Tag Archives: black and white

February 23, 2017 – Vintage Neon

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Before the Interstate Highway System was developed, state routes and roadside motels dotted the southwestern landscape. Privately owned businesses lined these thoroughfares with unique signage offering a variety of services for the long-distance traveler. Greasy-spoon cafés and auto-service stations shared the strip. With the introduction of the Interstate System, travel was faster and more convenient, but the quality of character was supplanted by larger chains and a decidedly more corporate appeal.

Denny’s and Auto-Zone replaced these local businesses, few of which survive today.

More than half a century ago now, this particular sign – a red and white vintage neon for Leo’s Auto Supply – was purchased and moved to the intersection of Glenn & Stone in Tucson, Arizona, by the proprieter of Don’s Hot Rod Shop. One of the owners, Leo Toia, had it relocated.

Along the Old Benson Highway, many of the small old roadside Motels survive, and Tucson boasts a host of vintage neon signs along the now-infamous Miracle Mile. Many of the old businesses have been lost, but there is a rich history here in Tucson, and this Leo’s Auto Supply sign is one of the survivors.

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February 18, 2017 – Saguaro Cactus Landscape

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Sometimes black-and-white is the only way to go. There’s a timelessness to black-and-white landscapes that is almost universally appealing. This was taken while hiking through the mountain run-off in Sabino Canyon last week. My feet were wet and squishy from tromping through knee-deep water, tromping up to the Seven Falls area.

A thunderstorm rolled through and cut the hike short, but it was an exquisite several hours in the canyon.

Getting out into the world, walking the downtown streets or the canyons are going on my ‘urban hikes’ are terribly important to me. There’s so much to discover out there, even just walking around the block, if one takes a moment to concentrate, train themselves to really keep their eyes open all the time.

I hope you like today’s photograph. Cheers.

“If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.”
— Jim Richardson

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February 17, 2017 – Vintage Photos

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What I love about photography is that it captures a moment never to be reproduced. Photographs are the mosquito in amber of human memory, imprinted with our own projected thoughts and emotions. Snapshots, if they survive long enough, become aesthetic curios. A casual photograph of a street scene in Manhattan taken in 1915 becomes more than a snapshot, but a historical document that captures, with accuracy, what life looked like in that particular place at that particular time.

One of my history professors once told me that the best way to have my work remembered would be to regularly go to the supermarket and photograph the merchandise on the shelves. Print, save, and catalogue them, and wait for time to do the rest. His thinking is that future generations will be thirsty for ideas about how we lived in the past, that the photographer of the present has only a vague concept of how radically a society can change in the short span of a generation or two.

My great grandfather was able to tell me the story of seeing his first automobile as a child and how dazzling it was. He could tell me how, years later as a young man, that the hand-crank engine starters were frustrating as he. He and his wife – my great-grandmother – operated a single-screen silent theater; he ran the projector and she played the piano. I say all of this to point to the last years of his life, with the internet revolutionizing instant electronic mail, cable television that allowed him to watch every Minnesota Vikings football game, and even a wireless headset so he could listen to the game without the noise of the game disrupting everybody else in the house.

Things change faster than they seem. And an old snapshot of a daughter or a girlfriend at cheer-leading practice somehow becomes a nostalgic conversation piece, a document of a by-gone era that makes the viewer think about their experiences in high school, wonder where the people in the photograph are today, or even if they’re still alive. It’s a faded piece of paper that reminds us how little time we have, and how precious these small moments might actually be.

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph.”
— Susan Sontag

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February 11, 2017 – Birds on a Wire

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On a little urban walkabout in Tucson, I found myself standing underneath these perched little characters. Looking up and looking down, there are fun little things to observe all around. It’s easy to ignore the details of our daily routine, and I find that putting a camera in between myself and the rest of the world makes it easier to notice all these details. What is simple and boring and banal becomes, magically, interesting and majestic and beautiful.

“What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.”
— Karl Lagerfeld

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February 09, 2017 – The Barrio

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Downtown Tucson is divided into the Presidio District, Barrio Viejo, and the Congress Street Arts and Entertainment District. You could throw a rock from one end and hit the other. But the old barrio is filled with old adobe mud-brick buildings and other rustic reminders of Tucson’s past. In the shadow of some of downtown’s taller office buildings and hotels, the neighborhood is strangely quiet, despite the fact that one could walk three blocks north or east and find themselves smack in the middle of the Rio Nuevo bar and restaurant scene.

This is a unique place, one I like to visit often, and home to a number of supremely talented artists, musicians, and other eclectic Tucson personalities.

This photograph was made using a vintage Yashica-D Twin Lens Reflex, a 1960’s-era medium format film camera. I just loaded some new film into the old beast, after several years, and started making new pictures. I look forward to sharing them with you.

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February 07, 2017 – Vida Graffiti

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I make a lot of pictures that don’t necessarily mean anything. My intent isn’t evident, and I have no specific audience in mind. I just see something that captivates me, often the ignored and banal details of our everyday lives, and I make the picture, I secure the image, I file the document away for future study.

I think a lot of photographers feel that way – that their work doesn’t necessarily have any intrinsic value in the exact moment that they made the picture. But there’s this strange sense that it might mean something to somebody, someday in the future. It’s like a contract with a shadow figure. It’s faith. I’m not a religious person, and I don’t believe in an afterlife. Photography is the closest thing to faith that I will ever have.

“The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”
— Dorothea Lange

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February 05, 2017 – Textures On The Trail

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One of my favorite things to do is train my camera on the ground. It’s painfully easy to walk around your own neighborhood and find absolutely nothing interesting. And hell – It’s completely natural for the places we spend the most of our time to become completely innocuous to us. Looking through the camera lens is a way to help renew one’s vision. There are amazing things all around, just waiting to be discovered. You just have to have the eyes and the right mindset to see.

“In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.”
— Alfred Stieglitz

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January 28, 2017 – The Drip

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Today’s image, like many that came before, is a throwback to the days when I was making mostly abstract artwork. Rather than rattle on about my interest in abstract photography, I will simply leave today’s image with the following quote by Pablo Picasso:

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

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January 26, 2017 – Black and White

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One of my friends – more of an activist, politically motivated, and extreme personality – once commented that my work specifically seeks to “mean nothing at all.” This was over a decade ago, but I remember the comment; it made me think a lot about the kinds of images I was making at the time. I didn’t feel insulted, but I did feel compelled, initially, to try and defend myself.

My natural instinct was to disagree (and I did disagree), but it was the first time I really sat down and tried to apply meaning to the photographs and paintings I was making. And it made me think about the utility of abstract imagery in a broad and general sense, too.

I don’t think all artwork needs to be a didactic teaching tool, or direct the thoughts and emotions of the viewer. In fact, in many circumstances, I have a contrary opinion. I am seduced by abstract compositions specifically because they can mean any number of things to any number of people. The possibilities aren’t infinite. Color, movement, composition, film grain, delicate or light brush strokes – these all guide our interpretation and emotional response. But abstract compositions allow us to think broadly about how an image impacts us, and the experience of viewing abstract art becomes very personal. An abstraction can remind us of a specific event, a movie we watched, an experience we had – and in an almost slight-of-hand kind of way, through some peculiar magic, an image made by a complete stranger can ascend to significance in the hearts and minds of the individuals looking at it.

I am compelled to make pictures like this for reasons that still evade me, but I make them because they affect me, they move me, they touch a part of my subconscious and tickle a part of my mind. I can’t expect images like this to be universally adored, but I have to have faith, as an artist, that there are other people out there, like me, who find this kind of composition interesting.

The hardest thing for an artist to do is follow their instincts. If I listened to all of the criticism, all I would do is try to mimic the landscapes of Ansel Adams or take endless ‘desert sunset’ pictures. There are plenty of those images in the world, and I just need to make images of my very own.

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January 11, 2017 – Clouds

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I moved back to the desert for a reason. This is one of many.

There’s a quality to the light, to the landscape and skies, that amazed me when I first moved here sixteen years ago. I love the monsoon rains, the mountains, the clouds. They say that nature does all of the hard work, and all you have to do is be there to capture it. There’s some truth to that. But it’s so easy to take our experiences for granted. When we see the same landscape, the same sky, the same friends, the same lover – when we see it every day, we appreciate it less.

Being an artist is recognizing this tendency, and never taking anything for granted.

This is all temporary, and it’s all incredibly amazing. I love being here, and I am in love with life.

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