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Category: Up Close
“Give a man color film …sooner or later you’ll catch him in the garden…
“Fashion, flowers, nudes and portraits — they’re all the same: light, form, color. And mystery. And mystery is very important. When I started photographing flowers, I thought, ‘My God, where have I been?’ I’m totally addicted to this project. I’d never seen the mysteries of a flower. We walk by wonders every day and don’t see them. We only stop at what shouts the loudest.” — Barbara Bordnick
“You give a man color film, and sooner or later you will catch him out in the garden taking pictures of flowers. This seems inevitable. He just can’t resist. He’s got this colorful film, y’see, and he spies this colorful flower, and… well, not being a chimp, he does realize that there are enough flower pictures in the world already, and that the one he’s about to take isn’t going to be of any use to anybody. But he can’t help himself. It’s too great a temptation to resist. He succumbs to the weakness.” — Anonymous – from his 1/18/04 Sunday Morning Photographer article
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A straight photograph cannot be abstract
“They are imbeciles who call my work abstract. That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.
When you see a fish you don’t think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water… If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirit.” — Constantin Brancusi
yesterday: a leaf
fell as I walked to the car
evidence of change
(Leica R8/DMR, 6omm Macro Elmarit)
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chasing butterflies and blue skies
as a child i chased
butterflies with a net
now i chase images
Once caught, I never knew quite what to do with the butterflies. I looked at them under a microscope. I marveled at their color and delicate lightness. I ended up feeling uneasy that, as I studied them, they became less beautiful; battered and wounded. In the end I gave up catching butterflies in nets. Now, catching fleeting moments on a light sensitive surface, I find the opposite. The images become more beautiful as I study them; push the edges around; pull information from them; adjust the colors, tonality and contrast. Yet, I still don’t know what to do with my catches.
Yesterday, arriving at a favorite bluff, overlooking the great lake Michigan, I found and caught the following:
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creative object as stepping stone to a realm of meaning beyond itself
“It should be possible for even the photographer — just as for the creative poet or painter — to use the object as a stepping stone to a realm of meaning completely beyond itself.” — Clarence John Laughlin
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Access to Awareness precedes Awareness itself
“The whole point of [making] pictures is so you don’t have to explain things with words.” — Elliot Erwitt
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Brady Street Festival, 2008. Slide show of additional images from this event.
To compose = present the subject in strongest manner possible
“To compose a subject well means no more than to see and present it in the strongest manner possible.” — Edward Weston
enjoy the summer
blooms return quickly to earth
with autumn’s approach
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Can we trust pictures?
“I don’t trust words. I trust pictures.” — Gilles Peress
water, wondering,
waiting for still to reveal
trustworthy knowledge
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Slide show of additional “river walk 080715” photographs.
Flora now nests where fauna once did
“[I crop] for the benefit of the pictures. The world does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera [frame].”
“What use is having great depth of field, if there is not adequate depth of feeling?” — W. Eugene Smith
they appeared where once
I photographed a family
of feathered friends
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Take the time. Put your soul in the photograph.
“There’s no such thing as taking too much time, because your soul is in that picture.” — Ruth Bernhard
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