Book Project

I have finaly taken the step to get a book project of the ground. I have wanted to do a coffee table photobook for years and now it is finally happening. I am currently working on the first draft. There is an enourmous amount of proofing, cutting and selecting to do. From wittling the hundreds of potential photos down to the best of the best to pruducing the text to colour proofing etc. And I am hoping to hit the local shefves before Christmas

Rememberance Day

It is time to remember again. The low gray overcast skies, the early November rains and the beginning of the darkness of winter are all pointers to the nearing of the day where people everywhere gather in front of cenotaphs, memorials and museums to remember. We remember the sacrifice that previous generations had to make to give us the freedoms we often take for granted.

I recently bought a second hand book of Photographs of World War 2 at our annual library sale here on Bowen Island. This is by no means the first war to be photographed. None the less, it is compelling to view these haunting images from the past of young men and women in the most destructive of all wars in human history.

I think most people have seen images from WW2. It has become part of a collective memory that resides in our sub-conscious. We have a mental image of that time which is based on no single photograph, but a blend of them all.

If I think of what images defines WW2 for me, it would be the contrast between the photos of destroyed towns and abandoned concentration camps filled with emaciated souls, taken by Allied photographers like Elizabeth Miller and Sam Gilbert, and the propaganda images of Hitler and the Nazi's taken by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the will and Olympia. The difference between fanatic idealism and the harsh realities it left in its wake.

May the images made by those brave photographers remain in our minds. Let us never forget.

The music of Ansel Adams

Many people don't realize that Ansel Adams started his life aiming to be a concert pianist and was gradually drawn away into photography driven by his passion for Yosemite valley.

The image above is the famous photograph of the Halfdome in Yosemite that marked a major turning point is his development as a photographer. He had spent the day climbing and taking pictures with his friends, it was close to the end of the day and he had only one glass plate left. With the convenience of our current technology it is easy to forget that men like Adams had to use large format camera with prepared glass plates to make their images. It was tiring and gruelling work to carry the large camera, heavy wooden tripod and the glass plates, especially if the photographer was climbing a mountain.

So he had only the one plate left and it was the end of the day and he had spent the day climbing with his gear. One can imagine that he was probably tired and ready to wrap things up. Up until this moment he had been struggling to make photographs that he felt lived up to the grandeur and beauty of the Yosemite. It suddenly occurred to him that he could really darken the sky if he placed a deep red filter over the lens. He exposed the glass plate and the result was this amazing image with the sky almost black and the massive rock face looming overhead. For the first time he had captured the sense of the imposing size and overwhelming presence of the Halfdome. It was the break through he had been looking for.

It is easy to assume that Ansel simply printed his Photograph from the negative and that he got it all exactly the way he wanted on the glass plate. But nothing is further from the truth. Ansel likened the process of making photos to his background in music. He often said that the negative is like the music score and in a symphony and that the development of the image in the dark room is the performance. People who witnessed the process said that it was like watching somebody doing a dance as he moved around in the darkroom in front of the enlarger dodging and burning the print. It would often take him a whole day of solid work before he found the right performance of the negative and was satisfied with a print.

Ansel spent a lot of time working at extracting from the negative what his mind's eye had seen when he exposed the glass.

Documentary versus Conceptual Photo art.

There seem to be a general division applied to photographic artists, you are either in the documentary or in the conceptual tradition. Generally speaking, documentary photographers are concerned with accurate and true representations of reality as they find it without modifications and embellishments. Conceptual photographers generally pre-visualize a concept which expressed in a photographic image that could be abstract, staged or heavily modified sometimes to the extent that the image is assembled from elements that does not even exist in reality. Now if I can narrow the discourse a little bit, in terms of art photography of landscapes, photographers like Ansel Adams (his famous image of the Tetons shown below) and other modern landscape artists of the kind that get published in the National Geographic are generally lumped with the documentary camp. It has a tradition that stretch back to the Photo Secession of Alfred Stieglitz.

Artists like Anne Brigham and Jeff Wall (An octopus and some beans shown below) are in the conceptual artist camp. The tradition of conceptual photography really stretch back to the beginning of the medium in the successful struggle to gain recognition as a valid artist medium. It has really come into its own in the Post- Modern era and the fast majority of Art photographers who break into the big leagues today are conceptual artists. This is no accident, the whole art world is currently dominated by conceptual art.

The sad fact is that with the rise of conceptual art there has been growing a parallel disconnect with people who do not become to the artistic elite. The average person who views a piece of conceptual art is left, at best, feeling disconnected and unmoved by it, and often feeling that it is trivial junk that anybody could have done. Within the art community this is viewed as a barbaric perspective which speaks of a lack of culture and education and that if people would just educate themselves more they would see how profound it all is.

To me this is one of the saddest things that has happened in the art world. The self conscious superior artist who disdains the public they are dependant on and the public who has all but given up on art as anything useful to society. I recently had a member of one of the most famous Architectural firms in Vancouver tell me that he is yet to meet anyone in the general public who likes the buildings they design, and this is in spite of the fact that their reception is filled with Governor General medals and other honours. It is simply tragic for both sides.

I am hoping to move away from purely conceptual work and in my art create images of beauty that speaks to people in a direct way while giving the serious art aficionado something to chew on as well. Essentially, although my landscape work looks a lot like documentary work and I find much in the documentary tradition that appeals to me, it is more than an attempt to portray the world as it is. I am far to aware of my own subjective perspective to seriously believe in my own ability to objective portray anything. My work is therefore a conscious attempt to capture the emotional impression and the Genius Loci or spirit of the place that I find myself in. In this sense I have more in common with the conceptual tradition.