Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Looking at pictures - Laguna Gloria, Austin, 2000

Artists sometimes claim that they work without thought of an audience – that they make 
pictures just for themselves. We are not deceived. The only reward worth that much effort 
is a response, and if no one pays attention, or if the artist cannot live on hope, 
then he or she is lost.

Robert Adams

It is sometimes hard to know what people see in pictures, or if they see anything at all. Tina, my wife, is my closest friend and biggest supporter but even she is unlikely to be able to say what motivated me to take a given photograph or what it means for me now. And that was the stimulus for today’s remodeling of the larger web site of which this blog is part: to make space for words with the images, to offer my current interpration (at the time of writing) of some that I care most about.

Roland Barthes wrote that “Photography is an uncertain art, as would be (were one to attempt to establish such a thing) a science of desirable or detestable bodies.”  Meaning (I think?) that you, the spectator, are unlikely to be affected by or interpret the images that I offer in the same way that I am affected by them or understand them. Nevertheless, I hope you will take a look at the new home page and browse around from there: http://www.mikebroadway.com .

* Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 18

Children in the mirror maze, Star of Texas Fair, Austin

There are as many ways to read this image as there are reflections inside the maze. There is the worried look on the boy’s face, the mirror multiplied arms and hands, pointing and flailing. The gorgeous, famously saturated, Kodachrome colors. 

Here’s one reading: the look on the boy’s face matches the way that Kodak executives must have been feeling in 2002 when it was made. Both this picture and the boy on a carousel picture in yesterday’s posting were taken at Austin’s “Star of Texas Fair & Rodeo” but there is a year and a sea change between them. This is the the older of the two. There is an original Kodachrome 64 slide for this image; there is no original for the carousel, nothing to hold up to the eye or lay on the light box, nothing to pay Kodak for.

I have already written about how I miss the Leica M6 that was used for this photograph but that doesn’t mean I miss film, not at all! If I were taking this photograph today, I could hold my position and click 50 times for 50 different arrangements from which to select the best, and it would not cost me a penny extra. I could pull the images up in Photoshop ten minutes after getting back to the house. I could have an 18×9 inch print in my hands by the early hours of the morning. In 2002 it was two weeks before I got the processed slide back to stick in the scanner.

The catch is, if I had shot 49 more frames I would probably still pick this one.

Disinterested rider, Star of Texas Fair & Rodeo, Austin

Who I am is flattered that someone chose this picture for the cover of their first CD titled, “who i am”

I know why I took the photograph but I don’t know why the boy bothered to get on the ride; it does not look like he found it thrilling. What we read into photographs rarely has much to do with what was actually happening or how the people present felt about it. This exact photograph taken as a family snap would carry a different set of possible meanings than it does presented in this blog context as an art object.  

As ‘art’, images are tools for us to understand ourselves; Rorschach tests. Maybe the empty seats speak of isolation, maybe the endless dull circling is an analogy to our 40 hour week lives, maybe the chains speak of the fragility of our existance or, maybe, about trust, faith and hope? Making and looking at photographs is one of the ways that I find out who I am.

– – –

If you happen to live around Austin, Texas, you can find Central Time Jazz Collective playing in town once or twice a week at local restaurants; check out their gig list at http://www.centraltime.org/gigs.html. If they still have any in stock, you might be able to collect a copy of the CD from the group while you are there. Or you can get MP3s of their tracks from Amazon.com; I particularly like the cheat.

 

Reflections in the otter pool, Portland Zoo, Oregon

No, none of these children are old friends of mine; the friend I am missing is the Leica M6 with which this picture was made in July of 2000. I still have it but it has not been used since the day, a little over five years ago, when I bought a Nikon D100 and walked through the looking glass into an all digital world.

In July of 2000, I had just fulfilled a dream and bought an all manual, all mechanical rangefinder for more money than I had ever then (or since) spent on a camera. The only non-SLR that I had owned since the Kodak Instamatic my parents had given me for passing a 5th grade exam in (cough) 1969.

I could sell it, I should sell it. Why haven’t I? I won’t ever use it again, not really use it, so why not sell it? 

All the usual things they say about Leica M cameras are true; the good, the bad and the terrible. Loading film into it is a royal pain and I had several very undecisive moments where the leader had failed to catch on the take up spool. On the plus side: to the modern eye this camera is almost invisible and silent; anyone who does notice it is certain you can’t be serious, not with that old fashioned point and shoot thing. I love the way it feels in the hand, and I really love its refusal to do anything for you – all manual, all the time.

But I think the true reason why I have not sold my M6 is because of a different type of decisive moment: I purchased and used it in the final days and months before the inflection point at which the balance of serious photography tipped from film to digital. It is the thread that connects me to the old world on the other side of the looking glass; perhaps the only thing I will ever have in common with Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt, Robert Frank and Ralph Gibson. It is the British accent that I still have despite now being an American citizen.

Garbage cans, White Sands

Some things are hard to arrange, you just have to be there. I know of photographers who spend a day or two scoping out an area to calculate the camera positions and times of day to get the shadows to fall just right for their planned compositions. Most of them make their living from landscape or commercial photography; for them the time is a financial investment. I doubt that I would have that much discipline even if I could devote the hours necessary; instead I must rely on serendipity. No matter how much time you spend planning, some things are just luck – even if I had calculated the length and angle of the shadow cast by these cans, I could not have predicted that a row of clouds would conventiently align themselves with the shadow.

Don’t go to White Sands hoping to add these cans to your portfolio; this image was made in 1990, when we went back with the family in 2005 the cans were gone, replaced by ugly brown plastic bins. Some photographs get better just because they are older and cannot be made any more.

Swimming pool at sunset, Hunt, Texas

My photography web site has gone through a few transitions in the years since it began, but it has never been much more than a catalog of images. There has been almost no text, no explanation, nothing for a search engine to index. Worse: until I switched hosting vendors a couple of months ago, allowing me to adopt Rails, I could only use client side JavaScript to drive the pages; the search engines could only see the home page and could not make any sense of that. Now at least Google knows about 700 pages or so but with little more to match searches against than image titles.

Well, all that’s about to change and starting this blog is just the first step.  The new code is written and text content is ready to go. With just a few more evenings to clean up and deploy to the server, the site will have a new home page and the first articles to guide the viewer around 30 years worth of photographs.

The image posted above, taken at a wedding in Hunt, graced the home page of my very first site design but you would have a hard time finding it now if you did not know that it was in a gallery named “Singles 2001 – 2003”, located two thirds of the way down the home page. So I choose this picture to launch my blog and announce the forthcoming web site refresh; I think it deserves a chance to be seen again.