Wheels #2 - Tuesday

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Wheels theme week continues.... Another image made where the air is blared by squint-tight sun. The challenge goes on: How to make lemonade from the lemon light of mid day in summer on the streets of Lancaster's epicenter? Yesterday I grabbed the searing red interior of a '57 Caddy. Tonight, just what you crave on a desert-like day... WATER! Here's the coolant cap from some wonderful piece of motorized sculptor built I imagine in the mid 1930s. No details, it's as if I present a picture of a trunk and it's up to you to imagine the entire elephant that's behind the thing. Here's a water cap... so go ahead, imagine the rest.

There are stories to these old cars and some of them I bet are pretty sexy. It was the first time when boys and girls of the masses could go off alone in portable rooms for a night of passionate fun.And the results? Seventy five year old kiddies walking these very Lancaster streets all a-squint against a sun that adds dazzle to memories of their parents' frolickings in seventy five year old trucks.

Themes Like Old Times

<- Met Al Morrison this Sunday at 'Wheels, Wheels, Wheels' along N. Queen Street where maybe a hundred street rods and classic cars were mixed with a couple dozen motorcycles in the blazing sunlight along the closed avenue. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of people on the superhot afternoon. Al's images are posted at his Flickr account and they inspired me to play with the things this week.

It's said that photographic images are not so much statements about the world as they are piece of it - minatures of reality. The more I think about that idea, the more it resonates with me. So this week I thought I'd try to pull pieces of a time-past together from under that searing sun (a photographer's nightmare) to see if we together could pimp out our recollections the way the keepers of these relics pimped their vehicles out. And where better to begin than the cockpit of an explosively red '57 Caddy? I wonder if our European and Asian visitors share North and South American memories (or myths) about cruising, top-down, AM radio blaring - Hot Town... Summer In The City? Huh?

It's over - Phewwww!

My show last Friday went fine. Hundreds of people passed through. At times you couldn’t move along the main hallway or get up the stairs (it sprawled over two levels, four rooms, and two hallways). I’d like to show you pictures of the mobs, but, um… well my two friends who took pictures thought I exclusively wanted pictures of my pictures set up, and so they left for dinner during the actual times that most people came to see the exhibit. So the result of all of the setup and marketing and hoping… that is the genuine crowds of people who came… well those are stored not on hard drives or flash cards… but in my rapidly dimming memory. Heck.

It was a nice evening. A lot of friends came by along with scores of people I’d never met. People seemed to crash through in waves. There’d be a quieter period when only a dozen or so wandered around, then… WhOOOMP! the doors would open and scores seemed to pile in. There was a free wine/beer/soft-drink bar on the second floor, elegantly matched with a range of finger food including a big bowl of cold shrimp.

How to gauge success? People said nice things. Some prints were sold. Some gallery people stopped by, but most were pinned down in their own shops along gallery row catering to the large crowds. There was a rock band across the street from us with people who spilled out into the street (which was not closed – Lancaster is a working city). Sometime I shall do a photo essay on a First Friday in the city. It attracts people who live way outside along with visitors from Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City.

How to gauge success? We were tired afterward. My wife, her sister Cathy, my friends Steve (particularly Steve - the enthusastic support from he and my wife, Rita, made this happen), Maria, Chris, Beth, and my partner Steve – all helped lug, tug, and set up. Tim Smedick along with the staff and volunteers at the Historic Preservation Trust were astonishingly supportive. I’m thinking they all had a good time.

I put out about six hundred cards re. my website. There were about two hundred left when we took things down. The Historic Trust people said that they’d never had as many people pass through.

How to gauge success? It was satisfying. But, I shall never, I think, put in that kind of work again. If someone else wants to show my work, I’ll supply it. But actually printing, framing, moving, hanging, and then schlepping it all out the same night… Whoa….

How to gauge success?

I’m smiling. And really appreciative of my family and friends – more than ever. Which is, after all, the very definition of success, eh?

But as for something to show you… Some images to display… You’ll have to take my word for the turnout… As for pictures to show you of the visitors….well... there weren't many. However my photographic team of Steve Cornibert & Maria Caridad did get a feeling for how the thing looked. Here... let me post a collage and I'll explain starting clockwise from the left hand corner which shows the view from the front door down the first floor hallway.


<- Click here You can see the stairs people took to get to the second floor. There are two rooms off of this hallway, the first to the right is the next picture w/ my Fulton image in the center. Note the small white thing to the left of that print? It's a paragraph of description.

The next room down the entry hall is the pictured next with the Cylo-Baseball series to the right and another display swept around to the left.

Farther down the first floor hallway is a small breakfast nook with large doors leading out to a veranda, which is where my large image of the twin spires was shown. to the lef of this were a number of smaller prints.

At the top of the stairs is another hallway... immediately to the left is a room, and at the end, you can see me entering the next pictured room, where the food and drink were served. See on the back wall behind the food table? That's my very large print of A.S. Groff's Hopes.

And finally if you'd gone immediately left at the top of the stairs, you'd have entered this room (in the very center of the collate) where I'd displayed largely images of Lancaster County. However, as the evening went on, people casually moved images from room to room - mixing the all up. Odd, but interesting.

Something else you can see ... is that I am NOT a graphic designer and the collage is pretty primitive, but it gives you a feeling for the intent of the night. Thank goodness for the air conditioning. The night was moon-struck and humidity struck. It was a tropical evening in South Central Pennsylvania. There was no need for any of the fireplaces which are built into each of the Trust's rooms.

Manipulator

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Okay, said I was going to be off until late this weekend, BUT... As it turned out I felt I had to deal with the charge of, "Manipulation!" which many of us hear monotonously from the Organic Photographic movement. Like many of you, I've frequently heard people speak of my images.... "Hey! That's not photography!"

I know I've dealt with that here before, but I decided to head off the controversy at the show tomorrow night by making this poster I've posted tonight. Hope it stops some repetitive questions. It's just not.... not... PC... to charge "Manipulation!"

Right? Right?

48 Hours To Go... YIPES!

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I guess the graphic speaks for me as well as itself. To find the rest of the show details click on the label 'Ted's News' below. And if you're in the neighborhood of 123 N. Prince Street in Lancaster... come by between 5:00 and 8:30 Friday evening and say hello. PLEEEESE!!!

The prints really do sparkle - especially the BIG thingeees.

Depreciation Lacks Constituency

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Curious thing about democracy. Voters want new things. Voters want low taxes. Maintenance is the residual. People have no sense of upkeep when they buy a bridge. They figure the thing's massive and made out of stuff that's eternal. Look at this bridge in front of the Pequea Yacht Club way down in rural southern Lancaster County. It spans the Pequea Creek just before it meets the Susquehanna river off stage-right in this image. I guess there's a marking around somewhere which gives the date it was erected. Judging by the iron work, I'm guessing sometime in the early part of the 20th century, about a hundred years ago.

Regardless, the skin's fallen away and the skeleton's hanging out. Only a minute or so before I took this photo, a school bus clanked over the thing. How long do you think before it drops into the creek? Or before a school bus summersaults down? The point is that governments in the United States generally lack a sense of what businesses call depreciation. There are no funds established when public works are created which will maintain them into the future. Each new generation launches a number of pieces of apparatus into a time stream where they sail through the ages. Unfortunately future generations fail to respect the gift, or even find it to be a nuisance - something that can sop up tax dollars they want to spend on new apparatus, or on payoffs for votes... their legacies are new bridges and smiling citizens.

There's no legacy in repair. No real bragging rights. No new plaques get pasted onto the sides of bridges. No new names go onto the things honoring the politicians who fixed the cancerous rebar. Not to worry, when a school bus gets dunked, panic will set in. And the President him/herself will fly to Pequea to promise federal dollars will be taken from folks in Texas, California, and the Dakotas among other places to rebuild this bridge over this creek. Lets me sleep at night here in the richest nation in history. You?

Image Magic? Not!

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Last Saturday I played with something that an early twentieth century anthropologist named James Frazier called "Sympathetic Magic." Fun, but Frazier invented another sort of magic which is reallycool to think about. Called Image Magic, he said it was based upon the idea that, "like produces like. Or that an effect resembles its cause." Images of anything are explained by their makers.

Now since we play with images - I figured hey... let me see if I can prove Frazier - REEEEEEELY WRONG! Let me see if I can find some thing which seems nothing like its creator. So this morning I loaded up my bike, and rode down to N. Water Street where there are all sorts of things that are left over from the past couple of hundred years. And there, on the corner of Water and W. Marian St. VIOLA! I mean look at this thing. It's a classical beautiful facade neatly restored in elegant sedate splendor by - our Hole In The Wall Puppet Theater!

Now of course the HITWPT is tasteful and its presentations are elegant good fun. But would you have expected this creation to be caused by the HITWPT? Okay, many of you come here from around the world. "Ted," you chortle, "I have no idea what the Hole In The Wall Puppet Theater does. “

Right... right... Still, from their name, what do you think that they do? Eh? Roll bologna? Of course not. And they are in the business of creating magic with every presentation. But yet... yet.... Haven't I done it? Haven't I found a clear contradiction to Image Magic in this magical image of colors, shapes, textures and forms? Huh? Huh?

Labor day Weekend

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Speaks for itself?

Putting Descartes Before The Horse

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Recently I heard of an early twentieth-century anthropologist named James Frazer. Seems he had a theory about what he called Sympathetic Magic.

Now if I got it straight, he argued that “things that have once been in contact with each other continue to act upon each other at a distance, even after the contact has been severed.”

Hmmmm… see those boats in today's image? There is no body of water nearby to the City of Lancaster that would permit ships like them to operate. Now, see the bricks, and the window arch? See the repeating arch over the coal-bin window to this building’s basement? I’m told you’ll find exactly this design routinely throughout the British Isles.

Do these two things point just one way – toward the truth of Frazer’s Sympathetic Magic? Somehow bricklaying and ship building techniques are just as real here in one of Lancaster’s lovely alleyways as they were when they were bumped up against sometime long ago. These two images, one made from brick, the others from wood and canvas are both material objects yet they are signs from long long ago, and far far away. What’s most magical is that we accept the fusion here on this tiny street without a thought.

And yet because they are, therefore I think. How would one say that, Sum ergo cogito? Sympathetic Magic, eh?

What's This About?

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They're a technology, those mules and that horse. I came to visit that technology, more ancient than the Phonecians, in a car. I captured their image electronically in a digital code. And I transferred it into two or three software applications for post production on my Mac. And the fact that we muddle all of that together into a final image to glow your monitor thousands of miles from where I'm sitting, and maybe dozens of years afterward... That is so ordinary that we are no more impressed by it than we are of the mud that forms after a rain. We have reached an age where it no longer makes sense to wonder how things work, but only how to work them to our advantage.

We simply don't care what makes a tool function, but how to function something with the tool. This is a very large change. In the living memory of thirty percent of the living population things worked just the opposite way. I am staring right now at letters formed by electricity. How does it get here? Where does it come from? What is it? Hey, that's all behind the curtain offstage. I just want to be able to grab enough to form these letters to write about something completely different. To write about three mules and a horse. Which may or may not have looked anything like the way they look here when I saw them through my lens down in Blue Ball.

They say that a concert pianist should never think about the mechanics of playing when she is performing. Because if she pays to much attention to the act, what she is performing will come apart. See how that works? By examining the way those animals form the image up above... we totally lose sight of the animals. I wonder how often folks fail to accomplish something because they become immersed in the process of doing it? The critics of art photography are a lot like that. They become caught in the details of composition, color, form, shape, and texture. Or they focus upon lighting, focus, apertutre, cropping, or exposure... and they miss what the image means. Process again trumps accomplishment, understanding, success.

Life lessons?

2 Night - 2 Night

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There are two nights. The one we move around in, and the one which we imagine. The choices in the first are few. We can move as the compass allows us, and determinedly wait until we punch through the darkness to some destination.

Ah, but the second night of our mind – there the choices are infinite. We can change everything but the darkness which defines night. But even though we swim through it, we can populate it with whatever . Any turn, any form, any smell, sound, feeling… It’s as if our hands can knead it to be sinister, romantic, inviting, compelling, or a place to shut down and sleep.

I like that second night best. Daylight seems more thoughtful or intellectual, while nighttime pulls out feelings that can expand as far as the darkness goes. And darkness swells on into the cosmos.

Night is a canvas that we paint with light. Night is much larger than day. And maybe that’s why the creepy-sense tingles then. Night seems to reduce us. And it’s only recently in human history that we’ve conquered small pieces of it.

Here's A Shot

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See down that path, oh about two thirds of the way? Fifteen years ago at about 10 in the morning I walked along it, my frisky puppy about five feet in front, heading for the parking lot. My car was parked just about where my VW's parked here. There was a building to the right back then. Off to the left across the street is a house and some corn fields. I recall the morning was beautiful, sunny with still air painted morning gold. My dog Meghan was so cheery, frolicking along... going for a car ride, one of her very favorite things. Abruptly I leapt forward to play with her – when it happened.

Just behind my ear, off to the right I heard a SNAP! REEEEELY loud, as if a giant had grabbed a tree branch and broken it like a celery stick. I twirled that way, and my dog... rolled to the ground just off on the grass to the right. Springing up, she dashed at breakneck speed for the car... "Whuhhh?" I murmurred, there was nothing there. No trees, just a vista rolling off to the Susquehanna river maybe a mile below. I ran for to the car like a crazy man. Looking everyway. Off to the left, in the cornfields I saw a puff of smoke. But no one anywhere around. No one.... nothing moved in the quiet moment.

Down in the borough over coffee I bumped into a police detective I knew and told him about the oddness of my morning.

He went ashen, leapt up, pulled me to his car and siren screaming flashed back to this place. On the way he explained about mach speeds. “If you've ever heard a plane break the sound barrier you know the crash it makes?” he hollered over the racket of the ride. “Bullets it seems do the same, but the noise doesn't travel far... not far at all.” You have to be quite close to hear them snap... like a giant twig.

Later in the corn field they found an impression in the dirt of where the shooter hunkered himself down. And they found a casing. For some days after that friendly state troopers waited for me in that parking lot drinking their morning coffee when I arrived before sunrise to open this place. They never explained why and simply drove off when I was inside.

And I've often wondered what would have happened if spontaneously at that moment I'd not leapt to play with my doggie. Soon afterward my friend the County Sheriff insisted that I carry a gun.

Two years later business took me away from this place where I'd worked for a decade. Where every morning like clockwork I'd leave to get my morning coffee and grab the newly arrived mail in town. This is the first time I’d returned there in maybe a dozen years. It looks forlorn.

Personal Assault

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Are you enraged?

Yes, that farmer is burning without a license! And the aromatic smoke is wafting gently into the air - visible for a couple of miles. You gotta problem widdat? "Oh no!" You gasp. "But... global warming... World pollution... Future generations... The sky... It's... It's falling!"

I guess I should have whipped out one of the guns that everyone know that Yanks tote, and shot the sucker. Self defense, right? After all, he's threatening the children and a whole lot of people who can afford seaside homes. And all of these hurricanes this year ... he's provoking them... Wait.. wait... no hurricanes this year? I mean all the hurricanes last year... Yeah... last year... What? Oh, none last year either? Okay... but Katrina. He made that happen and all those people living below sea level in the Mississippi Crescent who got engulfed. He did that. And there must have been blizzzards somewhere, huh? Darn... forgot my gun. How could I do that?

Sure is pretty though, huh?

Potion

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How many times did this guy visit this place?
No, not the steps in this alleyway,
But the place within that round hole.

The place he can carry about with him
But hidden, he thinks,
In a brown paper bag.

Wherever it is that he goes,
This bag holds no more of it.
So it's discarded like his dignity.

Last night it was filled with either
A bottle of better memories or
The potion of despair.

One that he sucks to move him from
Where he sat on a cement stoop
In a dank alley to somewhere that hurts less.

Because here is not the place he wants to be.
Nor the place that he was last night after
He brought this bag to this step and poured

Escape all over his soul.

Chris Weds Catherine 2

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There are a couple of moments just between late afternoon and twilight when you can walk into a shady grove and the light is thick enough to slow everything. Even the butterflies scurrying home, flutter more slowly, as if the light's become sweet syrup. And if you go there the transitions are as romantic as... as... Catherine on her wedding evening.

Chris Weds Catherine 1

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Chris & Catherine got married today. I was a guest with a camera assigned to do the fill shots. You know,the little ones that capture the mood of an elegant event. As the couple sat listening to Pastor Rick's homily they touched. It's the small hidden things, I think, that allow us to express so much. Two hands entwined - outpower a zillion words.

Biggies

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Okay... I am too preoccupied with the show which I will have exactly two weeks from tonight. Thanks for humoring me through this thing. Today the four LARGE images arrived from Dave Beck at Studio FX, Inc (104 Wheatland Park Lane, Lancaster). THEY ROCK! Whoa. So before you ask which I decided to blow up, I thought I'd pull them together tonight with some info. But then I figured that since I was going to do this for the blog, why not go a tad farther and create something I can attach to a media e-mailing? So, here's what I came up with. They have all been printed on canvas, coated, and stretched on wooden frames in a "gallery wrap" format. This pulls the edges of the images around the wooden rectangle support and as a consequence they do not need additional framing for showing.

From the top: The red image is of the The Fulton Theater and measures 24" X 20". Below it on the left are the Orange St. Twin Spires and they measure, 34" X 52", to the right the Trinity Spire which measures 32" X 50" and on the bottom is the largest print, a horizontal of the ghostly A.S. Groff Hardware building that measures, 66" X 28".

Dave did an astonishing job capturing the colors from the monitor to canvas. The saturation and vibrancy of the prints are eye popping. While I've seen my prints in all sorts of media over the years, I've never had them truly enlarged. The sharpness of the Canon lenses resulted in details I didn't know existed. For example: the weather vane atop the Trinity Tower has the word "West" clearly imprinted upon it. No way I knew that from the monitor. And there is considerable room to make the images even larger. In fact, I'd originally ordered the print on the bottom to be 8 feet on the horizontal edge! All of my advisors talked me out of it. The wimps!

I have no idea how to price these things. Or any of my images for that matter, and it will be a major focus for discussion among friends over the next two weeks. If you have any suggestions... lemme know, either here or send me an email.

Enhancement

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A visual idea often has a moment of life then dies, you know what I mean? Look, how often have you snapped a score of pictures but when processing time comes.... YUCK! What were you thinking when your finger twitched the shutter? It was even worse when you'd send away film and it took a week until two, three, even five rolls of slides came in the mail. You'd pull them out and always... always... always... your heart would drop. Oh there'd be a keeper or two, but overwhelmingly the idea died when the lens chute swallowed that burst of light.

Now we have tools to find what idea or feeling that other guy... the one who took the picture... the younger you... wanted to send to you when he clicked the shot. Look at this image for example. It was sunrise in the center of Middlebury, Connecticut. I'd never been there before and this mill race called me. It seemed so photogenic. And yet, when I looked at the images of the ruins of the old mill... There was so little there. Before. Now, after an hour of teasing the hues and textures here's the image the younger me filled the frame with. Now I can hear the roar of that water. I can feel the rumble under foot. I'm squinting again as the low morning sun gleams into my eyes. Is this really the scene as it was? Or is this image fiction? Know what? I don't care. You?

Where'd That Come From?

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When an artist works upon a canvas he can tease out a third dimension from that flatness. He can find consequences in that blank space which are able to enchant our childlike wonder. We can stare over his shoulder as he outlines shapes, forms, and textures that we just didn't see there. And out of thin air... or flat surface... he conjures balances and resemblances that were apparently on that thing all along - but only he saw them well enough to brush them to the front. I'm drawn to people who are like that with ideas. You know the kind who find them in everything and relate them to others and choreograph their dancing so that I don't just believe their conclusions... I enjoy twisting and turning them around like a child with a gemstone. Or a youngster peering over an artist's shoulder on a hot June night night on Hilton Head Island deep into South Carolina.

GEEK STUFF: Canon EOS 20D, Canon EFS 17-85mm (f4-5.6) ,1/6@f/5.6, exposure Bias value: -2, ISO: 400, Focal Length: 72 mm, Date/time: 6/3/07: 7:45 pm, Metering Mode: Pattern, Camera RAW

ROARRRRRRR!

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The first one rattles and roars down North Lime Street at 4:10 in the morning. A side loader, a pair of laughing workers holler over its belching diesel motor. They pull large plastic containers along on their plastic wheels, bumping them down the sidewalks. then pour recyclables by hand into the truck's bin: SPLANG! WHAM! CRAAASH! For eight to twelve minutes they lug one after another of the man-sized containers and then drag and thump them back. Finally yelling they scramble in and the huge motor roars away to another stop a half block down. The process repeats. After some wenty minutes they're finally out of earshot - someone else's problem.

At 5:18 the back-loader arrives. It's yowling pair of attendants drag larger containers down the long echoing alleyway. A device at the rear grabs the lips of the portable plastic bins and upsides them into the maw of the back when an operator pulls a lever. His pull excites the truck's power to slam the bin's top once, twice, three times and more to shake and bang its contents free. It's smacked down onto the street to be pulled and rolled back down the cement, stepped alleyway - BUMP, SLAM, WHAM! And another's pulled out. The process repeated.... Roll... thump... bang...whirrrr... bang... whirr... BANG BANG BANG... whirr WHIRR WHIRRRRRRRR! With each load a compactor's tongue inside the beast's mouth crushes its latest screaming meal. It's a cacophony of manic fury. It takes this team longer than the first. But finally they too roar to the next stop down the street and their work's a repeat.

At 6:05 it's time for the front-loader. This massive rolling engine has a claw on the front that snuggles into the side of a huge metal bin... scraping it up as the truck's revved way way high... its mufflers shaking against the mighty engine's bellow. A metal door atop the container drops away against its side with a slam that makes dogs for blocks bark in terror. The bin's smashed back and forth, slammed against the top of the truck to shake loose its metallic innards. And then the motor whines to drop it back to the sidewalk, its top door whaming shut. This truck seems worked by just one man, who tugs it hard into first gear, missing it at first, with that loud scratch of badly clutched metal on metal. This engine is worked loud, and the third truck in three hours rattles down North Lime to its next commercial pickup a half block away.

Until recently this all was against the law. There was a noise ordinance which specifically banned commercial trash pickups in the city of Lancaster between the hours of seven and seven. Inexplicably, a new city council apparently changed the law so that pickups could begin at five. Of course these start at four. Waste Management has no fear of enforcement. A policeman came along while this was going on last Wednesday morning. I asked him to take action. He explained that this was not his work, but rather I should call the Mayor's office. I have a picture of the policeman talking with the truck operators. I'd post it, but why bother. It's not art... And not his business.

Sometimes the trucks back down the street, or pull forward and backup in place. In reverse an electronic beeper's engaged, loud enough to vibrate the fillings of listeners' teeth. There are many sleepless listeners in the homes along this largely residential street.

See that window on the upper left? That's where my wife and I used to sleep on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. Now we lay awake. Helpless in the night. Little wonder good people, many of its most dependable taxpayers, flee Lancaster for the peaceful suburbs, eh? Nor why, after almost a quarter of a century, we're sadly considering moving ourselves. Sigh....