Little Bubbles
Little Bubbles
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Category Archives: photography
Vegetal Curves
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Vegetal Curves
Ample Make This Bed
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Ample Make This Bed
Ample make this bed.
Make this bed with awe;
In it wait till judgment break
Excellent and fair.
Emily Dickinson
Hounds of the Heart
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Eight years ago, we adopted two ex-racing greyhounds. Sophie, our first greyhound, was two-and-a-half, extremely shy, and spent her first couple months with us in a fetal position. She wouldn’t eat unless we left the room. She’d tremble violently when she was around people she didn’t know, but she slowly started getting used to us.
Sophie’s Paws
When we took her to a greyhound fundraiser, thinking she’d like being around other greyhounds, we met Charlotte, a year-and-a-half and just off the track with a broken foot. Charlotte’s exuberance was a sharp contrast with Sophie’s nearly pathological introversion, but Sophie felt an immediate bond with Charlotte, which she demonstrated by draping her neck over Charlotte’s neck in a neck-to-neck hug. We knew we had to adopt Charlotte. Six months later, her broken foot healed, Charlotte came to live with us and taught Sophie how to be a dog, how to play, how to be happy, how to enjoy naps on the sofa, and how to trust a few humans.
Charlotte in the Sunshine
When Sophie was lost 4 years ago (the gardeners left the gate to the yard open and we searched for Sophie for two agonizing weeks before we found her), Charlotte was always part of the effort to find her and happy when she was reunited with our family. They are a continuous, wonderful part of our lives beyond being frequent subjects for my photography. They are our greyhound girls, our hounds of the heart, our family.
On Christmas Eve, we found out Sophie has lymphoma, and a week later, the lab results from the lump on Charlotte’s head indicated she has sarcoma, after having had a malignant melanoma removed from her chest two months ago. Needless to say, we were reeling from this awful news. We’re getting them the treatments they need to fight this, combining both traditional protocols with alternative approaches. And then we take it a day at a time.
A friend with greyhounds who has been through this said to try and stay calm around the girls so they’re not stressing out like their humans. I try. I’m not sure I’m that good at compartmentalization, even though I understand what my friend means. But the hounds know. They follow me around the house, having to be in whatever room I’m in. So we continue going for walks, we continue showering them with love and treats.
Ultimately all time is borrowed time….for all of us, which the head may acknowledge, but never the heart.
The Ethics of Seeing
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Spoonbill
I always have mixed feelings when visiting the zoo. On one hand, I get to see an array of amazing species, but on the other hand, they are locked behind bars. In the aviary of the L.A. Zoo, I spotted this Spoonbill in an enclosure with a couple Sacred Ibises. He (she) was hunkered over, emitting an occasional wheeze. I stood next to him for quite a long time and then snapped his picture, hoping to capture some of his dignity, his beauty, his misery. His eyes were rivetting. I’ve been taking a home study course in bird languages from the ravens, the blue jays, the mockingbirds, the mourning doves, the sparrows, and finches in my back yard. I’m still a novice, but I do notice how much they say with their eyes, speaking paragraphs through blinks and dilations. If I could, I would have told this magnificent bird, “You are beautiful,” and “I’m sorry.”
I lament the fraught relationship between humans and animals. We’re not so different from one another, and yet we humans act as if an opposable thumb grants us an oppressive dominion over everything, having the right to do what we will with other living beings. Heartbreaking stories abound resulting from abuses of that dominion.
Meerkat
In the research I’m doing for my doctoral dissertation on the influences between early twentieth-century women photographers and women writers, I’ve spent some time reading and thinking about the notion of an ethics of seeing, a topic Susan Sontag introduces at the beginning of her seminal book, On Photography. She writes: “In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.” I certainly believe that aside from the prurient, exploitative, commercial value some photographs contain, a photograph can also be a witness, find beauty that’s overlooked, and stir our compassion for beings other than ourselves.
My own animal photos are inspired by the work of Isa Leshko. I am humbled and moved by the haunting beauty of her images of animals. In particular, her images of elderly animals are incredibly poignant and compelling. If there was ever a photographer practicing the ethics of seeing, she is. She has certainly changed the way I view other beings through my lens.
Isa Leshko’s Ash, Domestic White Turkey, Age 8 I
Ghosts
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Ghosts
One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.
Far safer, of a midnight meeting
External ghost,
Than an interior confronting
That whiter host.
Far safer through an Abbey gallop,
The stones achase,
Than, moonless, one’s own self encounter
In lonesome place.
Ourself, behind ourself concealed,
Should startle most;
Assassin, hid in our apartment,
Be horror’s least.
The prudent carries a revolver,
He bolts the door,
O’erlooking a superior spectre
More near.
Emily Dickinson
An Old Burroughs
Adding Machine
I found this old adding machine tucked into a forgotten, quiet corner of a used bookstore in Ventura, CA. I didn’t know that this particular brand of machine was invented by the grandfather of Beat writer William Burroughs, who wrote a collection of essays called, The Adding Machine.
Technology changes so quickly these days…..people are lining up outside Apple Stores for the iPhone 6, and when I was growing up, a family had one phone that sat on a table, or it was mounted on a wall and required spinning a rotary dial to register a specific number. Zeros were the longest to dial because they were required to travel the entire circumference of the rotary. I can still hear that distinct, mechanical sound, and, oddly, I can remember the smell of my grandparents’ old, black rotary phone…an interesting mix of resin and cigarette smoke.
I never worked an adding machine. By the time I was in high school, early pocket calculators were replacing the slide rules that most students of physics had sticking out of their back pockets. Still, I love the typewriter-like faces (another machine now obsolete) of these adding machines, now relegated to the quiet corners of memory.
The Poet of Prague
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Egg
Josef Sudek’s Egg
I had not seen the work of Czech photographer Josef Sudek, “The Poet of Prague,” before I created my own photo of an egg and its shadow. Sudek’s development as a photographer is an interesting story, but his work speaks for itself…..beautifully, wonderfully poetic.
In an article that Charles Sawyer wrote for Creative Camera in 1980, he describes Sudek’s photographic aesthetic perfectly, “The eye is usually accustomed to seeing not light but the surfaces it defines; when light is reflected from amorphous materials, however, perception of materiality shifts to light itself. Sudek looked for such materials everywhere. And then he usually balanced the ethereal luminescence with the contra-bass of his deep shadow tonalities.”
In Sudek’s own words (taken from the text accompanying a short video tribute to his work set to music):
” I believe that photography loves banal objects, and I love the life of objects…”
” Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations, so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light or by its surroundings…. To capture some of this – I suppose that’s lyricism…”
The banal through the eyes of Sudek…….exquisite visual poetry.
Fred Sandback
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Needle and Thread
It’s always great when someone compares my work to another artist’s, particularly when it’s an artist I’m not familiar with and have the thrill of discovering. In this case, someone saw this image and compared it to the work of installation artist (though he prefers to be called a “sculptor”) Fred Sandback, who worked with elastic cord and acrylic yarn to delineate or bifurcate three-dimensional space. Obviously, photography and thread sculpture don’t share the same relationship with space as one is two-dimensional and the other three, but both can draw the eye along line and form. When I work in black and white, my attention focuses on line and form, light and dark, eliminating the distraction of color. It’s all in the eye. I use light like a thread one follows into a dark room. For Sandback, his work was meant to be experienced in the third dimension, as opposed to seeing photographic reproductions of it. In a statement he made in 1999 about his own work he says:
“I left the model of [ ] discrete sculptural volumes for a sculpture which became less of a thing-in-itself, more of a diffuse interface between myself, my environment, and others peopling that environment, built of thin lines that left enough room to move through and around. Still sculpture, though less dense, with an ambivalence between exterior and interior. A drawing that is habitable.”
Figs and Light
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Four Figs
With monsoonal moisture blanketing the area, the light has been difficult with regard to photographing. When a moment of morning sun broke through the cloud cover, I ran for the camera. Figs are in season here now and so, for a brief moment, I could celebrate both figs and the light.
Redzenradish Photography 