around the house # 6-8 ~ pictures everywhere

It should surprise no one who follows this blog or knows me that I, with my belief in print making as the only manner in which to fully appreciate a photograph, have pictures hanging on the walls of my house. However, it did surprise me to realize that there are 56 of my pictures (all framed) on the walls. If pressed before I made the count (just today), I would have speculated that there are 20-25 hanging photographs.

Moving on ... on today's entry on LENSCRATH, there is work that shares my fascination with dirty / patina-ed kitchen utensils and food given over to decay, albeit pictured in a different manner than my similar referent pictures. The work by Joan Fitzsimmons is accompanied by an artspeak-ish (not the worst I have ever read) statement, which is to be expected from a B.F.A + M.F.A. picture maker ...

In my work, I’ve asked questions about human relationships, the nature of home, my relationship to nature, and the significance of the quotidian. The ordinary act of living is endlessly complex and uncertain .... ~ Joan Fitzsimmons

Fitzsimmons goes on to tell about her manner of working and her "relationship" (my word) to her referents and concludes with informing us that she "now note[s] that my materials and imagery and manner of collecting them, suggest/are traditional female work, so I am, once again, ready to place it within a feminist context."

Fitzsimmons' pictures are OK. Some work in creating a moderate visual interest. Others not so much. In either case, as far as making pictures of cutlery is concerned, Fitzsimmons' work pales in comparison to that of Jan Groover.

Groover's work has been described as "predominantly empirical, visual, and sensual - images rife with mystery, movement, and intrigue. There's a good read, No More Lazy Still-Life Photography, Please about Groover HERE I especially like the part about when Groover stopped making what she had been doing during her early career. She complained that ...

... she didn't know what to do, and her husband literally said, "Go photograph the kitchen sink." He managed to shut her up, but she took him quite literally, and started photographing just the shit that was in the sink.

Unlike Fitzsimmons and other contemporary picture makers for whom Concept is everything (hence all the artspeak which, ironically, is rarely about art and more about personal self-psychoanalytic crapola), According to Groover, the meaning of the objects is of no importance; only the shape, texture, and form that falls into a particular space is important. And was Groover's Formalist attention to shuch thing which instigated John Szarkwski to say...

.... her pictures were good to think about because they were first good to look at.
iMo, that's something that could not be said about Fitzsimmons' pictures.

around the house # 1-5 ~ fertile ground

Pursuant to yesterday's entry I culled out 130 pictures - from my archives - which were made within the confines of my house. Hence, the start of my around the house body of work.

During the selection process it became very apparent that my kitchen has been the most fertile picture making location, followed by the area around the toilet in one of the upstair bathrooms. Both rooms have abundant and ever changing natural light. However, the kitchen leads the picture making pack by virtue of the ever changing tableau vivant(s) of kitchen things (especially in the sink) and food stuff (raw and remainders).

The overwhelming number of around the house pictures could accurately be labeled as still life pictures.

civilized ku # 5163-64 / kitchen sink # 45 ~ analytical vs poetic

pile of leavings ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

things in sink ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

streaks of light ~ (embiggenable) • iPhone

I am constantly amazed at how many picturing opportunities - resulting from serendipitous occurences over time - there are in my house. Makes me realize that I should create yet another "hidden"-in-my-picture-archive body of work comprised of pictures made within the confines of my house. A body of work which I suspect would most likely be my largest body of work and could aptly be titled Ode to André Kertész.

Moving on to another topic .... with the exception of my life without the APA work, I have almost always been an advocate for and the making of straight photography. I believe that the medium's unique-to-the-visual-arts intrinsic identity as a cohort of the real is photography's defining characteristic. I also believe that making pictures - which are visually interesting - of the everyday commonplace world is the most difficult to achieve use of a camera.

In addition to the preceding paragraph, it should be quite obvious to write that the camera is fully capable of capturing pictures which are very accurate representations of the real. That written, I believe that, in the digital picture making realm, the pursuit of "perfect" pictures - specifically, ultra high resolution and defiition - has had a deleterious effect on the notion of photography as an art. To wit ....

... in effect, this visual "perfection" has bent the medium and its apparatus more toward super documentation / analytical rather than to the poetic. Consider this writing by Lorenzo Papadia (regarding his Fade Point work):

I believe in the strong evanescence quality of things, beyond the appearance, where everything ceases to be «true.» In the digital age we are all obsessed by the high fidelity of the image, the so-called «quality». I believe photography should be lacking in the perfection of its materiality. I think instant photography today may turn away from this «surplus visibility», providing us a more poetic view as it envelopes the concept in a veil of mystery and secrecy...

While I have made thousands of Polaroid pictures (literally) and while I really like Papadia's Polaroids, iMo, Polaroid photography steps a little bit too far outside the line of straight photography. It is, again iMo, a bit too "poetic" and too enveloped "in a veil of mystery and secrecy". Those notions aside, the Polaroid is a fully capable means for the making of great pictures.

Re: my "straight" digital picture making - I have, from day one, deliberately avoided the pursuit of "perfect" pictures. My choice of cameras has always been dictated by the deliberate avoidance of ultra-perfection state-of-the-art sensors. In the making of my first prints made from digital files, I deliberately added soft vignetted corners to the pictures (and still do to this day) in order to introduce "traditional" photographic imperfections. And, I love the look of my 24"x24" prints made from my "mere" 16mp files.

My preference for the aforementioned "imperfect" manner in which I make pictures is dictated by a single consideration .... even though current state-of-the-art camera sensors "see" in ultra high definiton, the human eye does not. Consequently, I want my pictures to look and feel more like what the human eye sees rather than what a sensor sees.

H2O # 11-15 / the new snapshot # 212 ~ in a natural environment

Almost 20 years ago, when I moved within the borders of the Adirondack Forest Preserve (aka, PARK), I looked forward, with eager anticipation, to spending significant time picturing the natural beauty of the Adirondacks and, for a few years, I did exactly that.

However, as I explored the Forest Preserve, I began to realize that the Adirondacks are not a place of wide-open panoramic-vista landscape beauty. Rather, like other NE forests, the Adirondacks is visually dominated by more intimate natural settings. The lone exception to that characteristic is making pictures from mountain tops of sweeping vistas of other mountain tops / ranges - a genre of Adirondack picture making that is performed to wretched excess (iMo).

Consequently, my picture making gaze migrated to more intimate natural settings (my ku work). Nevertheless, I also began to feel, un-satisfactory wise, that I was making pictures that were "picture postcard perfect". Despite the fact that my pictures were the equal of those made by other "serious" Adirondack landscape "masters", I couldn't escape the notion that I was making "generic" Adirondack pictures - not unlike those in this entry.

As those realizations began floating around in my skull - somewhat subconsciously rather than by conscious thought - I began to move from referent-oriented picture making to that of making pictures of whatever (discursive promiscuity) which exhibited visual qualities and characteristics - organization of color, shapes, lines, tones, framing, et al - that created a visual emphasis on / sense of visual energy. Visual energy which could be viewed independent of a picture's depicted referent.

Hence, the increasing emergence of my civilized ku work which is less linked to referent matter than it is to visual organization across the place of a 2-dimensional surface.

I write of all of this in order to explain why my submissions to the Water themed gallery exhibition will consist of pictures more like those in my previous 2 H2O entries than those in this entry ...

... if I were submitting pictures to a nature picture exhibition, I would be submitting pictures like the ones in this entry - pictures which are referent-centric. However, the call for submissions I am responding to is from a photo gallery which, I am certain, would also be happy to be called an art gallery. That is to write that the juror for the exhibition will be looking for qualities in a picture which transcend that of the depicted referent as well as exhibiting a manner of looking at the referent (water) from a new conceptual perspective.

H2O # 1-5

Yet another body of work, water, has emerged from my picture library as the result of a gallery call for submissions for an exhibition of the same name. I'll soon have a water gallery on my WORK front page.