Category Archives: black and white photography

Jacket On A Chair

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Jacket on a Chair

Jacket on a Chair

I’m still enthralled with Roy DeCarava’s work, particularly his dark tones and haunting light. Peter Galassi describes DeCarava’s aesthetic in his introduction to Roy DeCarava: A Retrospective, which is probably why I’m drawn to DeCarava’s work:

“At the heart of DeCarava’s photography is an aesthetic of patient contemplation. It is common that we say to ourselves (or to others) that our lives would be richer if we could only slow down, if we could take time to savor and consider, if we would attend to our own backyards.”

I’ve begun to notice that my best images come from a similar kind of “patient contemplation.” When I’m still on the inside, that’s when I see things more clearly, like the way the morning light falls across Joe’s jacket hanging on a kitchen chair.

To Be Serene

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Serene

Serene

Travel always provides opportunities to see new things, capture new things. The dark side to that is the self-induced pressure to see and capture everything. I’ve discovered a sense of greediness in wanting to capture it all, a greediness that can rob one of the immediacy of any moment.

Recently, my husband and I visited the island of Kauai in Hawaii. It’s a beautiful, lushly green island, and also a challenge to photograph given unpredictable weather conditions involving rain and wind. So, you get what you get. Even with a tripod, nature doesn’t always stand still. WIthout a tripod, the excitement of capturing an image may translate through the camera and produce a subject that is out of focus. Those two things combined contribute to me having to toss the majority of my photos from the trip, although a few photos remain. Those remaining images are precious reminders about stilling oneself when one stands before a subject, particularly a beautiful subject…..and there were many of those on Kauai. When I expressed my thoughts about this image greediness to a photographer friend, his advice was to slow down and “trust.”

Such greediness also reminds me of those photography theorists who insist that camera-wielding tourists act as empirialist agents, committing acts of violence through the innocent eye of the camera. Many times I disagree with that, particularly when one’s subjects are not people. Still, spending time on an island once inhabited by Polynesian peoples whose land and culture were stolen and fetishized by white Western culture, I was much more sensitive with regard to where I pointed my camera. However, when capturing this image of the Buddhist statue ringed with a leaf lei that sat inside the entrance of a local bookstore, I felt a profound reverence for both the statue and its location inside a place I consider one of my temples. I “took” the photo, but the image gifted me with a sense of serenity.

So, how does one remain serene with camera in hand? How does one both be in the moment while capturing the moment? It’s a balance I still strive to master.

Photogenic Produce

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Mon Petit Chou

Mon Petit Chou

I have crossed the line. I now buy produce not just for its nutritional value, but for its aesthetic value. So, when I come home with some odd fruits or vegetables, my husband asks, “Are we actually going to eat these?”

Sometimes we do.

Naked Photographer

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Taking Shots The Photographs of William S. Burroughs

Taking Shots
The Photographs of William S. Burroughs

“There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing… I am a recording instrument… I do not presume to impose “story” “plot” “continuity”… insofar as I succeed in direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function… I am not an entertainer…”  from Naked Lunch

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Apparently, Burroughs recorded life using more than a pen. A new book has been published, Taking Shots: The Photographs of WIlliam S. Burroughs, the catalog that accompanied an exhibit of William S. Burroughs’s photographs at The Photographers Gallery in London. It seems there are more than a few writers who also took pictures, including Jack London, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Wright Morris, and William Faulkner.

 

A Feather

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A Feather

A Feather

A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.

–Gertrude Stein, from Tender Buttons

For Imogen Without the Hair Pins

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For Imogen Without the Hair Pins

For Imogen Without the Hair Pins

Imogen Cunningham is another photographer from whom I draw inspiration. In addition to her flower photos, her still lifes, particularly the unmade bed with hair pins scattered atop the sheet, is one of my favorite images.

Homage to Wright Morris

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Silverware

Silverware

There are some images that, for whatever reason, sink into the psyche. Wright Morris’s work, his extraordinary presentations of the ordinary, informs and inspires my own work. He not only takes beautiful photographs, he combines them with text in his novel, The Home Place, which is where his image of silverware in a drawer can be found.