street

Posted on September 15, 2015 by greg

I love street photography. I love the energy of it. I love the unplanned immediacy of street photography. I love the connection between the photographer and what’s taking place within the frame, and I love the connection between the viewer and the image itself. When you look at a good street photo, the photographer disappears — it feels as if it’s just you and what’s happening in the photo, unfiltered by any photographer. I love street photography.

Wait, let me amend that — I love street photography when it’s done well. But here are a couple of true things: first, it’s really difficult to do it well. And second, it’s even more difficult to do it well with consistency. Good street photography is hard. Bad street photography, on the other hand, is incredibly easy.

I should also point out that although I love street photography, I’m not a street photographer. I sometimes shoot photographs on the street (though I’m more likely to shoot in alleys), but street photography isn’t entirely about location. It’s about the ways people inhabit and move through public spaces. Most of the photographs I shoot in public spaces are urban landscapes. If there are people in the photographs, they’re incidental.

That said, I often see good street photographic moments when I’m out noodling around. I’m a completely fucking brilliant mental street photographer. But brilliant mental street photography doesn’t translate to the camera. It’s one thing to see a street moment and think ‘There — that’s it.’ It’s entirely another thing to anticipate that moment, put yourself in the right spot, and have your camera ready to shoot it. That’s one of the reasons I’m not a street photographer. I’m just not willing to walk around with a camera always at hand, ready to snatch that exact moment when everything comes into alignment.

But last week, as I was wandering around downtown, it occurred to me that I do always have a camera at hand. My smartphone. It’s not a great camera, but so what? It’s quiet and unobtrusive, which is pretty important for street work. I have an app called Lenka that shoots basic black-and-white images. This clearly isn’t the optimal arrangement for street photography, but it’s what I had with me. You have to work within your limitations.

I set the app to allow me to take a photo by pressing the volume button on my phone (so I wouldn’t have to fuss about with using the phone as a viewfinder) and went off try some street. Almost immediately, I came across a small group of folks learning to be blind. The headquarters of the National Federation of the Blind is located downtown, and I assume that’s why we so often see a group of blindfolded people with canes being escorted around town. I took a couple of shots without looking.

They weren’t great photos, but they were enough to encourage me to keep trying. I wandered around, saw some interesting folks, took some shots. I tried not to focus too much on people who looked interesting, because those were mostly folks who were marginalized because of addiction or abuse or weight or some other social condition. I tried to look for visually interesting situations instead.

Then I ran into this old drunk guy.

He immediately panhandled me, asking for spare change. I don’t carry much money; I use a debit card for everything. The only cash I had was a couple of twenties. So I told him I didn’t have any change — and I surreptitiously took his photo without looking. Shameful behavior on my part. Doubly shameful in that the photo was blurry.

The guy grinned and offered to take a twenty, which was a nice move on his part. It made me like him enough that I wanted to give him something. I told him I was heading for the drug store across the street and down the block, but if he was around when I came back that way, I’d hand over a little something — and I surreptitiously took his photo again. Still without looking; still shameful. This time the photo was badly exposed.

So I went to the drug store, bought a cupcake for myself and a chicken salad sandwich for the old drunk guy. When I came out of the store, the ODG was hobbling across the street with his walker. I’d told him I was going to give him something and dammit, he was going to make sure I didn’t forget. I gave him the sandwich and a couple of bucks (and yes, I knew he’d spend the money on booze). Again, I surreptitiously took his photo. Again, it didn’t turn out well; badly expose and blurry.

That’s what you get for shooting without looking, I suppose.

Having done my part to support the local alcoholic community, I kept on wandering and shooting. Every so often I’d stop and find a place to sit and chimp the photos. Most of them were bad. Some were really bad. But mostly I was okay with them. If nothing else, I was learning to get the framing right. Mostly. Partly. That’s hard to do when you’re shooting from the hip.

The light was getting increasingly harsh, the shadows were radical — great conditions for urban landscape photos, but not what you’d call street-friendly if you’re relying on shooting blind with a smartphone. Almost everything I shot was badly (or weirdly) exposed.

I decided to end the experiment. I knew a nice, quiet, dark space nearby (okay, let’s just call it a tavern), so I headed there for a cool drink and a chance to evaluate the photos. On the way there I came across the old drunk guy again. He’d taken off his shoes, put them in the basket of his walker (along with the uneaten chicken salad sandwich), and laid himself out on a public bench for a nap. Or to sleep it off.

And hey, I took his photograph one more time. Shameless again.

I learned four things from the experiment. First, I’m not a good street photographer. I’m okay with that. I’m not a rotten street photographer either. I can improve. If I decide to. Second, street work has a moral component. In the U.S. you pretty much have the right to photograph anything and anybody in the public arena. Doesn’t mean you should, though. Third, if you have a moral discussion with yourself before you shoot a photo, you’ll probably lose the shot.

Earlier I mentioned I tried not to focus too much on people who only looked interesting, because they tended to be folks who were marginalized in some way. Shooting photos of those folks would (or easily could) be exploitative — even if that wasn’t my intent, and even if I never showed the images to anybody. It would, in effect, be turning them into props; it would not be treating them as people.

There was a specific moment during the day I made a rule for myself. Shoot first, decide later if the photograph was ethical. Here’s how I came by that rule. I saw another drunk guy. The old man I’d met earlier was clearly an alcoholic, but he seemed pretty self-aware of his condition. He was friendly, with a sort of style and charm about him. He was clearly intoxicated, but not sloppy drunk. He was a sad case, but he was in control of himself and I liked him.

The other drunk guy was probably in his late 20s. He was staggering drunk. Oblivious to the world drunk. Slobbering and probably in dubious control of his bladder drunk. High school drunk. There was nothing likable or charming or self-aware about him. I could feel compassion for him and his situation, but I still recognized he was pretty disgusting. And he was heading up the sidewalk toward the public library.

I hurried to catch up. I didn’t feel any need or desire to photograph the guy himself, but I thought it might be interesting to photograph the reactions of the people he met in the library. I took a single shot when a library patron came out of the library as the drunk guy approached. And then I thought it would be cruel to photograph those reactions; it would be demeaning to the drunk guy himself, and to the people he encountered. The photos wouldn’t be about anything but condemnation for a man who had some serious problems.

So I turned off my phone and put it in my pocket. I felt I’d made the right decision when, as these two guys approached each other, the library patron looked completely repelled. But as they got closer the library guy’s face shifted from loathing to concern. He stopped and spoke to the drunk guy; I couldn’t hear, but I assume he was asking if the drunk guy was okay. The drunk guy just lifted a hand — maybe in acknowledgement, maybe in denial, maybe a suggestion that the library guy should mind his own business, I don’t know — and he just kept zombie-shuffling toward the library.

I’d turned my camera off. I missed that shot. It had the potential to be a truly good street photo. It was a strangely non-judgmental moment. Almost sweet, on the part of the library patron. And that’s then I decided shoot first; decide its value later.

I said I learned four things from the experiment. Here’s the fourth: a sincere attempt at street photography (for me, at any rate) is oddly dissociative. It’s a combination of being very aware of yourself and the world around you, yet being somewhat removed from it. Until — and this is the freaky part — until you see the elements of a photo possibly coming together. At that point you become intensely aware. Of everything. The light, the geometry of the background, the spatial relationships of what’s in the frame, and you start plotting vectors of interception — where it’s all going to come together and where you need to be at that point to shoot the photograph. And it’s both exciting and terribly frustrating because oftentimes you’re also hyper-aware that you’re almost certainly NOT going to be in the right spot at the right moment and you’re going to miss the shot.

I love street photography — when it’s done well. I doubt I’ll ever be terribly good at it, but I’ll periodically continue the experiment. If nothing else, it’s great fun.

sunday salon, redux

Posted on August 16, 2015 by greg

I’ve been noodling around with cameras since I was in my teens. The mechanics of photography — all of that aperture, shutter speed, depth of field, ISO business — have been second nature to me for years; I rarely need to think about them.

But nine years ago I realized I was almost entirely ignorant about the medium itself. I’m talking about photography as history and culture. I was familiar with the names of a few of the photographic big hats — Ansel Adams, Cartier-Bresson, August Sander — and I could recognize some of their more well-known images, but basically I had no understanding at all of what had been done in photography, or who had done it, or what they were thinking when they did it.

I was the Jon Snow of photographic culture. I knew nothing.

(Joel Sternfeld)

Homer Page? Never heard of him. Ralph Meatyard? No idea. Mike Brodie, Ara Güler? Hadn’t a clue. Tina Barney, Tony Ray Jones, Lewis Baltz? All cyphers. Guy Bourdin, Helen Levitt, Anders Petersen, O. Winston Link, Milt Rogovin? Meant nothing at all to me.

So I set out to correct that. I decided to educate myself. I’d pick a photographer’s name and do some research. I also decided to share what I’d learned (or thought I’d learned) with the members of Utata, a Flickr group of smart, creative, funny, curious people who enjoyed photography and discussion in equal measure. I’d write a short essay on the photographer, include an example or two of the photographer’s work, and we’d chat about it. Or debate it. Or argue about it.

(John Vachon)

It was fun. Everything about it was fun — the research, the discussion. At first, I did them every week. I’d publish them on Sunday and we’d discuss them all week. I took a very catholic approach to selecting the subjects. Street photographers, portrait photographers, fine arts photographers, fashion photographers, sports photographers — there was something to learn from all of them. I looked at the usual dead white guy photographers, at little-known contemporary photographers, at cult and niche photographers, at niche photographers, at photographic curiosities. I ran through the alphabet, from Berenice Abbot to Guillaume Zuili.

(Guillaume Zuili)

The salons, I admit, weren’t always well-written. And there have been a few embarrassing mistakes in research. Some of the more controversial salons led to a harsh arguments. But it was fun. At first.

As the discussions became more informed and intelligent, I felt the need to spend more time doing research. The essays became longer, and included more examples of the photographer’s work. The extra research meant I could no longer keep up the once-a-week schedule. I began doing them every other week.

(Lu Guang)

After a few years of this, it became a chore. A pleasant chore, for the most part, but still a chore. I stopped doing them every other week and began publishing the Sunday Salon at irregular intervals. A month might pass between salons. Maybe five or six weeks. I posted fifteen salons in 2010. Only four in 2011. Seven in 2012, and only three in 2013 — and two of them were on the same photographer.

And then I stopped.

I just didn’t want to do it anymore. I continued to read about photographers, but the idea of writing an essay about them was simply too much unpaid work. And I was okay with not writing them anymore.

(Lillian Bassman)

Until I re-watched Paris, Texas a couple of weeks ago. Wim Wenders, that man knows how to frame a shot. Then coincidentally, Wenders re-released his photography book Written in the West, with a few new photographs. The photos were mostly shot when Wenders was scouting locations for Paris, Texas. So I started to read about Wenders.

And the Sunday Salons were reborn. It had been two years since I’d written one. I believe I’ll start writing them again, though not on any schedule.

(Wim Wenders)

So here’s the Sunday Salon on Wim Wenders. And here’s a list of the published Sunday Salons. I don’t know how many there are — somewhere between 150 and 200, I suspect. Some of them — especially the earlier ones — may look a wee bit wonky; Utata shifted publishing platforms a few years back, and not everything translated easily to the new platform. But they’re there if you’re interested.

story of my life

Posted on July 27, 2015 by greg

“What are you doing?”
“Taking a photo.”
“Of what…that thing? With the wheels?”
“Nope, the lines.”
“Lines?”
“Lines.”
“Like…lines?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I know. It’s okay.”
“Lines.”
“Yes.”
“Okay then.”

so sad so cool

Posted on March 26, 2015 by greg

The truck, that was the first thing I noticed — just off the road, on the other side of a deep, grassy ditch. At some point in time it had been a serious truck. Not a gentleman farmer’s pick-up that could also be used to run errands, but a full-sized working truck built to haul serious payloads. Now it was basically a ruin; sitting lop-sided in the dead grass. It had been sitting there so long it had actually settled into the soil.

Beyond the truck was a house. A small farmstead, really — the house, a collapsed barn, a few small outbuildings, some sheds, a scattering of grain bins, rusted farm equipment. There was surprisingly little vandalism, aside from a few shattered windows and maybe the front door, which had been torn from its hinges. Most of the damage appeared to be the result of weather and long neglect. The property was clearly abandoned, and had been for some time.

It’s a curious term, abandon. It connotes a complete giving up, an absolute and total acknowledgment that there will be no return, a total surrender. Perhaps whoever lived there had originally intended to return — but at some point there had to be a moment of recognition that it would never happen. There’s something profoundly sad about that.

Here’s an odd thing: I couldn’t bring myself to enter the house. I mounted the stairs and stood in the doorway, but I was reluctant to go inside. Not because it wasn’t safe (the house itself seemed pretty stable), and not because it would be trespassing (legally, I was already trespassing). I was unwilling to go inside because it felt wrong. It felt like a violation, somehow. What makes it odd is that at one point in my life I had a job that involved routinely trespassing and violating the privacy of other folks. But back then I was getting paid; to trespass in the house for no reason other than my own amusement seemed like some sort of transgression.

However, I didn’t feel that way about the other buildings on the property. I noodled around in them without any compunction at all. This one, for example.

It was just a few yards away from the main house. The roof had caved in a long time ago, and the debris made it almost impossible to walk around. It didn’t help that there were obvious nails and shards of broken glass lying about (combined with the fact that I was wearing sneakers). Still, it was easy to tell the building had most recently been used as a sort of office or studio.

The bones of an old Hackley upright piano occupied the main room.

In 1863, at the height of the American Civil War, Milo J. Chase began building pianos in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A few years later, his company was reorganized as Chase-Hackley Pianos. The company had a good reputation as builders of durable, medium quality instruments. The pianos could be bought directly from the manufacturers, which allowed buyers to avoid sales and additional shipping charges. This made Chase and Hackley pianos popular with rural and farm families — at least until they went out of business in 1930, victims of the Great Depression.

It’s easy to imagine farm kids sitting in front of this old Hackley, struggling away at some painful version of Clair de Lune.

Behind the house were a variety of small, slowly collapsing sheds and workshops, as well as well as some farm equipment — all of which suggest that at one time this was a rather successful farming operation. There was a woodworking shed, a machine and tool shed, and a couple of storage buildings — all of which were in some stage of dilapidation. Only a few had working doors; none had functioning windows.

As with the house, most of the damage was a result of time and weather — and in some cases, animals. One bench was littered with raccoon shit, there were what appeared to be small mammal nests under some of the workbenches, and paw prints in the dust.

The barn was the most severely damaged structure on the farmstead. The roof and one wall had completely collapsed, two of the other walls were pretty unstable, and the fourth wall seemed to be supported primarily by stacked bales of old hay. I wouldn’t have gone inside at all, except that I could see some bones — and bones make me stupid.

So I crouched down and groucho-walked inside to look at them. It was dark, of course, and what I first thought was an old sack turned out to be the semi-mummified remains of a dog. It appeared to have died of exposure or natural causes rather than violence, and was eviscerated by other creatures after death. The roof was too low at that point to allow me to examine the dog closely. I couldn’t even photograph it properly; I had to hold the camera out at arm’s length and shoot blindly. This is the only shot that was in focus — which is probably just as well.

I didn’t stay at the farmstead very long. Places to go, people to meet, and all that. But the entire time I was there, I was very aware of my own internal dissonance. I’m not a terribly self-reflective person under most circumstances. I don’t spend much (or any) time thinking about what I feel, or wondering why I do stuff. Yet I was conscious of being torn between feeling This is so sad and thinking This is so cool.

Because it was so sad and it was so cool, and it still is. I’ll almost certainly go back at some point when I have more time to explore. Maybe I’ll even overcome my conscience and actually go inside the house.

oblique nouveau-neo-new topographics

Posted on January 5, 2015 by greg

Twice in the last couple of weeks I’ve been asked about my ‘photographic style.’ The first time I basically said “Dunno, never thought about it.” I mean, who thinks about stuff like that? The second time I said “New Topo, laid on its side, and turned 45 degrees to the left.” I said it as a joke, but after I said it, I sorta kinda became the type of person who thinks about stuff like that. And hey, it turned out to be sorta kinda true.

Back in 1975 a guy named William Jenkins curated an exhibition of a new school of landscape photography: the New Topographics movement. Landscape photography to that point in time had generally followed the path of landscape painting, which for the most part consisted of romantic depictions of ‘undisturbed’ nature. We either had the Ansel Adams approach (epic vistas photographed on a grand scale in black and white) or the Eliot Porter approach (intimate color images of a few trees or a handful of leaves scattered on a pond). Nothing wrong with either approach, but that was basically it.

Traditional New Topo approach

Then along came Jenkins and his New Topo crew. His exhibition consisted of 168 black-and-white prints of warehouses, industrial sites, suburban tract housing, filling stations. The idea behind the exhibition was to present the modern landscape as it actually existed rather than in an idealized way. Most art photographers used the camera as a device for self-expression. The New Topographics photographers reduced the camera to its most basic function.

The camera, after all, is a tool that records everything in front of the lens. Every goddamned thing, not just the pretty stuff or the majestic stuff. And it records it all with the same precision. It records with a detached, unemotional, deadpan eye. That’s all a camera does. With that idea in mind, New Topo photographers deliberately attempted to remove any notion of ‘artistry’ from the act of photography. Their intent was to depict the objects in front of the lens in a way that merely mapped their surface. In other words, to reduce the subject of the photograph to an essentially topographic state.

Neo-New Topo

The exhibition garnered a lot of attention. Not all of it was positive. Hell, relatively little of it was positive. Most folks thought the photographs were bland, uninteresting, boring, even ugly. And hey, those folks were right. I tend to agree. In my opinion, a lot of those photos really were butt-ugly. But they were interesting.

People who thought about photography as an art — not just viewed it, but consciously and deliberately thought about what photography was and could be — those folks found the exhibition fascinating. Why? In part because they realized the emotionally detached camera opened up a visual world in which people could see the stuff that had previously been filtered out. The ugly stuff. The old tires, the broken sidewalks, the trash cans, the old telephone wires, the litter. All the crap photographers normally worked hard to exclude from their photographs.

Nouveau-Neo-New Topo

But there was a problem. Humankind has spent something like twelve thousand years unconsciously building the foundation of aesthetics. It’s really difficult to just toss all that aside. It’s hard NOT to look for beauty, hard NOT to try to include that beauty in a photograph. That’s a lot of human nature to overcome.

So a sort of Neo-New Topographics style emerged fairly quickly (and yeah, I just made that name up). It’s a style in which photographers still photographed the same anonymous human-shaped landscapes, and continued to objectively map the surfaces of whatever is in front of the lens — but with the recognition that even industrial sites and warehouses can be beautiful. And after that, a Nouveau-Neo-New Topo approach, in which photographers actively sought out what beauty can be found through surface mapping.

Oblique Nouveau-Neo-New Topo

That idea has become a big chunk of my photographic patch. Over the last few years I’ve been working in a sort of Oblique Nouveau-Neo-New Topo style. Surface mapping at a slant. New Topo, laid on its side, and turned 45 degrees. Because I prefer my surface to have depth. I like a surface that extends itself. A surface that sort of falls away.

ONNNT (which is also the sound a Canada Goose makes when landing in icy water)

I can’t really say that’s my ‘style’ since I shoot all sorts of crap. But when I’m deliberately looking and seeing photographically, that’s pretty much my default approach. Find an interesting surface — then either photograph it straight or find an angle that allows the eye to shift off into the distance. Oblique Nouveau-Neo-New Topo. Takes longer to say than to shoot.

But hey, at least now I have a response the next time somebody asks me about my photographic style. ONNNT.

The photo that sparked the question the second time.

oxbows and bottoms

Posted on October 23, 2014 by greg

One of the advantages (and let’s face it, there aren’t many) to being a freelance writer is that on any given day you can look out the window, see that it’s a lovely afternoon, and say “Fuck it, I’m going to go wander.” You can’t do that very often, of course, if you want to keep beans and tortillas on the table. But just knowing you can say it — and do it — is pretty liberating.

Yesterday I looked out that window, saw that it was a perfectly lovely autumn afternoon, said “Fuck it” (and yeah, I said it right out loud), turned off the computer, grabbed my aging little Fujifilm X10 camera, and walked out the door. I knew exactly where I wanted to go. Sort of.

The Chichaqua Bottoms Greenbelt. I knew it existed. I’d seen it on Google maps. I knew generally where it was located (it’s only about 20 minutes by car from where I live). I had a basic understanding of what was meant by ‘bottoms’ and ‘greenbelt’. But I’d never taken the time to actually go there. Proof, if you needed proof, that I can be a massive fucking idjit.

This might seem silly, but one reason I wanted to visit the place is because of Chichaqua. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating. Some 350 years ago when this area was being explored and mapped by French coureurs de bois and voyageurs, they asked the local Sauk and Meskwaki Indians what the river was called. The river, they were told, was Chicaqua. The French had also heard that same term to describe a skunk,so they assumed that was the name of the river. The French began calling it Rivière Mouffette. Skunk River. And that’s what it’s still called. In fact, chichaqua was a term meaning ‘having a powerful smell.’ The natives had been talking about the wild onions and cabbage that grew along the river banks.

I don’t know why that amuses me so much. But it does.

What’s weird, though, is the Chichaqua Bottoms Greenbelt is no longer a part of the Skunk River. A century ago (give or take a few decades) folks decided to ‘straighten’ the river. Which is a pretty arrogant thing to do. The idea was that a slow-moving, winding, meandering river was inefficient and prone to flooding. So they dug a massive gash in the ground and re-channeled the river. This sort of thing happened all over the world, by the way — not just in the American Midwest. Nobody realized at the time that a slow-moving, meandering river was a good thing for flooding. It localized the flood, which reduced the overall severity. Nobody realized that ‘straightening’ a river would reduce an area’s biodiversity. Hell, nobody knew what biodiversity was, or why it might be a good thing.

So…big gash, straight river. And about 25 miles of the old Skunk was isolated.

See that straight blue line on the map? That’s the current channel of the South Skunk River. It’s basically a long ditch. A very pretty ditch, to be sure, and I love wandering along it. Nature has made interesting and lovely, but it’s still a ditch. That wiggly blue line? That’s the old channel. Nothing even remotely ditch-like about it.

Back in 1960, the county bought up about 9000 acres of the old Skunk River channel. The water had never drained from the old channel; the area had basically become a series of oxbow lakes and bottoms. What the hell are oxbows and bottoms? Glad you asked. That’s an oxbow in the photograph below.

An oxbow is a U-shaped body of water; it occurs naturally in meandering rivers. An oxbow lake is one that’s formed when the U-shaped loop is cut off from the main channel, either because some engineering fuckwit decides to ‘straighten’ the river, or because a big flood (or sometimes an earthquake) will shift the river channel itself. Bottoms, on the other hand, are alluvial lowlands, which probably doesn’t tell you much. It’s what we call that land by a river that floods all the time. Marshy land, mosquito-breeding swamps, rich in sediment. If a river runs through a city, the Bottoms are where the poor folks usually live.

That bench in the photograph below? That’s sitting on bottomland. Oxbow lakes and bottoms. Great for wildlife and flood reduction. Sucks for housing.

After the county bought up the old Skunk River channel, they sort of encouraged it to be more of what it already was — a wildlife habitat. They re-introduced otters, and bobolinks, and wild turkeys, and a few species of endangered turtles. Other species returned on their own, like Pileated Woodpeckers and various raptors. They preserved old trees and planted tree species that used to grow in the area before it became farmland.

And I have to say, they’ve done a fantastic job. The place is completely fucking beautiful. Within the first half hour I was there I saw two Great Blue Herons walking along the dead-end road that leads to the area. Herons on the road. They were apparently gigging for frogs in the marshy ponds just off the blacktop. I saw the first bobolink I’ve ever seen in the wild. I nearly stepped on a Northern Water Snake that was three and a half feet long.

Did I get photos of those critters? No, I didn’t. Why? Because I was too busy looking at them to bring my camera to my eye. I’m rubbish when it comes to wildlife photography. What I did instead was photograph the stuff that didn’t move. You know — trees and all that. The water — which I guess does move, even in oxbow lakes. But the lakes and marshes themselves are pretty stationary. I’m not much better at landscape photography than I am at shooting wildlife. I think that’s partly because the landscape is SO BIG and the camera can only jam a small chunk of it through the lens. Still, these photos will, I hope, give you some small idea of the Chichaqua Bottoms.

I’d only planned to be there a short time. I figured maybe an hour. You know, just a break from work to refresh my mind — then back to the computer. But do you remember that bit I mentioned at the beginning of this post? That bit about one of the few advantages of being a freelance writer is the ability to say “Fuck it, I’m going to go wander”? Well, that’s exactly what I did.

It’s days like this that make the lack of a steady income bearable. Pension plan? Pffft. You can’t put days like this in the bank. You have to spend them when you have them.

warm boot

Posted on September 15, 2014 by greg

Ninety percent of the work I do takes place in my head. The other ten percent involves shifting that work from my head to the computer through my fingers. Because so much of my work involves the creative writing of other folks, I spend a lot of time thinking about odd stuff, asking myself odd questions, researching odd topics.

Example? Sure, here’s one. Last week, I found myself exploring the history, function, and evolution of the lapel — complete with tangents on why we only see peaked lapels on formal evening wear, and the sad decline of the boutonnière loop on the reverse of the lapel. Here’s another issue I dealt with last week: at what point, in a science fiction mystery set in a massive orbiting space colony, does the number of sapient species living in the colony cease to create the illusion of the diversity of life in the known universe and begin to become a distraction from the story?

Where the gravel road intersects the line of trees is a bridge spanning a river.

I do most of this thinking and wondering and questioning and researching in a small office with a window that looks out on a deeply uninteresting suburban street. I periodically shift to the kitchen table, where the windows look out on some deeply uninteresting suburban back yards. The absence of anything visually interesting is usually a good thing; it makes it easier to stay inside my head, where almost everything is interesting.

But I also need to regularly reset my brain, so once or twice a week I either bang into the city or I go lounge around the countryside — which I tend to think of as either a cold boot or a warm boot (do people even use those terms anymore to describe different levels of rebooting a computer?). The city is a cold boot. A complete re-start. The countryside is a warm boot. Restarting without going through the rigorous Power On Self Test.

Jameson and Peanut

A couple of days ago I did a warm boot. Got in the car late one afternoon, went looking for a bridge over a river. Any bridge, any river. It’s really a pretty easy task. There are rivers, creeks, brooks, and streams all over the Midwest. The same with roads. At some point all those roads have to intersect with all those rivers, creeks, brooks, and streams. And that means a bridge.

Fifteen — maybe twenty — minutes later I was standing on a classic steel truss bridge spanning the South Skunk River. These used to be pretty common bridges; easy to build, practical, sturdy. They began making them out of wood in the 1870s, moved to cast iron a few decades later, then to steel in the early 1900s. Engineers still make various forms of truss bridge, but these old steel units on secondary or gravel roads are gradually being replaced by safer, more easily built, less expensive (and much less interesting) concrete beam bridges.

Perfectly understandable from a governance perspective. But it’s still rather sad. There’s simply no romance in a concrete beam bridge. No struts on which Peanut and Jameson can record their love.

Skunk River

It’s a nice river though, the South Skunk. Hundred and eighty-five miles long. Add another ninety-five miles after it joins up with the North Skunk and they both meander down into the Mississippi.

It’s not actually named for skunks, by the way. Back in the mid-17th century when the French coureurs de bois and voyageurs were wandering around in the wilderness, they often (and I mean seriously often) failed to properly translate the names given to local geographical landmarks by the native peoples. The local Sauk and Meskwaki tribes told the French explorers that the river was Chicaqua, a term meaning ‘having a powerful smell.’ The Indians were apparently referring to the onions that grew wild along the banks. But since they’d also used the same term in describing skunks…well, there it is. The Skunk River.

Long and straight, heading due east.

I noodled around on the bridge for a while, no longer thinking about aliens or the sociology of fashion, then got back in the car and headed farther upriver. But this is the Midwest, and the roads rarely follow the course of geological features. The secondary highways and gravel roads are long and straight, laid out east-west and north-south on a grid.

That’s the work of Thomas Jefferson. I don’t mean to suggest Jefferson was out in Iowa with a surveyor’s theodolite (that’s that little telescope-looking thing). It’s just that he came up with the concept of the Public Land Survey System. After the Revolutionary War, the new U.S. government needed to raise some cash, and find a way to reward the soldiers who’d fought. The solution was pretty obvious: there was a whole lot of land unoccupied by white folks — give it to the troops.

But first that new land had to be surveyed. It took years to actually implement the system. It wasn’t until white folks began to ‘civilize’ Ohio that the government began to apply the system. It’s really pretty simple. They established east-west baselines and north-south meridians, divided the territory into square townships (never mind if there were any actual towns there yet), made each township six miles by six miles, divided the townships into thirty-six sections of 640 acres each, set aside one section (always Section 16) for a school, and when it came time to lay down roads all they had to do was follow the grid.

Canoe access farther up the South Skunk.

Which is what I did. I followed the grid. A couple of miles east, eight miles north, a few miles west, cross over the soulless, ugly little concrete beam bridge, and there’s the river. With a canoe access marker, telling me how far downriver the next canoe access point is.

The brain is rebooted. I go home and the problem with the alien species saturation point seems a lot more clear. Later when a friend asked “How was your day?” I replied, “It was busy.” “Yeah? What did you do?”

And really, what could I say? I drove on roads laid out on principles designed by the third President of the United States, and stood on a bridge probably built during the Depression of the 1930s over a river mis-named by French explorers a hundred years before Thomas Jefferson was born — all to distract myself from thinking about aliens and lapels.

Instead I said “I went for a drive and thought about some stuff.” Which sparked a long, long silence during which I swear I could hear my friend thinking “What? Are you fucking kidding me? That’s what you call busy?”

“And I made my final selections for my fantasy football team,” I said. That seemed to satisfy him.

color photography is vulgar

Posted on July 27, 2014 by greg

You know whose birthday it is? Today, the 27th day of July–whose birthday? It’s okay if you don’t know, on account of I’m going to tell you.

It’s the birthday of William Joseph Eggleston. You know, the photographer? The guy who took black-and-white art photography by the neck, wrestled it to the ground, and rubbed its face in bright, bright color. Lurid color. William Eggleston. Bill. Born in that fine Southern city of Memphis, Tennessee. 1939. Seventy-five years old today.

Yeah, he’s still alive. His son, Winston, told The New Yorker magazine that Eggleston will likely spend the day “playing Bach sonatas on his recently installed Bösendorfer piano.” Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe that’s just the sort of thing a son would tell The New Yorker magazine, because he didn’t want to say his dad might just spend the day slowly sipping bourbon and looking out the window at Overton Park in Memphis, wondering how the hell he could possibly be seventy-five years old.

He pissed off a lot of important photography folks, Bill Eggleston. Folks like Walker Evans, who didn’t like color photography. Walker Evans, whose quest was to make photographs that were “literate, authoritative, transcendent” (which he did, by the way, nobody can say Evans was anything less than literate and authoritative). But the man just didn’t like color.

“There are four simple words on the matter, which must be whispered: Color photography is vulgar.”

He was authoritative on that, no mistake. Eggleston, though, liked vulgar color. And he didn’t give a rat’s ass about being authoritative or transcendent. He had–and probably still has–a subversive eye. “I am at war with the obvious,” Eggleston once said. Which, given the vivid color of his photography, sounds an awful lot like bullshit. But it’s not.

I wrote about Eggleston’s war with the obvious half a decade ago, and I’m just too lazy to spend the time trying to find a way to repeat it using different words. You can read it if you’re interested. Or just trust me–when Eggleston said he was at war with the obvious, he was straight up telling the truth.

Eggleston at a piano (photo by Juergen Teller)

I’m hoping Eggleston has himself a happy birthday. I’m hoping he really does play some Bach on his fancy piano. And sips some bourbon. And maybe spends some time outside. It would be cool if he shot some photos today, but if he doesn’t…well, he’s taken his share. It’s okay if he leaves the camera at home.

(By the way, that photo above–the one by Juergen Teller? It’s a damned fine photo. I like it a lot. But it’s pretty obvious. Teller does good work, but he’s no William Joseph Eggleston, is he.)

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