Crystal Clarity

What's clear? Is anything doubtless? Anything? Look, there ought to be facts. Things that... are, correct? I know some deconstructionists. Literary scholars. Well, sort of. Each was once upon a time an academic... College instructors. None earned tenure. Literature departments gush green Ph.D.s into a collegiate labor market that's become a lot like the market for art. Which is to say, no market at all. Increasingly universities are contracting arts and humanities positions through attrition. So tenure-track demand has fallen below replacement levels. Supply of humanists way overwhelms demand. 

Markets require a price that will clear surpluses. Yet only a negative price will clear a market like art or deconstructionism. Meaning? Market entrants will have to give their services away or, increasingly, pay customers to take them. Now subsidies are effectively a way to pay customers to accept a product (think Tesla). And while there are significant heaps of government,  donor, or endowment subsidies to colleges and universities - they have not reached a level sufficient to clear the market (in fact they've fed the beast). Meaning? There will at first be a bulge in unemployed humanists, until eventually many leave the market, seeking to retrofit themselves to fit the demand for customers who are hiring. These are labor markets only tangentially (at best) in need of deconstructionidt scholarship.

To the market emigrants, deconstruction becomes perhaps a memory, a hobby, therapy, or a creed - maybe all. Trained to deconstruct... they do... in business, government, non-profits... in whatever port the storm's driven them. Which is different from critical or strategic thought. They are graduate critics - a lay priesthood. 

Nothing to them is clear. Subjective kicks objective's ass. 

They're trained to miss the point. They are driven by a faith in nothing. Nihilism. The critical question is: How acceptable are life options. If we take our eyes off of that for even a moment, we are at risk of allowing distractions away from the obvious. Like the numbers on a pay or assistance check... smiles on family faces... risk benefit results... Or risk benefit analysis at all. 

They are driven by a faith in nothing. Nihilism. Only to discover that hope is not a business plan. 

The GEEK STUFF?  Nothing special. Here's a grab-shot of  vessels cooling before packaging at Ireland's Waterford Glassworks. The golden light bulb cast turns mood into fact. Reflections spark the imagination. As in life, we confront each successive object through its foreground. Knowing even the nearest future through what the immediate moment permits us to know. Is reality what filters allow us to believe? Or is it crystal clear that here are three beautiful objects? Of course, beautiful's a weasel word, huh? Adjectives do that. 

Cicero @ Trinity

Cicero by Scheemaker  c. 1750 • Trinity College Library, Dublin

It was around 1750 when Cicero was imagined in a marble block under Peter Scheemakers' chisel. And since then Cicero's sat among what eventually grew to just over 50 busts of many of the dead white men whose writings surround them in the library of Trinity college, Dublin. Or at least they do for the moment. Whether they will remain among the 100s of thousands of similar writings of DWMs in this ancient collection is dependent upon the passions of a cultural revolution raging upon western campuses. 

We're at an inflection point. It's factual that these works form a base  that defined Western Civilization. Notice that I've used the past tense there? Which gets me back to that word... inflection. It's sort of paradoxical that this debate is now spread to the campus of Ireland's most distinguished University. Why? This was the island where monks tediously repaired and transcribed the West's oldest thoughts. Footsteps away from this great library hall sits the Book Of Kells, the oldest illuminated Bible in existence: Which is also rumored to be the work of a handful of DWM. Well, there's controversy over the W, so maybe that will save it from the pyre? 

How much longer will Cicero overlook the library's students? Maybe this image of mine is a pre-rubble record? Wouldn't it have been great to have at images like this from say the great library of Alexandria before savages intent upon pillaging and debasing ancient thought put it to the torch? Imagine images from the library or Ephesus, or even from the great libraries of 20th century China that were ravished and looted during their Cultural Revolution? 

  

Belfast Gunsmog

Belfast, Northern Ireland • Royal Avenue • April 2013

Royal Avenue • Belfast • Northern Ireland • April 2013
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It's said that the Europa is the most bombed hotel in history. Belfast was  once Ireland's money machine. Which is why the Brits held onto it and its neighboring counties when the Irish Republic seceded in 1946.
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Since the 1950s though– – like blooms in winter – shipbuilding, textiles, tobacco traders, and  the region's heavy manufacturing shriveled. Even without The Troubles world economics would have sucked them  away... Ahhh but The Troubles.
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From the early 1800s through the Good Friday Agreement of  April 10, 1998, violence between the occupiers and the occupied gashed the Ulster counties leaving Royal Avenue blood-spocked and gnarled by bullets and bombs.
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The Irish and British fight over this Northern hunk of the island terrified investors who fed the economics that vacuumed at the region's industries.
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Peering up above Royal Avenue in center-city Belfast the sky was smokey with what? A memory of gun-smoke steeped smog... And squinting into the yellow haze I muttered, "_Gunsmog!_" the stuff stained the Northern Irish heavens.
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Then I panned down to the rebuilt Greek columns on the Hotel Europa, and coughed.

34 Main St. • Killarney, Ireland

How to mute Killarney?

It's a tourist town of about 12,000 permanent Irish residents, yet it seems to have more hotels than people. The city streets evoke Disneyland - or Disneyland evokes them. Their colors make for squinting.

And then there's the smooshing together of decoration, both around, on, and inside the store fronts. Killarney shops are shameless as showgirls in their efforts to grab attention. Blocks are eye-exhausting as Vegas in their palettes. Of course Vegas boasts performance architecture that's imploded, what? Weekly? Daily? Vegas won't tolerate history, or even nostalgia, much less antique.

Killarney, OTH, has a patina-of-shabby that seems as carefully adhered to its surfaces as the layers of paint which are probably  inches thick. And see how at first this image seems as if the camera was canted? but look closely, the lens was straight as a nun in a gay bar, but it's the shops themselves that are bent by age.

Now see this late afternoon sidewalk? While the blinds in the upstairs window boast mid-last-century dust, the sidewalks are surgery-table clean. Killarney's kept like a retro set for WWII soldiers, back when the photographs were black and white, but the memories were full-on chrome.

Killarney works at being a memory. But one that's hard to mute.

Geek Stuff: Shot with my Canon 7D, worked with PS the processed with Alien Skin Exposure's Kodachrome II to tease out the rich antique late-afternoon reds and memories that my grandparents and my mother brought to America.

The Best Might Accomplish Nothing

 Recently someone asked about a journalism degree. And I replied that journalism is an activity, accomplishment is what it documents. The activity’s incidental… Secondary… Unessential. But in other circumstances, the activity is necessary… inseparable… ONE with the accomplishment.

In this case here, I’m the photojournalist… This guy is a master glass blower at Ireland’s legendary Waterford Crystal. Which means he’s among the world’s best, perhaps one of history’s best, at accomplishing with his mastery of process. Something a journalist cannot do.

Not only won’t journalists admit this: Most don’t know it.

So Much Blarney

See that road sign there on the left of this image? It points to Blarney Castle. This little town square is almost in the shadow of the old ruin. Well, maybe not a ruin. The place isn't habitable but it's sure well preserved given the hoards that come to kiss its stone. There were more Americans, Canadians,  and Australians walking these streets as I meandered about  than Irish. Tourism's a MAJOR industry on the island.

Regardless of the stuff we come to see, Blarney's a great example of what's just beyond the snapshot frames of the 17th century stuff. It's where townsfolk come to shop in 21st century wagons. I like that. This could be Lancaster's town square, or the centers of Blue Ball, Paradise, or Intercourse. Well, maybe not. In fact, our squares are gridlocked with Amish horse carts. Hmmmm.... 

Odd I travel to the olde sod to scratch my ancient Irish roots and find towns that are more modern than my own. There's some kind of lesson there, right? 

Along the Liffey

The British murdered a million Irish

Another million were forced to immigrate

When the potato blight killed

The food that absentee English landlords

Allowed their tenants to eat.

Meantime Aristocrats exported 

More than enough food 

Causing the19th century genocide.

And igniting the next century

Of troubles. 

It was not a religious war

It was a reclamation. 

And now on Court House Quay

Along Dublin's River Liffey

This guy, cast in metal,

Stands enfolding his

Earthly belongings.

It's to cry...

Dublin, Ireland. Across the river is The Immaculate Heart of Mary on City Quay in the midst of the city's Docklands. Canon 7D, Post processed in PS4 with Topaz Adjust & Alen Skin's SnapArt oil paint. Custom brushes and textures.  Cross processed with beta version of  customized Alien Skin Exposure 6.

Kilkenny School Girls

Are they beautiful? Captured (if it's possible for anyone to capture these three in any real sense) along the streets of a damp, chilly, and dreary Kilkenny afternoon. The trio burst from their shells at the sight of my telephoto with the lass on the right growing a finger-beard to mock my own. Can you look at them and NOT smile? Wuddaya-think? Are they 16, 17 years old? (or 30 or 40?) From a certain age women have that mysterious power of seeming ageless in their beauty, huh? 

GEEK STUFF: It was a rainy Kilkenny early-May afternoon pierced through my Canon EFS 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM Lens on the Canon 7D. Post in PS4. Tools? The texture's my own mix. The dynamic range was dug out with Topaz Adjust. And the palette was created through multi adjustment layers each designed in AlienSkin's Exposure 5 with a boost to the DOF through a selective application of Bokeh 2. Oh yeah. I kissed the palette a bit with AlienSkin's Exposure 5, that I manually over-rode to find my feeling inside the frame.

On Wrappings & The Craic

Content?
People aren’t their
Wrapping.

People
Are the layer
Between

Wrapping
And sinew that
Describes

Their own
Closely cherished
Concern.

A man’s
The sum of his
Caring.


For the poet and artist – streets invent people, rather than the other way around. Or at least they present them as feelings whose wrappings are like a novel’s opening. Wrappings set the playwright’s scene… They are life’s adjectives. And occasionally adverbs… It’s the artist’s job to drop in exclamation points!

This guy’d just left the Tig Cóilí on Galway’s Mainguard Street down at the end of Shop Street where I’d pointed my Canon 20D’s Canon EFS 17-85mm. Tig Cóilí’s known for its music and the craic.

“Uh, wuzzdat, Ted” you wonder? Well since 1905 the Tig Cóilí’s been filed with news, gossip, and conversation. It’s an Irish thing… Maybe jive's the word that comes closest to the craic here in America… But not really since jive’s gone archaic, huh? Anyway, I reached into this image with PS4 and Photomax on the first round, then all sorts of tools to prod at different parts of this feeling… tools like Topaz’s Adjust & BW effects, plus AlienSkin’s powerful Bokeh. Of course the final texturing and all of the brush work were my own designs.

I'm way behind... Soo... let's go huh?

I've been away, then working, then the dog ate my  homework :-) Soooo.... Howzabout I upload almost a dozen and hope someone likes something? Lemme know K and I'll tell ya the story around the image you might like.

A) Let me first return to Ireland:

1. Here's my major favorite... a street scene from downtown Dublin..

2. Wanna get stoned? Visit Blarney Castle..

B. I'll come back to Ireland in the next upload but I've also been shocked by a guy who wondered what he'd feel like after retiring from a senior management position...

D. Then there were the girls already set for their own job interviews at BoyFriends R. Us... 

E. I went back to the archives to look again at Hank's Love Shack in the now razed Lancaster Stock Yards which has become a job creating high tech industrial park. Love the sunset here...

F. Okay, while revisiting the abandoned Stock Yards some six years ago I wandered along what was, once-upon-a-time the main street of America's second largest stock yards at the turn of the 20th century.. The jungle returned..

G. Up in New England two weeks ago I visited my buddy Joe and his grandson Matt. Great moment, eh?

H, Sunrise on Cape Cod... The bayside after the storm... From a 3 panel pano..

I. My friend Andreas and I roamed the streets of Florence a few years ago on an early morning photo shoot. We got separated and I found an early morning market... Tried entering this image in a show a year or so ago. It got rejected... They didn't know how to categorize it. Wasn't art huh?

I. Since the Stockyard file was open, I decided to revisit an image that I originally worked in 2006. It's fun to see how much I've changed.. maybe learned. Regardless, it's also fun to assess the emotional change that the image now evokes in me...

J. Which brings me to a Sunday bike ride in the very early morning this month through the streets a couple blocks from my home here in Lancaster... This is where Grant Alley crosses Shippen Street. We're looking into the sun searing down Grant.

Okay, I'm kind of caught up. Unfortunately I've not yet reduced a small smattering of images that I've formatted for printing with dimensions way too large to post. I'll get them formatted soon. Comments anyone? Suggestions? 

Cliffs, Crags, Prows

Looming ships of

Ancient giants

Slice deep and 

Through foamed

Enigma.

The Cliff of Mohr guard the southwest coast of Ireland. Imperfectly though: Their walls breached by Celts, Vikings, Normans, and Brits - but never by Romans. 

Confronted by mid-day sun – The photographer's nightmare – I chose a hand held five piece panorama with my Canon 7D through its ES-S17-85mm at f/14 - 1/400 dialing an ISO of 1000. Then significant stitching and post processing with PS4 involving custom textures and various adjustments layering with AlienSkin and Topaz Suite tools. In order to deal with the searingly burnt-out mid-day skies, the clouds are hand painted in PS4 as are the mists. 

Reconsolidation

Reconsolidation: Some profession, maybe the psychologist's, created that word which means, "the moment you remember is the moment you forget." Here's a promontory poking from Northern Ireland's Giant's Causeway into the gush of the North Sea. Immovable object slams into irresistible force. Or maybe the other way around? 

The camera stops time in sharp focus... but reality does neither of those things. Impressionism explains memory from a stream of glances. It's been written that, "an artist's vision is centered in wonder rather than in an eye." Art pokes into recollections to pluck out what we cannot see. Never saw. What we remembered or felt. Feeling's what impressions are about. 

Art without wonder is merely craft.

The Giant's Causeway's southern end sits here on the Northern Coast of Ireland pointing toward it's other side eleven miles to Scotland. It is one of Britain's most visited natural site. See that sky, only minutes before it drove a May hailstorm hard at us.

Canon 7D, EF-S17-85mm, ISO 150,  Triple image pano knit in PS4 for dynamic range adjustments. 

Pieced-Impressions

Dunno where in Ireland I captured this. We watched thousands of these homes drive past our windows. They filled my memory with their colors, boxed shapes, and tidy; lines, walks and alleys. 

They weren't like American memories... not exactly. They weren't like European memories... not exactly. But they weren't foreign. Weren't exotic. They fit onto my story arc comfortably: Abstract pieces of box-color with plenty of fireplaced-space inside.. Each with doorways that open, uninterrupted by porches or stoops, directly onto the world's-rush. The world that bussed us past their un-barred windows to leave a sense of color-brushed security.


Canon 7D, EF-S17-85mm, ISO 1000,   AlienSkin: Snap Art 3: various layers of mixed media, Exposure 5, Kodachrome 20 ASA. Custom textures/brushes.Hand drawn sky and features to reveal pieced impressions.

Killarney Sweet Shop

I live in America's Amish country. The old order has largely stopped its technological clock somewhere in the middle of the 19th century. The towns of Ireland, I've found, have stopped their urban  street clocks somewhere in the late 1930s or pre-war 40s. So much seems as familiar as nostalgia. Here on Killarney's Market street's a powerful example... Look at the candies in the crystal jars. Can you read the flavors? These are the penny-sticks lurking almost beyond memory of most of us today. Killarney, like most of Ireland's small cities, is a well-crafted memory.

Canon 7D, EF-S17-85mm, ISO 300,  Double image pano in PS4 for dynamic range adjustments. Custom brushes/textures. AlienSkin: SnapAr3 Custom Textured oil for shadow texture/vignetting, tExposure 5,Agafachrome to capture rich European 50s color depth.

Dunluce Castle's In Ruin!

Okay, yeah... it's a hair pretentious, huh? But fun though. I found this frame among the collection at the National Gallery in Washington. They let us photograph all of the masterpieces since, well, we own them... Right? Anyway, the image is another one I grabbed last month in Ireland.... Here's the scoop... This is

Dunluce Castle is a now-ruined 13th century medieval castle in Northern Ireland. It is located on the edge of a basalt outcropping in County Antriim, and is accessible via a bridge connecting it to the mainland. The castle is surrounded by extremely steep drops on either side, which may have been an important factor to the early Christians and Vikings who were drawn to this place where an early Irish fort once stood.

In 2011, major archaeological excavations found significant remains of the "lost town of Dunluce", which was razed to the ground in the Irish uprising of 1641. It may have contained the most revolutionary housing in Europe when it was built in the early 17th century, including indoor toilets which had only started to be introduced around Europe at the time, and a complex street network based on a grid system. 95% of the town is still to be discovered.kay, yeah... it's a hair pretentious, huh? But fun though. I found this frame among the collection at the National Gallery in Washington. They let us photograph all of the masterpieces since, well, we own them... Right? Anyway, the image is another one I grabbed last month in Ireland.... Here's the scoop... This is


Dunluce Castle is a now-ruined 13th century medieval castle in Northern Ireland. It is located on the edge of a basalt outcropping in County Antriim, and is accessible via a bridge connecting it to the mainland. The castle is surrounded by extremely steep drops on either side, which may have been an important factor to the early Christians and Vikings who were drawn to this place where an early Irish fort once stood.

In 2011, major archaeological excavations found significant remains of the "lost town of Dunluce", which was razed to the ground in the Irish uprising of 1641. It may have contained the most revolutionary housing in Europe when it was built in the early 17th century, including indoor toilets which had only started to be introduced around Europe at the time, and a complex street network based on a grid system. 95% of the town is still to be discovered.

And now for the GeekStuff: Canon 7D, w/Canon EF-S17-85 IS USM, F/16@1/800, ISO 1000. 6 image pano, merged in PS4: AlienSkin, SnapArt... mixed media: Oil, Watercolor.

The Great Hunger: 1845-52

Once upon a time, England ruled a conquered Ireland. It's native Irish people labored as tenants – forbidden by British law to vote or own land – paid in the potato crop they raised on a quarter acre of marginal land allotted to each tenant family. The rest of the rich earth produced corn, grain, vegetables, and livestock as rent for the British – frequently absentee – landlords. Between 1845 and 1852 a virus annihilated only potatoes, while the majority of remaining land produced rich yields for export. There was abundant food, but none made available to the Irish tenants who farmed it. They starved by the millions suffering not in a great famine but a Great Hunger. Other millions emigrated, many to America, Canada, and Australia. The country has never regained that mid 19th century population.

In Dublin stand these specters of The Great Hunger's victims.

Canon 7D, Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6), PP in PS4 Paint and custom textures created with AlienSkin: SnapArt4, Impasto. Custom brushes.