duality

I'm in the early stages of updating one of my web sites... not ready to upload yet, but with several pages recoded. This process is turning out to be an excellent way to drag some things out into the light where they can be examined.

It's perhaps easiest to explain by looking at recent photographic subject matter. On the recent Chicago trip, I was periodically immersed in the local gothic counterculture, shooting portraits of various individuals. Today, at home, I drove up into the mountains just south of town, in the rain, and shot landscapes.

There will be both landscapes and portraits in the updated website, and there may be a fair amount of very recent work... although I'm feeling a need for another weekend of shooting to complete even the landscape part of this, and even that will be subject to a refresh before long. A concept can only rarely be adequately examined in a day or two.

I'm faced with juxtaposing a duality; the city, complex, artificial, and teeming with humans, in some ways a vision of nihilism; and the land, nature, seen through the simplicity and minimalism of zen.

As always, there are places where these things overlap, where they connect. However, I need to make a temporal jump to do that.

The gothic counterculture I've so recently photographed is a creature of the recent past, born from the ashes of post-punk less than 30 years ago. Certainly it draws on much older ideas, although these are often presented almost as repetitive caricatures. With a few exceptions, there isn't a lot of depth involved in those older symbolisms.

However, if one looks not at the music-based counterculture, but at that older influence... one anchored in literature, in architecture, in philosophy... it goes back at least 400 years, and it's not really an urban thing. It's perhaps not entirely natural either, but once a rural English estate provided a perfectly acceptable habitat for these explorations of the darkness.

Nature too has it's shadows, particularly in the rainy season. I still have some work to do as far as reconciling eastern and western ideas, but I'm accustomed to this. Things need not fit together perfectly, it's just fine if they complement each other instead, leaving a middle ground to explore, a place where new ideas can spring from this cautious intermingling of different cultures.

talent

Today I was having lunch in Oldtown Eureka, when someone behind me said "is that a Leica?"

I had a 10-year old M6 today, a blackbody with the white lettering removed, intentionally a bit of a stealth camera. Most people don't notice it.

The young guy at the next table turned out to be a photographer prepping for an exhibit, carefully pondering where on the walls to place his work. He hasn't been at it long, five months, and has a cheap Nikon D60 with a slow zoom lens.

Then I heard the dreaded "will you take a look at my work?"

Fortunately, he's good. It's much easier when that happens. Nice shots of details from old abandoned industrial buildings, sharp, well exposed, good composition with good use of negative space and selective focus.

I spent more time talking to him than I really should have considering I was on deadline today. But it was worthwhile, I think. All he really needs is a little encouragement, a little confidence, a little more experience. And I made my close-of-business deadline with 30 minutes to spare anyway.

mild

It feels so warm here on the coast, after a week in Chicago. Daytime highs have been in the mid to upper 50s, and it's just felt great.

I took an older Leica, an M6, to the office today and shot some film over lunchtime. That felt good, too. Simple composition, simple equipment; one camera, one lens.

gothic crafts

Last night I stopped by a gothic craft fair at 1901 Gallery... saw a couple of old friends, photographed a number of interesting people. The merchandise was a little predictable, but fun to look at. really it was the people I enjoyed, the conversations.

I'm flying home tomorrow morning, and it looks like this time the weather may cooperate. Todays relatively mild drizzly weather is giving way to colder and clearer air. It may be a few months til I return here, hopefully after the worst of winter is over.

absinthe

Last night I stopped by a relatively new (I think) Chicago club called "Lucky Number" which is sort of ironic, because in 1979-81 I spent a lot of time at another Lucky Number, later/better known as Club 950... one of the early punk/new wave clubs, long fallen victim to gentrification now.

This new place, which I assume is unrelated, caters more to a goth crowd, at least in the second floor space. There are regular DJ events. It's not all that far from where the old Lucky Number was, maybe a couple of miles west, but it's far enough that it's still easy to park.

I sat at the bar and scoped out the light, looking for future photo ops. Not much light, except behing the bar and by a pair of exit signs. If I'm going to document this current iteration of the counterculture, it may need to wait til spring when I can take people outside under the streetlights. Or perhaps work the west coast for now, and return here after the thaw.

I did have a nice conversation with the bartender, who calls herself Lolly Gagger, and grabbed a candid shot or two of her. On the way out I met the editor of a year old goth 'zine, and looked through the most recent issue. Looking at the masthead, at the contributors... I know several of them. I've photographed three of them, have backed another one up in a streetfight.

The counterculture, as always, is a very small world.

cold

Despite the weather, my flight into Chicago arrived 20 minutes early. The snow hadn't been as bad as expected, there were perhaps two or three inches on the ground… there was still light snow falling as I picked up my rental car. The wind had picked up, but again it wasn't as severe as forecast. The temperature was just below freezing, and beginning to fall.

I stopped for dinner, then went into the city. I was seeking a modern counterpoint for my punk photos taken in 1981-82, something to broaden the timeline and include modern countercultures, or better yet, find a way to bridge the two. So I stopped at a small club on Clark Street just north of Belmont, where Scary Lady Sarah was scheduled to DJ. She's the bridge, the person who knows some of my old friends from the punk years, and also moves within the current goth scene. Although she has left Chicago and now lives in Berlin, she returns several times a year to spin music… and coincidentally, I was able to catch the last night of the current visit.

The light was impossible, we had to shoot in faint streetlight filtering through the tinted front windows of the club. Even at ISO 1250, I had to shoot at 1/3 second at f/1.4. I tried to include the colored lights playing on the wall behind her, although the light moved quickly and unpredictably. This part worked well enough, I'd originally intended to convert the images to black and white, but after downloading them decided to use the color renderings instead. The images are a little soft from camera movement, there's a little flare, there's some high-ISO noise, and I like them anyway.

Leaving the club around 1:00 am, the temperature had fallen to 18 degrees; but that was near the lakefront, moderated by the still relatively warm (40 degree) water. Returning to the place I'm staying in the north suburbs, perhaps 10 miles in from the lakefront, it was only 8 degrees.

That pretty much held all of yesterday, in mid-afternoon it was sunny but still 8 degrees. I went outside only once, to a nearby wi-fi place to deal with some attachment-intensive work e-mails. Other than that, I wrote, edited, responded to e-mails on my phone. It was a busy work day, busier than expected.

Today is better, in the 20s, the edge is off the cold, and the weekend looks almost mild in comparison.

reading material

I'm packed and ready to fly to Chicago in the morning, assuming the weather allows. It shouldn't be any problem getting in the air on this end, but there's a major winter storm moving through Chicago right now. It should be about out of the area by the time I get there tomorrow evening, but high winds and blowing snow could be a problem. So I'm expecting delays, and possibly not minor ones.

I have quite a bit of work with me so can stay busy in airports or wherever. Tonight I went looking for a book to bring with in case I get bored with that. The two things I'm mostly reading right now are big, fat, and heavy, not good travel books. So instead, I'm bringing a copy of J.G. Ballard's "Crash." A nice slim paperback, suitably punk, and appropriate reading material for airplanes, I think. Wonder if it will make the person in the next seat nervous...

The trip was booked on only two days notice and I've made no attempt to schedule any shoots while there, only a few people even know I'm coming. Instead I'll probably brave the moderating but still worse than normal weather forecast for the weekend to get out on the streets at night. Maybe I'll even venture into counterculture-land and see what kind of interesting random subjects I can get to stand in front of the lens for a minute or two. I have some more mundanr things to do while there, of course, but they won't take every minute of my time.

sunday

For the first time in quite a while, I decided to make a special trip to the Bay Area, unrelated to work, specifically to shoot. The impetus was provided by a visiting model I'd been corresponding with for a while, and... just by a desire to shoot.

V is your basic art model, except with a shaved head. We'd talked when she first started, two or three years ago, but the timing was bad. It's perhaps best that we waited. She's experienced now, more confident of her ability.

Being the tail end of a long holiday weekend, and a nice warm (low 60s) sunny day, this usually almost deserted coastal location was fairly busy with hikers. We had to pause every five minutes or so and wait til someone passed, but the spot offered plenty of places screened from view and we had a good line of sight. The shoot itself went smoothly, efficiently. There wasn't really much of a personal connection, plenty of easy conversation but the energy was more businesslike than enthusiastic. That tyrned out to be an advantage this time... there is a bit of distance and formality in the photos I think, but given the starkness of the eroded concrete walls and her bare head, that somehow felt more appropriate.

It wasn't til a couple of days later that I had time to download the card. In the intervening period I'd felt a little disenchanted about photographing naked models, a little tired of it. But after looking at the images, I'm thinking that as long as I maintain a balance by including other subject matter, it shouldn't be too difficult to pull that creative spark out of hiding on most days.