Improvised Music Outdoors

I just got back home from a gig playing improvised music for a silent film. We were playing outdoors, at the pavilion at James Madison Park in Madions, WI. This is a park where you can watch the sunset over Picnic Point across Lake Mendota, and the water is always reflecting the mood of the sky in beautiful patterns.



I used to live near here, about two blocks from James Madison Park. This was my first apartment when I first moved to Madison in 1986. I would come down to the Park all year long, at all times of day and night. Coming down to watch the sunset was practically a neighborhood ritual. My best friend and I, who lived across the street from me for those same years, would go down to the water on hot humid summer midnights and skinny-dip off the rowing docks to cool off.



I love the way the light on Lake Mendota shimmers and moves from the vantage of this Park. It was one of the reasons I kept coming back down to the water, especially at sunset. In my back catalog of older photographs, I can identify this location as important to my development as a photographer. I have numerous photos that are abstracts of the colored light ripples on the water, with no other imagery; pure pattern, pure abstraction. I can recognize this in retrospect as a formative experience, a piece of self-training, for later photographic work.



The silent movie we improvised to, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), is a classic German Expressionist film. One of its interesting aspects is the set design and backgrounds, which are all distorted, non-rectilinear, and psychologically complex. It's interesting to realize the influence of Freudian thinking on this film, which is about murder, mesmerism, somnambulism, and other then-horrifying glimpses into the shadows of the unconscious mind.



I'm very happy with what we played. This was my first gig playing Stick since the recent surgery, and I wasn't sure about my endurance, my ability to haul gear around, and how the Stick would work with my ostomy bag in place. In fact, there was no problem. I had help hauling gear, setting up and tearing down, and the Stick's belthook and shoulder-strap configuration avoided the ostomy bag entirely. I did tape the bag to my skin so it would be out of my way for the gig, and I did have to watch out for cables. I just brought a couple of processors for effects, not my big rack. So it was minimal gear anyway. I played bass guitar for one scene, but most of the film was on Stick.

Four or five people came up to me afterwards to complement our group on the composed music for the silent film. They were astonished to be told that it was all spontaneously improvised. Most thought it had been pre-composed, rehearsed, and planned. In fact, there were no rehearsals, we just show up and play. With the right people, though, people who have played together before, and are good at listening, it's not difficult. This is in fact my favorite way to make music: just play. With the right people, it works.

This group of players tonight was the same that improvised music for Nosferatu last Hallowwen in Madison. (I'd also had fun making a poster for that gig.)

Much of the music tonight was in the groove, rhythmic, almost like aleatoric rock & roll, often quite hard-edged and psychologically intense. Which was great, because that really suited the mood of the film. Some of the audience comments I heard later said that they felt the music was perfectly matched to the music, perfectly applied, and therefore it must have been composed. That was why some of those commentors were surprised when they found out how we actually did it.

I felt part of a rhythm section again, me playing bass lines mostly on Stick, some on bass, with Geoff Brady playing really brilliant drum grooves. Playing like this makes me play better. It was a very satisfying gig. I was tired by the time I got home, and I needed to rest for a couple of days afterwards, but I got through it, and it felt good.

I managed to tape the performance with my little digital voice recorder. Actually I used two DVRs, and will at some point mix them together to maximize the recording quality and balance. Meanwhile here are a couple of short excerpts from two different chapters of the movie, from one of the DVR recordings.

Performance excerpts:

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, excerpt 1    

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, excerpt 2    

Geoff Brady, drums, percussion, theremin
Arthur Durkee, Chapman Stick, bass guitar
Kia Karlen, french horn, percussion, small toy instruments
JoAnne Pow!ers, saxophones, flute, cornet

Location: Live at James Madison Park shelter, Madison, WI, August 28, 2011

Capitol Reef

images from Capitol Reef National Park, Utah, February 2010









procession of gods
marching along the stone wall—
deer echo their gait

Abstract Glass

These are close-ups of glass pieces from the Dale Chihuly retrospective show at the De Young Museum in San Francisco.











For me, what these colored and black lines and curves most closely resemble, in other artwork, is Georgia O'Keeffe at her most abstract. For example, as seen in the recent museum show and book catalog, Circling Around Abstraction.


Georgia O'Keeffe, Black Abstraction, 1927


Georgia O'Keeffe, Grey Blue & Black – Pink Circle, 1929

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.

The Joys of Monochrome Photography

Mono Lake, CA

Let's expand the palette a bit, from purely Black & White.

A significant amount of my own photographic body of work is monochromatic, but not black & white. Just as I work with my photos in B&W, I work with them as sepiatones and cyanotypes. These are "looks" that I create digitally that emulate antique printing technologies. (More about some of my sepia work here.)

Those old sepiatone photos in your parents' attic, or in the antiques shop. Those 19th-century officially-printed cyanotypes. I love the look of the antiqued photo, and I love the tonal qualities of cyanotype and sepia prints. I was in an antiques store in Paso Robles, CA, in yesterday, and there was, as there are in such stores, flip boxes of antique prints from several eras, going back to anonymous formal posed ancestors on tintypes. Sepia is in part just aged black & white, as the old chemicals fade in the sunlight after many years. Cyan prints were often sun-prints, using a very forgiving chemistry (invented in the 1840s) that allows one to make contact prints in direct sunlight rather than in the darkroom.

Changing the color values of an image, without changing its overall monochrome palette, can change the mood of the image. Sepiatone is associated in my mind, as in others', with age, antiquity, the gracefulness of the anonymous fabric of receding time. Cyan is something I associate with coolness, and serenity. I have made large cyanotype prints of forest and ocean scenes, and they have a timeless quality to them, as though representing eternity.

(One contemporary photographer whose work evokes older technologies, and who largely prints in cyanotypes, as sun-prints, is John Dugdale. Dugdale makes sun-prints using old camera technology, contact prints, and old chemistry. I highly recommend Dugdale's books illustrating Walt Whitman's poems and Henry David Thoreau's journals.)

Here's a cyanotype version of the same photo I placed at the beginning of this column:


Mono Lake, CA

For me, this version is an improvement, because it emphasizes the tones of the water, and the dark volcanic ashes of the bluff across the water, also reflected in the lake's mirror surface. The blue tones bring out the serenity of the image, for me, and are entirely appropriate to use with scenes that are mostly water and/or sky. I have been experimenting with cyan prints a long time, both digitally, and as actual sun-prints.


Taos Plateau, fall 2004, Taos, NM

When I lived outside Taos, NM, I made several small sun-prints that I later assembled into a book as a gift for my mother's late-fall birthday. The hand-sewn chapbook contained poems written there on the Plateau, and several color photos, bound in a sunprint made outside my trailer on the Plateau. I rediscovered this little book when I was cleaning out my parents' home earlier this year; I set it aside to keep, a gift returned.


Arroyo Hondo, NM


freight train, Grants, NM

I find the mood of sepia to be at times equally quietist, but also warmer. It is a good photographic style to depict melancholy, a sense of aloneness, duende, soledad.


Grand Marais, MN

There is a stillness that appears in monochrome prints that color photography doesn't contain, because colors are life. Colors are lively, colors are life.

The presupposition that monochrome photography is more artistic than color is in part based on the fact that monochrome prints are manipulated, always processed as art, and are self-consciously aware of their non-reproductive status. That is, they don't pretend to be picture windows into real life. (Whatever that is.)

Colors reproduce life. Color photography is an emulation. It is only apparently reproduction, of course, since the photographer still chooses the moment. Photojournalism, paradoxically, is still a largely B&W medium; that was true in part because newspapers and magazines found it cheaper to process and print B&W film than color film. (Sometimes assumptions of normality are based purely on habituation and tradition. It's absurd to presume correctness merely from habituation, but that is the normal practice.)

So, for me as an artist/photographer, I find color and monochrome to be different and occasionally complementary media, not in opposition, and not in competition. I intend to keep practicing both.


Mono Lake, CA

The Joys of Black & White Photography

Firehole, Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area, Wyoming

Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it may be. —Edward Weston

I’ve been working hard these past few days, making photos and video. I've retraced some of my route from my last road trip, eighteen months ago, visiting the Badlands, Bear Butte, and Devil’s Tower, although I stopped in different places, with different light than last time—which was winter, this time it’s summer, and hotter than blazes all day long, usually in the 90s, well over 100 degrees according to one readout, and I’m a bit sunburned—and took different kinds of photos. I am reviewing them now, and liking several so far. I am also experimenting with converting the best of them to black and white from the color originals.

I was reading Edward Weston: Color Photography before leaving on this trip, and it both inspired me and stimulated my thinking.

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. —Edward Weston


Firehole, Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area, Wyoming

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.

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. —Edward Weston

In the desert Southwest, scene after scene can be monochrome, pure shape and form. But then there are also many wherein color is the whole point. The colors of mountain strata turned on their side make a display as brilliant as it is unforgettable. Painters have achieved this; although one remembers that east coast art critics didn't believe at first that the colors in the canvases Georgia O'Keeffe painted in New Mexico were real. They were accurate in every detail.


Dinosaur National Monument, Utah/Colorado

The artist can adjust tonal gradations in editing and printing black and white. Weston’s exquisite and influential prints were all 8x10 contact prints from the negative. Ansel Adams developed the zone system for B&W printing, and was equally influential in establishing photography as a valid artform. Both of them were masters in the darkroom, which is where the print really came to life, reflecting the artist’s input and intuition. Printing is more like painting than making a negative, perhaps.

When I work with a B&W digital image, the process feels like the darkroom process. Everything I ever learned about tone and shading, dodging and burning, all the technical aspects of producing a good print: these all apply. You look to bring out the tonal areas that need enhancement, and leave those alone that do not. It can be very engrossing. The end result is a B&W image that is as carefully mastered as in the darkroom. What matters is the end result: the finished image.

But anyone who thinks that any photograph, color or B&W, is somehow pure and untouched, has fallen for the myth of photojournalism's honesty. In fact, all photos being with a decision: when to open the camera's shutter. After that, the artist makes many other decisions. A photo is not pure: it is always as worked through as an art object.