John Voss - Photographs: April 2009

Sunday, April 26, 2009

This weekend was spectacular! It has been unseasonably warm...a strong taste of summer...and brilliantly sunlit, but the humidity didn't accompany the heat, so for me at least, it's been a real treat. On Saturday morning we drove over to Iona Marsh that lies just south of the Bear Mountain Bridge on the west bank of the Hudson River. Susan wanted to scout the area for painting subjects, and I had brought along both my MF and LF kits to make photographs.

It's interesting to me that marshes seem to change very little from season to season other than the presence or absence of ice which isn't even a factor when the marsh is in salty water. The water this far up the Hudson is, I am told, a bit briny although it's quite far from the sea, because salt water is conveyed in ever more diluted quantities by the tide.

Once again (as will often be the case now) this is a PS toned negative scan that attempts to replicate a real print that will be toned as described below. The camera was the P67 with 135mm lens, and a green filter.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Living where we do, spring gets sprung a bit later...maybe a week or two...than it does closer to NYC. The early vivid green of nascent leaves and swollen buds on a warm and sunbathed day is palpably thrilling. I found myself wandering near where our gallery is located (Montgomery, NY) and drove to several places I'd thought might yield promising camera fodder, and was happy to discover what you see here. These are negative scans that I've photoshopped to resemble the toning they'll get when prints are made. The toning will be a light bleaching in a dilute potassium ferricyanide and potassium bromide solution, and then a brief bath in thiocarbamide with sodium hydroxide controller followed by selenium 1:10 with generous washing between steps. For certain subjects, I think the warmth added by the toning is very welcome. (BTW, I was using the P67 with a 135mm lens for these which I've cropped to the more squarish presentation I prefer. )

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

The opening for our show was a lot of fun! As I've written elsewhere, the show itself was totally free of anxiety...the work was done; it was as good as it was going to get, and folks would either like it or not. But hoping people would attend, that there'd be enough wine and goodies, and even maybe (by the grace of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) some red dots would appear (as if the work were getting chicken pox! ;)...well, that's what one worries about. But all the concerns were quenched with a decent turnout, adequate treats, and...yes...some red dots for both Susan and me! (in fact, today, another of Susan's large paintings sold which is a really good thing to have happened given this miserable economy). And best of all, we were surprised and delighted to have some very special people show up...friends from both our real and virtual worlds (i.e. internet buddies), and family...my two sons, who traveled a great distance to be there. So...it's been worthwhile, and I'm pretty happy about it all.

Now, since these posts almost always involve an image or two, here's one that I've not scanned or printed before. It's from a week in 2004 that we spent visiting Susan's family in Florida (north Florida...not the south Florida snowbird roost that so many from our area have migrated to. Susan's a native of the area.) It's from a road that leads to and from the Kingsley Plantation (google it...it's quite a historical treasure). I was using my big ole honkin Toyo D monorail camera on a heavy tripod with the only lens I think I had at the time, a 210 Rodenstock Geronar. I'm posting it because it's a nice reminder of where we could have been this week. It's also fodder for toning in thiocarbamide and selenium which is my current exploration.

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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.