Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Tail Light, Santa Fe

Yesterday I only had two photographs to choose from; today, in Santa Fe, I have 28. Each visit I have made to the town over the last ten years has proved to be rich in images though not quite of the type one might expect from such a storied location; there is something special about the New Mexico light but it does not stir me to make National Geographic cover submissions when I am in the state’s capital. Perhaps half of all the images I have shot here have been abstracts, half of the remainder have been store windows, and the rest have been of people; but very few of them appear on first sight to be specific to Santa Fe.

It seems that there is a Santa Fe muse that calls on me when I am here. I can rationalize it as a combination of being off duty and on vacation, being in a place where cameras are on every second arm and raise no eyebrows, being in an art Mecca so who wouldn’t be inspired? But I think there is something more than simple psychology at work for there is a strand that ties all the images that I make here together (and subtly different from those I make elsewhere) even if it is not as obvious as the turquoise and adobe reflected in this car body.

Austin Surreal

It was a case of use it or lose it, vacation time that is, so I took Friday off intending to go downtown with the camera. The day was overcast and the light flat so I postponed; Saturday morning brought the hard shadows and warm tints that I had wanted so off I went. Excluding some productive vacations, it has been 15 months since I set out to take photographs: the final step in my aesthetic recuperation.

I am happy with the results but aware that I might be too easily satisfied. Thom Hogan recently wrote an article on his site, titled “One in 76” (scroll down his 2010 News and Comments archive and you will find it), in which he says that he does not like coming home with a lot of good shots but nothing that shows he pushed the boundaries. Historically my keeper ratio has been similar to the 1 in 36 that Thom describes; my ratio yesterday was about 1 in 8 suggesting I wasn’t trying hard enough.

I have a lot of photographs of people entering or exiting a large frame like the one shown here. It’s something of a formula: find an interesting background such as a street mural or White Sands, New Mexico, or Calgary Beach, Scotland, and wait for someone to enter from stage left or stage right. This is the pattern followed by no less than 6 of the 15 images I have posted from yesterday’s expedition. It’s a good pattern, I like the images aesthetically and semanitcally, but it’s a safe approach that keeps me well inside my comfort zone: utilizing longer focal lengths and avoiding the risk of up close eye contact.

If I am to turn Saturday morning downtown into a series, going back multiple times, then I will need to go outside that comfort zone and grow a little. If I don’t then I will just end up with 16, 24 or 32 “keepers” of the same thing in different colors.

The Paddler - Iona, Scotland - 2006

I am chuffed; Fotomoto has selected my Edge of the Unconscious picture as their “featured image” for today, April 2! It will be interesting to see if that leads to any income for Save The Children but if it doesn’t straight away, well, every bit of exposure helps. At least someone thought well enough of it to allow it to represent Fotomoto for the day.

The Paddler photograph above was made two shots later on the same afternoon and from the same vantage point on the ferry quay, Iona, Scotland. The sunlit aquamarine could be the Caribbean backdrop for a super model fashion shoot but instead it is in the North Atlantic and she is an everywoman archetype; a stand in for all of us that would rather be paddling than working in the office this April second. For this brief moment she was doing what every tired mother dreams of when the laundry still needs to be folded and the three year old upstairs just awoke, coughing.

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.

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.