Racist?

Drive south along Interstate I95 and leave North Carolina. Within a quarter of a mile South of the Border appears on your left. It's a sprawling tourist trap filled with clip-joint shops, restaurants, a gas station, and assorted tourist attractions - including a large public toilet. It presents you with a battle between ticky and tacky, with tacky ahead by a nose.

The motif is sort of stereotypical Mexican... as imagined by people who don't seem to like Mexico all that much. Now I'm not a believer in the concept of La Raza. Most Latin Americans that I've met have as much European blood as me. However they are as ethnically different from my Irish ancestors as Serbo-Croatians. There is a Latin culture that's taken on unique national characteristics as you travel from nation to nation. What ties them together is Spanish.

However, ethnic cultures always seem to clash - and those clashes produce some hot sparks, even fires - right? Last week, a television news lady was fired from her network job on NBC for having a discussion which seemed to license black-face halloween costumes. Which brings me to South of the Border in South Carolina.

Here's that Pedro public toilet. So? Is "Pedro" not as ethnically insensitive as black-face costumes? The place has been around for decades -  perhaps half a century. Its designers probably consider the motif to be fun. Moreover it's thousands of miles away from the Mexican border. But... have definitions of humor changed drastically enough over the last couple of decades to pop the place's humor balloon? Is South  of the Border a racist (or at least an ethnic) dog-whistle?

Summer Along James River

Summer afternoon along the James River at Palmetto Bluffs, SC

It was wet heat in Beaufort County for our 2016 June stay on Hilton Head Island. You know, the sort of heat that sops clothes like dish rags. It was so chronic you felt a bit chilly when the temp dropped below 95. But then, Hilton Head's in deep Dixie and built atop a mostly drained swamp along the Atlantic's Low Country. This was the heart of the Confederacy where, in my great-grandparents' time the most belligerent of slavery's proponents once lived. In 1850, according to a historic marker in the county seat, this region had 1,111 white people and 8,361 slaves occupying 151 plantations. Cotton was king. 

The James river mixes into the ocean about 5 miles to the southeast from where I found this image so it's tidal at this point. With Charleston to its north and Savannah to the south, Beaufort county's inches above sea level... And well down into reptile and mosquito level. Thinking about this land's people some 150 years ago means imagining a time before air-conditioning. Which is the high tech that finally disrupted how this summer wet-heat went unchallenged. 

For two weeks we largely lived like space travelers on Mars... Locked by choking hot days inside of cooled-air bubbles. I tried bike riding only twice, but even at sunrise - the humidity was so thick that downhill felt like uphill. 

It's not that Dixie's summer days are lazy. No, self defense vacationers tour the place within cars that whisk them between cool bubbles. Down there autos aren't designed so much aerodynamically as they are thermodynamically. Once, decades ago, a southerner criticized me for living where heating costs were so high in winter. He implied that Yankees were energy wasteful. And yet I'm thinking that the electric costs of summer A/C inside of those old high ceiling southern buildings must compete with my gas heat, no? Isn't electric always the most expensive way to do HVAC over the course of a year? 

Ahhhhh well. Southern summer scenes are gorgeously pretty and seem to be accompanied by a deep low voice quietly signing, "Ole man river... Dat ole man river..." And as I scurried back to my car's A/C I wondered just how much fuel, there in the 100 degree plus sun, it took a man to tote that barge and lift that bail... 

Geek Stuff: Took the reference shots with a Canon EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5) screwed to my 7D. A lot of processing later I'd finally prepared the images for AlienSkin's SnapArt to create this languid late afternoon oil painting into capture the searing sun's glare. As you can see, I try not to use a lens shade and seek opportunities to let the light flare across glass and my wide angle's got a lot of glass surface to attract sunlight. 

Bourbon St. • 1968

Still diving through the slide trove I found a couple of weeks back. They're coming out at random: Like the way miners find veins with explosives? Except for Kodak Carousel projector rings that were ordered, the rest are a jumble... memories smooshed together with the melange of Bingo balls in one of those tumblers. And like them, I reach in and pluck a moment out... Some ignite memory lights in wherever my brain stores things. 

Others seem to be part of someone else's life entirely. 

But here... here... Of course is our New Orleans honeymoon... Yep... Yep... I was there with Rita... Uh-huh... But this image? This instant? The colors faded away from the slide... and I cannot find them in my memory's storage bins. Why was the street so deserted? Was it too early for people? It was the first week of June so Summer'd happened way down there in Dixie. Maybe this was midday and only visitors like us were sufficiently weird to be out in the sun?

For sure it wasn't nighttime. Nope, nights in the Latin Quarter are NEVER this empty. Night's an open sluice gate on this street... Where people just keep on flowing like the ancient river a couple of blocks away. 

We've gone back to this creole place a few times. Even after the flood, this part of town's still a honkey-tonk constant. It's good that some things don't change in a world that's nothing but. Still, it's a city that's so culturally and climatically foreign that living there'd kill me. 

Up here in the north, the circus used to come to town every couple of years. They did that because customers wanted the break between visits. New kids had to grow into a appetite, and old appetites had to be resuscitated... Time allows both of those things. Both for the novelty of traveling circuses and traveling to circuses, like New Orleans. 

Summer's Started

Down in Hilton Head, SC last week. Summer comes to Dixie with an early muscle, especially in the Low Country... along the the Atlantic Coast. Hilton Head Island's shaped like a running shoe and we stay very near it's flat instep. Once a bog, it's flat and canal-irrigated to draw the brackish water back to the sea. If the ground's not everywhere as damp as once-upon-a-time the air's still wetter than a stoop-laborer's back And twice as thick. Mid-day's are for beaches, pools, and air-conditioned spots cluttered with books and adult beverages.

Bike Shed

Out back we store ... Well, have you noticed that the word "shed" is double entendre? As a noun, it's a place where we keep stuff. As a verb it's the act of discarding. A bike shed sort of promises both of those things. And this flat island teases you into believing that you'll shed the vacation belt-lime baggage if you''ll peddle your bike from the shed. Getit? In a way, nothing says island summer like this lazy morning image of those backsides poking out and teasing me to wrap my fat legs around their fat saddles. And yeah, why not, huh?

Jungle Glade

To circle the jungle between me and the sea. And the way it dares me to leave the bike and wander trails that wind somewhere. Which I almost did except a snake rolled and wriggled out of those leaves there to the lower right and coiled blink-fast onto the trail and then off into that underbrush. So much for the dare... Back to the biking... When, just to my right,  I heard water plop down from the bike-path's bank and jerking around I saw...

Primordial Lurk

this thing and peddled like hell away, parked, and tip-toed back, my Canon 7D with it's 70-300mm lens cranked all the way out. Through which... I watched it, it watched me, I focused, shot, and backed way up. After gasping a bunch, I went back and kept shooting while it lay there watching, only its eyes flicked, the rest of that body flat... still... cocked... and stinking up the thick swampy air. You know the word, fetid? Yeah, now imagine this thing's breath and you've got a match.

Night Watch

Oh yeah... Wildlife thinking reminds me that I probably forgot to post this wild herd I captured in Uganda's Queen Elizabeth Park. Okay, that was last summer and there are crocs, not gators in Africa so the segue's kind of hard to explain. Hmmmm... But these pix are all summery, right? RIGHT! So it's a theme :-)

Searing Mid Day Dixie

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Nightmare Daylight

Searing light bleaches
Colors and inks
Black shadows
Except when
It doesn’t.

Tybee Island, Ga.
Canon 7D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm: PS4, AlienSkin, Bokeh2: Custom textures & brushes. Thanks to Distressed Jewel.

Emporia Tanked

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Sunrise burns
Pepsi quenches.
It is not
A tankless
Job...

Emporia, Canon 40D: 40D: PS4: AlienSkin, Bokeh2: Topaz: Custom textures & brushes

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Chill breeze puffs
The day before a
First frost
Crackles summer
Away with
The boat for
Winter.

GEEK STUFF: Chesapeake Bay, MD. • Canon 20D: Canon EF-S 10-22mm (f3.5-4.5), PS/CS4, Topaz, AlienSkin/SnapArt/Watercolor, Custom strokes, textures, brushes, filters.

Blonde In Savannah - 2

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Dolled up for her portrait, the little cutie posed in bare feet. I let the photographer work... And like a voyeur... snuck my lens into the posing space.

Hilton Head Island, South Carolina

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Does this need a comment?

Night Fishing

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America To Me

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So what to do under the glare of the Dixie sun in mid summer? What to do when you're standing in the parking lot of a monster discount store? What's the story... the feeling... the idea... What runs together as the heat melts even primary colors down into streams of a place that's like the places that every American goes? How to turn the commonplace into a thought about the commonplace? As you feel the sun sear your skin to a bubbling consistency?

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Here are the virgin pictures from my FlashCard... Comments?

Naughty

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Found her in Savannah... Where else?


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Here's the virgin (!) image.

Dixie #10: River Street • Savannah, Ga

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I had to come a great distance
To find these feelings.

And now they have come
A great distance to find you.

They are an old new message
In a new old bottle...

Addressed to the finder.

Dixie #9: River Street • Savannah, Ga

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Hush for a moment along River Street. If you gaze intently as a cartoon-watching child you’ll feel it… an echo… of Bourbon St.

It’s a waft of bawdy Southern culture… the one that comes out at night along the waterfronts of Dixie’s cities – hawking the teasey patina and paint of fading flashy ladies waiting for the sailors.

Dixie #8: Hush... Don't Wake It

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In school, photographers have been taught to pre-visualize so that the result will conform to their, and the client's, expectations. And for most of the genres of photography (forensic, fashion, wedding, sports, etc.)... this is perfect advise. But for art photography, the principles are broader.

Of course I frequently set out with an idea or a feeling that I want to capture. But today, we get two bites at the apple. We can pre-visualize before we click the shutter. And/or we can pre-visualize as we bring our images up in Aperture, LightRoom, Bridge, or whatever application you use to sort pictures. In this second place we can pre-visualize before the post processing.

This is a new space for photography in most cases. Oh sure there were artists in the old days who did spectacular enhancements in the darkroom. These were the pioneers for the digital enhancements we can now achieve.

Which means that in art photography the whole needn’t be the sum of its parts. Putting parts together is adding thoughts and feelings to them through the new power we have to express our imaginations. We can arrange pieces of moments the same way that novelists can arrange facts. And the final result needn't mimic reality at all.

Dixie #7: River Street • Savannah, Ga

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Dixie #6: River Street • Savannah, Ga.

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Dixie #5: But... Izzit Art?

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Ever been to Tybee Island, Georgia? Been into the biggest restaurant on the beach? If you have, you've seen this (welll the male half of you have). Okay, so why's it here?

(1) It is one of the most colorful sites on Tybee. Somehow it sums up my feelings about my visit. It's a good humored good-ole-boy scruffy place. Um... colorful.

(2) In 1917 Marcel Duchamp went down into art history by submitting a porcelain urinal from a plumbing equipment manufacturer which he mounted on wood and signed R. Mutt. He then submitted it into an UN-juried art show. It was refused. Now notice the show was UN-juried and yet the organizers wouldn't allow him to exhibit what he called, "Fountain". It whipped up a furor over who decides what is art.

Look at the color of this image. Look at the texture. Look at the formality of the composition, the shape, the form... And of course look at the lighting. I get grief for my enhancements. Folks who insist that images must look, well, 'real' don't like the way I carve holes into my images through post processing techniques that allow the viewer fly through the image plane into their own narrative.

So here's a non-enhancement. But... but... it still provides a plane ride, right? Is it art? Was Duchamp's 'Fountain'?

Hope so, but it's your call...

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No need for a virgin image today... up there... that's it.

Dixie #4: River St. • Savannah, GA

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My friend Craig Tanner's crib is Savannah, Ga. And he guides the fresh eyes of gifted photographers in his workshops around the old South's grand city. Eventually they come to River Street. Unfortunately my eyes are no longer fresh, dimmed by many visits over the last thirty years or so. But like Craig, I'm compelled to take them down to River Street at least once a year to grab images, ideas, and feelings from the characters and color of this crusty seaport.

So? Wuddaya think?


Let me go farther into this image in more detail as a result of some questions from viewers...

I try to conceptualize what I'm after... what I want an image to say. The triptych form is almost cheating... it lets me expand the canvas and to create more sophisticated texture. You know, cram a greater range of nuance into the thing through collage.

So the question I wrestled with yesterday was about "Fresh Eyes" on River Street. And then there is the whole double meaning thing of "Fresh". Plus I was anxious to gently have fun with the wonderful character studies generally seen in Savannah portraits. Lastly I wanted to subtly create a sense of place. But different from a lot of my past takes on River Street...

Particularly studies of the street itself as a character. Click here to see an example

Or if you like, click here to see a number of my prveious years' River Street and Savannah images (including street portraits).


If you've been to River Street in Savannah you know that it is a epicenter for tourists, prol-food restaurants, bars, ancient buildings which once created the enormous wealth of this city that have been repurposed for instantaneous commercial fun, and yeah... a number of shops where ticky is losing a wrestling match with tacky.

So... how to wrap all of that into one image for viewers who lack so much of that context? Huh? Huh? Huh? How to create an image that is fun all by itself, but can pull people who want to take the trip through it to explore the underlying thoughts and feelings?

Hmmm... since this was about "Fresh" eyes... Howzabout I take a gaggle of faceless tourists and mix em up with the saucy eyes of some ticky-shop denizens? What is the feeling of this River Street place? Can you pile together its parts to create something greater? Like a lot of my stuff, its conceived to give you a moment's reward, or more if you wanna hang around for the show.

Long way around... but that's what I was after... when I dropped that gang of menu-viewers between the two other characters of River Street. It's all in the 'fresh' eyes from either side that tie the entire thing into a narrative... Um... I hope..

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And here my friends are the virgin images fresh from today's FlashCard.

Dixie #3: The Bridge

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Eventually life presents us with a bridge.


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And here is the virgin image from the FlashCard...