Pattern Search

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Perhaps ancient monkeys who recognized faces looming among the leaves escaped the tigers? Regardless, some primal part of our brains has evolved to seek out patterns. Maybe that's why we're so contentious, since each of us is capable of finding, then defending' our understanding of patterns we discover in everything that swirls about us?

There's a curly willow tree on a pot beside the front door to our home. It's been pruned. On a wintery day, it's leafless and hibernating. Actually it's pretty ugly, and we'll probably replace it come Spring. But each day as I notice it aside the steps I see its tippy top and wonder about this pattern.

Wonder's a good thing, right?

Thrills Through The Night

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You never know the end of a sentence you speak until it is over. You're listening right along with your audience. Meantime you're assessing reaction. You look at body language, listen for telltale sounds, and wait for interaction to shape your next sentence, even before it's spoken... or heard by anyone - including you. Well, a lot of art's like that. The process is mysterious.

I captured this retro car made from stiff paper from its perch on a child's antique bedlamp. The boy inside of me loves this guy. And as I listen and read what I write about him, I'm finding out why. What I feel about the time he is supposed to be from... About messages that mold our dreams. About color and fantasy and how my eyes still pop wide at things that are charming and sweet.

And I recall as a boy dreaming about driving, and piloting, and doing other super things. Right, "super" because to me driving and flying were indistinguishable from the stuff that superheroes did all the time in my comics and in my books and of course in the movies. At night, as I drifted off, they'd blur together with things that the grownups could do. I'd fly, I'd hit home runs, I'd leap tall buildings, I'd run touchdowns, I'd lighting-draw my six-guns, I'd drive like the wind through the night - in a hot rod that was round and strong and the sort of thing that hard-boiled detectives drove to foil the bad guys... and... and...

"Foil?" Does anyone say foil anymore? And do any adults have lamps with fantasy tough cars which are the last things they see before the room goes dark? And... and... We should. We should foil the bad guys and drive sweet works of art... If only in our dreams.

And that's the end of my sentence about that.

Orange? Why?

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"So why," the tourist said with a smirk, "is this called Orange Street? Like, you don't grow oranges in Lancaster, Pennyslvania... Right?"

"Um, nope," I smiled as I walked away. "There''s another reason."

Why Five?

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They met here in secret, even in winter. But five chairs?

GirlFriends

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Once upon a time Payton and Tori were little girls. Here they are top and right with a buddy. Watching kids play diddles with something inside that crumbles walls of reserve. All that stuff we learn that makes us careful, and respectful, and respectable, and... and... adult! All that stuff fades a tad - when we watch kids play. And it makes us so happy that we smile. Which makes it alright to watch kids play.

Presenting The Fulton Theater

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This is my masterpiece. Hey, I didn't say it was "a" masterpiece... see the wording there? It simply accomplished everything I wanted it to.

BACKGROUND: The Fulton Opera House is one of, or maybe THE, oldest continually operating legitimate theater houses in America. It has been lovingly restored and the interior rivals many of the New World's great halls. Certainly there are no third class cities in America who have anything superior to this gem. Most importantly, it is a theatrical house where an excellent professional theater company and a superb regional symphony reside.

With those things in mind, I wanted to present the building as a theatrical fantasy. I wanted it to appear as a perspective defying stage set where the roll-away front could be whisked aside to reveal a dramatic stage. I wanted it to resonate theatrical colors and eye popping magic.

So this is what I did. See how it glows? Imagine the wildly gel'ed klieg lights popping through the cracks between the facade and the stage and then flaring into the night sky. See how the marquee glitters? It's about theater, art, IMAGINATION! Can't you hear the music? I even went for the road sign to create high tension to fill the unrelated space on the right with negative space of an imagination-worked-reality of the real streetscape. But not a real one at the same time. See how it sits in the city, yet in its own dazzing place. All of it a great, gaudy, glittery, stage set of dramatic excess.

You should see this image blown up to monstrous size.

BUT...

You know what will happen if I post this creation on the various photography forums? I guarantee you that people will complain about the sign. They will argue that the intensity of the colors are "unreal", that the image looks artificial (Hey Ted, it's crooked!"). And that no one... NOT ANYONE will wonder what I had in mind when I lovingly worked this thing to life.

There will be reviewers who will notice that the pedestrian appears drawn instead of photographed (he is). That the borders are allowed to simply come into existence (right, like a proscenium arch). That it is not tack sharp (true, like a stage set viewed under intense lighting from the mezzanine). That it does not look like a photograph!

They will impose the usual tests of: color, lighting, form, shape, texture, dimensionality, and conformity with maybe three tedious methods of composition. And as soon as any one of the tests fails to result in an answer that's a perfect fit... they will have found a reason to say, "No!" to my masterpiece.

And not one of them will wonder. Wonder about performing artists who have moved hundreds of thousands of spectators for over two hundred years with dazzling shows from behind this showy facade. Nor will they wonder about how they might depict the abstract meaning of "theater". Because, they do not think abstractly, grasp intangibles or meaning… so that they cannot wonder about wonder... or my intent.

And they will miss my little masterpiece. So... so while I have posted it one time on one of those forums... and while I learned all of this stuff from posting and watching so many other posts on those forums...

This is the only place now... here and on my website... that my masterpiece will hang.
For you...

And I hope that it will make you wonder about what I wondered about. And how you might visually wonder about the same sort of thing. And maybe...

Maybe...

You will wonder why the great bulk of rather serious photographers are wondering only about technique or craft, and not art.

Art Girl

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Have you been so engrossed recently? So fully involved in something that a photographer can hunch down right in front of you like this guy did, and, heck... who cares?
I took this with my old Olympus clam-shell film camera, probably on Kodachrome - or some such - scanned it into my machine and only just found it tonight. When? Dunno, maybe back in the summer of '02. She's five years older now. Darn, so am I. But I'll betcha' that she's just as charming. There are some things that lenses don't lie about. She's one of them.
In a world where everything seems designed to gross us out... It's grand to see someone merely en grossed, eh?

Prying Into Oysters

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Michael Kimmelman in his book, "The Accidental Masterpiece" argues that art has a higher purpose than just satisfying the senses. What he's tossing about is the idea that the philosopher David Hume proposed that beauty in art, as opposed to finding beauty naturally in a radiant vista, is dependent on reasoning and critical analysis. People may come around to seeing beauty in art through reasoned argument.

See, if you just look at something, these guys are thinking, and you go, "WOW!" well... you might be seeing something that's just stuck to the surface and it might be shallow. Beauty in art they figure is not solely decorative, nor is it there because the colors of the painting go with the couch. It should have a higher rational for being in art. Beauty in art has a function. A reason for being there. And we frequently have to work to pull it out. Coming at art without thinking is like going after the oyster without tools to tear at the shell.

So, thinking all those deep thoughts... I created this image from my trip to NYC last month. I wasn't after grandeur, or might. I just wanted to see if I could describe what people did to this spot of land. What I feel that people did to it. And since I am the world's greatest expert on my opinion about anything. Well here it is. Y'goddaproblem widdat?

Subtle? Nah!

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Okay... okay... This is cheesy. But %&$#! it is snowing outside again. Well, of course it's snowing "outside" where else would it be snowing? But that's the way this stuff is making me feel... FUDDLED! I am sick of monochromatic piles of icy cold resistance to life and frolic.
So that's why I did this image. I cranked up the color so high it will sear hambugers (which is what Rita is cooking down below, and they smell... delicious.)
Speaking of delicious. You know how McDonald's has created a perfect taste sensation with its french fries? Look you don't have to even like them to get my point. They have distilled out everything in that offering but taste! There's no redeeming nutritional value, and you sure can't compare the McD's experience with dining haute cusine... And yet... yet... It is a perfect experience.
Shallow... empty... vapid... and... perfect.
Which does leave you with a memory. Pass a McD's anywhere in the world, and if you've tasted those french fries, you will feel them on your tongue.
Art? Nah. Subtle? Nah.
Sort of like this graphic pumped full of color and then slathered over with the sponge filter from the PhotoShop stock set. I even cloned away every distraction. And now I can look outside my window at the bleakness, then gulp in the color from my monitor. And - well, there's no redeeming artistic value I suppose... but it sure tastes good on the tip of my spirit.

The Accidental Century

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The Twentieth was the American Century. Why? As an economist I’ve read all the theories, mostly revolving around Yankee Ingenuity. Americans, they said, were a special breed bubbling out of a melting pot that assimilated the best of yearning emigrants. These were people who were enthused by a work ethic which was reinforced by a level of economic opportunity and mobility that may never before have existed. Okay, perhaps there's a hair of truth to the huddled masses theory of economic development. More probably it emerged from the rest of the world's lack of anger management.
When your natural competitors bomb the crap out of one another not once, but twice in the same five decade span, well it's hard for them to turn rubble into plowshares, rap music, or Fords. So, protected behind two very large moats, America became the only market to people too war crazed to provide for themselves. In return for Fords America imported the family jewels of Europe and Asia.
But over the course of the next five decades, the competition ramped down their nastiness, or at least relegated it to the noisy Balkans and the snarling Mid-East where they were sufficiently gracious to allow Americans to tend to the nasties with that large part of their budget that was siphoned off into police-protection-for-the-world.
And while the U.S. shifted taxed-away bucks into planes, tanks, and bombs, the old competitors shifted their savings into factories, machines, and education. Now they've built efficient new devices to produce far better stuff than Fords which wheeze out of fifty year old plants, produced under fifty year old work rules, by workers with benefit packages designed to be financed by the competitors' family jewels fifty years back.
Sometimes I fear that the accidental century is as over as the cog and lightning bolt on a rusting Ford medallion sitting unprotected against the snow.

Power OutAge

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Question: Can we find art? Is it just a matter of framing something... Anything... That results in art? And, oh by the way, does art have to be beautiful? Is beauty even necessary?

Look at this old rusting truck. I think it's a Ford from the early 50s that sits along the decaying Lancaster stockyards. Suppose it was a work of art when it rolled off the assembly line. If I photograph it, am I merely replicating someone else's art? Or have I brought something else to the frame here? Maybe the streaks of snow? Maybe the tight composition? Maybe my interpretation of the tonal and color ranges? Can you or I make something we see through the lens into art?

If I bring you a bucket of water from the ocean, is that water art? If I photograph that bucket filled with ocean water, what then? Maybe there's a difference between good taste and art? I mean, what most of us... any group of us consider movingly beautiful will probably be in good taste. If it shocks us by it's astonishing ugliness, if it is innately vapid, if it is a mere reproduction of what is somewhere in nature... is the photographer who takes the picture an artist... or some sort of taker-of-visual-dictation?

I have manipulated this truck image. It is not true to the moment. By adding or subtracting, by shifting or recomposing... by any number of techniques including wholesale creation of parts of this truck... Is the whole greater than the sum?

If the photographer brings nothing more than astonishing craft to accurately capture great beauty in a moment, has he committed art, or is he a plagiarist of nature?

I wonder if art doesn't demand some subjective alteration that manipulates the original moment in order to do photographic art. I wonder if the "unaltered" image can ever lay claim to being art? Is there imagination in tedious replication through the photographic process? Or is there merely great craft?

I wonder if it's the alterations that make my truck here into art (not necessarily good art, or bad art) rather than the original digital capture.

I wonder... at the power this old truck once had... and now it sits there... Out in the elements... Out of power. Power left out and worn out... Power Outage as a double entendre. Are visual entendres, art? Hmmmmm......

Yikes!

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I just discovered a depressing website. Click here on Juha M. Kinnunen's name, and you will see why I've posted what I've posted tonight. Juha's work is so astonishingly good that, for just a moment I wondered why I bother. Then I thought of all those guys who go to the course every Saturday in spite of the fact that Tiger Woods is alive and playing golf in a way that is only related to theirs by the greatest stretch of imagination. But hey: It is imagination that keeps me coming back to this digital course each night.
Still, tonight I think I shall send you off to visit Juha's site, and while you do, I will hide behind a pile of every trick, gee-gaw, frim-fram, gimmick, and scrikity-scrack I can pile upon my work so you won't notice that ... I am out on the course, but what I do is related to Mr. Kinnunen's only by the greatest stretch of imagination.

Flare For Effervescence

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When they invent neon chalk pastels... I will shift media. Or maybe they have, and they're called RGB pixels? And maybe I play with them daily? Like here. And maybe they let me diddle with the effervescence of night? Perhaps they make light into clay that I can knead, twist, and pull into places where it wasn't so that now it looks as if it belongs... Make that "feels" as if it belongs. At least to me.

Now wait, before you look at this photo and murmur, "Ted, it's a pity that the lens flare ruined that image...." Think at me. There are only a couple of really sharp things in this graphic. And when the artist allows something to become tack sharp... Well that's a clue. That's where I'm going here.

This is about flare, and night, and shapes that exist, and don't. Usually the real things are sharp. And that's the way it was out there tonight. Flare is more than an accident here, it's a guest. There's a reason I call this "Flareful Moments". It's about the effervescence of light. Monochrome night overpainted in neon chalk pastels.

Doggone

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Pickle, Meghan, Jamie, Phoebe and now Rocco have left these there. That's the line of buddies who've lived with us here in Lancaster. And like these prints, they're vivid memories.

If dogs aren't there: it ain't heaven.

It Comes From Where?

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Sometimes the camera finds the image which drew me to it so perfectly that shudders happen. Then, while I sit in front of the monitor first one tool then another slides away superfluous light to discover sheer, pure, perfect colors you can practically run your fingers across. Finally what the camera found shimmers to a life that's beyond the actual moment when the shutter snapped - an image that's more true than real.
Is it fiction?
And how does it happen that I'm sitting there, and the release or creation of an image like this becomes a spectator sport?

Looking For Magic

I've been dragging for the past few days. Cabin fever. A talented photographer friend, Alistair, on a popular forum wrote that the snow's got me cranky. Hmmmm... S'OK, went out to grab something precious.

Hard though, bumping around over ice cragged roads, through hard puddled parking lots, over neck snapping ruts, all walled by mounds of murk stained shards. But you know, no one is really made unhappy by February unless they were at the minimum, from the accumulation of winter's body blows, a tad unhappy to begin with.

Sigh... If there was going to be magic, I was going to have to work for it. It's good artistic therapy to have to really look at the details off in the corner. Behind the piles. So I made up my mind that all of this was as real as I wanted it to be, that I could dissolve it at will. Perhaps had I stayed indoors and found a triumph like John Roberts' evocative violin - well it might have been warmer. But no... I wanted to crack through my cranky by going out there.

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And that's where I found this guy, goose-bumped but patiently waiting for his load of happy toddlers to push him out of where he'd gotten stuck. Here's a character who'd be fun to dig out to get children giggling. And if they could giggle in February... why not me?

I found the magic, right?

City Snow

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Photographers hunt for ways to romanticize life. Snow becomes a metaphor for virginity, innocence, sweetness - like that. When in fact it's been a traditional enemy of civilization. We are a naked animal, evolved in warm climes. Snow is not our natural habitat. We've adapted and make compromises with snow. We slow down, build cabins... ofttimes wheeled cabins.

Snow makes us cautious: makes us think about things which we'd otherwise do reflexively. Like walking. Or driving. Very few of our automatic actions are carelessly done in the stuff. And when its mixed with ice, we fear it the way vampires do sunlight. Snowstorms are lovely in romantic movies. Or in the countryside where a viewer watches it, drink in hand, through a crackling fire reflected in a large picture window.

City snow isn't like that. City snow snarls, makes things brown, freezes wheels to streets, packs then cracks into dirty ice shards which slash tires, and skin.
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City snowstorms are the reason they invented hot chocolate with marshmallows.

Gloveless

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The lad shoved at the slash
Of ice-pebbled wind.
Gloveless, he lurched into it.
Near home, I gave him
Mine.

Simulated Love

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Silk flower love.

It's like those forums where so many think a critique of photography has to do with whether the horizon is un-tilted. Have you noticed how often commentors confuse technique with meaning? With value? Process for worth? With what an image is of, as opposed to what it means?

Sure, craft is the reason catalogue photo studios exist. Ditto the bulk of wedding photographers. Ain't nothing wrong with craft, but its presence in an image does not alone justify that image's value. Yeah, I understand newbies wondering why they are taking snapshots while all the images they see are something else... and in most cases... something better. Craft is an important condition for excellence, but not a sufficient condition to art. Writers must know a language, but grammatical mastery is only a milepost along the way toward poetry.

I understand all of us wishing that some new lens will be the switch which turns every image capture into.. into... Hey, how many golfers dream that a new putter will morph them into Tiger Woods? But the great photographic images aren't the result of pool-table aligned horizons. Or spot color gimmicks on a monochrome rectangle. Neither putters, nor lenses make images important. It's not the bow, it's the archer.

Technique from the mastery of gear, color, and composition can create high craft. But the gap between high craft and art? It's the distance between simulating and feeling love. Doing and understanding.

It's the gap between the silken rose and the mind's. Or between an image which faithfully reproduces a silken rose, and one which reveals how the tailor’s rose differs from nature’s product.

The Lads Are Gone

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Old man bought new lumber
Two years back.
He knows the rot.
Maybe come spring
He'll fix what can be
. Or never again
. Not ever.
Last of his line.
The lads are gone.
Nature heals itself.