lundi 11 octobre 2004

Road Trips Aaron Siskind... abstract discoveries My mind was burdened by another petty argument... thankfully fresh air clears the head... and mine needed clearing. Headache, neck-ache all brought on by a stupid "snap" at my wife as she needed to be taken for a pee for about the 12th time today. I should explain... her situation with having a pee has directly involved me for the past five years. She has suffered from Multiple Sclerosis getting on for fifteen years - it's hard to say exactly as the malady creeps up ever so slowly and chips away at one's faculties almost unnoticed until, one day, you realise that your partner is always dragging her left toe when she walks... or never wants to drive but always sits in the car passenger seat with her eyes firmly closed even though I'm describing a scene and she's agreeing that it is very photogenic, or whatever, in general agreement with my first opinion on the matter... but with her eyes firmly closed, that is, because the roadside trees and close scenery rushing past the car's windows as well as the broken white hazard lines in the middle of the road are all flickering abstractly and violently within her field of vision and causing unspoken discomfort. Years later, after two bad falls resulting in fractured femurs, coupled with lack of balance makes it very difficult for her to stand on her own two feet... so I have become her legs and zig-zag her wheelchair through the house many times a day, and night, to the loo. Of course I only have to touch against a door frame and I'm a stupid ass... which if followed by another brush with something unyielding... well, today I was approaching ogre status in her mind. So like my daily bike rides (except it was too wild and windy today) I surfaced for air and took a hike... around the block. As I said a few blogs ago photography is like gardening (or was it cycling is like gardening) in that you can forget everything that's nagging inside your head. Turning soil with a spade and then breaking crumbs of it in your hands is very therapeutic. Two hundred meters of standing on the bike's pedals with your ass off the seat and reaching the top of a steep climb can be too... and so it is with a manual camera. There is nothing better for photographic satisfaction than loading a film into a manual camera and, if necessary, wasting that film. The satisfaction I know is mostly is seeing an image... but increasingly more so in this automated age there is satisfaction in doing it yourself... estimating the exposure... setting the controls and focusing carefully by hand... pressing the shutter release... you can almost throw the film away if you feel good after going through that exercise as I did to clear my head. But no... there's a blog image to produce and after making a quick print I scanned the image and PhotoShop was used to sepia tone the above abstract image of mortar-filled cracks and lichens on a neighbour's garden wall. The captured scene was about 15 x 12 inches in area and several different exposures were made, each framed carefully in the 100 percent accurate viewfinder of my Nikon F2. Concentrating on the framing was important as I try more and more to print full-frame without any cropping or reframing of the enlargement. Of course none of these selected vignette image ideas are new... you see them in a number of photo magazines as we photographers try to be arty, clever, abstract, different... but I still do them quite frequently to train my selective eye and calm my confused brain. I am reminded of Brassai's classic book "Graffiti" and Aaron Siskind's "Road Trip." Looking at those examples again I wonder how many photographer's are nascent painters trying to discover their preferred art form. 9:25:19 PM    comment []