Monday, September 19, 2016

My Other Voice

Today, perhaps more than ever before, the axiom is true. Talk is cheap. We are inundated by it. TV and radio, yes. (How old hat!) Facebook, email, tweets.

Well, at least we rarely anymore hear pagers going off!

Music is a lovely escape from all this word chatter.  But so can be pictures.

When the camera was invented some thought it would be the end of painting.  But the human imagination being what it is that newer form of imaging -- so literal and real -- instead moved painting in a new direction. Towards impressionism and abstraction.

Today, with cameras everywhere, seeing what "is" in almost real-time is commonplace. But much as with the nearly endless increase in words so much of today's imaging seems to have very little to say. Another face. Another smile. (What is it about selfie smiles?  That lip stretching unreality that is supposed to pass for joy and enthusiasm.)

I have, for most all of my life, taken a somewhat different path.  To not ask the viewers of my work to see what the camera saw (It needs me not for that. Nor I it), but what I saw in my mind and then made 'seeable' to others via the tool of photography.

Here are several of my favorite such images, limited by what I have made available to  myself in digital form.

Yes, the newer ones were created that way. But others -- no more or less literal -- were created using chemical means. Film and paper. Or transparency. Then digitized as they appeared in that earlier modality.

In no particular order. Accompanied by just a few words.




"Charles in Winter"

A silver print "brought out" with potassium ferricyanide. Mid 1970s


"Grapes at Sunset"


Any 'manipulation' was done in camera with light. Natural light, just as the name suggests.  Late 1970s. 

From a Cibachrome additive print.






"Prayer"

Ektachrome printed on Cibachrome additive color process.

This was an "eureka!" grab shot taken in the Everglades National Park. Sisters from Mother Teresa's order.

Whether the sisters were prayerful at the time I cannot say. What had caught their eye was a large alligator swimming underneath the only slightly elevated boardwalk.






"Moonscape"

My then young son carefully placed in the composition with a remnant reflecting pool shortly after the tide went out at New Hampshire's Rye Beach,  The ethereal quality was, again, carefully created in camera.

Ekatachrome on a Ciba print.







"Leaves"

A "found" shot.  One of my favorite photographic experiences. Isolated, yes, but largely otherwise as seen.

Ektachrome on Cibachrome.






And now some created in the digital modality.

"Bench in Autumn"

Like many here this is from a series I call "My Morning Walk."  Grab shots of the beauty all around me/us here on my property in the Monadnocks, NH.

As I saw it, not the camera.







"Wild Flowers"






"Winter Sunrise"

Nothing here, apart from the sun and the cottage, is quite what the camera saw. But it is exactly what I saw. Even to the contributing "lens flare."






"Sunrise on a Misty Morn"

How much was in the scene vs in my mind I almost cannot say.  But the scene called everything forth. I just had to let my eyes see it all.







"Storm's End"

Probably the most "natural" shot here. Light did all the creation. And color. But it lasted a mere moment and was caught forever.

Taken through our bedroom's "glass wall."





Thank you for allowing me to share these. 

-Don


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