John Voss - Photographs: May 2009

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Last week's post mentioned the multitude of millionaires in New Jersey. Well, some of these folks were thoughtful enough to leave or sell their estates to the state or counties which have now become extraordinary parks for all to enjoy. Natirar (Raritan backward) is the name of an estate once owned by the king of Morocco. "The river and Peapack Brook run through it. The estate includes 22 buildings, many historic, six wells and three bridges, NJ Transit right-of-way and three streams, a pond, woodland. The 33,000 square-foot mansion itself, grand that it may be, is sedate and austere. Its history intrigues."* It is owned by the Somerset County Parks Commission which bought the place for 22 million dollars. "The mansion, two cottages, carriage house and greenhouse stand on 88 acres that the county plans to lease to Sir Richard Branson, owner of Virgin Airlines. The house will continue on as a retreat facility albeit commercial, not philanthropic with a full-service spa, conference center and restaurant that will be open to the public. The other 403 acres will be maintained as open space." *

The place is an absolutely gorgeous park. The two photographs below were made on May 15th while circumambulating the carriage path that is about a mile and a half or two in length. I schlepped the entire 4x5 kit (3 lenses, Shen Hao camera, 1 degree spot meter, darkcloth, tripod, film holders (10), filters, and loupe); the P67 might have done as well, but I love the big negatives. Thank goodness I don't have an 8x10 jones, or I'd be in traction.

* from: http://www.njskylands.com/clnatirar.htm

Sunday, May 17, 2009

People give the entire state of New Jersey a terrible time. It's as if it were simply destined to be the butt of jokes because some state had to be, and Jersey's number came up....I don't know. It doesn't help that it hasn't got a single city that's got the stature of it's Pennsylvania, or New York neighbors' greater cities; nor that it's decades of polluted air from the oil refineries in the northeastern part of the state are drive through souvenirs as one traverses the New Jersey Turnpike. But I recently learned (though I haven't checked that this is true) that NJ has more millionaires than any other state in the union. It also has some of the loveliest and most cultivated wealthy suburban and semi-rural areas I've ever visited. It has some pretty damn good universities too i.e. Princeton, and Rutgers, and one helluva popular Atlantic Ocean coastline.

The two photographs below are from a Morris County park called Willow Wood. It's an arboretum that is easy to walk through, and lush with a rich variety of plantings that offer wonderful flora that bloom and strut their stuff during the different months and seasons of the year. We will return to this pocket paradise again...and perhaps many times...to paint and photogarph it's vivid beauty.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

I often marvel at the extraordinary still life photographs of flowers done so well by so many photographers. I, however, have almost never made an image of a flower or flowers either outdoors or in the studio with the notable exception of some flowering dogwood trees. But, here are a couple that I've posted to break the ice. The lower one was made at an arboretum here in Orange County. Making flower photographs there is like fishing in a well stocked pond...the subjects are abundant; the skill to capture them well is another matter. The upper 'graph was made at the little park in Craigville where I've made a number of images that I really like. As I may have written somewhere else on this blog, it's a memorial to a young boy who died of an incurable disease, and whose family belonged to the religious congregation that built the park. A lovely stream runs through it, and the place fosters a deep sense of peace that is a fitting commemoration of a young life too early extinguished. I never fail to find something that absorbs me there, and may also be worthy of a photograph. But most of all, I enjoy the sense of tranquility that permeates the trees, grass, and flowing water.

Friday, May 1, 2009

The photograph below was posted with a rant I should never have written late on a Friday night when I was too tired for my frontal lobe to have taken an active part in its composition. In other words, it was a pretty dumb thesis that seemed even dumber after a good night's sleep. It wasn't dumb because it was wildly wacko wrong, but because it needed a lot more words, and a lot deeper scholarship to make its' case. So...here's the pic that it went with without the blather. It's a bit abstract, but not too much so that you can't recognize what it is. I hope you like it.

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"Now to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk. Such rules and laws are deduced from the accomplished fact; they are the products of reflection and after-examination, and are in no way part of the creative impetus. When subject matter is forced to fit into preconceived patterns, there can be no freshness of vision. Following rules of composition can only lead to a tedious repetition of pictorial clichés." —Edward Weston

"How do you become Real?" asked the rabbit. "It doesn't happen all at once" said the skin horse, "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to those who don't understand." From "The Velveteen Rabbit"

ARTIST STATEMENT

I make the picture; you do the rest. What you bring to viewing an image is unique, and to suggest what I think you should or might bring would be inauthentic. The only manipulations I use are those of traditional wet darkroom practice which can be emulated with reasonable fidelity in Photoshop Elements, Lightroom or similar software.

Just a bit of 'attitude', thank you very much!

"Photography for me is a way of avoiding grown-ups, boredom and going to the laundromat. It allows me to live in another world, intensified and of my own finding. I assume the right to stare long and hard, to be blunt, loving and unselfconscious. I attempt to find a kind of poetry that eludes me in other more sober activities. It has become a continuous search with no shining end in sight except to go on trying." - Lilo Raymond from Women of Vision: photographic statements, 1982, Unicorn Publishing House

"Photographs are one of mankind's most profound expressions of stillness. They allow us the ability to hold time in our hands and facilitate a merging with time that exists in no other form. ... The world owes a great debt to all those who have, from a state of exceptional awareness, preserved stillness for us to hold." from the Introduction to Road to Seeing by Dan Winters.

"Compensating for lack of skill with technology is progress toward mediocrity. As technology advances, craftsmanship recedes. As technology increases our possibilities, we use them less resourcefully. The one thing we've gained is spontaneity, which is useless without perception". David Vestal

"When I make a photograph, my perceptions feed into my mental model. My model adjusts to accommodate my perceptions (leading me to change my photographic decisions). This modelling adjustment alters, in turn, my perceptions. And so on. It is a dynamic, self-modifying process. It is what an engineer would call a feedback loop. It is a complex, ongoing, spontaneous interaction of observation, understanding, imagination, and intention." from The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore

"The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public." Henry Geldzahler

"Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas every day, we read novels by the million and buy records by the billions. We, the people, affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art. The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires." from Wall and Piece by Banksy quoted by Bill Jay in LensWork No. 67.

"Art has gotten a bad name as the realm of unctuous charlatans, greedy dealers and their glamortrash clientele--the hang of smartypants fish-wrapper scribblers and toot-brained mummies who dress like Johnny Cash. As cartoon-like as it seems..., the fashionable art world constitutes a tiny fraction of the comprehensive art world, but it has plenty of money behind it." James L. McElhinney

"A serious photograph not only sets itself apart from all other moments but also captures the particularity of its subject—a face, landscape, tree, store front, tool, cigarette butt, pattern of ice crystals—while at the same time revealing its universality. Again, that is what art does—what art demands and requires. Without particularity a photograph is but a meaningless generality. A photograph of a non-descript parking lot that could be anywhere in urban America, whether that photograph is eight feet by eight feet and hanging at MOMA or four inches by four inches in an automotive magazine, is exactly the same thing—a trite generality. The photograph that captures the particularity of its subject stops us because it lies outside the daily barrage of trite and general images we are bombarded with. It holds us because it is like no other moment. It holds us because it has seized its subject as it has never before been seized. " John Wood, 21st Editions

"Objectivity and subjectivity are always a constant battle. When I work on something, I try to be as subjective as possible. Then, as I go along painting, I want to gain a certain degree of objectivity in order to know if anything's working. I look through mirrors; I turn the painting upside down; I try to go outside the house or studio and try to peer through windows as if I'm somebody else looking at it. I go through all these motions to try and see it from an objective point of view." Jamie Wyeth, 2004, from his website

“I always think that being a good photographer is less about knowing rules than knowing yourself. What I make of a subject comes from inside of me.” Michael Levin

"Look at any photograph and the question naturally arises. What does it describe? The world in front of the camera, or the world inside the photographer's head? This tension -- between objective and subjective -- is fundamental to photography. Szarkowski labeled it Mirrors and Windows. Other divisive terms have attached themselves at various times. It's a problem peculiar to photography. There is no mistaking a song or a screen print, for example, for the objective world. But an 8x10 pepper? That's a tougher call. However it is defined, the perceived division has been a meal-ticket for analysts, not to mention the occasional photographer." From a Blake Andrews review of the book Deutschland by Gerry Johansson for Photo-eye.

"Skill without imagination is craftsmanship, and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art." Tom Stoppard

Continuing with the traditional processes of photography in an age in which technology has become ubiquitous there still remains a niche for those of us who embrace the way of the undigitized, unplugged, and hand made.

Usually Close to Home

Most of the photographs here made before September of 2013 were made in the Hudson Valley of New York State. As much as I might want to visit a host of other iconic and exotic locales, I have loved where I've lived, and have found it visually stimulating and satisfying. But, since September of 2013, I have been exploring the region of northern Florida, and southern Georgia where we have moved to stay. The ocean is close by, as are pristine salt marshes, abundant trees that are new to me, many draped in Spanish moss, perpetually changing beaches and dunes, and extraordinary skies. It will be a new body of work. I'm eager to get started.

As to their mostly being monochrome, the venerable photographer, teacher and writer David Vestal offered that he listened to radio because the images were better, and photographed in black and white because the colors were better. I agree completely about the photographs.