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

Still Waiting

Will that train never get here?

Ruth Bernhard Photos in Art Show

Faithful readers — there is at least one, I think — will know that I am a great admirer of the work of Ruth Bernhard. Here is my earlier post about her. I am always casting about, looking for a reason to post another of her photos. I found an excuse just today when I discovered a show of modern photography at the Harn Museum at the University of Florida. According to the museum’s website, they are showing:

215 works by 77 international 20th century Modernist photographers including multiple works by masters such as Ansel Adams, Weegee, Edward Weston, Walker Evans and Ruth Bernhard, as well as less familiar innovators Jan Saudek, James Nachtwey and Marion Post-Wolcott.

The show is on now and runs until January 6, 2008. I am certain it will be worth the time to see if you live in the vicinity or will be traveling there.

Good. Now that the excuse is out of the way. . .

That is enough for one day. Stay tuned. I am certain to find more reasons for more of her photographs.

Fluffytek Blog Review

I admit to being an Anglophile. How can you not love the British who brought us Shakespeare, Churchill and J.M.W. Turner ? Back in the days when the dollar was healthy and Americans could afford to travel to Europe, I went to the U.K. as often as I could. I feel safer and more at home on the streets of London than I do in Manhattan. So perhaps it is no surprise that the best blog about photography of nudes that I have found in my perambulations around the web comes from Great Britain.

The blog is Fluffytek and never mind about the name. There is nothing “fluffy” about it. Just go to the blog and wade in. It is written by a husband and wife team who live in England. Lin, the woman, is pushing 40 but still models and does most of the writing. Richard is the photographer and he also writes.

The entry for Thursday, October 4th is a good example of why I like it so much. Lin writes about one of her personal heroes, Frida Kahlo. Lin, who occasionally alludes to her own chronic pain, writes movingly about Kahlo’s. Separating Kahlo’s pain from her art would be like reversing the law of entropy; it just isn’t possible and Lin doesn’t try. What results is a fine capsule of the essence of Kahlo and her art. You could read an entire biography of her and not get much closer to her than you can in three or four minutes of reading the blog entry.

The day before the Kahlo post, readers were treated to a brief essay about the “photographic eye” and the continuing battle Lin and Richard are having with their son’s art teacher who doesn’t admit photography into the family of art.

Lin, who admits to approaching 40, also writes about modeling. Her insights into a model’s role in producing a good photograph are especially useful, given the dearth of good blogs by models. There aren’t many. In fact, there is a dearth of writing by photo models period. Edward Weston’s model and wife Charis Wilson is about all that is worthwhile. Lin reaches deeply into her own psyche and, from time to time, explores her own motivations; which, at least to this male photographer, seem insightful and wise.

They live in County Norfolk in England. Norfolk has given the world much, including Boudica, the Celtic queen who led an uprising against the Roman occupiers in 60 or 61 A.D., Admiral Lord Nelson and our own Thomas Paine. Nelson once wrote, “I am myself a Norfolk man . . . and glory in being so.”

Norfolk is meaningful to my family too. My father lived there for a year during WWII. He was a B-24 pilot with the 44th Bomb Group which was stationed at Shipdam. You can read about Shipdam here. If you scroll down that Wikipedia page you will see a photograph of a rainy Medal of Honor ceremony in progress. That medal was being awarded to Col. Leon Johnson for his heroics in the low level raid in August 1943 on the Ploesti oilfields in Romania. My father flew that mission as well and his was the only other plane in Johnson’s wing that made it back safely. I am reasonably confident that my father, who was a photographer, took that photo because he had the negative and several other photos taken from the same spot in his possession when he died.

But my family connection is not why you should read Fluffytek. You should read it because it is a thoughtful, rewarding place to spend a few minutes each day. You’ll learn some photography, some quantum mechanics and some humanity.

Oh. I almost forgot. The photography is excellent. All the photographs in this entry are theirs. Check out their galleries here and here.

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.

Gender

This is from an interview with Gloria Steinem:

Q: Do you see the world through the prism of gender?

A: No, the world looks at me through the prism of gender.

Her answer raises some serious questions for photographers, especially serious fine art photographers.  One assumes that people who take pictures for the “Playboy wannabe’ web sites such as femjoy.com, metmodels.com, mplstudios.com, nudes.hegre-art.com and that ilk don’t bother themselves with such questions and there is no doubt that serious pornographers are incapable of even contemplating such issues.  Serious pornographers call into question the scientific consensus that Neanderthals are extinct.

For today, all I do is raise the question.  Later posts in this series will explore the issue.

Democratization of Photography

We’ve reached the ultimate democratization of photography: Anyone with a point and shoot camera can take a picture and anyone with a computer can start a photography blog and write about the picture.

The question thus arises, “Why should I look at these pictures or read this blog?”

First, these aren’t pictures; they are photographs.

Second, this isn’t the usual blog.  I promise not to be narcissistic nor humorless.  In fact, I intend to inject a fair amount of humor and won’t bother you much with myself. Most blogs today are all about the authors and their lives.  But I doubt that you much care what I had for dinner last night nor do you really need to know the names of my dogs.  (Unless, of course, you model for me someday and one of the dogs comes along. I’ll probably post a picture of them even though I’m trying not to be narcissistic here.)  I’ll also endeavor to write well.

As I said in the first post — which you can read in the “About” section — one of the serious problems with photography of nudes is that much of it consists of photographs made by pretentious photographers taking pictures of self-conscious models.  I suppose we do that to prove that we aren’t doing it just for the salaciousness of the enterprise.  People might misunderstand otherwise.  We live, after all, in a country founded by Puritans.  It would not do to admit that making photographs of naked nubile women is fun nor would it do for the naked young women to admit that taking their clothes off for a camera is, among other things, a lot of fun. The inner voice asserts, “You can’t make Art if you are having fun.  Art is serious.”

Baloney.

It is true that many great artists did not live particularly happy lives, but does anyone seriously contend that most of them did not love doing their art.  Was Alfred Steiglitz not having fun photographing Rebecca Strand or Georgia O’Keefe?  Was Edward Weston not enjoying himself as he made photographs of Charis Wilson?  Would anyone seriously argue that Ansel Adams did not love being outdoors?  I’m guessing that Imogen Cunningham adored making photographs of flowers and young women. Ruth Bernard no doubt loved cramming models into boxes and arranging her studio lights to focus our attention on the beauty of the human form.

So we’ll enjoy ourselves here.  We’ll be unstinting with praise and chary with criticism.  Exploring environmental nudes with empathy, we’ll also examine the human condition and the environment of which we are a part and from which we can never separate ourselves.

Welcome.

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.