Monthly Archives: April 2017

April 13, 2017 – Abstract Panel

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“There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.”
~Pablo Picasso

I like that abstract art asks questions and provides little (if any) answers. It guarantees a unique experience from each individual pair of eyes that look at it. It’s mystifying to some; I’m not so foolish to think that there aren’t people who just do not enjoy abstract artwork. But I would challenge anybody to visit the Mark Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. This was the artist that did it for me.

Looking at photomechanical reproductions in text books, I would go so far as to say that I utterly loathed the prominence and popularity of artists like Mondrian or Rothko. Standing directly in front of one of the canvases, though, is a completely different experience. I was transfixed. Seeing a painting or a photograph on a wall – seeing the actual thing – is different than seeing it in a book and trying to puzzle-out why it’s so damn special. Most Americans will never set eyes on the actual Mona Lisa – it’s referenced in pop culture, in films, and reproduced in coffee-table books and art tomes. And we all have an idea of what it is. Seeing the actual art object, to look at the texture of the canvas that was actually touched by the artist’s hand…that’s a whole other game.

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April 12, 2017 – Promotion

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“The eye should learn to listen before it looks.”
~Robert Frank

Life, experienced life, is a patchwork of sensory experiences – sights, sounds, feelings.

As a photographer, I’ve always been intrigued by the ephemera, the little textures and details. They add up to something much larger than the individual parts, and I enjoy photographing the tiniest little details.

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April 11, 2017 – No Parking (graffiti)

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“Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask ‘how’, while others of a more curious nature will ask ‘why’. Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.”
~Man Ray

I know that many young photographers – and many of the masters – are known for their portraits.
Street portraits, especially.

I have quite the collection of faces, to be sure, but I really enjoy documented the forgotten and ignored spaces, the things we tend to intentionally disregard. Man-made environments that man tends to rarely, if ever, wander. There’s a quality to these spaces that interests me.

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Better Call Saul 3.01 – Mabel

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“Good and bad is not the same thing as legal and illegal.”

Entering its third season, Better Call Saul is much more of a slow burn compared to its Breaking Bad predecessor. This has some fans of the Gilligan-verse frustrated, hoping for the violence and action that the Walter White saga delivered, but Saul is a different animal altogether, much more patient with how it allows its characters to unfold. Ultimately I think this is a good thing. Especially considering that Better Call Saul is a prequel, because the audience already knows where most of the main characters eventually wind up – it’s important for this series to be more of a character study than a thriller.

Better Call Saul, when it was first announced, had the stink of ‘cash grab’ all over it. It was announced at the tail end of Breaking Bad, one of the most successful television shows of all time, occupying the same Breaking Bad universe. And let’s face it, when we hear the term ‘spin off,’ our hopes aren’t often that high. But show creator Vince Gilligan and partner Peter Gould have made something far better than a cheap knock-off – in fact, some might argue that Saul is, in many ways, superior to the show that came before.

Aside from the traditional black-and-white Nebraska Cinnabon flash-forward to the dull existence led by the show’s protagonist, season three picks up precisely where season two left off: conman turned lawyer Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) has admitted to his mentally ill brother Chuck (Michael McKean) that he sabotaged some of Chuck’s legal paperwork in order to secure a client for himself and his nascent legal practice. Chuck, the golden child and the successful, law-abiding lawyer, reveals that he, too, knows how to run a long con. Having led Jimmy to believe that his own mental illness had truly gotten the best of him, Jimmy feels remorse – then Jimmy confesses. In the next scene, we see that Chuck is already taking down all of the space blankets taped along the walls to cocoon himself from his fear of electromagnetic waves (the primary symptom of his mental illness). Chuck wasn’t losing his mind after all, and he’d been secretly recording his conversation with Jimmy, capturing the entire confession. Chuck has already been established as an exceptional attorney; he knows his secretly taped audio confession likely won’t hold-up in court, but we all know he probably has something bigger planned.

And even though Better Call Saul is entirely its own show, fans have been excited to see the return of Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), the ice-cold drug lord who masks his criminal enterprise in a collection of fast-food franchises. The conclusion of season two planted the seeds, and various easter eggs (including a clever acrostic of episode titles), have confirmed Fring’s return (as well as later-released press photos).

It appears that audiences can look forward to seeing how Mike (Jonathan Banks) becomes one of Fring’s chief enforcers. As Mike gets ever-closer to discovering precisely who Fring is, Jonathan Banks continues to deliver a show-stealing performance. The Saul story-line dissolves when we cut to Mike, and audiences try to figure out what he’s thinking, what he’s planning.

As strong as Odenkirk, McKean, and Banks are in the show, the production’s secret weapon is Rhea Seehorn’s complex portrayal of Kim Wexler. She is the heart and soul of the Saul’s story, a character struggling to keep her head above water during the ensuing flood. She isn’t manipulative (as Jimmy and even his brother Chuck are), she isn’t greedy (as the various suits in her field of work appear to be), and she isn’t criminal (as virtually every other character in the show is). She maintains her affinity for moral uprightness, but cannot control her attraction to Jimmy’s crooked ways – that’s the primary struggle of her character. Kim portrays the most human struggle in the show, one that all audience members can relate to in one way or another. She doesn’t like it, but she continually gets wrapped-up in Jimmy’s schemes, and it is this writer’s opinion that the conclusion of Better Call Saul will include her death – that will be the final tragedy that divorces Jimmy McGill from any hope of moral redemption.

Vince Gilligan may be a one note pony – Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are identical, Faustian tails of relatively innocent men being drawn into a criminal enterprise that threatens to overwhelm them. Jimmy’s crimes are certainly more nuanced than Walter White’s, but that’s just a detail. It is to the show’s credit – to the writing and the acting – that we continue to root for Jimmy despite the wrongs he has done – such was not the case by the time we hit the third season of Breaking Bad. Jimmy can’t outrun his lies forever – we already know that – and it is certainly entertaining to watch his character evolve while the noose begins to tighten.

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There are a couple of easy-to-miss details that I would love some assistance with. As fans of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul already know, nothing in the frame is accidental. Color scheme, costuming, editing, frame-rate, perspective, and pacing are all meticulously constructed to create an intentional, dynamic universe for the characters to inhabit. So why is the miserable Cinnabon manager reading “The Moon’s A Balloon” while on break at the mall? There isn’t a chance in hell that this particular book wasn’t chosen specifically for this character.

“The Moon’s A Balloon” is one of the best-selling memoirs of all time, of a man that contemporary audiences would scarcely recall: David Niven. The book is an account of his life in Hollywood during the 1950’s and 1960’s, beginning with the early loss of his aristocratic father. Stories of service during the second world war follow, and then tales of partying with legends of the silver screen. It’s a gossipy tome, at times earnest and heart-felt, but mostly boastful, about life among the stars while living in Los Angeles.

Does this somehow reflect the dim life that the once wealthy and talented Saul Goodman has been reduced to. A memoir about a long-forgotten Tinseltown big-shot perhaps reminds our character of how grand he used to be? I’d be curious to hear your opinion.

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April 10, 2017 – Desert Graffiti

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“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place. I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”
~Elliott Erwitt

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April 09, 2017 – Red White Blue

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“To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.”
~Edward Weston

I don’t have a lot to say about today’s image. I was on a bike ride through the warehouse district, and I stopped several times to make some pictures. There’s something about these industrial textures that resonates with me, and I don’t feel like spending the time or energy trying to intellectualize it.

There’s something beautiful and perplexing about this kind of imagery to me, so I use my camera to document it.

Notice, of course, that it’s an industrial textured photograph in red, white, and blue, which aligns itself with an old series I never finished about the corruption and death of the “American Dream.” One of these days, I may draft an essay. But for now, I’ll let the images just exist on their own merits.

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April 08, 2017 – Message Board

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McNary, Arizona, is only about ten minutes down the road from Pinetop-Lakeside. Unlike the Pinetop community – with curio shops, antique malls, and a well-established network of cabins, resorts, hotels, and restaurants – McNary is a forgotten, depressed community with collapsing buildings, open dumping grounds in the middle of residential neighborhoods, and shuttered shop windows. The population is around five hundred people, eight-six percent of which live below the poverty line.

Here’s one of the old shop signs, covered with graffiti, bulletins, and the faded original paint.

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April 07, 2017 – Abstraction In Red, White, Blue

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“A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.”
~Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965)

This is an image that would fit well into a series I started (and abandoned) a long time ago, consisting of abstract photographs in red, white, and blue, usually of broken, decaying, or aged surfaces. The idealism attached to the colors of our nation’s flag, contrasted against industrial patterns, chipped paint, and scratched surfaces seemed, to me, to represent what we were enduring during the early days of the great recession.

After the housing market crashed and local economies began to suffer, jobs began to evaporate. Construction projects in metro Tucson stopped dead in their tracks. Rent-a-fences sprung up around half-completed housing projects, graffiti proliferated, and I was laid off from my job at a local photography lab and retouch studio. I had some time on my hands, so I started making something of a documentary about the death of the American Dream, and it eventually evolved into something a little more aesthetically pleasing and less overtly depressing.

With this image – and with the image I made for April 1st – I might consider finishing the series.

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April 06, 2017 – Latch

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Somebody designed it. Somebody dug the ore out of the ground. Somebody smelted the ore to separate the metal from other materials. It was liquefied and molded, painted and installed. It’s just a simple latch – nothing more and nothing less. But the material likely circled the world a couple of times before it wound up affixed to the back of a delivery truck on the loading dock of a grocery store in Tucson, Arizona.

And I really do find it kind of remarkable – the sheer complexity of it. I also think that there’s an elegant beauty to all of the little things we, collectively, have invented, designed, assembled, and put to use. The average person doesn’t understand how tumblers work in a simple door lock, and I saw an incredible TED Talk where the presenter asked people in the audience to please illustrate precisely how a zipper works. These are things we use every single day, and we take them completely for granted.

Take a closer look at the objects you interact with every single day, and think about where they came from, and how they came to be in your possession. You might just appreciate what you have a little bit more, and you might just find yourself marveling at how we, as a species, have arranged our world.

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April 05, 2017 – Cracked Typography

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“A good photograph is knowing where to stand.”
~Ansel Adams

Simple words, but profound. We live in a world that Adams never could have predicted, where phones have camera lenses that outperform most film cameras from the last hundred years, where every single citizen is in the business of making and distributing images. Now that everybody has access to the technology, and now that everybody practices with social media – facebook and snapchat are the real juggernauts – the photographer is easy to miss, and the photographer is motivated to try and look at the world differently, rather than just document it.

Perspective is everything.
Where you stand is everything.

Everybody is in the business of making pictures now. But not everybody is in the business of making unique images. It still takes determination, creativity, and skill to make memorable photographs. Selfies at the bar are a dime-a-dozen, and there’s a great big world out there.

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