Top 10 List

It is Thanksgiving Day here in the United States.  Here is a list of 10 things we are thankful for here at this blog.  These are in addition to the most obvious and most important: family, friends, good health, shelter, pets etc.

10.  Women unwilling to take off their clothes for my camera.

9.    Hahnemühle Paper

8.    Adobe

7.    Ansel Adams’ Moonrise over Hernandez, NM.

6.    Silver Halides

5.    MOMA

4.    My Cameras – Hasselblad for film; Nikon for digital.

3.     Readers of this blog

2.     Women willing to take off their clothes for my camera.

1.     A land of clear light

The Limits of Landscape Art

There is a new and fairly silly article about “landscape” in the current edition of Orion Magazine. You can read it here. It is by retired art critic Rebecca Solnit, author of several books including: As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (2001), River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003), A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2006) and Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (2006) and many columns for Orion.

Her “landscape” article is proof that just because you are published, doesn’t mean you are always right.

As I understand her, she finds traditional landscape painting and photography lacking because it does not incorporate enough of reality. She also doesn’t like it because it portrays the earth as feminine and; therefore, passive. Finally she doesn’t like the fact that it “de-emphasizes” the energies which pulse through the landscape and the universe.

Wrong, wrong and wrong again.

Of course landscapes leave out stuff. One of the first and most important compositional decisions an artist makes is what to leave out; what to ignore. That is just like survival; to live we must decide what to ignore. Even if it were possible to depict all of reality in a photograph or on a canvas, no artist would want to. Art is about discrimination. Whatever an artist’s vision is; to convey it to the rest of us compels omission.

Moreover, even though she may like the requirement, “traditional” landscapes do reduce a multi-dimensional reality – probably many more than the three Ms. Solnit recognizes – into two. Photographers must learn to see in at least three dimensions but reduce to two. Another way of counting – and viewing landscapes – is that they reduce four dimensions to three: A good landscape includes time. The eye is drawn into the photograph and then through it, thus incorporating at least one concept of time. But the fundamental point is that the artwork requires imagination from both the artist and the viewer. The limits Ms. Solnit finds in landscapes may well be the limits of her imagination, not the artistic imagination that created the work.

Next she faults landscapes for coming out of a tradition of seeing land, “. . . as feminine and the feminine as passive—as something you act upon rather than an actor.” No doubt many artists may have thought that about land as feminine. The earth is our mother in most traditions, after all. But it is much less certain that landscapes all come from a tradition of viewing the feminine as passive. Inanna, Lilith, Hera, Artemis, Durga and uncounted other women from mythology were anything but passive. I doubt that Ms. Solnit herself is passive. Gender does not determine activity; that is done by genetics and culture.

Comparing landscapes to real estate for sale, she says, “It is easier to dump nuclear waste, for example, into a place you imagine as inert than one you understand to be constantly moving, changing, and connecting to everywhere else.” That too seems wrong. If Ansel Adams had made a photograph of the moon rising over Yucca Mountain in Nevada, I doubt the nation would be contemplating storing our nuclear waste there. No one is suggesting we should store it in Yosemite, thanks in part to Adam’s landscapes.

Finally, she decries landscape art’s inability to portray the energies pulsing through the place. It is true that we humans have a very limited ability to detect energy. We have only five senses which we tap into most of the time. And even those are limited. Most of the reflected light illuminating those landscapes is invisible to our eyes; most of the sound, inaudible to our poor ears; unsmelled by pathetic noses; untasted and mostly untouched. But does that mean I can’t feel the energy pulsing through a Turner landscape or a Picasso representation of a landscape?

What Ms. Solnit worries about isn’t the art form, it is the viewers. But don’t take my word for it. Here is Thoreau on the point: “The question is not what you look at—but how you look and whether you see.”

_________________________

The photo was made by Laura Gilpin. Passive? I don’t think so.

Slow Trains

When you are waiting for one, all trains are slow trains. Might as well read a good book while you wait.

Lake Superior Nudes

Of all the photographers I know of that are working with nudes outdoors – also called “environmental nudes”, a term I think meaningless; you can’t take a human being out of the “environment” any more than you can take the land out of the “landscape” – Craig Blacklock is probably my favorite. He is better at it than anyone I know of and is far better at it than me. Blacklock is a landscape photographer who lives and works around Lake Superior. (There is something about the Upper Midwest that seems to breed photographers of the nude. More on that in subsequent posts and reviews.)

Last year he published a book entitled “A Voice Within: The Lake Superior Nudes.” You can have a look at the book here and buy it which is something I’ve been intending to do. Maybe now I will.

Here are a couple of his photos which I especially like. Notice in this one his skill in deciding what to leave out of the photo. One of the skills in composition that all great photographers develop lies in deciding what to leave out and this photo is a fine example of that.

Many of the photos in the book convey, primarily through the posing skill of his model/wife, a wonderful tranquility. But the composition of the rest of the photo contributes as well. The line of rock which occupies only the top of the photo gives way to that little rock island upon which she sits which then leads your eyes to her partial reflection then to the expanse of slightly rippled water. Note how almost all the space in the photo consists of that quiet gray water.

All the photos in the book were taken around Lake Superior and, if you think she looks a little cold in this photo, wait until you see the “ice” photos.

Naked Landscapes in a Land of Clear Light

This blog and its accompanying website are experiments. Somewhere in the recesses of my brain is an inchoate idea of what a photograph of a nude ought to look like when it is of a landscape with a nude in it. And somewhere else is a vision of what a landscape without a nude in it ought to look like as well. Whether I will ever create a solid, material two-dimensional photograph of that vision that you could hang on your wall – or want to – remains to be seen.

In the meantime, I’ll post some thoughts on photography here. Probably on other subjects as well. I welcome comments, constructive criticism and your knowledge as well. I am a retiring and recovering trial lawyer with no formal art or photography training and my ignorance of the subject is as vast as some of the landscapes I shoot. Please share your knowledge with me and my readers.

Let’s get a few basics out of the way now. First, a great deal of nude photography consists of photos taken by pretentious photographers of self-conscious women. Everyone involved in the process seems to think that because a naked woman is involved, overt seriousness is required to deflect objections to the enterprise. Humor is not allowed and it is best if it appears that no one is having any fun. This attitude is leftover from the Puritans and currently is embodied by the “Repuritan” Party. European photographers and their models seem a little less encumbered by it, but my feeling is that many of them too are infected by our puritanism. It results in much technically competent photography that is boring. It also results in some technically incompetent photography that is boring. There are men in the world who use a camera in an age-old male pursuit: Getting women to take their clothes off. That is their right I suppose, I just wish they wouldn’t inflict their snapshots on the rest of us.

Another important point: Examining photography on a computer screen is like examining the flavor of a fine wine by looking at the unopened bottle. Wine is meant to be drunk; photographs are meant to be printed. So when I write of a photograph that I have seen only on my computer, remember that I am criticizing a stream of electrons flowing across a computer screen, not the real thing. To continue the alcohol metaphor, it is the difference between beer and stale beer. You get the point. Nonetheless, I do believe that some valid things can be said about even a photograph that has been downsized, jpeg’ed and otherwise messed with in order to get it onto the worldwide web in a form that people can look at but not steal.

Finally, I exclude from this blog all of the pornography and all of the “pinup” photos of young women on the web today. They are designed solely to titillate males. None of it is art; most of it is a form of pornography. It demeans and objectifies the women, helps create and maintain unreal, false ideas about feminine beauty and operates; in its way, to separate the genders. More on that in later posts.

And, just to be clear, while I don’t much like that kind of photography; I like living in a country that allows it. Mr. Justice Black was right, the First Amendment means what it says.