Category Archives: still life photography

An Old Burroughs

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Adding Machine

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

Egg

 

Josef Sudek's 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

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

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.

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.

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