Category Archives: photography

a pretty good day

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My day? How was my day? I’m glad you asked. My day didn’t go quite as planned.

My plan was simple. Most of my plans are simple. I’m not even sure you can call a vaguely elastic notion of ‘a nice lunch somewhere’ and ‘a walk someplace interesting’ a plan. But that was the extent of it. A nice lunch. A walk. What could possibly go wrong?

But first I had a minor problem to deal with. My debit card was about to expire. I’d called the bank before the Thanksgiving holiday to find out if a new card had been sent (I recently moved and was concerned the card might have been sent to the old address). I was assured the card had just been mailed to the correct address and I’d have it soon. But it still hadn’t arrived yesterday, so I called the bank again and spoke to a very polite young man named Michael.

Michael told me I needn’t be concerned, the card had probably been lost in the mail. But to be safe he could put a block on the debit card and send me a replacement debit card. He asked if it would be okay if he did that. I said “Why don’t you send a replacement, and I’ll keep using this one and keep an eye out for suspicious charges.” Michael didn’t think that was a wise course of action. It took a few more minutes of conversation before I finally realized Michael was just being polite; he was absolutely going to enforce a policy of blocking the existing card and issuing a replacement to protect me (and the bank) from fraud. And he was going to block the card NOW.

I checked my pockets; I had a total of US$19 in cash. Enough for lunch and a walk, but certainly not enough for the next few days. I asked Michael “What am I going to do for cash?” Simple — go to a branch of the bank, he said, and they’ll issue a temporary replacement card I could use until my permanent replacement card arrived.

So I went to the bank. A very polite young man named Terry said he was terribly sorry the post office had lost my renewed debit card, and he deeply regretted any inconvenience it caused me, but he’d be delighted to give me a temporary replacement card. He just needed to see a state-issued photo ID card. I gave him mine. It had expired. “Sorry,” polite Terry said. “You need to have a current state-issued photo ID card.” I showed him my Social Security card. No. I showed him my Veterans Administration card, issued by the federal government, complete with a brightly-colored photo of my smiling face. No. I showed him my voter registration card. No. I showed him various other forms of photo identification — everything from an ancient faculty ID card from Fordham University, to my library card, to my Utata business card, all with photos of me at various ages. No. I pointed out that it was highly unlikely I’d concoct an elaborate false identity spanning more than a decade just to obtain access to a temporary replacement debit card for an account with just a few hundred dollars in it, especially since I’d had an activated and working permanent debit card just an hour earlier.

Terry was very polite…but no. I needed to go to the Department of Motor Vehicles and get a new state-issued photo ID. On my return, he’d be over the moon to give me a temporary replacement debit card.

So I went to the DMV. Yesterday was the 29th day of November. Going to the DMV at the end of the month, when everybody who dawdled and/or forgot to renew their various licenses, is like a combination of attending a Palestinian funeral in Gaza (a mad, chaotic crush of people, all rending their clothes and wailing, wishing they too were dead) and an old-style Soviet bread line (an infinite number of somber, sad-faced, spiritless drones dressed in rags, waiting in line with bovine fatalism, without any real hope of getting anything remotely like what they’re standing in line to receive). To make matters worse, I arrived right at lunch time, when all the employed people who were delusional enough to think they could get their end-of-the-month DMV chores done during their lunch hour arrived. And when most of the DMV personnel went out to McDonalds for a Big Mac.

I got in line. I waited. I made it to the clerk — a polite middle-aged man named Raul. “I need to renew my state-issued photo ID,” I said. Raul would be absolutely delighted to renew my state-issued photo ID. Did I have a certified copy of my birth certificate? I told him the bank didn’t require a certified copy of my birth certificate to get a temporary replacement debit card…so no. “How about your passport?” No, I hadn’t brought my passport either (which wouldn’t have done any good anyway because it’s also expired). Raul said if I returned with a valid passport or a certified copy of my birth certificate, he would happily give me a new state-issued photo ID so I could get my temporary replacement debit card until my permanent replacement debit card arrived since my existing debit card had been blocked because the post office had apparently lost the renewal debit card.

Here’s something you may not know. In order to get a certified copy of your birth certificate, you need to go to the county courthouse and present a state-issued photo ID card or a valid passport. In order to get a valid passport, you have to present either a state-issued photo ID card or a certified copy of your birth certificate.

Happily, I actually had a certified copy of my birth certificate. So I returned to the house, found the birth certificate, returned to the DMV and Raul gave me a new state-issued photo ID, returned to the bank and Terry gave me a temporary replacement debit card. It took six hours. Then I had a very pleasant but very late lunch, and took a very short walk as the sun was beginning to give up.

During the walk I saw the best Men’s Toilet Ever:

menAnd I saw this quickly-walking woman who had no interest in having a cold beer:

cold beerBack at the house, the mail had been delivered. You can imagine how I felt as I approached the mailbox. But of course, the debit card hadn’t arrived while I was out getting the temporary replacement debit card. This is real life, not fiction, and real life rarely gives you a neat and tidy resolution.

In real life, mostly what you get is another day pretty much like the day before. Every so often real life drops in a day that’s twisted as a pretzel. But I kind of like pretzels, and even though my day didn’t go as planned, I thoroughly enjoyed most of it. It was still a pretty good day.

crows

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When I was a kid, a neighbor had a crow for a pet. I was altogether fascinated by that bird. It was huge and black; it walked with a dignified, clerical stride; and it was astonishingly clever. It was so smart it hardly seemed to belong to the bird family. It was was almost as if some sort of spirit being was inhabiting an unnaturally large bird’s body. The bird was so large I found it a little scary and intimidating, but I was completely taken in by it.

Ever since I’ve been a fan of the crow. A fan of all the larger Corvidae, actually — ravens, jackdaws, rooks, magpies — but mainly the plain old common crow. One of the things I love about crows is that despite their size (they’re burly bastards; they get up to about 21 inches from beak to tail) they’re almost invisible. People simply don’t notice them most of the time. Cardinals, they notice. Goldfinches, they notice. Blue jays (also Corvids, by the way), they notice. Bright, cheery, colorful birds — even the tiniest of them — get noticed. Crows get ignored. It’s like they have the power to cloud the minds of humans.

From the day I first picked up a camera, I’ve wanted to take a good photograph of a crow. Not a good ‘nature’ photograph that includes a crow. Not a documentary photograph. Not a ‘pretty’ photo. What I wanted was to take a photograph that showed crow-ness. I wanted to shoot a photo that depicted crows as I understood them. That desire became more intense after I discovered Karasu, the book of photographs by Masahisa Fukase. Karasu means ‘ravens’ in Japanese. The English-language version of the book was called The Solitude of Ravens. They were the most amazing black and white photographs — strange and wonderful. Fukase’s ravens were feral and furious; they looked supernatural and dangerously smart. I wanted to photograph a crow the way Fukase photographed ravens.

And I tried. For years I tried. If I saw crows — in town, in the woods, on a bike path, it didn’t matter where — I’d often follow them. I have been led astray by crows more times than I can count. But I never got a shot I liked. Never.

Yesterday on my Thursday Walk for Utata I happened to hear some crows flying overhead. I was talking on my cell phone at the time and had to end the call rather abruptly. “Oh god, crows…there are crows…lots of crows…have to go…bye.” I couldn’t see where they were coming from; a bulding blocked the way. But as I cleared the building I could see a tree filled with crows. Filled.

So I rushed to get there. I needn’t have hurried though. Crows kept coming. And coming. And flying away and coming. For an hour crows came, landed in the trees, rested a bit, took off, flew away. An hour. The most amazing hour. And they were still there when I left, still flying away, still arriving.

After about ten minutes I realized there were really too many crows. It was impossible to focus on just a few. It was a crow jumble, a mosh pit of corvids. It was almost Biblical. I’ve no idea how many there were. An overwhelming number of crows. There are, for example, 482 visible crows in the photograph above (Yes, I actually counted them, putting a red dot over each individual crow so I wouldn’t count them twice; 482…and there are certain to have been some I couldn’t make out in the tangle of branches).

The noise was staggering. Thousands — tens of thousands — of crows, all cawing and cackling. It created a sort of pervasive white noise. Your brain filters it out. Intellectually you register it as noise, but it somehow seems both physically and emotionally distant. Like if you were hearing it through the wrong side of a telescope — if that makes sense. Perhaps it was just sensory overload.

It never occurred to me to use my camera to video the crows — which I deeply, deeply regret. Instead I tried to find some way to photograph the mass, to show the scale of the murder of crows. It was impossible, of course. Maybe Fukase could have done it. Maybe. I surely couldn’t.

Eventually I stopped trying. I let the camera hang idly in my hand. I just stood there and watched and listened and was amazed.

It was, for me, a truly phenomenal moment — if you can call an hour a ‘moment.’ I don’t know why so many crows gathered together. I don’t know where they came from or where they were going. They were flying off into the sunset. Literally.

I still don’t have the photograph I want. I came a bit closer, but I suspect the only way to show real crow-ness — to show the essence of crow — is to zero in on just a few birds. Three, maybe, or four. Or two. Maybe one. Maybe just a part of one. I don’t know.

But last evening’s experience didn’t cure me. It added another level of enchantment to my understanding of crows.

in which i pass through farmland and become confused

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Yesterday was probably the last day of ‘good’ weather I’ll see until Spring. I’m using the term ‘good’ deliberately and after some consideration, because in the Midwest near the end of October a day in the mid-70s is a treat — even if it’s windy and cloudy and looks like it might could decide to storm at any moment.

And what’s a guy to do on the last day of ‘good’ weather? Get on the bike, of course, and take off — preferably someplace new. Which is exactly what I did. I rode north on a bike trail out of Ankeny, Iowa into farmland. Open fields, corn, soybeans, barns, cows, and a whole lot of wind.

Long before this was a bike trail, it was part of the the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad line. Before that, the tracks belonged to the Des Moines & Minneapolis Railroad Company. And before that I believe dinosaurs roamed the earth. Now it’s part of the 20,000 miles of rail-to-trail conversions in the United States.

One reason these converted rail lines are popular with cyclists is because they tend to be relatively flat, smoothly paved, with gradual shifts in elevation. That makes for easy riding, of course. And this trail was no exception. Riding north was an absolute breeze. Literally. There was a 17 mph wind at our backs. Riding south was a lesson in wind resistance. Iowa has a lot of wind.

It also has a lot of sky, and fields that used to hold crops, and farm structures, and black dirt, and giant Tootsie Rolls made entirely of hay. I assume that’s hay. Or straw. Do people grow straw? What the hell IS straw? I’ve always assumed that whatever it is the farmers roll up into those massive pellets was something to feed cows. Or horses, maybe. Or, I don’t know, goats. Farm animals. Livestock. Although now I think of it, in the movies barns are always full of hay. Or straw. And some kid is constantly using a pitchfork to move it around from one part of the barn to another, though it’s never quite clear why. Maybe hay it’s like cat litter for horses. I don’t know.

Whatever those massive pellet rolls are for, I rather doubt they’re scattered around the fields for aesthetic purposes. But it would be very cool if they were.

Equally intriguing (to me, at any rate) is the old farm equipment that gets shunted into small paddocks or stashed away behind sheds and barns. I find myself wondering if the farmers think this equipment might somehow come in handy in the future. As spare parts, maybe, or material that can be scavenged and cobbled together with other odd bits of this and that to create…well, something like that blue pick-up bed/trailer-looking unit that’s been attached to what appears to be the framework for some sort of enhanced interrogation device. Clearly that thing, whatever it is, was constructed with a purpose. Unless the wind just picked it up and deposited there, like Auntie Em’s house.

Maybe this is the farmer’s equivalent of the urban dweller’s problem: what to do with that twenty-two pound, twelve-year-old computer monitor that nobody wants, and has been taking up space in the storage room since two computers ago?

It’s the same with old farm vehicles. What do you do with an old 1955 Ford pick-up? You park it out back near the even older 1950 International Harvester pick-up. I was really drawn to that old Ford. It must have been at least partially restored at some point in the last couple of decades, then put back out to pasture. It’s actually a very cool looking machine, and whoever chose that color to restore the truck had some taste.

Back when those two trucks were new, the D&M Railroad was already a hundred years old. A hundred and fifty years ago incredibly powerful locomotives pulled boxcars loaded with coal and grain across those same fields I was bicycling through. I find that oddly comforting. I like to think that in another hundred and fifty years that same band of now-public land will still be used by ordinary folks in some way.

Unless Mitt Romney gets elected. Then we’re just fucked. Go vote.

my favorite interruption

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It’s an interruption of light. That’s all it is. But it fascinates me — visually, conceptually, artistically, emotionally. Most photographers look for good light; I look for good shadow.

A tree in this small alley-turned-courtyard obstructed the sunlight falling directly on the burnt sienna wall, resulting in a dark, self-similar shape of that tree. We’re able to see that tree because light within a certain spectrum falls on it; we see its shadow because light is prevented from falling on the wall. A shadow is the only thing we see because of the absence of light.

The term ‘shadow’ comes from Old English, the language spoken by Anglo-Saxons between the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century. It shares the same linguistic root as ‘shade’: sceadu, which referred to a place protected from glare and heat. ‘Shadow’ itself, however, comes from a somewhat later and more narrowly defined derivation of the term: sceadwian, which referred to the act of creating a small bit of shade (most beautifully defined by one etymologist as ‘to protect as with a covering wing’).

Though shade and shadow are essentially the same phenomenon, we experience them as very different beasts. We tend to treat shade as a form of shelter; we generally see shadow as only the reverse projection of an object. And that’s a shame, because when you raise an awning to shelter you from the sun, you’re using a shadow to create shade. You are, in effect, mimicking a bird tucking its head under its wing. If you can’t see the delicate loveliness in that, there’s no hope for you at all, at all.

I entered this alleyway/courtyard seeking shade. In it, I found a shadow. And I was content.

unasked questions

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I love a mystery. I love a mystery so much, I’ll often go out of my way NOT to solve them. Once a mystery is solved, then it’s obviously no longer a mystery.

Yesterday my companion and I stood for a moment on a bridge and watched a young man repeatedly throwing stuff into the river. I assumed it was something like bits of dried bread, maybe to feed the fish. She thought it might be corn or some sort of grain. It wasn’t at all clear. Not a huge mystery, but enough to make me want a closer look.

We followed the stairs down to the river and I asked the young man what he was throwing into the river. He said, “Candy.” He showed me his knapsack, which contained a plastic shopping bag full of small individual-sized packets of M&Ms. He also had a box filled with packets of some other candy.

“Is this for the fish?” I asked. He spoke in a half-whisper, saying something that included the word fish, but I couldn’t quite understand him. He seemed mildly reluctant to look at me, but was certainly polite and patient and quite willing to answer questions. Rather than pester him, though, I simply said “Enjoy yourself,” and we continued down the walkway along the river.

Looking back at one point, I noticed him standing and watching us. I held up the camera in what I hoped was a universal ‘Can I take your photograph?’ gesture and waved to him. He waved back, which I chose to interpret as ‘Sure, go ahead.’

The whole thing seemed a wee bit odd, but I figured the guy was possibly developmentally disabled or maybe stoned. Either way, it was no big deal and we continued to walk along the river.

On the walk back, the young man was still there. As we approached he pulled on a bright blue jacket and I decided I was going to ask if I could shoot his photo. Before we got to him, he stepped onto the small sand bar that had formed along the walkway and began burying some things. Digging small holes with his hands, dropping in whatever he was burying, filling the holes, then patting them down tidily.

He’d just finished burying the final thing when we arrived. “Would you mind if I took your photograph?” I asked. I was going to give him my name and hand him my card and explain why I wanted to take his photo — but he just stood up, returned to the walkway, turned and stood there. Like Gort awaiting orders from Klaatu.

Sakim

I just took the one shot. “Can I ask your name?” I said. He spoke very softly. “Sakim.” I showed him the photograph and he smiled. “That’s good,” he said.

I wanted to ask him about the candy again. I wanted to ask him why he was throwing candy to the fish. I wanted to ask him what he was burying in the sand and why he was burying it. But if you ask questions, you get answers and I’m not convinced the answers would have been nearly as intriguing as the questions.

the people are wrong

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I’ve been shooting a lot of cityscapes lately — partly because I have a new camera that’s particularly well-suited for that sort of photography, and partly because I’m a sap for the geometry of structures. It’s been pointed out to me that most of my photographs are unpopulated. Devoid of people or other life forms.

This photograph, for example, sparked a couple of my favorite internet people to make the following comments:

I’m becoming increasingly aware of how meaningfully empty and post apocalyptic your cityscapes are. I used to think it was purely a compositional choice, that you didn’t want too many people or cars cluttering up the frame, but now I’m wondering if Des Moines has been quietly evacuated

I’ve wondered, too, about Des Moines. Where are all the people?

Where are all the people? The people are all over the damned place. They’re out on the streets and in the alleys and walking through the skywalk. I don’t always include them in the photographs, though. When I’m shooting cityscapes, I’m usually drawn to some combination of light and shadow, or some arrangement of form and shape. I’m usually drawn to the geometry, and the problem is that so often the people are just wrong for the geometry in the frame.

They’re dressed in the wrong colors, or they’re moving the wrong way, or they’re standing in the wrong spot or in the wrong stance, or they’re looking in the wrong direction, or they’re looking in the right direction but with the wrong expression. Sometimes they’re just wrong for reasons I can’t articulate, but they’re clearly wrong in the frame and they distract from what interests me.

When the people are being right, I include them. But when they’re being wrong I wait until the right people come along or until there aren’t any people at all. Or I give up and go somewhere else. For example, the following photograph needs people. I noticed the light and the shadows and the reflections, and I parked my ass across the street and waited for the right person or group to move into that space. I don’t recall how long I waited — I’d guess it was somewhere between a quarter of an hour and half an hour. During that time a lot of folks entered the space, but there was something wrong about all of them. None of them contributed to the space. So I documented the light, and moved on. With the right person, it would have been a good photograph. Now it lacks life.

There are other times — less common, to be sure — when I notice people who look like they’d be right. There’s something about the person that draws the eye and makes me think all that’s lacking is the right background. So I sort of wander along with them for a while in the hope they’ll move into an interesting space with good geometry. If they don’t, they don’t. I end up with nothing. I tagged along with the kid in the next photo and his puppy for maybe ten minutes (any longer and I begin to feel like a pervert). I shot maybe a half dozen frames in a half dozen different situations — but the light was always wrong, or the shadows were wrong, or the geometry was wrong. And when the exterior factors cooperated, the kid or the puppy were wrong, or I was a half second too slow or too quick. So in the end, I got nothing interesting.

The thing is, I’ve been shooting cityscapes — photographs of the city. Not photographs of the people. This new camera is also, I think, well-suited for street photography and I’d like to start getting involved in that. Street photography is a lot more fluid and relies on a different sort of geometry. Instead of looking for the geometry of structures into which people might fit, I’ll have to learn to look for geometry and structure in how people move and arrange themselves.

Cityscapes, in my opinion, can fail if the people are wrong or if the geometry is wrong. I have the feeling that when street photography fails it’s because the photographer is wrong. That should make things interesting.

parsimonious

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I was reminded today, in a roundabout way on Facebook, that I’m a stingy photographer. I guess I prefer to think of my approach as not being wasteful with film — but since I don’t actually shoot film anymore, that’s sort of ridiculous. In any event, the result is the same: I just don’t shoot a lot of photographs.

I don’t normally dwell on this sort of stuff, but one of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s more famous quotes was posted on Facebook: Your first 10,000 photographs are the worst. It occurred to me that I probably hadn’t shot ten thousand photographs in my entire long and semi-wicked life.

Here’s what I mean. I recently completed a series of photographs for Utata’s Just One Thing project. My contribution — my one thing — was the four miles of the Des Moines skywalk system. I spent six days noodling around in the skywalk. Sometimes I was there in the mornings and sometimes in the afternoon so I could catch different sorts of light. I was there on sunny days, and rainy days, and overcast days. Six days, and I shot a grand total of 177 photographs. That’s it — six days, 177 photos. That’s fewer than 30 photos a session. On average, each day I shot less than the equivalent of a roll of 36 exposure Kodachrome transparency film. Which they don’t make anymore, but you get my point. Not a lot of photos.

skywalk outtake

Out of those 177 photos I used twelve for the project and had eight others I’d consider worth keeping and showing people. So all in all, I got twenty worthwhile images out of 177 exposures. I don’t know if that’s a good ‘keeper’ rate or not; it seems about average for me. Would I have more keepers numerically if I shot more? I don’t know.

I’m not entirely sure why I’m so parsimonious with photography. All 177 photographs for the skywalk series were shot using a digital camera with a 16 gigabyte memory card that can hold nearly 3700 .jpg images, so it’s not a matter of space. I tell myself it’s an artifact of having learned photography using film, but I haven’t shot film in years. Surely I’m more adaptable than that. I mean, even a flatworm can learn to adapt to current conditions.

skywalk outtake

It might be the sort of photographs I shoot. I tend to shoot situations that either require patience or immediate action. Either I find the scene I want to shoot and wait for all the elements to come together in the frame, or there’s no time to wait at all — you shoot or you lose the moment. In the first circumstance I might shoot two or three exposures, but if I’ve prepared myself, that’s all I need. In the second circumstance, there’s rarely a chance for a second exposure. You’ve either got the shot or you don’t.

skywalk outtake

I’m the same way, though, when it comes to writing. Serious writing, that is — the writing I do professionally. When I’m putting words in a row for money, I try to be economical with them. Of course, when I’m just nattering away for my own amusement — like now — I’m a total spendthrift with words. Then I have no sense of moderation at all, at all. I don’t mind wasting words then; I figure there are always more words out there and I’m not likely to run out of them.

The only time I’ve been profligate with film is when I was a working private investigator and had to shoot photographs for the job. Photos of crime scenes, surveillance photos, photos of suspected arson cases, evidentiary photos in personal injury or insurance cases. In those situations, film is cheap. It costs less to have lots of redundant photographs than to have a case fail for the lack of the one photo you really need.

skywalk outtake

I have, on occasion, told myself not to be so stingy with photographs. But it never seems to take. I see the thing I want to photograph, when possible I take a moment to decide on the camera settings (aperture and shutter speed and white balance and all that), then I raise the camera and take a shot — maybe two, sometimes three. Immediately after that I think ‘Got it’ and that’s that. Or I think ‘Nope’ and then I either wait for the elements to all come together again, or I just move on. If I’ve missed it, I’ve missed it. The nice thing about photography is there’s always something else to photograph.

Right now — at this moment — I feel like I should train myself to shoot more photographs. But I suspect that the next time I find myself with a camera in hand and something I want to photograph, I’ll probably do what I always do. I’ll either get the shot or I won’t, and then I’ll move on.

skywalk outtake

this is what we do

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It’s hard to explain the affection I feel for Utata — for the community itself, for the staff, for the members, for the very concept of Utata as a place where intelligent, creative people from all over the globe gather to chat, argue, and shoot photographs. We often refer to Utata as a tribe — a neo-tribal virtual collective that’s held together by kinship. But this isn’t a kinship based on consanguinity; it’s a kinship of attitude and spirit and intelligence and exceedingly varied interests.

I feel especially affectionate toward Utata today. That’s partly because today is Labor Day in the U.S. Ever since 1894, the first Monday of September has been a day set aside to acknowledge and honor the economic and social contributions of workers. At least in theory. In reality it seems as if the United State no longer honors men and women who perform labor — only those people who make money off those who labor. So on this day I’m reminded how very special are the men and women who volunteer their time and labor to make Utata work. They don’t get paid, they take some dull and grinding chores upon themselves, they sacrifice their leisure time — and they do it all simply to create and maintain a venue for other folks to be creative. That’s what we do.

Just One Thing badge

This is the other reason I’m feeling affectionate about Utata today: we’ve released our summer project: Just One Thing. It’s a perfect example of what makes Utata unique. The concept is simple: focus creative attention on one thing  (or one type of thing). It might be a specific lawn chair moved from place to place in an Austrian town, or a wildly re-purposed red high heeled shoe, or a woman holding a variety of umbrellas, or a selection of grey post boxes in Canada., or a look at the world deliciously inverted through a glass apple, or the assorted old stuff found jammed in the hollow spaces of an interior wall and uncovered during home renovations.

It’s an odd collection, to be sure, but perfectly in keeping with the sensibilities of Utata. Beyond the obvious conceptual theme, one of the things that holds this project together is a generous sense of wit and whimsy. You will smile as you look through these photographs. And you will have thoughts you’ve never had before. That’s what we do in Utata.