in particular -- should be our whole lives. Unless we walked/ate/slept/dreamed painting, we could not call ourselves true artists. This mentality dealt the final blow to my enthusiasm for a visual arts degree in large part because I gave up on some big dreams earlier in life because I couldn't bear the thought of that fierce intellectual monogamy. Now someone was trying to force it on me, something I just couldn't swallow.
The bottom line is photography will never be my whole life. Nor will writing or music or sewing curtains for the spare bedroom. Sometimes a walk on the Atlantic City boardwalk is just that, a walk on the boardwalk. No analysis, no careful and particular observation, no being left behind because no one wanted to wait for me to create the perfect shot. There will be weekends for that. I can plan a whole series of work around the Jersey Shore, allot entire weekends to my images.
Maybe it's also okay for me to come home from a weekend at the beach with no photography to show for it. Maybe, for this weekend, I was defined by my place in my family as opposed to my place behind the camera. While I sometimes envy people whose cameras are a permanent part of them, even they go through dry spells. I'll never be shooting constantly, but I hit a pretty good rhythm with consistency. Some days other pursuits just take precedence, and that's an important part of how I live and work.
This isn't something I should feel guilty about. I am not a single-minded person with a perfectly crystallized identity and direction to my life. I am a grazer who wanders through and past just about everything. I used to beat myself up over this part of myself, but I've come to know its unique pleasures and advantages as well.
Even if to the outside world it looks like I'll never get my act together.
Sort of disenfranchised by the "art world" and sick of feeling like New York City was the center of everything that mattered, I struggled in my last semester of undergrad to figure out what "career" really meant to me. I knew one thing: it didn't mean money and corporate success, though I know I could succeed in that sense if I had the inclination. So I signed on for a year of AmeriCorps*VISTA (think domestic Peace Corps) and found a niche in a quirky but awesome non-profit here in Baltimore.
I made a choice. Plenty of my former colleagues are probably sucking up to galleries trying to get representation, and I know a few have found very well-deserved success. But I made another choice and created a different identity for myself. Now I have a choice again. My VISTA year is ending, and as of August 15 I am no longer property of the U.S. Government.
What will I do? I have a choice to stay in the vein of urban public education, stay in the vein of urban youth, stay in non-profits, or start over entirely. This process of reinventing myself every year or two has to stop. For one, I have a lot of trouble concentrating on the "fun" side of life when all I have done for the past six years is change concentrations, schools, jobs, and towns. By signing on for a year-long contract position, I've forced myself to make another choice and another change.
Though my diploma calls me an artist, I could be happy at any job and do well almost anywhere I landed. The question is, how many of those jobs really matter? Last night as I was falling asleep I thought of all the children I have gotten to know in Baltimore this year and wondered where they were sleeping, what their houses were like. I wondered how, having done so much, I can just walk away, another college-educated white person who has done a year's time in the inner city trying to make the world a better place. That's not me. Personally, if I believe in something I want it to be a way of life. I can't walk away from all those children to work in the coat room at the BMA, or even to be an office manager at Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts. Can I?
Again I'm at this crossroads with my career, wondering which identify I want to run with this time: the visual artist; the nerdy kid who loved physics, calculus, and psychology (though not necessarily in that order); the writer; the Habitat for Humanity volunteer; the underpaid non-profit employee who worked overtime with a team to put in $250,000 in grant proposals last week; or the woman who worked tirelessly in a public school in Baltimore for the past year. Somewhere, sometime in the next few weeks, I'll find it.
Digital photography is here to stay. There are those of us who fought the dominance of cassettes over CDs, email over snail mail, and even questioned the necessity of high-speed internet when dial-up started to become obsolete. Once an advance in technology comes down the line, it is impossible to roll it back, for better or worse. Throughout history there are plenty of occasions when our ingenuity has led us down a not-so-nice road, but there is no “un-discovery,” only a need to consider carefully what we have made.
In a given body of work, the choice between film and digital can have a profound effect on the content and meaning of the photographs, a fact that often seems overlooked in the ideological debate of old versus new. We need to make the choice consciously and intelligently, the same way we choose a film speed to attain a specific look and feel to our images.
This intelligent choice forms the crux of my view on the matter and brings out a critical issue presented by cheap digital technology. The digital camera revolution, with more than a little help from the internet, has brought photography to the masses like never before.
The difference between consumer film cameras and professional photographic ones has usually been clear. The Pentax 35mm point and shoot that carried me through middle and high school took snapshots. My finished film and prints came from the one-hour photo and I placed them into fuzzy, leopard-print albums for safekeeping. The big SLR had many more moving parts and I developed those prints myself. At that point I was taking photographs.
Cheap consumer digital cameras have opened the floodgates for free, unlimited high-resolution pictures. Even digital SLRs are now within everyone’s reach. When I was in Europe, the vast majority of American tourists I saw had dSLRs. However, I doubt many of them were utilizing the full potential of their equipment simply because they were using them as glorified point and shoots, setting the camera on full auto and snapping away.
The key here is conscious choice. If I photograph the ruins of Bethlehem steel with really fast, really grainy black and white film, I alter the content of that work when I go back and shoot the scene at ISO 100. Likewise, digital photographs provide a different process and a different feel. The fact that black and white prints are made by hand and digital prints are computer- and machine-generated is significant.
Digital photography as a professional tool presents us with some responsibility. Knowing and experiencing both processes is essential to developing a full mastery of the medium. Choosing one over the other should be something every photographer can explain. When using a digital SLR, I find it necessary to use all manual controls to achieve the image I want. This is important.
Creating truly great photographs should still require us to stop and consider the scene, adjust the aperture, shutter speed, and focus, and carefully frame the shot. We should still look at the light meter. Photography hasn’t changed that much. It is still about a lot of exploration and intelligent choices with some happy accidents mixed in, all of which should be made by our own hand. Digital has a lot of tempting shortcuts, but we must learn all the techniques of the medium if we want to mature as image-makers. Otherwise we are just taking very pretty snapshots.
Note: Now that wedding, honeymoon, and moving have all been successfully completed, Words + Images will once again be updated weekly.
Somehow, despite a heat wave and a house full of boxes waiting to be unpacked, I managed to get to the BMA on the last day of Looking Through the Lens, an exhibition of iconic photography from 1900-1960.
A few local bloggers have already reviewed the show, which spanned four large rooms and certainly showcased the breadth of the BMA's photography collection if not their curatorial distinction. However, on the day of my visit I didn't examine the overall energy of the show, nor did I take particular interest in how the pieces communicated with each other on the walls. Blessed with only a few hours to spend with the work, I devoured the work piece by piece, notebook in hand, taking in as many images as I could before the exhibition closed.
It had been about a year since my last opportunity to enjoy art alone in a gallery setting like this. When I haven't been looking at work that interests me on a regular basis, I forget so easily the wealth of ideas and inspiration it can bring.
I won't discuss all my notes at once, but I do want to talk briefly this evening about the artist's hand. Art observers will most commonly refer to “seeing the artist's hand” in a piece of art actually made by hand. A painting or a sculpture, for example, can retain brush strokes or chisel marks to remind the viewer of the hands that created it. When we look at photographs, we likely judge them based on more scientific properties: depth of field, tonal range, composition, subject, or content. In my own work, seeing the process, the evidence of the artist's hand in a photograph, often distracts from true enjoyment of the piece.
The Raoul Ubac montage in Looking Through the Lens fascinated me, perhaps for this reason. The untitled piece featured an interesting study of a woman's face and a glass bottle. Though it looked very clean from afar, that illusion faded when I approached it for further inspection. Along the edges of the photos I saw dents and uneven cuts where the x-acto knife had wandered slightly. I saw where the man had cut the photographs with a tool.
This sight brought to mind my own late nights in the darkroom as an undergrad, utility knife in hand, working at a table cross-hatched with decades of stray x-acto marks. Though I don't always display it in the final project, I can't deny the tactile nature of traditional photo processes. Looking at work that retained some of that hands-on experience placed me squarely in the studio with the photographer, and the surreal imagery brought to mind the fragmented, incomplete images of my own thoughts. I could write a paper on traditional vs. modern photo practices, but for now I will just say I am unsure whether I would have had such a well-rounded experience with the photos had the piece been done in Photoshop.
The photo book by Charles Norman Sladen really stole the show for me, though. I scribbled down notes and gleaned a lot of ideas from the all the big names at the show, but Sladen's book Great Chebeague Island, Maine really took my breath away.
Surprisingly, we know very little about Sladen, save for the fact that he chronicled his family's travels to Great Chebeague Island in these unique and very striking photo books. Sladen pasted five or so pictures, generously spaced, onto the page and extended/embellished them with extremely intricate and talented ink drawings. The photos become only the starting point for a larger scene and Sladen weaves them together like an elaborate dream, all five connected by ink on the page.
Sadly, I have been unable to find images of Sladen's work online, and most references I found were responding to the BMA show. I would love to find a reproduction of the book I saw, but doubt such a thing exists.
I'm sure Looking Through the Lens will come up again in Words + Images. The argument can certainly be made that it lacked cohesion and focus, but the broad sampling of styles, content, and ideas also provided fertile ground for the mind to wander.
Until next week...
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