John Voss - Photographs

Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Sometimes the light is rather flat, and the sky is also fairly dull. However, the ocean refuses to have a boring day, and leaves rhythmic tide pools as the tide recedes.
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Thursday, February 6, 2020

It's been a long while since I visited this part of the St. Johns River. Here are two photographs from there...one from the shore, and the other from a dock.

Saturday, January 25, 2020

Here are more images from yesterday's (January 24th) traverse of Huguenot Park.

Friday, January 24, 2020

I returned to Huguenot Park today because the clouds and sky were photographically very promising. Here are two from today's efforts. More will be posted soon.

Thursday, January 2, 2020

For those of you who visit this blog from Australia, I want you to know I mourn the devastation and loss of animal life you are experiencing. You are in my heart, and I send whatever will travel through the ether in sympathy and caring. Despite pervasive news coverage of our domestic situation, your plight is not being ignored and is being reported on more often now. <3 p="">

Friday, December 13, 2019

Returning from DC this past week, I drove through Shenandoah NP on Skyline Drive. I stopped often to make these photogaphs.

Thursday, November 28, 2019

Despite it being Thanksgiving day, I got to spend a little time out with my camera. I was hoping for some photographs in the city (Jacksonville, Florida), but the light was absolutely no good for what I was hoping to do, so I compensated with a photograph of the Treaty Oak, and then my favorite shrimpboat berth with shrimpboat. (MF Film)

Monday, November 25, 2019

At Little Talbot Island SP again, I loved finding these last Friday.. (MF Film)

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

As often as I've visited Little Talbot Island SP to make photographs, I can't remember ever being disappointed. These four are from the very southernmost part of the beach and are not indicative of the gorgeous stretches of 'clean' sand that are so appealing to those who spend time here. (MF Film)

Sunday, November 3, 2019

Here are two more from the area where I photographed the wood fence below. I was uncertain about including the graveyard headstones, but decided they belonged and shouldn't be ignored. (MF Film)

Monday, October 28, 2019

Our annual trip to the mountains in north Georgia was again in the general area of Blue Ridge. Here are a few photographs from the week including one from Burt's Farm which I photographed last year. The pumpkin display is extensive and features orange and white ones. (MF Film)

Sunday, October 27, 2019

Here are two photographs I rather like. One is from many years ago at Pemaquid Point on the Maine coast. The other, taken recently, is also of rocks, but in Florida at the mouth of the Fort George River. Both were taken with the same camera, a Pentax 67 but more than thirty years apart. That camera is still the one I use almost exclusively.

Friday, October 18, 2019

I'm trying to stay away from the shore where it's all too easy to find interesting subjects. So, I went for a very long walk on a bike path a few hundred yards inland and found this. (MF Film)

Sunday, October 13, 2019

Most of the trees at Washington Oaks State Park are live oaks. I recently read that they were much prized by ship builders because of their often complex curves. These photographs were made in the gardens which are beautifully maintained. (MF Film)

Monday, September 30, 2019

Returning to the present day, here are two photographs from Marineland Beach. There was a strong breeze and a tempestuous sky that was a fine complement to the raucous surf. (MF Film)

Thursday, September 26, 2019

Here are three from 2012 taken in the Warwick Valley of 'upstate' New York near where I used to live. I think this is an orchard, but I'm not sure what kind. The trees are too tall and straight to be apples which leaves me utterly uncertain of what they are. They were gorgeous in their April raiment, though! (MF Film)

Tuesday, September 24, 2019

More oldies! From my summers in Maine teaching at the New England Music Camp came this view of the lighthouse at Pemaquid Point. We often went there on our one day off from teaching, and always stopped in New Harbor to eat lobstah with a mug of beah! The other is of the moon at perigee over the Hudson River at Peekskill. Good times! (MF Film)

Saturday, September 21, 2019

Sorting through some pages of negatives from years past, I discovered some from 2001 that were taken at Watkins Glen, NY. I seem to recall reading that some Tarzan movies were made in Watkins and/or one of the other glens in that region. It's fun to see these almost 20 years later. (MF Film)

"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.