# 6835-45 / all things considered ~ life squared-a year in the making

(all photos embiggenable) ~ adirondack scenic

landscape

around the house

kitchen sink

people / portrait

travel

picture windows

single women

still life

street photography (in situ)

quite possibly my favorite picture from 2023

AT THE END OF THE OLD / START OF THE NEW year, it customary in some quarters to do a year-in-review thing. In many cases it is a a “best-of” kinda thing. In any event, here is my take on it…

Inasmuch as, in an overall scheme of picture making things, I toil in the discursive promiscuity garden of picture making, I nevertheless feel compelled, by the medium’s custom of organizing itself into recognizable, theme-based bodies of work, to relegate my pictures to separate / definable bodies of work - 10 bodies of work as presented above.

That written, re: the pictures in this entry, while they are presented as the “best-of” each category, they are not necessarily my favorite pictures of 2023. If I were to discard the limits imposed by adhering to separate theme classification, it is possible that some of these pictures would not make the cut. Case in point, the adirondack scenic picture would be nowhere to been seen.

That’s cuz, to be honest, that genre-“beautiful” scenery pictures-is not something that I pursue with any passion. The simple fact of the matter, picture making passion wise, is that the only dictate that drives my shutter activation finger is the making of pictures of selected segments of quotidian life which prick my eye and sensibilities.

# 6757-61 / common places • common things ~ omphaloskepsis*

can you see the alchemist at work? ~ all photos (embiggenable)

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead-his eyes are closed.” ~ Einstein

I HAVE PREVIOUSLY WRITTEN THAT I AM NOT a fan of hi-def photographs. That is photographs which make obvious extreme fine detail and resolution. To my eye and sensibilities they often tend to illustrate everything but reveal nothing. A good example of such is in the comment made by a gearhead who wrote about one of his pictures…

look closely at the fabric on the side of the hat. The detail is there.

Unless the picture was made for the hat manufacturer-fyi, it was not-then capturing the fine fabric is critical to the picture making mission. However, if the mission is to incite an emotional / mental involvement from the non-fabric obsessed viewer or, the non-photo technique obsessed viewer, iMo, who gives a crap about the fabric detail?

And, I might add, looking “closely”at a picture is a sure-fire recipe for missing what a photograph might be “about”. That’s cuz a good photograph is all about the collective visual sum of its parts, not the parts in and of their literal selves. iMo, in a really good photograph, when the sum is good, the overall effect can draw the viewer’s eye across the field of the print in order to investigate some of the parts - an activity that I label as experiencing a photographs visual energy.

All of that written, it explains why I have never been in pursuit of making photographs that exhibit ultra hi-def or, for that matter, photo technique “perfection”. That’s cuz I believe that the best photographs are those that have, albeit most often subtle, a sense of the mysterious. That is to mean, mysterious in the sense of being somewhat enigmatic, i.e. difficult to understand or explain cuz, ya know, some things are best left to a viewer’s imagination.

I know that I am successful in that pursuit cuz, at exhibitions of my photographs or when someone is viewing one of my POD books, the single most common comment / reaction I hear is, “Why did you take a picture of that?” (mystery #1). Followed by, “I don’t know why I like it, but, I do.” (mystery # 2). Reactions that are the result of the fact that my photographs are not stating the obvious. As in, ain’t pictures of beautiful things beautiful.

To be certain, my photographs are not in any manner in the same mystery league as, say, the grand mysteries of the universe. However, I do believe that I am exploring the little mysteries of how the quoditian, aka: everyday life, can mysteriously present, to those whose eyes are not closed, “quiet,” little vignettes that, when pictured with a sense of creating interesting form, produce prints of surprising visual beauty…

…a perfect example of the medium’s alchemistical ability-something of a mystery or is it magic?-to facilitate the nearly inexplicable or mysterious transmutation of the commonplace into the exceptional.

The fact that my eye and sensibilities are captivated by those seeming mysterious “presentations” is, believe it or not, after all these years still a mystery to me.

*aka: navel gazing - the practice as an aid to contemplation of basic principles of the cosmos and human nature

# 6591-93 / travel • kitchen sink • single women ~ a roving eye...have iPhone, will make pictures

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AND I QUOTE:

“…Discovery in the photographic realm: treat the iPhone like it's a serious camera—concentrate—and you can do good work with it…” ~ Michael Johnston

Acting parse-imoniously, re: the meanings of “serious" camera / “concentrate” / “good work”, my first reaction is, “Well, well, well…better late than never.”…another doubter bites the dust.

That written, and having just returned from a trip to 4 tourist laden hot-spots, I can state with a high degree of assuredness that (seemingly) everyone has “discovered” that their iPhone-or any other similar device-is more than capable of producing very good quality photographs. How “serious” they consider the camera module to be or how much they “concentrate” when using it, is hard to determine but…I am reasonably certain that they make “good work” with it.

All of that written, if the cell phone picture making hoards even think about it at all-and I would guess that they do not-very few of them would consider themselves to be photographers. Rather, if asked, they might say that they were just taking pictures. Very few would ever say that they were making photographs. That’s cuz, as Jean Shepherd wrote:

“…he is [they are] the simple householder who desires only to ‘have a camera around the house to get a picture of Dolores in her graduation gown’What artistic results he [they] obtains are almost entirely accidental and totally without self-consciousness…”

iMo, this voluminous picture making craze is a very good thing. Who gives a damn if pictures are being made without the use of “serious” cameras or a high degree of “concentration”. And, if their definition of a “good” picture is one in which “Dolores in her graduation gown” are in focus, properly exposed, with decent color values, made easy by the simple touch of a button, that is a very good thing cuz…

…there really is such a thing-as KODAK phrased it-The Joy of Photography. It can be a very simple joy and you do not have to have a serious camera and a lot of concentration to experience it.

they’re eveywhere ~(embiggenable)

6493-95 / single woman ~ behind the scene (instructional)

uncle momo cafe ~ Jersey City, NJ (embiggenble)

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wedding reception ~ Jersey City, NJ (embiggenble)

wedding reception ~ Jersey City, NJ (embiggenble)

I DO NOT OFTEN POST INSTRUCTIONAL aka: how-to, entries but, when I was working on the top picture in this entry, I performed a modification on the image file that I thought might interest my readers.

That single women picture was made without any opportunity for any iPhone settings. There was just enough time to point the iPhone and hit the make-a-picture button. The iPhone was pre-set to the PORTRAIT setting and chose the paper bag as the focus point. The “single woman”, aka: my subject, was not in focus. Not to worry cuz…

…one of the great features of the PORTRAIT setting is the fact that one can change the so-labled f-stop when processing the file. So, when I opened the file on my phone, I set the f-stop to f16 which essentially created an everything-in-focus image file. I copied and saved that image file and went back to the original image file and returned the f-stop to its original setting.

I now had 2 image files, one sharp, one soft focus. It was then a simple procedure-on my desktop machine using Photoshop-to select the “single woman” in the sharp image file and place it on a separate layer in the soft image file. And, voila, I now had the picture that I wanted; sharp referent with soft background. And, as you can see in the finished photograph, I made some modifications-color balance, tonal adjustments (on the single woman), high recovery (the light globes), and the removal of the upper left cyan cast (mixed light, daylight + tungsten)-on some selected areas of the image file and then merged the 2 layers together.

ASIDE I made a couple additional single women photographs while in Jersey City this weekend past. Those 2 photographs were made with my “standard” single women M.O.; making a picture without the woman in question knowing that I was making a picture of her. Which leads to a question, re: the Uncle Momo single women…

She seems to be aware of the fact that I was making a photograph of her. Although, it is possible that she might have thought that I was looking at / reading something on my iPhone. Whatever, the case, it does call into question whether I can, thematically writing, include it in my single women body of work. Gotta thing about that. END ASIDE

#6490-92 / single women • common places • common things ~ ennui

this weekend past in Jersey City, NJ ~ (embiggenable)

this weekend past in Jersey City, NJ ~ (embiggenable)

this weekend past in Jersey City, NJ ~ (embiggenable)

IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE TO ME TO READ a blog entry-from a dedicated gear head-that expresses a sense of (non-commercial) photo making ennui. It would seem that an equipment fetish is not particularly conducive to the making of good photographs.

While it would me very easy for me to heap a bunch of no-shit-Sherlock on the author, I thought that I would instead-for instructive purposes only-intersperse a few Brooks Jensen quotes-from his Things I’ve Learned About Photography-together with a few excerpts from the blog entry in question:

excerpt: All I can manage to say for the photographic process now is that it gets one out of the house…But without a spark behind the process all the trappings of the craft are mostly rendered meaningless and banal….old duffers like me wandering around with wonderful gear in a vain attempt to re-capture the magic we felt when taking photographs in our youth….

The more gear you carry the less likely you are to make a good photograph. ~ BJ

excerpt:…Almost as though we've all concluded that with the endless torrent of images being constantly shared everywhere that no individual shot or selection of shots matters anymore….I felt a certain sense of futility…Another futile attempt to carve out some sort of alternate viewpoint.

…every photographer who sticks with it long enough arrives at a technical plateau where production of a technically good photograph is relatively easy. It is here that real photography starts and most photographers quit. ~ BJ

Now I am not suggesting that the author is about to give up making non-commercial pictures but, if he were to do so, it would not be much of loss to fine art photo world cuz one should…

Never ask a person who collects cameras if you can see his photographs. ~ BJ

PS

You would never know it by looking at the photographic press [ed. gear focused blogs], but there are an amazing number of creative people engaged in photography who couldn’t care less about equipment but who love photographs. ~ BJ

# 6443-50 / bodies of work ~ stumbling down a dead end street #2

the kitchen sink ~ (embiggenable)

legs and heels ~ (embiggenable)

still life ~ (embiggenable)

facades ~ (embiggenable)

Life without the APA ~ (embiggenable)

picture windows ~ (embiggenable)

tangles ~ (embiggenable)

single women ~ (embiggenable)

Adirondack Snapshot Project ~ (embiggenable)

ACCORDING TO THE IDIOT QUOTED IN MY LAST entry, I have apparently been “repeating the same basic work, for decades and decades, unaware that I have been stumbling down a dead end street”. That would be because I have been making pictures driven by my very own picture making vision. A vision that does not allow me to go careening around the technique / visual effects / gear-obsessed picture making landscape like a drunken sailor. To wit, I see what I see and that’s how that I see (all credit to Popeye who said, “ I am what I am and that’s all that I am.)

That written, re: careening around like a drunken sailor, I will readily admit to careening around the referent landscape like a drunken picture maker. A picture making condition condition (affliction?) that I call discursive promiscuity. To my eye and sensibilities, any thing and every thing is fair game for a picture making possibility. The result of that discursive promiscuity is that I have accumulated, over the past 25 years, at least 15,000 pictures.

One might think that that glut of pictures would make for a very unruly mess. However, that is not the case cuz, thanks to the guidance of my vision, the overwhelming majority of my pictures exhibit a consistent,-but not formulaic-very particular attention to form, aka: the “arrangement” of the visual elements-line, shape, tone, color and space-within the imposed frame of my pictures.

This “consistency” leads to a very interesting result; while I rarely work with the thought of creating a body of work in mind, nevertheless, I have, over an extended period of time, realized that my eye and sensibilities have been, and still are, drawn to specific referents again and again. The result is that eventually-many times over the course of years-I “discover” that I have, in fact-albeit inadvertently, created many bodies of work.

ASIDE the body of works illustrated above, with a few images each, are some of the bodies of work I have created, most of which were “discovered” in my library (as opposed to deliberately created). The are at least 6 more bodies of work I could display. END OF ASIDE

And, what I find interesting and very surprising is that, once a number of referent related pictures are organized into a body of work, the coherent consistency of vision is, quite frankly, amazing.

Makes me quite happy that I have not tried to “re-invent” my vision. And BTW, I really like the “street” I am on. It is not a “dead end” and, in fact, there is no end in sight as far as I can see.

# 6423-37 / comon places • common things • still life • people ~ meaninng schmeaning

Quality butcher ~ Scotland (embiggenable)

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Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.” ~ Susan Sontag

IN MY LAST ENTRY I PROCLAIMED THAT, re: the medium of photography and its apparatus, it’s the same as it ever was. I believe that to be true albeit with one notable exception; the Major League Division of the Fine Art Photography World. To wit…

Over the past decade or two, fine art photo galleries and art institutions have been taken over-I would venture to write”hijacked”-by the Academic Lunatic Fringe. That is, at the directorial level graduate degrees-MAs /MFAs-are the norm and, consequently, the work being exhibited or acquired adheres to the ALF dictum of meaning trumps visual content. Or, in other words, what a picture means is much more important than what a picture depicts. Concept is the thing, which quite frankly is to be expected of academia, aka: the home of ideas.

The unfortunate (iMo) results are two-fold; 1) most ALF pictures are, to my eye and sensibilities, visual flops, and, 2) the pictures are always accompanied by a bloviating art speak explanation, re: what the pictures mean. The explanations are, iMo, virtually indispensable inasmuch as the pictures, in and of themselves, are rarely self-explanatory. In fact, after being told by a picture maker exactly what his/her pictures are about, I rarely see in his/her pictures whatever it is the maker is trying to express.

University presses [ed. +fine art photo book publishers] increasingly hold to the policy that requires books of pictures to incorporate “substantial” texts…. layering together pictures with the photographer’s words, [ed. or more likely an academic’s essay] but also sandwiching the concoction between slabs of social—scientific balloon bread. ~ Robert Adams

To be completely honest, I should make it clear that my dislike, re: this sad state of photographic affairs, is predicated upon a very selfish desire to be visually engaged when viewing photographs on a gallery / art institution (or even online) wall. That is, as opposed to pictures of the self-pyschoanalyzing, navel gazing “investigations” by some so-called lens-based artist’s obsession with the “intersection” of some aspect of a social-scientific balloon bread concept and his/her inner self/life.

# 6191-94 / narrow depth of field ~ is it now an effect?

from my single women series ~ µ4/3 camera / 20mm (40e) / @ f1.7 (embiggenable)

iPhone ~ Portrait setting (embiggenable)

iPhone ~ Portrait setting (embiggenable)

iPhone ~ Portrait setting (embiggenable)

BACK IN THE OLDEN DAYS OF PICTURE MAKING, aka: pre-digital, picture makers came by narrow depth-of-field “honestly” - camera+”fast” lens+shoot wide open = narrow depth-of-field. This technique was applied to many uses such as portraiture or drawing attention to a featured referent in a picture. But, in any case, it was derived from an intrinsic characteristic of the medium’s equipment.

In today’s digital picture making realm, narrow DOF is harder to come by given the typical smaller than so-called full-frame sensors + the laws / science of optics and image magnification (which I won’t get into here). For many picture makers who desire max DOF in their picture making , this a bonus.

As an example, in my picture making, wherein I am seeking out aesthetic form, I want every line, shape, texture, space, color, value, et al to be rendered with clarity and definition. That’s cuz every visual element with my imposed frame is an integral part of the aesthetic form I picture and hope to make perceivable to the viewers of my pictures.

For those who like narrow DOF, the options for obtaining it are limited and usually very expensive. Like, have you priced a (so-called) full-frame digital camera with a “fast “ high quality lens? While I like narrow DOF in some of my picture making, the expense versus small need-actually, it’s more like desire-does not justify the expensive. So….

….when the desire for narrow DOF strikes-I turn to my iPhone 13 Pro Max and its Portrait setting / feature. And, in case you haven/t noticed, over the past few months I have been using that setting-and,surprise for me, within a full-frame-much more than I ever imagined that I would. That’s cuz, best as I can tell at this point, I have been seduced by what my eye and sensibilities perceive as the soft, emotional warmth of pictures made with some significant degree of limited DOF. Which, again to my eye and sensibilities, stands in contrast to the hard, analytical, detached coolness of those pictures made with sharp definition and clarity from edge to edge.

ASIDE No. the iPhone Portrait setting does not accurately replicate the effect of the the old-timey film camera+fast lens combination. Yes. It can get confused, re: what to soften versus what to keep sharp, by small details. But, with some processing “corrections”, it does what I want it to do for my apparent narrow DOF picture making purposes. END OF ASIDE

All of the above written, I am ever so slightly conflicted with use of the iPhone Portrait setting. For the first time in my picture making life, I am using a filter to achieve a look / effect. OK, it'‘s not a filter. It is actually computational photography, Nevertheless, I can not help but feel that I am “cheating”, re: my sacred straight photography vow. Although, when picturing scenes / referents which are static, I do pre-select the aperture setting which creates the DOF look I am after and, 9 times out of 10, I print the file from that selection.

So, RATIONALIZATION ALERT, it’s kinda like straight photography, right?