Next exhibit

 I'm starting to print for the next exhibit, this one opens October 2nd at a small local venue. Most of the images came together quickly, for this one I'm drawing from the "Minima" series, these are what I call naked portraits, that is they're art nudes but with expression of emotion encouraged. It's all simple backgrounds, either in the studio or with careful composition on location. I'm using images from 2010 through 2022, up to 14 selected right now although I never rule out shooting a few more right up until the last couple of weeks.

It will be a mix of black & white, mostly from the earlier years of the series, and some more recent color work... probably alternating on the wall, although with only five printed right now (and needing to order some more paper) it's early.

Dasha and Tiana below, as examples.

 I'm wanting to elaborate a little on some of the writing immediately below. If I'm rejecting the mallgoth culture, looking beyond the obvious commercialization of rebellion, why is that? What was different about the earlier experience?

The closest I can get quickly to explaining what we experienced in the post-punk years starts from the sublime. It's perhaps best known to us today from Edmund Burke's writings, but they're really quite tedious and he takes quite a long time to get to the point. Instead, I found the following: 

"Arthur Schopenhauer, in "The Will and the Representation" (1819), explored the fissure that lies at the heart of being, and envisaged a self that can in certain situations observe itself in the very act of confronting a fearful inner abyss, and by so doing attain a certain dark grandeur." 

The quote is from Simon Morley, editor of the book "The Sublime" and he's done us a favor because I can vouch that Schopenhauer isn't exactly a fast read, either.

In any case, that abyss is where we were perched in the early post-punk years, and it was a surprisingly wide-spread phenomenon among the folks I spent time with. We'd pretty much universally rejected middle class suburban values, torn the whole framework down, and in the process created our very own abyss. It took a little while to build a new framework. In my case, the void lasted from sometime in late 1978 into sometime in 1980, I think. For sure by April 1981 I'd pretty much worked through it, because by then I was helping a friend find the way. While there was not any one day that was before or after, a milestone was July 14, 1981. That night I met a young woman at Exit, I'm not really sure who picked up who, but we spent the night together and pretty much talked through the entire process of nihilist destruction followed by gradual rebuilding that we'd both been through. I only saw her once more after that plus a couple of phone conversations, but parts of that night are still very vivid memories. We shared a lot of interests, had read a lot of the same books, and it was very easy to talk about it.

That was four months after I'd seen Bauhaus play for the first time, and talked to Peter Murphy and Daniel Ash after the show. They had been, and continued to be, on the same trajectory, passing through a lot of the same interests as me... well documented in their lyrics. It was about a month before The Fall and the afterparty that went into the next morning, and for sure Mark E. Smith understood all this in his own irreverant way. It was more than three months before I met Siouxsie and drank beer with her, an hour or two isn't really enough to get to know someone but my sense is that she hadn't dived that deep into the abstract although I think a couple of others in the band had. Finally, it was a good two and a half years into listening to Joy Division and more than a year after Ian Curtis committed suicide, those songs were much more personal and emotional than they were about philosophical ideas and they never toured the US so I'll never know for sure. It certainly was a fitting soundtrack for the inner city experience of the time, and it appears that Manchester was in some ways like Chicago and other large cities.

The places are an important part of this narrative and possibly hard to comprehend for many today. These were still the cities of white flight, urban wastelands with numerous boarded up buildings and vacant lots and with gentrification barely started in a very few select neighborhoods. Violent crime rates were near all time highs, much higher than today. The US was deep in recession. We'd fled the suburbs, many of us, for bleak, gray but inexpensive inner city neighborhoods where most whites were afraid to go. Barely a week went by that we didn't hear of someone we knew being mugged, and most every month there was another overdose or suicide. The music, the writing, the art grew out of that chaos and anarchy. If some of that music wasn't very upbeat, that's because it reflected daily reality. Still, most were trying to find a way forward, not a way down. Many of us did find paths forward.

There were malls then, mostly in suburbia, but they had little or nothing that we wanted. It was essentially impossible to buy post-punk fashion there, mostly it was constructed by odds and ends, retro stuff from Goodwill stores or resale stores or scrounged and repurposed in some other way. A lot of us were very anti-materialist, and the concept of buying shiny new ready-made coffin shaped backpacks would have horrified us. It kind of still does.

It's been argued that goth goes back to the 60s or 70s, that the Velvet Underground and The Doors were precursers. There were references to "gothic" in a few places in the late 1970s. But it was probably 1982 or later before anything like what we now call goth began to come together in any organized way. Most of us, the first and second waves of post-punk, were gone by late '82 or early '83 and much larger, more mainstream crowds were beginning to descend on the clubs. Where post-punk was more often than not led by British bands, goth became much more American. The earliest examples maybe still had some things in common with us. Early Christian Death, at least through when I saw them (February 4, 1984, in San Francisco; with the classic Rozz Williams/Valor Kand/Gitane Demone/Constance Smith lineup), I'm pretty sure Rozz had read some of the same books that I had. After the surrealism of Catastrophe Ballet that began to drift. I didn't see 45 Grave til sometime later, and while they had a better sense of humor than they're often given credit for, that's about where my interest ends. After that it quickly seemed to become an angst-ridden fashion show. 

My goth experience was mostly later and as a photographer. I worked mostly with alternative models, and by 2003-2009 that often meant goth. Some of those young ladies were brilliant, a few of them understand much of what I've written above. I wasn't working with average people though. They poked fun at mallgoths more than I ever did. We sometimes wondered if it was possible to fake a counterculture look for the camera, and usually the consensus was no, putting on clothes and makeup did not equal authenticity and that it wasn't hard to tell.

That's enough for now. Perhaps I'll find a few photos to go with the stories.

 While on the goth theme: Acid PopTart, from the first of our two shoots so about 2005-ish, in Columbus Ohio. She was fashion editor of Gothic Beauty Magazine during this time. The shoot was done in a light drizzle, in the parking lot of a hotel while another model and photographer shot in one of the  rooms. I've published the whole story elsewhere, so won't go into detail here.

Goth

 

Today there was a local goth day. Photo op, right? Actually it was a bit of a challenge, as so often happens it was mostly mallgoths. Not a lot of authenticity, not surprising away from a major urban area. For at least some of these kids, their ideas come from the internet, not from personal experience. Most telling for me was that the one bookseller at the event had not a single serious work on the shelf, despite the fact that there's so much to work with in this genre it was all superficial fiction... and not even the best of that.

Perhaps I'm being too cynical, having been there at the beginning, before anyone beyond a very few journalists was calling it goth, and that only indirectly. Read the history, and I've seen most of the bands cited before they were popular. Later, I had opportunities to photograph several individuals central to the subculture. In many ways I was lucky. Now, so many years later, some of this feels disconnected from the earlier concepts. 

The images above: The first one, she was pretty much expressionless, vacant, sat in one place and hardly moved for 30 minutes while he did his best Rozz imitation (the real one was a whole lot more chrarismatic). So the image is of visual interest only, and the backlighting was tough. The second one is about the contrast; mom done up as goth, kid in Carhartt's. What will he be when he grows up?

Photographing the band was easy, having done so many of them it took only 8 or 10 images to call it done, and they were only marginally interesting. There was only one person on the floor right in front, everyone else was standing back; can't remember the last time that happened and it sure is easy to move that way. Some of the crafts on the tables offered interesting images, in some ways more interesting than most of the people. In this case the event served as useful practice, zone focusing and framing quickly, grabbing images before the subjects were fully aware... although no one seemed to object to being photographed, if I paused too long they over-posed so it worked way better to grab the images quickly.

Burlesque

 Earlier today, a friend told me she's in a new local burlesque troupe. From the couple of video clips and photos I've seen so far, it looks promising; that's a good thing. A couple months ago I went to see another local attempt and was sadly disappointed. There's a vacant niche here, for sure.

That got me thinking about the various interactions I've had with burlesque performers around the country, and the fascinating people I've met along the way. 

The first group I recall photographing was Hells Belles, in Detroit. That was in January 2005, it was 9 degrees F and we shot in an old restored downtown loft building near old Tiger Stadium in a half-abandoned neighborhood. It was part of a gothic-themed group shoot, organized by Racine Miller... then a law student, now a practicing attorney. She lined up the space, and recruited the majority of the models and did such a great job of it that I had to bring in three other photographers to help, we had over 20 models and three floors of space to work with.

Hells Belles were the first to arrive, all nine of them entering together. They dropped their things in the center of the large empty main room, and started to change and do makeup. One of the photographers tried to be polite and avert his eyes, and soon realized he was surrounded and there was no direction to look that didn't have a performer in some state of undress. It was obvious they'd been doing this for a while, they were soon ready and dispersing in small groups to create images. That was the day I met Sparkly Devil, who I'd shoot with twice more in Detroit after Hells Belles had long since broken up. We accidentally broke up a crack deal on the downtown streets, borrowed a shopping cart from a homeless guy, and made a mess in a clawfoot bathtub in a borrowed Victorian home in one of the then few gentrifying neighborhoods.

 Salome Slaughter was probably next, in Chicago. Again, we met at a larger shoot, this time with perhaps half a dozen people present; she was a friend of a friend. We turned her into a living statue, covered neck to toes in cling-wrap then gauze and plaster, in a duo with another model. The really amazing images happened when we cut her out, after 45 minutes of immobility the freedom resulted in a burst of enthusiastic and spontaneous movement and it was really easy to catch that energy. Again, that led to subsequent shoots. Salome has the distinction of being possibly the most extreme model I've worked with, as far as working conditions. Besides the plaster, we covered her in dried mud, worked in everything from 104 F and hot blowing wind in sand dunes to sub-freezing sleet and snow at Allerton Park, to wading a thigh deep marsh half a mile from the nearest trail. I was in hip boots, she was stark naked. It was actually a while til I got to see Salome perform on a burlesque stage, a few of us surprised her for a performance at Exit... which was outstanding. Considering her formal acting training, that didn't surprise me. That's her in the photo above, an evening shoot along the Chicago lakefront. In typical fashion, we walked under Lake Shore Drive from her nearby apartment and she wore only that one flimsy garment the entire time.

I met Michelle L'Amour in late spring 2010, when she performed (as Naked Girls Reading) at my exhibit opening at Gallery Provocateur in Chicago; her partner Franky Vivid was another of the artists exhibiting that night. It was pretty crowded, so a few of us went to see another performance a few weeks later when we didn't need to be "on" for the audience ourselves, when we could just enjoy. The photo above was taken after that performance, which was top-level. Two of her co-performers (Greta and Crimson) later participated in solo photo shoots. Take a look at https://michellelamour.com/about/ for more about Michelle; and that "The Most Naked Woman" video at the bottom of the page is a very worthwhile 11:54, I strongly encourage watching it.

Somewhere around that time, a little before or after, a group got together in Chicago and called themselves SS-XXX. I knew most of them long before then, had photographed several of them. The shows were OK the first time, repetitive after that. The attempt to be counterculture edgy turned out to be limiting. There's only so much one can do with fire dancing and a grinder on a metal plate throwing sparks. 

 Most of the performers were very good models though. I did a number of shoots with Natalya and they kept getting better. A shoot with Colleen in her apartment was very successful, quietly sophisticated. A shoot with Candy aka Alexandra on the streets and alleys around her Pilsen apartment covered a range of things, including a surpringly soft series against a fence with a Chicago PD car in the far distance, then finding recently expended 9mm casings in the alley right behind her place, then a slightly ominous looking set after nightfall on a bridge over the Chicago River, after a conversation best kept private. 

Curiously, another member of the group who I won't name booked a shoot, and then I turned her away after she tried to reschedule for the second time. I don't think she's accustomed to being told no, but I have a low tolerance for unreliability and in the end she took it well.

There were others, in some cases I don't recall any of the names. The shows themselves are challenging to photograph, rapid unpredictable movement best addressed with zone focusing, and poor or extreme lighting. When it works though it can result in strong images. Experience photographing dance and anticipating movement helps a lot. As a generality, the better performers are not only fun to watch on stage, they tend to make excellent creative collaborators in front of the camera. Movement can range from nuanced to assertive depending on the performers style, and communication is usually easy. So if this new local bunch does as well as I think they will, that's a positive thing.

What Might Be

 From a conversation this morning about recent landscape work: A few of the images are of ecological restoration sites that I've done design or permitting for; young alders along the restored Salt River, for example. One of the first steps in a restoration is understanding what was once there. In this case we were able to put part of it back, but not all of it.

Other images are of still degraded landscapes. In those cases, I guess I'm seeing what's there now, and what was once there, and what might be there again someday. It's a very intuitive thing, thinking in multiple and dynamic temporal scales... and not easy to explain.

After that I spent a few hours relaxing at the hot springs. Nice to unwind a little, and going two hours south meant it was 10 degrees warmer. No major revelations, but there was a chance to think about already defined things.

 This is my current analog loadout, about to go with me to get another cup of coffee. Lightweight and it barely fills a third of a Domke bag.

Changing to digital, the camera body would be about 3 oz heavier but no need for a handheld meter or film; I'd carry a charger and extra SD cards only for extended out of town travel. So probably a wash or just a bit heavier depending on the situation, but not enough to matter.

These days, I consider simple to be a good thing.

 Over the weekend I loaded a roll of medium format and shot half of it, intending to finish the rest of it sometime in the next few days. A lot of the reason is simply that I have a roll of Plux-X 120 sitting around  waiting to be processed, old enough that I don't even recall what's on it. May as well fill a tank, so it was an excuse to pull an old 500C out of the drawer where it usually lives. 

This quickly led to a realization: As much as I enjoy the quality that comes with the larger film negative, and as much fun as I had for years working in medium format, right now it doesn't fit my goals very well. I'm just happier with the small, unobtrusive 35mm rangefinder.

For now, that is. I tend to do something til I get bored with it and desire to break up the routine a little.  That may take a little while or a long while.

 

 

Chey Alexandria, from the "feral" series. December 2021, on the Russian River in Mendocino County.

Film

 Because it's been a while since I've processed film in quantity, I'm stepping back and making fresh decisions about which products to work with. That's because things change over time; the film stock, the chemistry, the nuances of my processing technique, my preferences for the end look. There's a great deal of misinformation on the internet, much of it from well-meaning newcomers who either read it somewhere else, or are doing their best to interpret their own results but not controlling for variables. For example, I've seen at least two recent statements that Tri X allegedly hadn't changed at all since introduction; one claimed to quote a post by a guy from Kodak (but with no link or citation). It's not even close to true, one look at my early work and more recent work makes that very obvious. Other sources claim multiple changes over time which is far more likely to be true. There was one big change that resulted in Kodak publishing new processing times (according to Wikipedia, this change was in 2007 and included allegedly finer grain and less silver; but they don't cite a source either. I do know that some of the new HC-110 times are not accurate, see the notes on Massive Dev Chart and my own experience backs that up).

So at the moment I have four rolls of Tri X, and two rolls of FP4 ready to proof and there are a couple of rolls of HP5 ready to process. All were done in Rodinal at 1:50 dilution and all with the same agitation and temperatures. I'll print a few examples, see what I like and don't like, and then shoot some more with whatever seems to be working for me. There are a few old rolls of 120 sitting around too, one-offs of each of several film types, great reason to run a couple more rolls through a medium format camera.

I probably won't settle on just one thing. Rodinal is a high acutance developer, which I like; that means the edges of the grain are less diffused, which gives the appearance of more grain and better sharpness although it's not really the same thing. That works for some subjects, not as much for others. So for those other things, I could use FP4, or I could just go to medium format... which I may very well try for the landscape work. It's a heavier rig but can be set up to be not too bulky. A tripod is a big advantage with larger cameras. I may not want to haul that on a 12-mile backcountry hike over rugged terrain, but close to the road it's perhaps worthwhile. 

I'll zero in pretty quickly on what I want to use. Things other than the look of the images may or may not factor in. 35mm Tri X is about $2.37 per roll more expensive than HP5. That doesn't matter for a few rolls, but over a hundred rolls it adds up. But then Tri X is available in 100 foot rolls for a better price, and I still have two of my old bulk loaders and would just need to buy a few new reloadable film cassettes at $2-something each and see if I can find the trimmer for the roll leader. So HP5 has a cost edge for small to medium quantities, but not for large quantities. Then there's the matter of whether one company is more deserving of support than another. I'm just beginning to look at that. Kodak is presumably still a fairly typical large publicly held corporation. At last check Harman (Ilford) was owned by a venture capitol firm. Either way, they're about making a profit and may or may not differ in how much they actually care about photography. That will take time to research and it's not a top priority this week. It's something I'll want to forget the moment I pick up a camera and go in search of images. There, it would just get in the way.

One thing that has become painfully clear doing just this little bit of information gathering: A lot of once commonplace film photography knowledge is rapidly being lost. Things that were once on my darkroom shelf, and that of most every other serious photographer, have in some cases become hard to find and often hidden behind internet misinformation. Young photographers, if you have opportunities to learn from older folks who learned when there was only film, go for it while you still can. Gramps may know things he's forgotten he knows, and will probably benefit from being around your creative energy. Maybe he'll even dust off that old camera.

Resilience

 

When I returned to serious photography in 1997, after a long absence, the first step was to recalibrate, to dial in technique. With photography, I've found it's helpful to learn the rules so one can then forget the rules. That is, get equipment handling and technique to the point that they're largely intuitive, and can then fade into the background. That frees up space to focus on the creative elements. It's perhaps daunting for someone just starting out, but I'd already worked at pro and semi-pro levels for something like 12 years, so for me it was more of a refresher and breaking some bad habits acquired as a photojournalist. In the early newspaper days, end published reproduction quality was often marginal at best so the incentive was to get the shot and worry less about say, holding the shadow detail. When I was ready to shift to exhibiting and higher-quality publication the quality had to step up some.

A lot of that initial calibration happened with landscapes, since they're readily available and it was possible to go somewhere, spend days away from other distractions, and just photograph landscapes. At first that was close to home (I was still living on Chicago's north side at that time, so usually it meant a 30 or 40 minute drive out to suburban open space). Toward the end of that year I transitioned to photographing people, and I also made extended trips to a couple of the standard and classic landscape photo places. There was a spring trip to Yosemite which lasted a week or two, and then a two week mid-winter trip to Joshua Tree. 

I was mostly shooting medium format film at the time, most everything was done with one camera body, one lens, and a couple of backs and a hand-held meter. A tripod added some serious bulk and weight. On the Yosemite trip I mostly photographed alone even though I was camping with some rock climber friends at Camp 4; a typical day involved an hour or two hike and then several hours working a given location. Joshua Tree was a bit more diverse. Jon was there for the entire time, now he's a successful commercial photographer http://www.jonchristophermeyers.com/ but then he was young and still learning and it helped me a lot to have to explain most everything I did, it brought to the surface a lot of things I'd been doing intuitively. Ellin was also there for the entire time, as was Melissa. Branka, then one of my favorite models, drove out from LA for several days mid-trip. So there was an interval of people in the landscape within a trip mainly oriented on just the landscape.

I still have a portfolio of prints from those trips somewhere, plus some slightly later images from Glacier National Park and a few Chicago region locations. They're generally perfectly exposed images, archivally printed on fiber-base paper, selenium toned, with rich tonal range. 

When I look at those prints today, all I see is pretty pictures of the landscape. They're related only by place, and otherwise pretty meaningless. 

I didn't have much time to think about it then, because by the time of the Joshua Tree trip I was already well into the "Strong Women" concept which was exhibited a bit later. I kept photographing people, and didn't do a lot with the landscape again until recently.

Last fall included a trip to Ridgecrest CA, in the Mojave Desert. It was a work related trip, but things weren't excessively busy at the time so I was able to wrap a couple of extra days in and drive the long way, up 80 and over Donner Pass and then down 395 on the back side of the Sierra's. I started photographing the second day at Mono Lake, in the higher elevation Great Basin Desert. It was past peak season and hardly anyone else was there. Hiking the best known trail got a few pretty pictures, and a feeling that this has been done a zillion times before. The shift began back at the trailhead when I walked across the road and took a few shots of the dead trees across the road. Then a few minutes of research identified some less traveled trails. Half a day later, I had some images that were a lot less conventional. Carrying just the M10 with a 50 Summicron, I was able to scramble to places that would have been challenging at best to reach with a bigger camera and a tripod.

Those images set the tone for the rest of the drive, with several stops along the roads and batches of images. After a day and a half of work things the return drive had to be more direct and with a lot fewer pauses, although a couple more interesting things were photographed along the way. 

In keeping with the previous post, I won't elaborate on the current concept except to say that the working title is "resilience" and that it was born on a rutted dirt track somewhere just south of Mono Lake. I've added some northern California images since then, a much more densely vegetated place than the deserts. It may very possibly split into two (or more) themes by the time it's done, too early to know right now. 

Philosophy

http://leicaphilia.com/ is a fascinating blog that I look at every now and then. In this age of internet gear geeks, this fellow, who among other things has a philosophy background, tends to focus much more on the act of creating images, and things which facilitate doing so. Also unlike many of the photography blogs I've seen recently, there's some quality work posted. It's refreshing to see black & white images that have a full tonal range, it's all too rare.

He doesn't post that often. In what is, at this writing, the most recent post (August 2021), he says:

"...a creator should never explain his work. Much better to just put it out there and let people explain it for themselves. There’s nothing worse, in my mind, then pretentious artist’s statements. Good art comes from somewhere other than the logical mind and can only be diminished by intellectualizing it."

I partially agree. Or maybe I agree part of the time. Certainly I'm guilty of sometimes wanting to explain at least my overall concept, although they tend to be short explanations and I hope they're not pretentious. As both a writer and photographer, it helps me to write about my thought process, it helps the concept to more fully come together more quickly. Perhaps the decision then is if, or when, to share those writings and when to keep them personal. Recently I've done it both ways. Going forward, probably it will depend on the concept and on the setting and on my mood at the time.

We're in complete agreement that it helps a great deal to have a theme or a concept to tie the work together. I'm not going to go look for the exact quotes, but it's there in more than one place, all the more reason for you to go take a look of your own. For me, the realization that the concept is really important was a paradigm shift, a night and day difference in how I photographed. The day I figured it out was the day I was offered my first serious gallery exhibit and that was not a coincidence, and that curator gets a lot of credit for gently nudging me to the realization. Ralph Gibson talks about something similar in his book "Duex ex Machina" where (on page 9, in the introduction) he quotes Dorothea Lange calling it a "point of departure." That story, about a conversation that happened in San Francisco in the early 1960s, was printed in a book structured as multiple themed chapters, that was published in 1999; not long after I consciously figured out something that I'd already done accidentally and subconsciously during my post-punk photojournalist years and then forgotten for a while. For both of us, and probably for many others, it took a while to understand.

Us art photography types often tend to overthink the concept. At least that's the realization I came to after one of several conversations with fashion photographer Sam Hessamian https://www.thecoolist.com/sam-hessamian-fashion-photography/  Sam was one of the f-eleven collective photographers, one of the about 40% of the group that I never met in person, but we did talk during the time the books were being put together. That was about 12 years ago so I can only roughly paraphrase now. Roughly, what Sam told me was that as a working fashion photographer he had to sometimes have a theme... what he called "a story" several times in a week, which didn't leave time to overthink it. And that a story didn't need to be complicated, that it could be as simple as "red." I'm pretty sure that was the example he used. All that mattered was that something tied the images together into a semi-coherent whole.

Almost everything I've done since that conversation with a gallery curator in... 1998? has had a theme or concept. Before that, back in the beginning, my mainstream 1970s photojournalism work had default themes because I was usually working specific assignments given by my editor. Then my post-punk work was conceptual because of a cultural accident, the subculture itself tied everything together, made the images about something. It wasn't til later that I had to figure it out for myself, and that required first an understanding. Sometimes a concept lasts a week, sometimes it lasts a decade. Sometimes they're simple, sometimes they're complex. Whatever the circumstance of the moment, that's made all the difference.

Media

 I'm back in an analog mood. These things are unpredictable and not entirely rational, when the mood strikes the easy way is to follow it for a while. In this case I think it's mostly about slowing down a little, engaging with the process of creating images, getting back to basics for a while. It's going a little deeper this time: In addition to processing film (six rolls so far this week, mostly Tri X, some FP4, a roll of HP5 in the camera now) and getting a feel for current iterations of various choices, I'm also back to processing in Rodinal. It was long one of my favorites, put on the side for a while. It's a huge plus that I was able to grab a mostly full bottle that's several years old and it works just fine.

I've also cleaned up the darkroom and am almost set to print. The only thing I'm waiting on is some Dektol which is one the way from B&H and should arrive day after tomorrow, so probably there will be contact sheets this weekend and maybe some prints. For now, I may stay with hard copy and not scan much... concentrate on the process for a while as I zero in the workflow.