Potter County #4: The Coudersport

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Ever seen a glimmering hunk of amber? You know, a translucent glob of ancient resin which collected around a seed, a bud, or an almost forgotten bloom in its center? And as you twirled it around, did it trigger memories that you didn’t really have? Recollections of a time before you should remember?

Coudersport is the county seat of Potter County, Pennsylvania and about 2,700 of the county’s 18,000 people live in the town that was formed in the early 1800s. Young, even by American standards, still it’s collected the ambitions of the turn of the twentieth century along a main street of shops, parks, and small office buildings. The streets hold memories of marching bands, and loggers. It is not a land that time forgot, rather one that time remembers lovingly – even longingly. If Coudersport did not exist, Disney would imagine it. In Coudersport you expected Mickey, Pluto, or Cinderella to skip out from door and alley ways.

On a sunny Saturday last week, it glimmered within its resin of amber time.
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PreProcessing: Again through my Canon’s EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) in Coudersport’s main street where I found their working movie house. PotProcessing: Lots of things going on here. I want to create a series of square format images that will hang among the various panos I created in Potter County and at the hunting lodge I posted a few days ago. To create the Edward Hopper mystique here I first turned to Topaz, then teased in two effects from AlienSkin’s SnapArt2. First the Comics filter, then I stroked in Impasto to deepen the nostalgic sense while reinforcing the palette that could have been washed out in the mid-day August light. Happily, I think it worked well.

Door Girl

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The bar's door
Opens to the street
Where she sits
All day
Exposed.

Why?

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Critics have written to me that the pole in that image above distracts them. Hmmmm.... I envisioned this composition from the moment I exposed the frame as a square. But the square format is so impersonally angular that it seemed to me the pole broke the plane into two softer areas that then balanced themselves in terms of dynamic weight. Yet, what I want to communicate here is best described in the words I've placed next to the picture above. So how about I try it without the pole? Does this re-worked image better communicate my questioning idea to you?

Pole Watching

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This is Spoletto, Italy. See that pole? See the work they' ve done to simultaneously preserve and expose it? It's from about the fifth century. Which is the only reason that they went to all of this trouble. It sits in a virtually inaccessible alleyway.

I wonder how many things we preserve simply because they are old. Hell, I wonder if I am preserved because of nothing more? But I digress.

At what point does the age of something justify its preservation? How old must a column become before folks say.. "Nope, can't cover that one up." I'm down with keeping stuff around, you should see my office. Worse yet, you should see my cellar. But.. but... When are we pleased that the trashman cometh?

BTW, that column's dinged, cracked, and scratched up. As the new year is set to begin wonder what purpose does the column's preservation serve? Anyone?

THOUGHT
If we each lived 100 years and one of us died on the day another was born...
Then we stand only twenty deep from this column up there in that image.
Do you realize how small twenty lifetimes are?
Imagine a theater filled with only twenty people.
Imagine that you passed just twenty cars a day.
Imagine that You came upon the supermarket when it held only twenty shoppers.

We are amazed at Roman antiquity, and yet it is perhaps just some twenty people away.
Twenty is not very much of anything, um, unless we are talking about hundred thousand euro notes...

Move On, Okay?

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"Walk Around Him" the sign says. Well sort of.
On a lot of days, I'd like to have a sign like that.
Something that keeps the traffic of life moving, but around me.
Wonder where you buy one?

Titles - Spoleto 5

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Okay, let me stop for a moment here and look into the backroom to discuss some of the business of image collecting.

If you're an artist, photographer or not, or if you're a collector reading this blog you are out of wall space, right? So, what to do when you've created or discovered a new series that excites you? It's not so much that you want to show it off to others, althought this is as much a performing art as acting... but that you want to live with it. To enjoy it. To discover its subtlties, tones, ideas and feelings. These represent moments which have the potential of informing you about a lot of things.

What to do with twenty or thirty new images?

I'm thinking about creating one of those books that Apple lets me make. But they give me very little room for text. As you can see, text is almost as important to me as the image. Still, I'd like to see the images by themselves. Large. Oh well, if the book it the only way, then maybe it needs some text on the images here and there just to create useful divisions.

Which brings me to this image. As you know, when an image is used in a commercial publication, it normally needs air. By that I mean it needs room for the insertion of copy. I have taken commercial work for so many years that I automatically take a number of images with a lot of air. Frequently areas which cannot be cropped away, but if they are not filled they become negative space which pulls the visitor's eye away from the important message of the shot.

Here's an example. I really liked this image and this scene. It's a small corner of a very public place in Spoleto, which I'm certain everyone who knows the city will recognize. It balances the old and new, plus reveals the way some of this city seems stilled, not in the 1500s but in the 1950s. I think I caught that well in this scene,but the air unbalances the image. It is an identifier, don't you think? It calls out for a copy block of some sort where I've placed the title to make this a natural divider in a book. Comments?

Using Beauty Up - Spoleto 4

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Have you noticed how you can use beauty up?

Remember the song that thrilled you? The lusty photo spread that made you, um, twitch? Do you recall the movie, book, sunrise, vista - even the thought or idea: the things that made you go, "Whoa!' when they first happened to you? Then as you returned, gradually wore off? Think of that glorious sunset over the mountains with the mists cutting the air and a bird lazily twirling against majestic clouds. Think of the explosive color palette, and the shapes and shadows at play against one another. And yes, you can recall that picture. In fact it looks so much like a picture, a photograph in your mind, that the difference between reality and pictures fade. And the pictures, so easily accessed from your memories are actually clichés. Almost... almost... corny.

See, we use beauty up. Like some sort of drug, we need novel new injections to keep going, "Whoa!" But even if the new injections are magnificent, they have to be increasingly novel,different. If not, we feel nothing, or less and less. I guess that's programmed into us to keep us striving, eh? Searching for the new? Of course the new needn't be better. Photography's been going through a dirty cigarette butt period in our great museums. Running out of sufficiently novel beauty, curators settled upon the ugly as an alternative way to coax out a "Whoa!"

It used to be that technique alone would lead to images that demonstrated such virtuosity that people would be continually impressed. But now technical perfection comes with the camera. If you can point them, you can create pictures sharp enough to cut leather - with more contrast than a day in the life of Britney Spears.

So increasingly, instead of the repeated spectacle,many photographers who are still searching for awe in beauty are hunting for the little shot. The nice, elegant moment to reflect the human condition. They're looking for warm patterns, satisfying shapes, and comforting compositions. Scenes that just maybe show two men who oddly mirror one another in a walk through a warm park on a fall day. Compositions which perhaps balance the fragility of life and light against the massiviness of history. They're replacing the "Whoa!" for an "Uh-Huh" of identification with a moment in the viewer's mind that's simultaneously identifiable and comfortable.

Given everything going on in the average life, comfortable... now that's a nice place to be, huh?

Whoa!

Spoleto 3

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Have y'ever noticed how music, poetry, novels, films - and so many art forms have one thing in common. The author determines how the idea and feelings will unfold for the audience. You start at the beginning, and unless you leave, you end at the end. The entire work is made senseless if you skip about. But with still photography, it's the viewer who's in control. She can linger as long as he wants (see how I satisfied the political correctness police with that last sentence?).

But I digress.

In so many art forms the artist creates a time flow. But still photographers freeze an instant that happened so quickly that no one could be aware. The human mind does not process ideas as quickly as our cameras do. In fact I can sieze a group of moments each wrenched from different times and sites. And I can combine them all at once. In one place like I've done here. I can do it so that they compliment one another in communicating what I feel or think about a person, a fact, a place, or presence. And the viewer can take over from there, pulling out a meaning that he sees or she feels. Photographs empower not only the photographer, but the viewer. Cool, eh?

Spoleto 2

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"You're so Damned slow Ted," a friend groused yesterday. "You spent two weeks in Italy, you've been home for almost four weeks - and you're not half through the pictures you made. What's up with that?"

Uh, well I don't do my images in the camera. They aren't about some collection of significant details, caught in a click and fixed forever. Each of them teases many layers of my understanding. Go ahead, look at some of the images I've posted and you'll see that each one is a small thinking pool. And I’m not only splashing around in there, but I’m inviting every viewer to dunk in a toe, elbow, nose, or nether region.

Once upon a time there were only three reasons why college professors could win a sabbatical leave: study, writing, or travel. Travel was considered so valuable because it caused people to compare their cultural beliefs with others. And since culture is essentially the container which explains who we are as groups of people – then the experience, it was felt, automatically led to deeper understanding of our beliefs, goals, and behavior.

These images are little windows, or maybe doorways into ideas I hold, or have held. Each one deserves attention so that I can grow, and hopefully share the results of that growth with others. In fact I’m only spending a day or so with each image – hardly slow when these doorways open out into such delightful pathways, or into the things that have renovated my spirit.

If you think of these images as meditations, hey, I’m moving along pretty quickly.


SPOLETO 2: In the center of the old town there’s a stairway dating back to medieval times. It is not a dangerous area, but hundreds of years of footfalls have made it seedy. As you’ll see when I show you images from Assisi, other hill towns are shiny, painted, scrubbed clean. But they don’t feel as lived-in as Spoleto. They look like the living room where parents ban their kids from entering. Spoleto lets people in. It feels authentic. The colors are bright, but aging. The shadows eat hunks out of sunlit walls. There are dents, scrapes, and evidence that people grew up and old here. Spoleto doesn’t so much live with its history, it seems to live in it.

Spoleto

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What Americans call alleyways, Italian hill-top dwellers call streets. Moments before I took this picture two motor scooters roared down this way, working around the suited pedestrian. Spoteto is a city which shows its use. The place is not a Disney set, but more like a grand old room in a mansion which needs some work. It’s a little dingy, a tad musty, and (as we'll see this week) someone could slip some putty into the cracks. But, like a well-worn shoe, it’s easy to put on and a delight to amble about in. Of the Italian hill towns we visited, it was my favorite.

SPOLETO: Italian history dotted steep hillsides with fortified cities. Spoleto, some 78 miles (126 km) north of Rome was built around 600 BC at the head of a magnificent wide valley carved between two mountain ranges. It’s steep streets are lined with a mixture of modern and ancient structures, some incorporating components pre-dating the second century. Its strategic position has involved it in virtually every war ever fought in this country, leaving the sort of scars which old warriors flaunt. The inhabitants, for example, repulsed Hannibal early in the third century. About 38,000 people live there. When we visited in October, the city had the look of a mid-rate hotel the day after a party crowd had left. It was charming, but in need of some dusting, furniture repair, and maybe a good washing down.