“Living life as an artist is a practice. You are either engaging in the practice or you’re not.”
Rick Rubin, “The Creative Act: A Way Of Being”
She's A Lady
The Minolta Autocord is my new love. Of all my cameras, she is a lady. She is delicate, she requires special attention, she is demure. I came back to her after a long absence (20+ years) and she took me back as though no time had passed.
My other camera, The Swede, is formidable; a Hasselblad 501CM manufactured in 2003. Pincay, the Canon R6, is named after Lafitt Pincay, the jockey. His lenses are named after racehorses. There’s Whirlaway, Secretariat, Cigar, and Ruffian to name a few.
Some are faster than others but, they’re all there to perform.
But the Autocord L, she’s a beauty. She was made in 1959 which was a good year for a Japanese twin lens reflex to be born. Minolta began to take their competition seriously and wanted in on the action. Rolleiflex was already out there stealing all the glory and there were others.
My little Autocord has a 75mm f/3.5 lens, uses 120 film, of course at a 6x6 format and has a top shutter speed of 1/500 sec.
Sometimes less is more. I don’t know what made me take her out of retirement. Maybe because she is so damn adorable.
Here she is:
Here’s what she can do:
And On A Personal Note...
I’ve been very fortunate with Ghost Trees, or Bardo photographs as I sometimes refer to them. I was in an open state and they rolled in so smoothly. It was in 2022 after my best friend of 30 years died. I was exhausted. That’s the thing I discovered about grief, it’s exhausting. It’s just with you all the time.
The Trees felt as if they had been conjured from darkness and then brought into the light. Looking at the past was still painful, my memories were still of regrets, not the sweet memories that would come later. I was unsure of the present and not at all equipped to consider the future.
Strangely enough, I do believe that it was because I was in this state where nothing made any sense that I was receptive to the images that were streaming into me. I wanted to give Suzanne a beautiful wood to travel through to get her to wherever it was that she was going and I could only do that through photography.
A year later and the visions don’t come to me in such a torrent. They come in slower now, they are more malleable. It took a year to create a foundation on which to work from. A difficult, rocky and painful year creating a woodland for her to walk through.
It's Happening!
Art Can Help
a book by Robert Adams, a little jewel of 88 pages. A collection of very short essays on photographs save one devoted to Edward Hopper. Adams is a sensitive observer and ever eloquent. I read it after work when I needed to divorce myself from my workday. I found that the truth is in the title, art can, in fact, help.
Light Study Series
This series is a deep dive into looking closely at the depiction of light on film. I’ve immersed myself into this project more than any other lately. It’s taken me to a place of curiosity, solitude and reflection. It’s the photo refuge that I’ve needed and searched for.
I’ve experimented with different cameras, different films, different light sources. I’ve always been completely seduced by the sculptures of Bernini and the light in Caravaggio’s work. It was only natural that I would eventually want to explore the same elements of light and shadow in my own work, and after all, isn’t that what photography is about, collecting light?
I’m hardly done. This exercise has taken me back to film and my beloved Hasselblad. That thunk of the shutter! There’s nothing like it. But the mirrorless has it’s place and cannot be dismissed. I am taking this subject in all different directions and am curious to see where it leads me.
Camera Lucida
“Ultimately, photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive. when it thinks.”
-Roland Barthes
What It Does
“This is finite, this will end - it’s a dash, a blink…now you see me, now you don’t. Just one of those existential moments.” Those words crawled right out of my fingertips and onto a random page in a notebook, while I was in the middle of it all; the middle of grief and despair but with light and hope on its heels.
And then I heard this most lovely voice, full of humanity and connectedness. It took me to a place of warmth and comfort. That’s what art does. Art can take us to a place of transcendence, be it a photograph, a painting, a piece of music. That’s what it does.
Reboot 2022
Mercy Photography.
What does that mean to me now? Is it just a place to put some photos? It’s become more than that. It’s my pocket of intention and vision. Intention and discipline and committment.
I fall short sometimes, oh do I fall short. But I’ve always, always come again and tried again. I can’t even make a promise to myself that there will be some kind of momentum in creating work because, this bipolar thing, it’s out of my control. I make strides, then the bottom falls out from under me. Then I have to start again. It’s ok though. I have more confidence these days. Ironically, failure has given me a measure of confidence that I wouldn’t otherwise know. So, there’s that.
My strategy to keep showing up is to create projects. My Field Notes category is my foundation. The photos there are what I really see in the world, the pure wonder, grace and simplicity.
Imperfect World, that is a project aimed at freeing myself from the illusion of control. It’s a celebration of the unplanned, an exploration of what might happen if I let go. There is no 50 or 85, no macro or telephoto. When I look at these pinhole images it makes me wonder how Niepce must have felt after creating the first photograph ever. Oh my goodness, look! he must have said. He figured out how to collect the light that he witnessed on a particular day, in a particular place, at a particular time. He was so taken by what he saw in this world that he endeavored to record it. Thank you, my man, I am so grateful you did that.
Photography is my practice and I claim only a modicum of competence. I draw inspiration from so many other artists. It is with gratitude and respect to them that I can move on with my own work.
Wisdom
“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
”
Something Beautiful For You
A beautiful little video created by Jan van IJken. It made my heart stagger.
Journal — mercy
What turns me on about photography? Nearly everything. Which photographers do it for me? Nearly all of them. I lived in San Diego in my twenties. It was a great place to live in the 80's - West Coast beaches, perfect weather and oh! The Museum of Photographic Arts.
I loved that place, both the city and the museum. As the name implies, MoPA was (and is) solely dedicated to the photographic arts. I knew about photography, of course. Well, I knew who Ansel Adams was so yeah, I knew what was going on - until I visited MoPA for the first time. That's when you know you don't know. You could get an education just browsing the books in the bookstore.
It was definitely something I was looking for. It was something that had a hold on me and influenced my vision of the world, though at the time I didn't know to what degree.
I was introduced to the work of Roy DeCarava, Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, Keith Carter and numerous other photographers. I wanted to learn more about Pictorialism, documentary photography, abstract photography, street photography. I was quiet then about my excitement because I was surrounded by people that were so knowledgeable in my eyes. I met people who were bona fide photographers. I couldn't see myself achieving anything in comparison to these people or even knowing as much about this art form.
In hindsight, what I was seeing was a collective of knowledge by many people who chose to make photography a part of their lives. I was taking all of the art and combining it together in a mountainous collection made by one person: the photographer. I've learned since and what may be obvious to others, is that there is no one vision, there is no one person that is adept at creating everything that I was awed by. Years later I've learned that there is room for me. It was sort of unbelievable that I had a voice that was just as important as anyone else.
I have a voice and I still have heroes. I will never stop being awed by photography (or any other form of creative expression, for that matter) and I will never stop learning. I'd love to share some of what informs my photography with you. So let me start with a Gregory Crewdson video from Nowness.
"The central theme in these pictures I think is a kind of search for meaning, a search for home, a search for some sense of connection"
– Gregory Crewson