Tag Archives: abstract

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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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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April 03, 2017 – Perspective

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Today’s image comes from a long walk I took along the Rillito River; there’s a walking path along the wash that cuts east-west across the northern area of midtown Tucson. There’s something to be said about walking along a nature trail and seeing these massive, man-made structures of concrete, steel, and rebar. To me, the straight line is a marvelous symbol – it’s the exact opposite of nature.

The trajectory of perfectly straight lines does exist in nature, but this kind of vector doesn’t occur because of the presence of other influences. For instance, trees would grow perfectly straight, but shifting soils, uneven distribution of nutrients, wind, and other naturally-occurring factors produce randomly mutated fractal patterns.

Day three is over, and ‘Abstract April’ continues tomorrow.

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April 02, 2017 – Street Textures, Graffiti

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Abstract April is going to be a blast, I can already tell. I’ve been going on long walks at the end of the day, camera in hand and music in my ears. There’s so much to explore, so many little details to examine – I don’t imagine I’ll struggle to find new things to share with you every day.

Because these are abstract compositions, it will be a bit of challenge to write about them. Abstract art, after all, is less didactic and more open to interpretation. I wouldn’t want to direct anybody’s interpretation or experience by influencing them with my words. The instant I explain how an image makes me feel, or reveal specifically what the object photographed is, it takes the question away – and I think that one of the joys of abstract art is that it asks more questions than it answers, and it motivates us to find our own unique answer.

So be prepared for brevity. This month is all about the image, very little about the written word.

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