Photography

When I returned from Paris in the early 80's, I continued my study of painting at the Arts Students League on West 57th Street. 

I attended classes in Life Drawing taught by Robert Beverly Hale and classes in Abstract Painting taught by Richard Pousette-Dart, the former was a Curator of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum and the latter had paintings in the Met's Abstract Expressionist collection displayed alongside the drip paintings of Jackson Pollack; but no matter the aestehtic wisdom these two may have passed along to me, what I remember when I look through the viewfinder of my Nikon, poised to photograph my sheep, was from a less hearalded painting instructor at the League, Peter Golfinopoulis who said, "A work is it's context."  

Here, I photograph the context of the clouds and the text of the sheep.

Charles Baudelaire characterized le flâneur as a "gentleman  stroller of city streets," he saw le  flâneur as one who portrayed from the outside and participated in the life of the city. While remaining a detached observer, le flâneur played a role in the cityscape. His stance was simultaneously part of and apart from the relationship between the individual and the greater populace. 

On Photography

(A modern) application of le flâneur (is) to street photography (and) comes from Susan Sontag in her 1977 essay, On Photography. She describes how, since the development of hand-held cameras in the early 20th century, the camera has become the tool of le flâneur:

"The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.'"

After the Wikipedia entry.

Or a Poem in garlic.   I wanted to shoot the garlic coming up and I wanted to get Poem in the shot; I told her to sit and I lay down in the garlic bed with a Nikon 14-24mm zoom lens, at a focal length of 14mm, on my D700.  Here, the camera is almost on the ground and the lens about 14" from Poem's nose.  At three frames a second, in several bursts, with Poem always in motion, I took 79 exposures to get one I  could work with.   Back at the computer in Adobe Lightroom, I used a graduated filter on the sky to bring out the moodiness of the day.

Last Saturday, a guy asked me if I had any garlic yet.  "It's coming," I told him,  "when it's in, you can order it from Garlic Department  of the General Store if you can't get to the stand."

Robert Altman, director of M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Player, Prêt-à-Porter, and Gosford Park, was in the U.S. Army Air Force and piloted B-24s in fifty bombing missions in the Pacific theater during World War II.

"I don't think anybody remembers the truth or the facts. You remember impressions."

In Adobe Lightroom, I darkroomed this photo as shot.  The exposure was decreased using graduated filters to bring more definition to the rams' faces and to contrast them with the blue  sky, which was adjusted for hue (I love chicory bloom blue), saturation and luminance, to increase the illusion of a third dimension on the two dimensional plane, seeing as we do, through perspectival discoveries of Quattrocento painting. 

Yet both versions of the photograph have little to do with what I saw in the viewfinder when I released the shutter. 

Reality, which in many cases is language dependant (opposed  to seeing your mother which is not), is chameleon-like with no fixed repository of meaning.  Specifically, does reality reside in your eyes, in the Nikon D700, in Lightroom, in my eyes, or in medieval eyes who had not yet seen painting by Sandro Botticelli?  All locales have their say here.  Perhaps a  (see)saw from Williams Carlos Williams can help us, “It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it..."  (see for say)

What I saw from behind the camera was none of the above; what I saw was a picture taken by someone else.  One that I'd seen years ago where the ram's head was above the photographer's while standing.  I had longed for the  majestic feeling of that  photograph and now I might finally get something similar to it—circumstances were permitting—I framed the rams with the  Nikkor 24-70mm zoom at 42mm; then shooting Aperture Priority at f/7.1, the camera adjusted itself to 1/250 sec at ISO 2000 and I got 6 exposures (all slightly out of focus, unfortunately) in 2 seconds before the rams changed position in the low, flat light of  the afternoon.  Jean Luc Godard often expressed to Raoul Coutard, his long-time cinematographer, what angle he wanted by referencing another filmmaker's shot, "comme Hitchcock à fait dans Rear Window..."

The rams look over my left shoulder at Poem who is sitting 20 paces behind me.  And you can bet she's looking back at them waiting for the word.