A Painting Journal

Aurorae, acrylic on paper, 2012

A painting journal

Trying something semi-new. Keeping a journal as I paint. Writing down thoughts in the pauses between painting during a session. Just as a record of the creative process.

Listening to music, while I paint, on random shuffle on iTunes on my laptop. Keep in mind that on my studio computer, my iTunes library can now play for over 190 days continuously, with no repeats. All kinds of music, truly random.

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Thursday, November 8
4:16 PM

Feel like painting today. There is sunlight streaming in for the first time in weeks. There’s one painting that I want to finish, now.

Don't be afraid to paint over something you liked before, but which didn't work for this painting. I am finding myself wanting to finish one of the “Lights” (Aurora Borealis) series of paintings today, after having it set aside for weeks. I have the iTunes music library on shuffle, listening to random pieces while painting. All over the avant-classical pop rock map. Copland to Patsy Cline to books on CD to Kate Bush.

Several layers of dry rush blue night sky, over existing backgrounds. Then the luminosity of the aurorae themselves. Lots of edge softenings, nuances, translucencies.

Even though I started this painting with bold geometric shapes, I've moved away towards something more fractal, more natural. Follow the brush. Bold and solid under layers yield to thinner, translucent, feathered upper layers. It looks better that way.

Because of the way I'm painting right now, or because of the abstract-realist subject matter, I find myself using large flat brushes. Angled strokes, really rather calligraphic. Sometimes the brushtrokes form lines and surfaces like geographic texture underneath the more visible layers.

Peter Gabriel to science fiction soundtrack creepiness. “He's got a ray gun!” Melodic punk Bob Mould. Zen shakuhachi.

The painting darkens but the lights still shine through.

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Thursday, November 8
4:46 PM

The next layers will lighten the painting up again. Let the dark over-layers dry for awhile. Then continue. Often I don't let the acrylics totally dry, because I do like the slight mixing that happens when you dry brush paint over a still slightly wet layer. The same kind of mixing that happens in nature, layers of sedimentary rock feathering and mixing together as they form, bleeding color from minerals leaching into the matrix.

Continuing to photograph each painting in progress, with the idea of using these closeups and sectional photos of color and brushstroke as painted stock backgrounds. Might even create and sell CDs of original stock on my own, of these my own materials. Why not? No one else has them, because no one else has these paintings in progress.

Photographing the painting in progress is also a way of looking at it, contemplating it, looking more closely.

Quick sunset of oncoming winter. There goes the last of the natural light. Even in the failing light, though, continuing to paint, kitchen lights turned on now.

Sometimes the texture of the paper still comes through, as do the lines of brushstrokes on lower layers.

Of course lighting affects mood. Color does as well. Despite what the neuroscientists claim, I don't think that's hardwired, I think it still has some culturally-bound factors. A lot of neuroscientists are not even aware that their own fundamental assumptions about what they observe are culturally-bound; unaware that their cultural bias is Western-scientific; as opposed to, for example, Inuit-mythic or Hindu-Buddhist-cosmological. Is a fish aware that it’s breathing water?

Color palette and language are not the same from culture to culture. What is held in common are the perceived colors of natural world objects. Red berries on forest plants around the world are poisonous often enough to humans to be of note. But there is no equivalent color in the northern Midwest to the color of young rice in the paddies, that unique yellow-green. So what we associate with those colors has at minimum some cultural input and conditioning with regards to how we interpret colors as emotions.

Yet I’m a North American, born on Turtle Island, and my roots for this kind of painting that I find myself doing are in Kandinsky and other branches of early Modernism, from the period before Modernism went ultra-rational, began to worship logical-positivism, and threw away all of its early vestiges of both irrationality and mysticism.

People forget that some of the key branches of early Modernism were deep explorations of the newly-theorized unconscious self, the realm of dreams and myths and archetypes; that got discarded in favor of rational utilitarianism. Not always an equal tradeoff. What the expressive color, the color of expression, in my painting means might mean what it means only to me, but as Kandinsky notes, if the experience of viewing the painting evokes an emotional, or mythopoetic, response in the viewer, all is good.

Laurie Anderson runs into Coldplay. Then 40s pop hits. A favorite slow movement from a Vivaldi cello concerto. Truly random music choices. The BBC Radio drama of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Rest awhile. Make some more photos of the painting. Think about starting dinner.

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Thursday, November 8
5:16 PM

I'm not remotely tired of photographing these paintings as I make them. It's not really about recording the process, more about watching change. Each working period yields a new painting. The painting you start with is not always like the painting you end with, and it might change several times during the process. Eventually it tells you when it's done, and you stop.

That's something a lot of my non-artist friends never seem to understand: listening to what the work tells you it wants. Non-artists all too often think art-making is all a conscious act of will, as though it were all planned out, pre-designed, engineered to the artist’s willful blueprint. Well, sometimes you do start out that way, but it almost never ends up exactly as you pre-visualized. It moves. It always has a will of its own. The artist doesn't control things as much as people think. There's a lot of intuition involved.

One of the things that makes a lot of current postmodern art so dry and emotionally flat, and often frankly boring, is precisely a lack of intuition, with too much conscious intent and control. Trust me, I've worked in advertising art and commercial design and illustration, where you are in fact working to a goal, an outline, a conscious intent. Art with a purpose, art intended to pass on a specific message. It's often still creative and fun, and sometimes even nuances, but it's not art that’s meant to endure. It’s meant to be seen once, clearly convey its message, then the reader moves on. Most art you see in magazines is like that. You don't desire to keep coming back to it, to look at it again and absorb it.

When I look at a Jeff Koons piece, for example, it's often very clever and flashy and interesting, really eye-catching and fun. But once I've seen it, I’m done with it. There’s no lingering. Looking at it a second time, I shrug. There is no desire to come back. It's commercial illustration writ large, and what it lacks is precisely that emotional intuition (Kandinsky again) that I find myself seeking from my own paintings. I don't tire of looking at them, or making photos of them.

Probably most artists feel this way about their own work, so it's hardly a revelation, I imagine. If it didn’t interest you as an artist, you wouldn’t return to it, or to doing it.

October Project. A movie soundtrack. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Cowpunk ditties. "I hate to wake up sober in Nebraska." Music rolling on.

Pause to make dinner. Ravel solo piano music.

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Friday, November 9
11:45 AM

Now we lighten up the colors again, so they emerge from the dark, glowing. Red glows over green.

Thinking ahead, planning ahead, envisioning in advance with the mind’s eye, what photographer Edward Weston called “pre-visualization,” is something I learned to do years ago as a graphic designer. You keep the goal in mind. You can hit the mental undo button to go back a step if necessary. You visualize what the end result will look like, and you approach that visualization even if you never quite match it in the real world. Imagination remains more malleable, in the end.

Working in layers on a painting, adding layers over layers, is for me analogous to working in layers in Photoshop. You know what's above and below, what masks and what shows through, how they interact. There is a similar sense of happy accident, the indeterminacy I often like to see in all the art I do. Being surprised as the artist is one of the things I love about the process. Discovery. The mystery of an unplanned but even better outcome.

Thinking about this further, layers are natural to me because they are prominent in my music, and the music I play and listen to. All those years spent playing Javanese gamelan, which is layered cycles of melody and heterophony. The influence of the Indonesian music I've studied and played on how I play in a jazz or rock combo setting, in which I also tend to think in layers. Avant-garde classical music and jazz, often structured similarly. I'm thinking of Steve Reich's cyclic gradual process music, and also more recently of Nik Bartsch and his ensemble Ronin, in which the tension between layers of melody and rhythmic cycles is integral to the music.

The underlayers of the painting show through in parts, in textures underneath, even when the pigments are covered over or mostly so. Remnants. Memories. Little bits of the past. Every painting is a history as well as a fact.

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Saturday, November 10
12:34 PM

Recently acquired the special edition DVD of Ed Harris' movie "Pollock," which is an excellent biopic about the artist Jackson Pollock, unsentimental and deeply moving. It’s not a psychoanalysis of Pollock, it’s a presentation of his life. The most interesting and intense parts of the movie are the scenes in which we see the artist at work, creating. To do this role, Harris learned how to paint. He built a studio behind his house, and began to learn. The paintings seen in the film are re-creations of Pollocks, made by the film studio art department, but also worked on by Harris on camera. This is one of the most realistic depictions of a painter in the films: there’s no faking it.

Watching Harris paint as Pollock painted, in character but also DOING the paintings is enthralling. You can see that the actor has absorbed how the painter moved, physically, which gives a strong clue to how he painted. This is a simply terrific film. It inspires me to take up the brushes again today and work some more.

Painting is becoming something that, once I've started doing it, becomes self-sustaining. I still have trouble with all the labels around art: painter, artist, etc. I'd rather than just do it than have a label I have to wear like a name badge. So I still don't think of myself as A Painter, I just paint. I’m happy to say I paint, and leave it at that.

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Monday, November 12
2:07 PM

This painting is now finished. No title yet, though I do know it’s part of the aurora borealis series. Call it simply “Aurorae” for now. I’ll put it up on the bedroom wall with the other painting, and continue to grow the cluster of paintings there, adding color to my room’s most empty wallspace.

Finished. Rather, I don't know what else to do with it. The end result is a bit darker than I had envisioned, nonetheless it's saturated with rich color. There are a lot of details here I like. Brushstrokes like waves of light and air.

Poet Paul Valery once opined, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." I feel some of that now. This painting is abandoned. I feel the need to go on, to work on other paintings. To do something new and unknown. To improvise.

In painting as in poetry, there comes a point after which more revision won't fix anything, and often makes things worse. I once was boggled to hear that a poet was teaching her writing workshop students that she sometimes revised a poem sixty times. I frankly find that either unbelievable or pathetic. If it takes that long to "fix" a piece of art, chances are you never will. Either it has defeated you already, or you've gotten stuck.

I don't feel that way about this painting, it just feels done. Abandoned, maybe, or perhaps it’s just telling me that it’s done. I don't know what else to do with it. I'm satisfied. I'm ready to move on to the next piece.

High Surf at Point Lobos

images from Point Lobos, CA, February 2010



Point Lobos! I saw it with different eyes yesterday than those of nearly fifteen years ago. And I worked, how I worked! And I have results! And I shall go again—and again! I did not attempt the rocks, nor any general vista: I did do the cypress! Poor abused cypress,—photographed in all their picturesqueness by tourists, "pictorialists," etched, painted, and generally vilified by every self-labeled "artist." But no one has done them—to my knowledge—as I have, and will. Details, fragments of the trunk, the roots,—dazzling records, technically superb, intensely visioned.
—Edward Weston, The Daybooks of Edward Weston, II. California, entry from March 1929



One cannot make photographs at Point Lobos without thinking of Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and the many other photographers who have worked there. It's an amazing place, as beautiful as you've seen in the classic photographs by the masters. Very few pictorial destinations live up to their reputations; this is one of those that do, along with the Grand Canyon, the Tetons, and a few others.



After the Robinson Jeffers Association annual conference, I spent another day in the Monterey area, at Point Lobos in the morning, then meeting up with a friend to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium for the afternoon, then a fine meal at Fishwife's in Seaside. It was a good day, a sunny and warm day, at the end of which I drove up the coast towards Half Moon Bay, where I spent the night. I also visited one of my favorite places, Pescadero State Park, the next day. The whole purpose of this roadtrip, other than the Jeffers conference, was to by on holiday, and make lots of photos. It's like being on a working vacation, but it's recharging and refreshing because you're doing work you love.



This morning at Point Lobos the surf was very high, from the storms that had been passing through the region. A clear blue sky in the morning, with dramatic seas. The Point was very crowded, as it was a holiday, so my photographic opportunities were somewhat constrained. This was my first visit to Point Lobos, but you can be assured that I will be visiting there again. Next time I pass through the area, I will most definitely spend a lot more time there.



There were a lot of other photographers out that day, engaged with the powerful surf. Some pros, a lot of families out visiting the ocean for the day. But it doesn't matter how many photos have been made at Point Lobos; it's an enchanting and beautiful place, and will provide beauty and splendor endlessly to all who come to visit. And no photographers ever make the same images, even standing side by side.

Edward Weston: Philosophy of Photography

In reading Edward Weston's writings, I am often struck by his concision. He's articulate, but he doesn't write more than he needs to. His Daybooks were his journal, his daily morning writing, during the decades of his formation and key discoveries as a photographer. They record his thoughts and feelings during the process of becoming who we now think of as one of the great photographer of its founding years, greatly influential, and a founding member of the pro-realistic and anti-"painterly" collective of West Coast photographer known as Group ƒ64. (I wrote about the Group ƒ64 manifesto earlier, here). Weston was always an individualist, even a maverick, and this is a theme that recurs throughout the Daybooks, intertwined with all his comments on his love affairs, his family relationships, and friendships. The Daybooks were a diary, after all. Weston himself redacted the books himself, later in life, wanting to protect the privacy of many lovers and friends he had written about; unsuccessfully, in the long run, as it's not hard to fill in the blanks in many instances, as his writing is so vivid and detailed, and so expertly captures the person both with physical description and observations of their character.


the Weston family

Weston's writings about photography are usually terse. They are in fact compressed and gathered, usually, from previous fragments and jottings. He manages to write clearly, in just a few paragraphs, a complete statement of his philosophy about photography. In reading through Volume II of the Daybooks, which covers his California years after his return from Mexico, I find the years 1931 and 1932 to be particularly fertile for Weston gathering together his thoughts on photography. He copies into his diary several statements he wrote, as letters or other replies to critics, and statements written for exhibitions. This was when things began to turn for his career, as well: fewer daily worries about money, more freedom to do what he wanted rather than what paid the bills.


Edward Weston, Pepper No. 30, 1930

It intrigues me that Weston writes about sculpture, with regard to photography. In February if 1932, he copies into his Daybooks part of a letter he wrote to Ansel Adams, who had written an article about Weston's San Francisco show. What I find intriguing here is that I have recently been experimenting with making sculptures in wood, and had been thinking about Brancusci, Moore, and Noguchi. In part, Weston is defending his oft-misunderstood photos of peppers, and other vegetables, which were sculptural, abstract, and incredibly sensual—many viewers interpreted them overly sexually, since Freudian thinking was the vogue at the time. Weston writes:

No sculptor can be wholly abstract. We cannot imagine forms not already existing in nature,—we know nothing else. Take the extreme abstractions of Brancusi: they are all absed on natural forms, I have been accused of imitating his work,—and I do admire, and may have been "inspired" by it,—which means I have the same kind of (innner) eye, otherwise Rodin might have influenced me. Actually, I have proved through photography, that nature has all the abstract (simplified) forms, that Brancusi or any other artist could imagine. With my camera I go direct to Brancusi's source. I find ready to use,—select and isolate, what he has to "create." One might as well say that Brancusi imitates nature, as to accuse me of imitating Brancusi;—just because I found these forms firsthand in nature.

I have on occasion used the expression, "to make a pepper more than a pepper." I now realize it is a misleading phrase. I did not mean "different" from a pepper, but a pepper plus,—an intensification of its own important form and texture,—a revelation. . . .

An idea, just as abstract as could be conceived by a sculptor or painter, can be expressed through "objective" recording with the camera, because nature has everything that can possibly be imagined by the artist: and the camera, controlled by wisdom, goes beyond statistics.
—Edward Weston, Daybooks, II: California, pp. 239-240

I'm going to pause here to take a sideways turn into Brancusi's own photography. I have a book in my library from 1977, called Brancusi, photographer. It is a hundred or so photographs by Brancusi of his own sculptures, both in the studio, and in situ. Some of the more interesting photos show the sculptures installed in place, with the sky in the background, or sunlight falling directly on the work through a gallery window. Brancusi, I think, would have agreed with Weston. His photographs are very thought-out, very aware of what is being seen, and designed to reveal, to make things more intensely real. They are more than snapshots, they are more than documentation: his openly-stated intent was to see the sculptures anew, in the best possible light. He took up photography, helped initially by Man Ray, precisely because he was dissatisfied with the ways other photographers had been making images of his sculptures. What we get, with this book of his photos, is a very Weston-like fresh look at the familiar: things known and familiar, seen as though they had never been seen before.

To return to Weston's letter to Adams, a few paragraphs later:

Let the photographers who are taking new or different paths beware of the very theories through which they advance, lest they accept them as final. Let the eyes work from the inside out,—do not imitate "photographic painting" by limiting yourself to statistics in a worthy desire to be "photographic!" ("photographic painting" is being used by Rexroth in an article about me, showing the expression to be a misnomer).
—Weston, ibid., p. 240

Weston's contribution was to see what was there, the thing in itself, no matter what his subject matter was. Weston was often criticized for not sticking to one idea, or theory, or subject matter, but constantly evolving and changing. Weston's work, like Picasso's, has "periods," in which the subject matter and style of photographic dramatically change from period to period. The Daybooks were written in the period when Weston was discovering utter sharpness of focus within infinite depth of field: a reaction, with other West Coast photographers, against the "pictorialist" style of photography that had first become famous on the East Coast. Weston wanted to see what he was looking at, not create duplications of the themes and arrangements of classical salon painting. He associated himself with Modernist painters, especially in his years in Mexico, and although he was not political, he actually influenced the painters more than they influenced him; for example, the realist social-commentary style of Mexican painting, from Diego Rivera on, was influenced by Weston's presence.


Weston at work, photographed by Tina Modotti

Weston makes this explicit in a statement written for his show at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, also copied into the Daybooks at the time:

Photography is not for the escapist, the "mooning poet," the revivalist crying for dead cultures, nor the cynic,—a sophisticated weakling; it is for the man of action, who as a cognizant part of contemporary life, uses the means most suitable for a clear statement of his recognition. This recognition is not limited to the physical means or manifestations of our day,—such as machinery, skyscrapers, street scenes, but anything—flower, cloud or engine—is subject matter, if seen with the understanding of the rationale of a new medium, which has its own technique and approach, and has no concern with outworn forms of expression,—means nor ends.

Fortunately it is difficult to be dishonest, to become too personal with the very impersonal lens-eye. So the photographer is forced to approach nature in a spirit of inquiry, of communion, with desire to learn. Any expression is weakened in degree, by the injection of personality:—the warping of knowledge by petty inhibitions, life's exigencies.

I do not wish to impose my personality upon nature, (any of life's manifestations) but without prejudice or falsification to become identified with nature, to know things in their very essence, so that what I record is not an interpretation—my idea of what nature should be—but a revelation,—a piercing of the smoke screen artificially cast over life by irrelevant, humanly limited exigencies, into an absolute, impersonal recognition.

"Self expression," so called, is usually biased opinion, willful distortion, understatement. Discounting statistical recording, any divergence from nature must be toward a clearer understanding, an intentional emphasis of the essential qualities in things.

Though photography I would present the significance of facts, so they are transformed from things seen to things known. Wisdom controlling the means—the camera—makes manifest this knowledge, this revelation, in form communicable to the spectator.
—Edward Weston, The Daybooks, II: California, p. 241

There's an insistence on the hard fact of the thing itself, in a Weston photograph, that reminds me of Zen training. Zen is all about removing the filters and assumptions, and seeing what is actually there—instead of what we think is there. Meditation training is designed to do nothing less than remove the scales from our eyes. (During the process, as time ripens, we also discover that we are our own worst enemies—which I can say for myself, quite forcefully.) Part of Weston's appeal is this hardness, this resolute circling back to the thing itself, and away from interpretation or mythologizing. A Weston photograph becomes the archetype of a pepper precisely because it explores the individual pepper being photographed so thoroughly, that it evokes the universal from the particular. This is what great art always does: make us able to perceive the eternal within the ephemeral, the universal within the particular. That's you recognize an archetype: something eternal and numinous shines through.



Of course in many ways Weston was also a heroic individualist, a "man of action," someone always going against the grain of what was popular and acceptable at the time. This led to many misunderstandings of his work, which he often felt bad about, as recorded in the Daybooks. But it takes a strong, developed personality to be able to remove itself from "self-expression," to not wish to impose itself on the photo. The Zen aspect of seeing what's there, rather than trying to "express oneself" via the subject matter, is Weston to the core.

I completely agree with Weston's desire to not impose his taste and feeling onto what he is photographing. As an artist who draws to see the world more clearly, I use photography in part as a meditation practice: a way of bringing myself into the present moment, of letting everything drop away, to Be Here Now, and perceive what is happening. At the best of times, I move into what I can only describe as an exalted state, where everything is more vivid, more real, more alive—and sometimes I must put the camera down, because I know I can't capture what I'm seeing so clearly, as if never before. It is at those times that I often make my best photographs: when I know that the camera is only capturing a small part of what I'm experiencing. One can rail at the limitations of one's tools, which I sometimes do: but one must also be aware of how helpful they can be in getting us as close to that impersonal recording of revelation that it is possible to get. I see this in many of Weston's photos of the most ordinary objects, seen so clearly, as a revelation, that hey become more than what they were: as Weston says, peppers-plus.

At the same time I am aware that composition, the moment of releasing the shutter, that timing and being in the right place at the right time, are elements of making the photograph that derive from the self. The photographer is not an omnipresent eye seeing everything: there are still decisions the person makes, before the shutter is released, and after. So my individual personality is engaged in the creative process.

But it is when my personality is subordinate to the revelation, to the recognition, to the seeing/being that Weston speaks of, that all my technical skill and decision-making aspects of the creative process align to make my best photographs. At those times, I really feel like I am witnessing something very much greater than myself, that I am lucky to be able to capture even a small part of, if I release the shutter just right, just so. At those times, I feel myself to be part of a larger process, and can even lose my sense of self in the creative process. Who is making the photograph? —becomes an essential question, a question of beyond-self being part of the moment. It's hard to feel ownership, at those times, although paradoxically this is also when I feel most a part of the work, and it results in my most personal work.

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Weston is, in the real sense, one of the few great creative artists of today. He has recreated the mother forms and forces of nature; he has made these forms eloquent of the fundamental unity of the world. His work illuminates man's journey towards perfection of the spirit.
—Ansel Adams

Weston's life and his work are . . . simple, effective, without ceremony. . . . He was one of those who taught photograph to be itself.
—Robinson Jeffers

Photography Is About Light

Artlip Lake, MN

I just returned from a weekend at the Minnesota State Fair, in St. Paul, MN, the city I lived in for a few years before moving on to New Mexico, California, and then back to Wisconsin later on. I liked living in St. Paul; although most of the cultural events I wanted to be part of tended to happen in Minneapolis, I found St. Paul to be a less frenetic and self-involved place to live. Except, that is, during the annual State Fair, which is one of the largest in the USA; although people-watching and tracking the various items you can get "on a stick" at the Fair is always fun.


Hare Lake, MN

This past weekend in the Twin Cities I also shopped. The Twin Cities have many very good used book stores, some of the best between, say, Madison or Chicago, and Portland, OR. Every time I go back to the Cities, I usually end up finding one or two books I've been looking for, for some time, and a few other things besides. This time out, I found one of Jerry Uelsmann's long out-of-print early photo books, which I didn't have; some poetry books; some philosophy and gender theory; and Ansel Adams' Portfolio book, which I had been seeking for awhile but hadn't found a good copy of yet.



Adams published seven Portfolios in his lifetime. A Portfolio is an edition of photographic prints, usually presented in a slipcase with text sheets, signed and numbered. Adams, being the prolific master printer that he was, produced seven Portfolios each numbering over one hundred copies. That's a lot of prints. Nonetheless Adams Portfolios are rare and valuable nowadays. Most are in museums or private collections. Some have been taken apart and the prints individually framed, or sold. All of that is acceptable, of course. Yet it's nice for the rest of us to have this combined book edition, which is excellently printed and packaged, with typography closely matching the originals.


Artlip Lake, MN

In continuing my own thinking about making photographs in the American West, which forces me to always think of both Ansel Adams and Edward Westion, I continually return to study both photographers' work. This book of the Portfolios continues that study.


Artlip Lake, MN

What struck me most this morning, as I sat reading on the porch, was the recognition of something that I have known for many years about my own photographic work: All my photographs are about light. They're not really about the ostensible subject matter. They're really about light, and how the light changes. Many of my photographs are really about the sky, not about the land and people under the sky. I've known this about my own work for some time, as I said. What was nice to read, this morning, was an affirmation, or validation, of this same awareness, as part of Ansel Adams' photography, as well. It made me feel an even closer kinship to Adams than I have felt before: because this time, I knew the why of it.


mist, Artlip Lake, MN

Here is the relevant passage from John Szarkowski's "Introduction," which I want to quote at length before discussing:

Adams would object to being described specifically as a landscape photographer. Like all good artists he distrusts categories, and it is true that he has made many splendid photographs of other sorts of subjects. Nevertheless, it is our prerogative to define the reasons for our own gratitude, and I think we are primarily thankful to Adams because the best of his pictures stir our memory of what it was like to be alone in an untouched world.

It does not advance us very far to note that Adams has made elegant, handsomely composed, technically flawless photographs of magnificent natural landscapes, a subject which, like motherhood, is almost beyond reproach. These attributes are surely virtues. For many they are sufficient virtues, and these many need not wonder what the precise difference is between the best of Adams' pictures and uncounted other neat, clean, and dramatic photographs of the glorious American West.

The difference presumably depends from the fact that Adams understands better the character and magnificence of his subject matter, and thus is especially alert to those details, aspects, and moments that are most intensely consonant with the earth's own tonic notes. We must remind ourselves, however, that all we know of Adams' understanding of the earth comes to us not from any direct view into his mind or spirit, but only from photographs, little monochrome substitutes for his ultimately private experience. To the best of our knowledge, he knows no more than he has shown us. As with any artist, his intuitions are finally no better than his prowess.

What Adams' pictures show us is different from what we see in any landscape photographer before him. They are concerned, it seems to me, not with the description of objects—the rocks, tress, and water that are the nominal parts of his pictures—but with the description of the light that they modulate, the light that justifies their relationship to each other. In this context it is instructive to compare Adams' photographs with those of his older friend and neighbor Edward Weston, who photographed much of the same country that Adams has photographed, but who found there are very species of picture. The landscape in Weston's pictures is seen as sculpture: round, weighty, and fleshily sensuous. In comparison, Adams' pictures seem as dematerialized as the reflections on still water, or the shadows cast on morning mist: disembodied images concerned not with the corpus of things but with their transient aspect.

From the standpoint of craft, Adams' problem is more difficult than Weston's, dealing as it does less with eternal verities than with quicksilver. Those who have wondered whether Adams' legendary technique is in fact altogether necessary, or whether it might be a kind of showy overkill, reveling in an unnecessary perfection, have perhaps not understood the content of Adams' pictures, which describe phenomena as ephemeral and evanescent, in an unpeopled world, as those of his contemporary, Cartier-Bresson, describes in a world of human events. To describe in a small monochrome picture the difference between the warm sun of May and the hot sun of June, requires that every tone of the gray scale be tuned to a precise relationship of pitch and volume, so that the picture as a whole sounds a chord that is consonant with our memories of what it was like, or our dreams of what it might be like, to stand in such a spot at such a moment.

Adams would perhaps say that it comes down to a question of good description, which is doubtless true but which has caused a good deal of misunderstanding, since the thing being described is not (for example) a mountain but a concept of one way in which a mountain might be transposed into a photograph.
—John Szarkowski, "Introduction" to The Portfolios of Ansel Adams

Szarkowski gives us great insight in Adams; more than many other writers have. This is useful precisely because it makes it see the photographs themselves in a new way. Adams himself often said that his (legendary) technique was in service of his vision, that his craft was what he needed to do to create the emotional "performance" of the finished photographic print. (Adams, a trained concert pianist before becoming a photographer, often used musical metaphors to describe his creative process.) Szarkowski gives us insight into what an Adams picture really is about: time, change, the ephemeral nature of geology and life, and the ever-changing light, sky, and land. What was it that led Adams' towards championing environmental conservation, decades before it was popular to do so? His awareness of how fragile and ephemeral the land is, and what lives upon it, including ourselves. And also, his awareness that wilderness is necessary to our often overly-civilized spirits: just knowing that there are wild places still—and which we may travel to, to explore, and experience some of the often-buried wildness in ourselves—is a balm to the spirit.


Cross Creek Falls, MN

In my own work, I continue to make more and more B&W pictures. I receive approval for this from many directions, both artistically and aesthetically. I do not entirely trust the opinions of all who approve my working in B&W, precisely because there has always been a bias for B&W photography being more purely "artistic" than color photography. I've written before about this bias, following upon what Edward Weston wrote about the topic:

Black and white is more artificial than color, in the original sense of the word artifice: rather, B&W allows for more of the photographer’s control and decision. A color photo can be apparently pure reportage; or rather, it is unquestioned in a way that B&W is not. One is reduced to pure tone and form. Some subjects are better suited to color, because there is critical information in the color values. But one reason B&W is still considered—rightly or wrongly—the more artistic medium is because it is more akin to artifice than is the quick color snapshot. The aesthetic prejudice for B&W over color is debatable at this point in time; Weston is correct that neither supplants the other, but at the same time each is valid as an artform. It's no longer accurate to say that B&W is "more artistic" than color. Yet I am drawn to it, as a change from color. I've often worked in monochrome; indeed I have a whole body of work that's monochrome, which I return to from time to time.

So while I appreciate any plaudits I receive about my B&W photography, I have to question what prompts someone to make them. Because of this bias towards viewing B&W work as inherently more artistic, for the reasons I discussed above, I often have wondered if a compliment about my B&W work isn't really about it being in B&W rather it being good, in and of itself. It's important to always check one's motivations, as well as one's biases, at the door, and see what's really there, rather than what one thinks is there.


white stone at the lake shore, Grand Marais, MN

All prejudices—artistic prejudices being rather mild and forgivable compared to others—are a kind of conceptual filter on our perceptions. We all carry around a lot of filters, which are ideas through which we see the world, not as it is, but as we think it is, or as it ought to be. The purpose of meditation practice, be it Zen Buddhist sitting meditation, or Christian contemplative prayer, or Taoist egolessness, is to minimize or eliminate the conceptual filters we carry around, so as to be able to see what's really there. Frankly, making visual art, specifically making photographs, is a way of doing that work that surpasses many others, especially the more verbal forms of art-making, which are more prone to generating than removing filters. I find, when out making photographs, that I can let go of or turn off the monkey-mind far more deeply than when writing a poem or essay. My best poems come from that same place of no-mind that my best photos come from: more often than not, I don't feel like "I" made the photo, or poem, but that it happened, or arose from another place. Photography is also about seeing what's actually there, about finding out how the light brings the world into shape. It's a process of discovery.


in the northern Minnesota woods

Weston himself wrote about this, in his essay on his color photography:

The prejudice many photographers have against color photography comes from not thinking of color as form. You can say things with color that can’t be said in black and white. . . . Those who say that color will eventually replace black and white are talking nonsense. The two do not compete with each other. They are different means to different ends. . . . You find a few subjects that can be expressed in either color or black-and-white. But you find more that can be said only through one of them. Many subjects I photographed would be meaningless in black-and-white; the separation of forms is possible only because of the juxtaposition of colors.
—Edward Weston


Artist's Point, Grand Marais, MN

Perhaps I have made for myself a middle ground between Adams and Weston: I am well aware of how the light strikes the body, which sometimes is illuminated from within. I am fascinated by reflections: in still, in moving water, in glass, in mirrors. I love seeing more than one image at the same time, within the frame, when a reflection gives us another layer of depth and illumination.

There is an M.C. Escher print, one of my favorites, entitled Three Worlds. In this woodcut, we see three levels of existence, three layers of being, all detailed by the way light falls on them. We get the reflection of trees on the surface of the pond; the fallen leaves on the pond's surface itself; and we see a fish in the water under the pond's surface.



At the same time that I experience the world as ephemeral, even fragile, as often as I photograph the sky, I also photograph the rocks and waters of the land, that give the land shape, and which etch and shape it. Having studied geology, I am aware of the long-time-scale forces that shape the surface of the earth, that we experience as eternal but which in fact is ever-changing. I find the rocks to be both solid and shadowy. There was an ocean here before, millions of years before, where the living Prairie now is covered with waves of rounded hills, and waves of prairie grasses cresting in the wind. I find Adams' photographic style to be very comfortable to me, precisely because it's all about the light, and the changing face of the light and sky where they touch the land. But I don't reject Weston's more "sculptural" or "eternal" style, either.


Artist's Point, Grand Marais, MN

I find Weston's pictures call forth a sense of timelessness that is the eternal ground out of which being arises. If Weston expresses the Atman, which in Vedic cosmology is the unchanging, eternal soul, Adams expresses the Brahman, or power of creation, life and change. In Hindu mythology, they go together, are in dynamic balance, in a cosmic dance of balance. That is not unlike the way some artists reflect upon each others' work, or reflect and balance out each other—much as Adams and Weston can seem to do at times.


Cascade River, MN

The appeal of Adams' photographs is in part, as Szarkowski says, their ability to evoke an experience. This is why Adam's technical expertise was so essential to his work: this is what it served. For myself, I don't find myself trying to replicate Adam's technical expertise, not even when making a photograph in the same places he worked, but rather, I find myself trying to find a way to transpose into the photographic frame what it is that the vision of a landscape, or other subject matter, makes me feel. As with the best art, the best poems, the best music, the successful photograph evokes an experience in its audience—in many ways, it is an experience, rather than being merely a distillation of the artist's experience transmitted. A successful photograph or poem makes the audience re-experience what the artist felt: there is an emotional and experiential transmission, something frankly pre-verbal, an empathetic connection, if you will, that ignites either the memory or the dream of what it must have been like, to be in such a place at such a moment, seeing the light there, feeling the heat and pressure of it, and being aware of how quickly the light will change.


Artist's Point, Grand Marais, MN

I make very few photographs in the middle of the day: the light is usually too harsh, too vertical, too strong. Unless, for example, when I'm out in the Utah desert, perhaps, where the overwhelming whiteness of the sky striking the land with its heat and glare is what I'm trying to convey in the photograph. More often, the dramatic light happens at the edges of the day, in the nuanced twilight zones of dusk and dawn, and in the morning and evening periods when the light is strongly horizontal, strongly colored. It was not uncommon for Adams to wait several hours for the light to become just right, before he opened his camera shutter to make the photograph. I have waited hours, myself, for the light to become just right. Sometimes, in my traveling, I find myself lucky to arrive at a place just at the right moment, with the right elements all fallen into place, to make an exceptional photograph. But it's also true that chance favors the prepared: my discipline as an artist is to be always ready, with my tools at hand, with my perceptions engaged, so that when I do find myself in the right place at the right time, I can capture the ephemeral, changing, evanescent light.

It's all about the light.

Making Photographs

Trillium and fern fiddleheads, Robert H Treman State Park, Ithaca, NY

In his short essay, "A Personal Credo" (updated 1982, in The Unknown Ansel Adams), Ansel Adams writes about the difference between taking a photograph and making one. This is an important distinction.

I'm not sure when I first began watching my own language on this point, using making by preference; I may have been influenced by Adams directly, having read at some earlier time the original 1994 version of his Credo. I do know that I've been making this distinction in my own language for some time, and that reading it again in his updated Credo was both revelation and reminder.

Adams writes:

The relative importance of photographic craft and its expressive aspects must be clarified. We would not go to a concert to hear only scales performed—even if they were played with consummate skill—nor would we enjoy a sloppy rendition of great music. In photography, technique is frequently exalted for its own sake; or, worst of all, is renounced as an impediment to creative work. The unfortunate complement to this situation occurs when a serious and potentially important statement is rendered impotent by a photographer's inferior understanding of the mechanics of production. Sympathetic interpretation seldom evolves from a predatory attitude; the common term taking a picture is more than just an idiom; it is a symbol of exploitation. Making a picture implies a creative resonance essential to profound expression.

The difference is in the language itself: to hear photographers talk about grabbing a shot, or taking, or stealing an image, or capturing a moment—these are all aggressive, almost violent actions. The indicate the mindset of a conqueror, one who seeks to possess or own; as though taking a photo of a mountain peak meant you could own the mountain. There is present that inculcated grasping personality-ego in such language, such attitudes.

To hear photographers speak of making an image, though, changes the relationship utterly. The work becomes a collaboration, a partnership, a living relationship between subject, photographer, and viewer. The photographer is the first viewer of the image being made; later viewers can share in the photographer's experience of that moment, if the image is well-made, technically well-presented, and evocative of mood and feeling. Adams talked about feeling a lot. I find his use of musical metaphors makes a great deal of sense to me; possibly both we were both trained as musicians before taking up photography. Adams' use of a word like "resonance," an acoustic term that also applies to psychology, emotion, and thought, is one I often in the same way, in discussing poetry as well as art-making. Resonance is one of those elements of a work that takes us into an experience of the work, and perhaps an experience of what the artist felt that led to his or her making of the work; it is a door that opens further into mythic or archetypal awareness. So Adams' advice to use the word making in terms of photography is in part a recognition that there's more going on, in both the making of a photograph and in its later viewing, than meets the surface of the eye. Making includes the photographer's relationship with what is made, as well as with what the image was made from.

(One might add parenthetically that in poetry as in photography, technique is also frequently exalted for its own sake—or renounced—with results parallel in poetry to those Adams deplores in photography.)

Adams continues in his Credo:

Seeing, or visualization, is the fundamentally important element. A photograph is not an accident, it is a concept that exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative. From that point to the realization of the final print, the process is chiefly one of craft; the previsualized photograph is created by a series of procedures unique to the medium. true, changes and enhancements can be effective during these processes, but the fundamental thing that was "seen" is not altered in basic concept.

Both Adams and Edward Weston discuss the primacy of visualization in their work.

The only caveat, and it's a small one, I might have with pre-visualization as a practice is that I have made some of my best images by not looking through the viewfinder, but by trusting my hand and intuition to capture a moment. Discovering this is what led me to my practice of stealth photography. I can hear Adams arguing in rebuttal that in fact I still visualized the image I wanted to make, and I still saw what I wanted to photograph first, before releasing the shutter. Even in the case of photographs shot from the hip, without looking through the viewfinder, I had an idea of my subject, and what I wanted to discover. I could quibble, but Adams would probably be more right than not, in each case.

Also, Adams and Weston were concerned about fine art photography, of course, and their comments exist in the context of their times and their work: remember that, at the time, what they were doing—sharp-focus landscape and portrait photography, captured in a perfect moment after much seeing of the subject, with some of the interpretation occurring in the technical process of making the print—was considered radical at the time. Remember, too, that fine art photography is still somewhat sneered at by both critics and the uncomprehending public, unaware of its potential as an artform in the right hands.

Seeing, or visualization, inevitably leads me to consider another big influence on the way I operate as a photographer and artist. I refer to Frederick Franck, a self-described "image-maker" who I have come to realize has been a central influence on my adult art and life. Franck wrote:

Looking and seeing both start with sense perception, but there the similarity ends. When I "look" at the world and label its phenomena, I make immediate choices, instant appraisals—I like or I dislike, I accept or reject, what I look at, according to its usefulness to the "Me" . . . this me that I imagine myself to be, and that I try to impose on others.

The purpose of "looking" is to survive, to cope, to manipulate, to discern what is useful, agreeable, or threatening to the Me, what enhances or what diminishes the Me. This we are trained to do from our first day.

When, on the other hand, I see—suddenly I am all eyes, I forget this Me, am liberated from it and dive into the reality of what confronts me, become part of it, participate in it. I no longer label, no longer choose. ("Choosing is the sickness of the mind," says a sixth-century Chinese sage.)

It is in order to really see. to see ever deeper, ever more intensely, hence to be fully aware and alive, that I draw what the Chinese call "The Ten Thousand Things" around me. Drawing is the discipline by which I constantly rediscover the world.
—Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation (1973)

I can say the same thing for my photography: what I have not seen closely, taking time to see it, before making the photograph, I have not really seen. Once seen, though, in this way, it can stay with me for a very long time; perhaps even always.

I first read The Zen of Seeing so long ago that it feels like I've always known it; it must have been sometime in the 1908s, though, that I first encountered Franck's work. In recent years, as he has become ever more lucid and clear, working through his project towards its essence, I feel as if I have followed, also becoming every more lucid and clear. Perhaps this is just experience, the practice that leads to skill in one's craft. I do know now, regardless, that what began years ago as a practice I called a camera walk has become for me something much richer and deeper in recent years, and has improved both my seeing and my photographic craft.

In his photographic Credo, Adams says something so close to what Franck says above that it must have been a parallel insight—and we can read these side by side as individual accounts of the same insight, the same deep seeing. Adams wrote:

The making of a photograph implies an acute perception of detail in the subject, just as a fine print deserves more than superficial scrutiny. A photograph is usually looked at; it is seldom looked into. The experience of seeing a really fine print may be related to the experience of hearing symphony—appreciation of the broad melodic line, while important, is by no means all. The wealth of detail, forms and values, the minute but vital significances revealed so exquisitely by the lens, also deserve exploration and appreciation. A qualitative appreciation of a print may require only a glance by a practiced eye, but a fine image deserves more contemplative attention. It takes time to really see a fine print, to feel the almost endless revelation of poignant reality which, in our preoccupied haste, we have sadly neglected.


Fern fiddleheads, Robert H Treman State Park, Ithaca, NY

When I go out on a photographic (and/or videographic) journey nowadays, I always take some time to see my subject before I make the image. I might take a long time. I might take only a moment; in which case there is something happening rapidly, changing quickly, that I must see in the viewfinder before it's gone. With so much death amongst my family and friends recently, I've become acutely aware of the fragility of all things, how quickly and suddenly they can all be gone, or broken, or unsayable. But even the quick photographs are made after a moment or seeing. I don't claim this is true for all the images I make; it is true, without fail, for those that I feel are among my best. A moment of contemplation before releasing the shutter is never lost, and deepens and enriches our lives and ourselves, even before the image is printed so that others might view it too.

So, I have consciously chosen to use the word making in terms of photographs for some time now. yet I'm also aware of the creative aspects of my artistic work in general, not only in photography, all of which is Making—a collaboration with nature, or in co-creation with the divine. Creation-centered spirituality comes naturally to me, as what I've always known and felt, even before I had the theological or artistic language with which to express it. Co-creation is precisely what it is—the aspect of making that is collaborative with the subject of the photo, for example—because making is also giving back, or giving into creation: adding to Creation's articulate beauty.

In the Details

Japanese maple and evergreen, Janesville, WI

The details are where the image comes alive. In your story, it's the details that make it feel real, the little moments and spoons on the table that make the writing come alive in the mind's eye, become clear rather than fuzzy. You can deal with the big picture, on the epic scale, but if your movie doesn't have a human story, it will remain cold and alien. Warmth and life come from the details. Sharpness of focus in a photograph brings more and more detail to the eye, and provides more surface to contemplate.

A telling detail in a poem or story can give the reader the hook they need to go into the writing, and experience it from within. The details are what pull us into the universal shared experience of being human; they are also what give us the rich experience of living inside the skin of someone very different from ourselves.

When I go out to photograph, I look at the small details just as much as the overall picture. When I shoot a panorama it often feels bland: documentary rather than expressive. I enjoy documentary films, especially films about music and musicians. And I also enjoy great panoramic photography. But when I zoom out to take an overview shot, I often feel as if I am making a context shot, and the real beauty and interest will be found by zooming in more tightly, by cropping out unnecessary details in the viewfinder, or later in the process of editing and printing. This doesn't mean I take only close-ups. It does mean that I am always thinking about the essential details in the frame. When you can't remove anything else that's inessential, or downright distracting, that's when you've found the right composition. It can take some time to find.


Japanese maple and wood fence, Janesville, WI

In 1932, the Group f/64 manifesto appeared. It was written in response to soft-focus "artistic" pictorial photography, which was the dominant style at the time. The photographers within the group wanted to explore a more "pure" photography, to see what photography could do for itself as a medium for pure artistic expression—for fine art, in other words. The Group f/64 were not content to follow fashion and re-create in photos the same themes and settings and imagery that had been found in painting for centuries, which a majority of pictorial photographers were doing. Pictorial photography was human-centered, often storytelling, sometimes illustration. Group f/64, in my opinion, wanted to see the world as it was, in an almost spiritual manner: to discover it, to find within it the expressions they wished to make, rather than impose ideas on a pre-planned stage. They sought out images without pre-planning, and learned that "luck" consists of being always prepared when one finds oneself in the right place at the right time. I practice this principle now by always having a camera with me; I've been "lucky" more than once simply because I had a camera with me, ready to make an image, when the moment presented itself.

Here's a key passage from the Group f/64 manfiesto, which lays this out most clearly:

Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form. The production of the "Pictorialist," on the other hand, indicates a devotion to principles of art which are directly related to painting and the graphic arts.

The members of Group f/64 believe that photography, as an art form, must develop along lines defined by the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium, and must always remain independent of ideological conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of a period and culture antedating the growth of the medium itself.

The impact and influence that Group f/64 had on photography, in its wake, is so foundational that many nowadays are not even aware of it. The "fine art photography" print is still considered, in most peoples' minds, to be a tack-sharp black-and-white print on glossy paper. Edward Weston and Ansel Adams are still the models and the standards, along with the other influential members of the Group (among them Imogen Cunningham and John Paul Edwards). The subject matter of photography will always evolve, as culture evolves and artists record it, as the land changes and artists record that, too. But the style in which the photograph is made, its technique and craft as a medium, must still come to grips with the philosophies discussed, and practiced, by the photographers of Group f/64.

What's interesting is that the photography that we view as journalistic rather than fine-art has always wanted to be sharp and detailed; rarely has moodiness been allowed in, in technical terms, and even more rarely have pictorial photography methods been used. But news photography, photojournalism, is reportage, and is expected to carry an aura of clarity and objectivity. There have been many great photographers who were essentially documenters of the world.

There is artistry in journalistic photography, nonetheless. A single iconic image can tell an entire story, through implication, inclusion or exclusion, through form and composition. But the purpose of such photos is to tell a story, so Group f/64 did not regard that as "pure" photography. Rather, Group f/64 placed their emphasis on sharp images, maximum depth-of-field, glossy printing paper which showed more detail than rag or matte papers, and on other factors that showcase unique qualities of the photographic process. f/64 is the smallest aperture on the lens of a large-format camera, which provides the greatest depth-of-field. Relatively long exposures are required to obtain this depth-of-field, as aperture and exposure are inversely proportional; so what blur one sees might be caused by the wind's movement of an object in the frame, or the pull and push of an ocean wave. f/64 images are typically rich in detail, although the process of printing is an artistic process, with shading and tone adjusted to affect mood, sometimes de-emphasizing some detail in order to bring out another.


Japanese maple and wood fence, Janesville, WI

What makes an image startling, a poem breathe, a film have a good rhythm, lies in how each artist in their medium handles the details. Sometimes leaving out details is necessary, to bring more important details into higher relief. A long list of details in a story can kill momentum, but one or two telling and important details, with all the rest left out, may heighten the story's impact.

The minimalist approach is to take away everything that doesn't need to be there. This can be seen in architecture and painting, as well. In photography, as in poetry, the richness does need to be there. But if you can do it with less, do it. Better a white wall reflecting the changing daylight, than a Baroque mirror in which all you can see is overwhelming decorative flourishes.

A Way of Working

My way of working—
I start with no preconceived idea—discovery excites one to focus—then rediscovery through the lens—final form of presentation seen on ground glass, the finished print pre-visioned complete in every detail of texture, movement, proportion, before exposure—the shutter's release automatically and finally fixes my conception, allowing no after manipulation—the ultimate end, the print, is but a duplication of all that I saw and felt through my camera.
—Edward Weston, writing in 1930

You know what you're going to see when you see it. Pre-visualization of the result, before you take the photo. Knowing how it will come out. Sometimes still being surprised, but knowing in many ways. You often know when you've gotten a great photo, and it can be a real ecstatic feeling, and very satisfying artistically.

I was late to an appointment today because I had to stop and take photos at sunset. The lighting was amazing, and the clouds were stunning. Rows of scalloped shapes lining up as the sun painted them for one brief moment before it all turned blue-grey.









Afterwards, as I got back in the truck and drove on, these words kept repeating themselves in my mind:

when the world presents itself to you
so willing to be loved
who are you to say No

This is the photo that I knew would be good when I took it. I knew to wait for the lines to cross in exactly the right place, and the clods cooperated just enough to frame the composition. This is the twinned work of discovery and pre-visualization, in Weston's terms. You don't make plans, but you stay open and pay attention, and the world offers you all of its itself, to be seen. You drop everything to make the photograph, then, because it's most important thing to do in that moment.


Lines, Madison, WI

Edward Weston on Color Photography

I continue to feel the need to come to grips with those photographers of that great generation 100 years ago: the photographers who made it into an artform. Photography began its existence as a scientific and experimental tool, became used for journalism and reportage, and as a hobby for amateur snapshot takers, and only then did it become accepted an artform. it was of course also used as a reference for painters, and it influenced their work; but it was still considered to be of the nature of a sketch rather than a finished artwork. Remarkably, photography is still controversial, as to whether or not some people will admit it's art or not; still set up as a "lesser" art in contrast to painting; still controversial a century after that great generation of photographers made it into art: Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Minor White, and their many peers and friends. They fought the battles I find myself still fighting, for recognition of photography as something other than a hobby or photojournalism.

The work these early photographers did is a legacy that I must now deal with, and that I have been delving into more and more deeply of late.

This is largely because I find myself continuing to turn towards more purely "art photography," what Ansel Adams called creative photography as opposed to commercial photography. Purely art photography is about the image, but also about what the artist feels when making the image, and hopefully this is conveyed to the viewer. Black & white photography allows for more manipulation. It is more inherently artificial an artform. Those early photographers all believed that making a print was itself an artistic process, that the negative was the place where the art started, not where it ended. They used various techniques and crafts to emphasize elements of the print to bring out the spirit of the image, to be more expressive of a personal vision.

I am confronting all this, some of it for the first time with intent rather than by accident, as I find myself more and more drawn towards black & white photography as, to me, a new medium for personal artistic expression. of course it's not at all a new medium. I have in the family archives one or two B&W photos I took as early as age 5, with my father's camera, while we were still in India. But my turning towards it now, after many years of being a photographer, is something new. I feel at last as those I have something to contribute.

i've never actually been interested in photojournalism. I've done it, and fairly well, during those years I was a music journalist who both wrote reviews and took concert photos. I respect the accomplishments of the many great photographers who worked for Life Magazine, or for the WPA during the Depression, documenting life as it happened in those times. I admire some of these photographers as human beings and as artists.

Nonetheless I find it irritating that non-photographers always assume, when they discover what I do, ask me if I do weddings. The truth is: I would do wedding photos for a close friend, if asked. But I have no interest in it as a business. It would frankly be a time-eating distraction. The general public still has rather non-creative ideas about what photography is, and what it can express. Reading Weston, Adams, White and others on the topic of creativity is revealing. Their arguments for photography's expressive potentials are still not general public knowledge, understood or accepted. Most people still think of photography as snapshots of vacations, important moments in one's life, and mementoes of moments with family and friends. It is all of those things, of course.

i've worked as a commercial artist, primarily as a digital artist, desktop publishing expert, and designer. I've worked in advertising, marketing, and book and magazine publishing. I never disliked working in the commercial sector, and I would do it again, if the right situation appeared. I would definitely return to the field of illustration. But that work never fed my soul. I could go back to it, but my heart would never be in it again.

What feeds my soul, in photography, is going out into the wilds, traveling, being outdoors, and working in the natural, available light, to discover and make photos from whatever I happen to see, wherever I happen to be. It's a process of discovery, whereas commercial work is a process of pre-planning and intent, with very little room in it for chance and spontaneity. On recent photo and video road trips, some of the places I felt most alive and connected to were places I'd never been to before: new discoveries, new locations.

Let's look more deeply into black & white photography by getting into backwards, by dealing with what a great photographer had to say about it.

Edward Weston had been an influential, successful, and renowned photographer for many decades before he ever took a color photograph. Edward Weston: Color Photography is a museum catalog of an exhibition of his color work, which he did at the end of his career, and a valuable document in book form of this aspect of Weston's career that remains largely unknown. Weston, ever the thoughtful writer about photography, wrote an essay in 1953, Color as Form, which is reprinted in this book. In the essay, Weston said some very valuable things about the differences between B&W and color photography. I've quoted them before, but let's hear them again:

So many photographs—and paintings too, for that matter—are just tinted black-and-whites. The prejudice many photographers have against color photography comes from not thinking of color as form. You can say things with color that can't be said in black-and-white.

I never expected to take up color photography, though unconsciously I had been thinking about it. You don't stop thinking about a thing because you don't do it.

. . .

As in black-and-white one learns to forget color, so in color one must learn to forget the black-and-white forms.

. . .

You find a few subjects that can be expressed in either color or black-and-white. But you find more that can be said only through one of them. Many I photographed would be meaningless in black-and-white; the separation of forms is possible only because of the juxtaposition of colors.

At just the moment I began to get somewhere, I had unfortunately, for several reasons, to quit. I feel I only scratched the surface. But those who say that color will eventually replace black-and-white are talking nonsense. The two do not compete with each other. They are different means to different ends.
—Edward Weston, from Color as Form

B&W and color do not compete: they are different realms. Different subjects require different applications. It can become the project of choosing the right container, the right form, to match the content. As in poetry, when the form enhances the subject matter by being the right container. In 1930 Weston wrote a statement for an exhibition in Houston:

Clouds, torsos, shells, peppers, trees, rocks, smokestacks are but interdependent, interrelated parts of a whole, which is life.

Like rhythms felt in no matter what, become symbols of the whole.

The creative force in man recognizes and records these rhythms with the medium most suitable to him, to the object, or the moment, feeling the cause, the life within the outer form. Recording unfelt facts by acquired rule, results in sterile inventory.

To see the Thing Itself is essential: the Quintessence revealed direct without the fog of impressionism—the casual noting of a superficial phase, or transitory mood.

This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock—Significant presentation—not interpretation.
—quoted in Edward Weston: the Flame of Recognition, edited by Nancy Newhall

Presentation rather than interpretation. Finding the right container in which to reveal truth. We absorb more than what is seen, when the creative force is present in the work. We see more deeply than we do when we merely look. Seeing and looking are not synonymous. Seeing is deeper than looking.

Color photography will never supplant or subsume B&W. B&W continues to be considered by many, rightly or wrongly, superior as an artform to color. This is because it is reduced. It is presentation, rather than interpretation of representation. (These are Weston's words, which require some contemplation.)

But photography is not all seeing in the sense that the eyes see. Our vision, a binocular one, is in a continuous state of flux, while the camera captures and fixes forever (unless the damn prints fade!) a single, isolated, condition of the moment. Besides, we use lenses of various focal lengths to purposely exaggerate actual seeing, and we often "overcorrect" color for the same reason. In printing we carry on our willful distortion of fact by using contrasty papers which give results quite different from the scene or object as it was in nature.
—Edward Weston, from the Daybooks, 1932; quoted in Newhall, ed.

This very artificiality of B&W photography—the exact sense of the root word artifice—is essential to understanding why B&W photography is more "artistic" than color photography. Or rather, is still thought to be. Weston was working out in his Daybooks the theology of photographic presentation: that it is indeed an act of Making. This is what artists do: they make art. To be a maker is to participate in the co-creation of the world, working in collaboration via presentation with the Creator. We distort to show the truth: as poetry is lies that get us to the truth.

Photography has never been "pure." There has always been necessity for the photographer to make decisions. And we are not cameras: we are not objective eyes. We make choices. We photograph what attracts us, what catches our attention. A photograph is in some ways always an homage to what we have seen in the world. It is an attempt to step into the continuous flow of time and preserve a distinct moment, under distinct light, never to be repeated exactly.

We edit wildly. We make willful distortions of what nature presents us, in order to see deeper into it. We redact what we see by focusing in closely on a single object or moment, and ignoring everything else. Accurate photojournalistic photography is all zoomed out, to catch the bigger picture, and put the moment in its context. You don't find many close-ups in journalistic photography. The truth of that kind of photo is different than the truth of the close-up of a pepper that looks abstract and alien, not at all like what we think of when we think of a pepper.

A B&W photograph is more like a painting in than is a color photo, precisely because it is quite different from the scene or object as it was in nature. This is key point: artifice is the central truth of art-making: the artist pulls things together into something new, to bring out a vision from the materials. The artist uses artificiality to highlight the truth of the natural. This is as true in portraiture as it is in landscape. Both great writers and great artists have defined art as a process of selective editing: you put in only the most important details, and leave out all the rest. You're finished when you can't take away any more.

Both color and B&W have unique things to say. Some subjects do not cross over the line so easily. Flowers, autumn leaves, the banded colors of eroding mountains in the Southwest: as WEston wrote, the separation of forms is possible only because of the juxtaposition of colors.

One thing that separates color from B&W is that B&W is all about tone. Very different colors will look the same on the B&W print, if they have the same level of color saturation: saturation and light-level matters more than hue. In color, hue is as important as saturation: when the colors are off, our eyes know it, and we are uncomfortable.

True color photography is more than just tinted B&W images. It shows the quality and tone of light, which you can't read just from the grayscale information. The same tone of pale yellow and pale pink are both the same tone in B&W. This is another reason choice of paper—high contrast, medium or low; glossy or matte—when printing is part of the artistic process. It is part of the artifice.

Let us be clear: artifice is not a pejorative term, in the arts, in this context. Craft supports vision, and all art is in some way made by the artist. It is the creative force, even when the artistic process is one of discovery rather than imposed pre-planned ideas, that sustains the art itself. Many great photographers have marveled that the world seemed to conspire to present them with perfect moments—as though the Universe itself chooses to pose, at just the right moment, in order to be recorded. I have experienced this myself numerous times. Some of my best photographs were "given" to me in just this manner. Like Weston, I often don't set out with a set plan, but I photograph what I discover as I move about the face of the earth. The process of chance and discovery is a gift. Some call it serendipity, others call it synchronicity. The point is: the artist must be ready at all times for those moments when discovery happens. Your job is to maintain readiness, and get it down as it happens.

Many great photographers have talked about great images being given to them; about their reliance on discovery. But they also had the eyes with which to see what was being presented. They didn't ignore it, or dismiss it, or just look at it and move along. They stopped, and really saw. it is not the camera that makes the photo, it is the photographer. If it were the camera, every amateur vacation snapshot would rival a Weston or Adams print in quality. Since they do not, we need to have thought about why they'd don't.