John Voss - Photographs: October 2009

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

It is about to be the season for me to feel it's okay to stay in the darkroom on a Saturday with only a brief foray outside for exercise and/or photography. It's going to be cold and nasty, and the warm womby darkroom will be a happy place to work without regrets for the lack of outdoor exposure.

It's a great tribute to master photographers that their "vintage" prints (those made at or near the time of their taking or their initial printing even if at a later date) are regarded as prime by dealers and gallerists. For those of us who inhabit a lesser sphere, the revelation that later printing that has had the benefit of long term percolation can vastly improve our initial attempts can be dramatic and thrilling. Below are three photographs that have been posted here before, but have been floundering around in my head as not very worthwhile as final prints. Using the magic of Photoshop as a tool with which to play, I've altered the original rather prosaic virtual "prints" into versions I'm far happier with and which I can very competently render in the darkroom with my traditional workflow.

So... what you see here is typical of the kind of work I'll be doing for the near future...i.e revisiting old work, and printing what I've not been able to get to. There may not be much or anything new, and there may be untypical lapses in posting, but I'm working on making better final images than ever, and that takes time.......

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Autumn has come to the wetland, and with it the wind and the rich color that fades all too soon. For one who photographs in monochrome, it's a challenge to separate value from chroma knowing that only the values will be registered on film. The two images below were made to record the wind (the leaves are a mess...almost unidentifiable) in the tree, and the suppliance of the reeds.

What these two photographs represent is a pleasant memory of a quiet, and tranquil walk in a place that has become as intimately known to me as my own face. Neither is remarkable, nor particularly memorable, but if they were pages in a book about this wonderful, simple place, they would certainly belong there as much as any other.

I spent some amiable time that afternoon talking to a couple of delightful people who have known this terrain for some 80 years. They were enjoying a walk on ground they've known a generation longer than I've been alive. Their love for each other was palpable..profoundly comfortable, and deeply, deeply familiar. Both have wonderful faces that speak of a rich, and happy life together. I'm beginning to view my relationship with the wetland in a similar way.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

As this is a blog, and not a website where the posted work should be the best one can make, this entry is just a "for instance". It's an example of the dilemma that confronts the photographer who is still loyal to the imperatives of modernism as defined by Adams, Weston, and their legions of disciples who continue to make photographs in that tradition to this day. But also, a photographer who's imagination is entertained by revisiting the pictorialists and their many modern practitioners who've reinvented that art and revitalized it. "Alt processes" now inhabit the photographic landscape in significant numbers, perhaps because artists demand to have a robust and active hand in making their art rather than to have to slavishly serve the authors of algorithms.

The pictures below are two versions of the same scene at nearly the same time. I had gotten to this place (Lakes Road beside the east end of Walton Lake...that's in "upstate" Orange County, New York, folks) just a bit too late for the excellent light that had been there moments before. I decided to play with selective focus, and sharp focus because I'm more and more intrigued by the former after being addicted to the latter for most of my work. Were the light on the foreground leaves, the top image would have been the clear choice for me. As it had just disappeared, the bottom 'graph made sense because of the graphic values that remained. Neither will be likely to ever be printed, but these have value to me as lessons learned...or at least considered. And, the exercise serves as one more invitation to be more playful and experimental. It's an amusing mystery to imagine what my posts might look like two years from now....Yikes!

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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.