Editor’s note: Bob Bowné has found beauty in this foggy-day winter scene at the Jersey Shore. His image brings us hope and reminds us that we can enjoy all the seasons, even in a summer town when the beach scene is quiet and the weather might be grey.
Here is a song from the show Grey Gardens sung by Christine Ebersole. Like Bob’s photo, and like most art, it can be beautiful while seeming sad at the same time.
And here’s a song for the guy who’s swinging from that cable without a net. Hopefully he can find beauty in his moment flying with the geese in the mist.
It was 34 degrees this morning at about 9:00 am when I drove on Wickapecko Road and noticed that the trees were lit up with snow. It was beautiful—Currier and Ives. I stopped and began walking over by the water. It was suddenly apparent that the temperature was causing the magical snow scene to quickly disappear. The white was melting, turning the trees from a snowy Christmas card to an icy, slushy exhibition, twinkling in the warming sunlight. Bits of frozen material were falling on my head making a clickity sort of sound on my hat—a sort of wintery “Raindrops are Falling on My Head.”
From a photographic point of view, not only was the light changing fast, but the subject was also being transformed from magical to mundane. I had to shoot fast, so I took about 15 quick frames, and it was all over.
It reminded me of Ansel Adams who was driving at dusk along a country road in New Mexico when he spotted a georgeous scene. He realized that he only had moments before the light was gone. He jumped out of his car and “struggled” to set up his large format camera on a tripod with the proper filters. He understood that he only had seconds before the moonlight would change. He took one frame and knew that negative would be the only one that would work. Later he wrote about how the painstaking process in the darkroom was accomplished.
Moonrise Over Hernandez became his most famous image.
“Moonrise over Hernandez.” Ansel Adams “almost ditched the car” when he spotted this scene near Sante Fe. Notice how the crosses are illuminated. Click to enlarge.
Above: “This Photograph is my Proof” by Duane Michaels. Click to make it a bit bigger.
By Paul Goldfinger, Photography editor @Blogfinger
Duane Michaels, an important American photographer, is 80 years old, and there will be a retrospective of his work opening in a few days at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.
Michaels has been a pioneer in photography by doing two things. The first was handwriting narrative text on his images. He says that the writing “gives information that the photograph could not convey.” Well, so much for a picture being worth a thousand words. His words usually consist of poems or brief stories as seen in the photos above and below.
The second advance was to place multiple photographs in sequence to relate a story. Duane Michaels is a storyteller.
Here is a quote from the Carnegie: “Michaels is cited as being seminally important in his willingness to bend the rules of the medium to suit his own ends. He is credited for broadening our understanding of the philosophical dimensions of photography from the 1960s to today. ”
The picture on top is called “This photograph is my proof.” I think it is enjoyable to read his brief narrative which adds an extra dimension to appreciating his images.
In general, I like my own images to be self explanatory to the point of rarely giving them titles. Just documenting the place and date is usually sufficient for me. I like to use the headline on Blogfinger to say a few cryptic words about the photo, but my goal is to stimulate interest rather than to narrow the experience for the viewer as occurs with Michael’s stories.
However, I actually am drawn to the notion of adding handwritten storytelling to a photograph. It is a fascinating and original idea. Today, most photography is shown on line, and you can’t very well write a handwritten note.
One of the beauties of creating an actual photo print, mounted on a mat board, is that you finish with a tangible work of art that you can hold in your hand. The handwritten note by the photographer adds a hand-made touch. I like to display photographs without frames—just the image on a mat board leaning against the wall or on some sort of easel.
In my blog gallery, I usually add music (“soundtrack”) to my photos to provide an added dimension. Like Michaels, I want to enhance the appreciation of the photograph, but, at least online, I do it with music, which is less specific than a written note. It’s like the soundtrack for a movie.
My idea of accompanying photographs with music is fairly original, although there are precedents. In 2011 we posted a piece about a museum show which featured the photography of Disfarmer accompanied by live music with Bill Frisell.
