Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Tobermory Post Office, Isle of Mull

The VFXY Photos theme for the week is “Red”; this is my submission. You can see all the submissions to the current VFXY theme at /photos.vfxy.com/themes/.

Tobermory is the major town on the Isle of Mull, off the west coast of Scotland. It is famous for the row of colorfully painted stores that line it’s sheltered harbor. A great place to depart from for sailing, whale watching or fishing.

British postal vans are red and yellow so it is only natural that the tiny post office, one of the harbor row, should also be red and yellow. Throw in a green door, window and some clothes and you have a rather strong primary color soup.

Boy and pigeons - Hyde Park, 1980

Soon there will be no more decisive moments, no more perfectly (or luckily) timed exposures capturing the ideal composition of human and street topography, no more envy of Cartier-Bresson’s instincts. We have hardly caught our breath from the demise of film and another technology inflection point looms like a second wave crashing over a stunned and struggling swimmer.

In June of this year I bought what will probably be my last still camera, A Nikon D300. That was five years after my first digital camera, a D100. Roll the clock on less than five years from now and there is zero chance that my next camera will not have high definition movie capability. And I am not talking measly 2 mega-pixel broadcast resolution High-Def, I am talking 9.7 mega-pixel, 3626×2664, 4K theatre resolution at 30 frames per second.

Shooting near 10 mega-pixel images at 30 frames per second you can’t miss the moment, at least not all of them. The wedding photographer won’t have to say cheese any more; the mother that blinks will have her eyes open and on camera two seconds later so print that frame. The fashion photographer can grab 30 seconds of video, at night, in the rain, and take the one shot where the model had just the right angle in her elbow.

The way we make photographs will change, what we photograph will change; some of us will adapt easily, some of us won’t. That’s OK, this is not the first time that the tools have changed. Change is good. Postmodern critics declared the end of art, there was nothing left to do. They were wrong, change is the catalyst of art.

Edge of the Unconscious

I don’t think I would ever single out one photograph that I have made as the most significant or pleasing to me, but if I was forced to pick my top five then this would probably be the first one I selected.

The picture was taken on a July day in the summer of 2006. The right half of the picture is filled with a concrete boat ramp that stands next to the main ferry dock on the island of Iona, off the west coast of Scotland. The dark lines to the right of the man are the shadows of the railings of the main dock. The rings set in the concrete are used to tie up smaller boats as they load and unload passengers or fishing gear. That is how the picture came about but that is not what it means for me; this is not a holiday snap for the family album.

Detail

The man contemplating the water is older than I am but not by so many years that I cannot identify with him. At first sight he is overweight but that is an illusion, mostly, caused by the positioning of his left arm. He is barefoot; appropriate for a tourist paddling at the seaside but maybe he is something else? Maybe he has been shipwrecked or maybe he is on a pilgrimage in shoe-less penance? Those might be pajamas he is wearing; he might be in a hospital awaiting tests? It is hard to see in the full picture but in the detail, shown to the right, you can make out a bag around his shoulder – he is on a journey.

Water and the sea can be symbols for many things. In Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, the ocean is a woman to be loved and honored but also “something that gave or withheld great favours.” The sea is the original source of life and continuing source of food, a parent, yet it offers no guarantees or compassion. The sea grants and then takes away Santiago’s prize.

In dreams, Carl Jung wrote, the sea is a symbol of our Collective unconscious, “because unfathomed depths lie concealed beneath its reflecting surface.” When you cross the sea you do not know what lies under you; you cannot see where you are going or where you came from. The sea represents the unknown and the unknowable; the sea represents mystery.

In Christian baptism, going down into the water symbolizes death. Walking on water is the test set by Jesus of Peter’s faith and trust. At least Peter tried.

Perhaps this man is waiting for Charon the ferryman to take him across to Hades? The rings might be used to chain reluctant passengers but this man is not tied, he will not run.

You can read your own story from this picture. I choose to see a man on the edge of the unknown, aware of both beauty and danger but trusting the beauty more. A man taking a moment to think back over his life before continuing on the road forward, with Van Morrison, Into the Mystic.

Knee Pads

The parents of American middle school teenagers spend a lot of time waiting: waiting in traffic lines to drop the kids off at school, waiting to pick them up after the school dance, waiting between matches at tournaments. Last night was the first dance of the school year, today was the first sports tournament – volleyball.

Modern middle school gyms do not, at first sight, provide many opportunities for art photography and I did not even look through the viewfinder for the first four hours of the day. Capturing sports action is not a talent I posses. The best sports photographers must really understand the game they are documenting and anticipate the action – I had two left feet and three left arms growing up, I have no such aptitude.

Then I started to notice the feet and the reflections from the gym floor. Feet are anonymous but still signal the presence of a whole human; feet speak of where the person is headed and where they have been. Joining the feet were reflections of the players and referees in the gym floor. And lines, lots of lines to mark what the players can and can’t do; where the feet may and may not fall. Now that is something to make art about.

This row of knee pads, sitting on the team bench, is the image I like best from the day. The reflection of the white socks off the floor caught my attention, and the large number of them made a change from my normal addiction to pictures of isolated individuals.

A modern SLR (Nikon D300) allowed the use of ISO 1600 without too much noise in the artificial light but the colors are not so interesting – white socks and pads reflecting off a yellow wood floor offer much less contrast than my mind perceived. Without contrast the subject of this photograph draws too little attention – Photoshop and a blue filter were the solution, with Georgia O’Keefe as the expert witness called to justify their use:

Nothing is less real than realism… Details are confusing. It is only by selection,
by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Photoshop CS3 has made the rendering of black and white images with a range of color filters much simpler than earlier versions. The yellow floor is reduced to near blacks by the selection of a blue filter and tweeking the levels. Now the row of legs, pads and their reflections command attention.

But what is the real meaning of these things? What would Georgia say to that?

Actually she might have quite a lot to say; that there are girls competing in a school sports tournament at all might have pleased her considerably, this is Title IX at work. Figuratively, we could all use knee pads in our lives but knowing that these are middle schoolers we might agree to let them hold on to the protection for they are perhaps passing through the hardest stage of life.

Into the Surf

You have to be hardy to run into the Pacific from anywhere along the U.S. coast; it’s cold at the best of times. In this case it was at Carmel, California, in the early 90s. The evening light was almost gone – the perfect time for Ernst Haas style motion blur.

The VFXY Photos theme for the week is “Sunsets”; as you can imagine there are no shortage of submissions – who doesn’t have a sunset in their collection. This will be my offering. You can see all the submissions to the current VFXY theme at /photos.vfxy.com/themes/.

This is also one of the images in the recently assembled collection of people photographs that you can find on the main Web site under People.

Audience in sun glasses, Sea World, San Antonio

We like to hide, even in crowds. Sunglasses allow us to deny to ourselves that people can see us; indeed, they do prevent others from knowing that we are staring at them. Sunglasses allow us to be outsiders in a crowd without embarrassment. Sunglasses allow men to study women – plausible deniability is always a lie.

It was not until weeks after I had taken this picture, when preparing to print it from Photoshop, that I noticed that I knew one of the people in it. Neither of us knew that the other was there until I showed him the print. Neither of us were wearing sunglasses; I guess you can be invisible in a crowd even without the expense of eye shades.

This is one of a collection of people photographs that I have just gathered into the selection you can find on the main Web site named, imaginatively, People.