The People's Night
Exhibiting thoroughly post-modern participation, I photographed election night from the television screen. I watched and heard the most gracious concession speech one could imagine. I watched and heard both candidates invoke Lincoln and give honor to the history of the republican party. I saw a crowd of every hue cheering. I watched history through a wire and satellite. I can tell my daughters that the race, and race itself, is over. At least for one night.
Young among the old
Like a follow spot the light catches one thin trunk without illuminating the majority around it; one young face catching the attention. The attention will not last but there would be no beauty if everything was eternal and unchanging.
Helices of sapling in sunlight, Rio Hondo valley
It was the contrast of the sunlight on this sapling in the midst of the shadows of larger trees that caught my attention. A dozen regular attempts didn’t show what I saw and felt. A long time exposure and vertical movement of the camera brought out the image I wanted to pass on.
Dark trees and light, Rio Hondo valley
I have joked that some of my photographs are rip-offs of modernist paintings (see Tow Away Zone) but they are not. Photography has been in conversation with painting since its invention; the two art forms riff off each other rather than rip off. In this case, modernist painting – abstract expressionism and minimalism in particular – have cleared the path that allows the image to be observed in the field and presented here.
But, while this photograph may have the appearance of being like a modernist painting, it is not a modernist image. This is not art talking about art, this is not art enshrining the platonic ideal of ‘flatness’, this is not art circling the void of absent meaning; this is of and about the presence of light and color in the trees of a mountain valley. This was made not with brush strokes from the imagination or intellect but with sunlight blocked by, and reflected from, trees.
There are places that affect your spirit for which a straight photograph cannot do justice; the road side stream and trees in this New Mexico valley is one of those places. The camera has been moved such that the light fell on the silicon to capture the way it fell on the mind.
Whitby rooftops, Yorkshire 1982
I’m stalling for time by posting an older image. What I really want to do is organize a selection of motion abstraction images on the main site and post a few of them on this blog but life has been busy with other priorities.
This photograph is from genuine Ilford HP5 black and white film processed the old fashioned way in a Paterson film tank.
An older reader might recognize the scene as being close to that in the background of the cover shot and first plate from Ian Berry‘s in 1978 book, The English. Probably the first photography monograph that I had ever purchased; that image was definitely in my mind when my then girlfriend, now wife, and I visited on a much cooler spring day.
Whitby, Yorkshire - Photograph by Ian Berry
Top dogs - Austin, October 2008
A hyperreal pet store; these porcelain puppies guard the empty windows of a jewelry store on Austin’s Congress Avenue, a few blocks south of the Capitol building. It’s early on a Sunday morning and staff have yet to arrive and unpack the safe of its carbon and pearl.
This is the latest addition to the Store Life series; you can find others in the Store Life Revisited selection of the parent Web site.
