Looking Up

It’s hard for me to not anthropomorphize the behavior of animals looking up to the sky as being spiritual. There just seems to be a natural interpretation of any animal with their eyes searching the “heavens” as seeking guidance or being lost in a sense of wonder.

As someone who spent their college career in the study of animal behavior, any form of anthropomorphizing was unscientific. As an artist now, I don’t have to fight that urge. In fact I think it has become a part of my image-making process. I look for the “expressions” in animal subjects that relate to my own emotions and feelings. My work isn’t just about the animal in my image, but also about how their behavior speaks to our own lives.

This little kit Red Fox was part of a den I worked at for over a week. I  feel like I caught it in a private moment of youthful contemplation of the universe. Color isn’t important to the image, so I rendered it as a black & white. To instill a sense that it was unaware of my presence, I composed so that it blends into its surroundings but made sure that the eyes and ears (pointing forward with its line of sight) are clearly visible.

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Artistic Process

The artistic process differs from medium to medium and is of course a never-ending learning process. As an artist working in the medium of photography, I cannot help but compare my medium and process to others. I find it both helpful in understanding my own medium but also in growing with it. And although I have been working in digital format for almost 10 years, the medium still feels new to me.

There is one aspect of working in digital format  that may be more important than any other. Unlike working with film, having immediate feedback on the camera’s LCD means being able to respond both to the scene in front of me and to the image I just created. And so as in painting, sculpture, or even composing music, I can analyse the result and adjust the process to do things differently.

Mostly, people think of that feedback as a way of checking that the camera is working correctly and that the image reflects what was desired. That is helpful, but maybe even more important is that the image itself becomes a new thing to which I can respond. Just as a painter lays down a brush stroke and then responds to how that brush stroke changes their feeling about where to lay down the next brush stroke, the photographer can respond to an LCD display of an image to determine what next direction to take.

In the image below that I made in Acadia National Park this past August, I was able to respond to the image I made as separate from the scene in which I was working. The image I made then could send me in a different direction than the scene itself would have.  As a result I could respond by changing focal length, perspective, polarization, exposure, composition, and if I chose to, also white-balance and application of a variety of other camera-based controls. The immediate feedback offered by the camera’s LCD allows me to be more creative in the field and ultimately with the final print.

This image was made with a Panasonic GH2 with an Olympus 9-18mm m4/3 lens at 18mm hand-held.

Cloud and Grasses, (c) 2012 Paul Grecian

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f/8 And Be There – Misleading?

I often come across photography related quotes and wonder what they originally meant. The quote “F8 and be there” is attributed to Weegee (actually Arthur Fellig) who was a famous street photographer during the 1930’s, 40’s and beyond. Arthur Fellig’s quote was meant to explain his secret to success. I believe it represents a philosophy to keep technical decisions simple and be where your vision takes you. The quote has been the mantra of photojournalists, travel photographers and even nature photographers. To some it implies that great images are the result of happenstance. But in a way, it represents a truism without much meaning. Photographs, wherever they are made and regardless of the subject, always require a “be there” component. The “F8” element speaks to the need for sharpness (the f8 aperture is the sharpest point of some lenses) and also a reasonable depth of field. The ability to work quickly is a necessity when working with action subjects.

The quote though in some ways over-simplifies the process. What made Fellig’s work so captivating was not his use of f-stop or even the fact that he was “there”. Personally, I dismiss this notion of “right place, right time” as helpful in explaining the success of an image. Every image has a place and time element, it is what the photographer brings to that place and time that makes an image meaningful.

In a January 19, 2012 New York Times article, Roberta Smith writes about Weegee’s photography  – “The combination of grit, humanity, intensity, merciless opportunism and spatial precariousness, coupled with an eye for uncanny details, regularly resulted in pictures that you can’t stop looking at….” For Arthur Fellig to explain his success as “f8 and be there” only suggests to me that he was so comfortable with who he was and how he wanted to portray events, that he could be anywhere at any time, not worrying about mundane technical questions, and create stirring images. For me, the real meaning of his quote is simplify your process and be true to your vision.

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Lord of the Flies……

Yesterday I was at Artists’ Gallery in Lambertville, NJ greeting visitors as they came in out of the cold to see the latest work of the 18 member artists. I had a very nice talk with a woman who came in with her husband. It was their anniversary. One of my images reminded her of a passage from the book Lord of the Flies. She was drawn to the piece visually, but it was the connection she made with a particular book passage that solidified her choice to purchase my print entitled Nocturnal Shore.

Great writers can place powerful pictures into reader’s minds the same way visual artists working in 2-D or 3D put powerful pictures in front of viewer’s eyes. But equally true is that powerful pictures can cause one to recall great written passages. I find this relationship between the arts, a consilience of sorts, increasingly interesting.

Nocturnal Shore

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Is It Done Yet?

An excellent recent blog post by Mark Graf deals with a quote I had never heard before:

“Art is never finished, only abandoned.”  - Leonardo da Vinci

As is often the case, Mark’s posts stimulate thought.  I commented on his blog that I often develop an image soon after making it if I feel I can capture the emotion I felt while in the field. This allows me to most precisely create an image that reflects both my feelings about an experience and also the colors, contrast, and general biological attributes of the scene. In this way, my “finish” point is based on a fresh memory. It’s not so much an “abandonment”, as in I don’t know what else to do to the image so I will just leave it be, as it is a recognition that the finished piece is what I intended when I started the process in the field.

The result of working on an image while the experience is fresh in my mind often results in a finished piece that also reflects closely what I saw. Although, once I am physically removed from the scene, if only by hours, every image becomes an interpretation based on memory. An especially exciting experience may be remembered more “vividly” than it would have appeared to someone standing next to me while I made the image in the field. I am of course perfectly OK with this (not that I have a choice really), as what I am creating is always an impression of an experience, not the actual experience. Neither film nor camera sensors record anything exactly as they appear. Film always had color and contrast biases. Working in digital format can be just the reverse of film (if working in Raw) in that it can require almost total artistic input due to the little pre-determined color or contrast decisions made by the camera.

So what happens to an image not developed soon after the field experience, but instead worked on six months or even years later? Well, like any other art I use all my experiences with the subject (some of which may be new since making the image), and my current mood and esthetic tastes to make a finished piece that reflects who I am at that moment. In this case, I have less of a “field intended result” in mind and more of a “current state” of mind on which to determine when a piece is “finished”. A year later I may be in a different state of mind still and work the image differently.

I suspect da Vinci didn’t foresee photography when he made his quote (or did he?). Photography, unlike many other art forms, may always be a work in progress, allowing different interpretations by the artist without end. It may not be so much a matter of abandonment as it is a temporary withdrawal (a temporary satisfaction). Because, unlike a painting which must be cast off (abandoned) if it is ever to find itself with a new owner, an original photographic image is always within reach of a new interpretation by the photographer. Unless of course you consider each iteration of a photographic image a form of abandonment, in that case……never mind.

Blue Bird - (c) Paul Grecian

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Know Place Like Home…

The 2011 edition of Photographer’s Market has been out for a little while and I received my copy from the publisher. Last year I had a feature article in the 2010 edition of Photographer’s Market which also appeared in the 2010 Artist’s and Graphic Designer’s Market. This year my article deals with making the most of local opportunities which has been a primary objective of mine since I began to work professionally.

It is still a strategy and a personal working style for me and one that I have seen friends use successfully as well. Lots of good stuff in the 2011 edition, certainly it should be on your bookshelf.

My article in 2011 Photographer's Market

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Abstract? It’s all abstract……

I always have some work in my booth that leans more to the abstract side of the realism-abstract continuum. Fundamentally, I think abstraction is no different in photography than in other two-dimensional mediums. With photography, most certainly with mine, there is often a real subject matter being portrayed. This may keep my abstract work from being as abstract as some paintings, but certainly it’s in that camp.

Ultimately, all art is an abstraction of reality. I, using photography, am working with a two-dimensional, static medium and yet hope to elicit an emotional response in my viewers based on a real experience or feeling that I want to convey. Photography, maybe more than any other medium, is seen as dealing with reality. It’s a paradox though because I am abstracting so much of the “reality” I experienced. Consider too that I may be using the subject in front of me to convey an idea or an emotion that has little to do with the literal visual stimulus I experienced in the field. That is, I have visualized a finished print of an image that is based on the scene in front of me but not trying to recreate (as closely as the medium allows), what the viewer would see were they with me.

As a culture, we know how to “read” photographs and paintings so that they make sense to us. Enough so that  may serve as a substitute for having experienced the event or scene first hand, even eliciting a similar emotion. It is up to the artist to decide by what means, and to what extent, to use their medium to convey a particular message. It’s tricky business.

Whether the work is that of Ansel Adams, who ultimately determined photography should be a faithful reproduction of reality (f64 group), or painters working in the style of trompe l’oeil, a greater or lesser degree of abstraction is still in effect. The very act of isolating a section of a visual experience and reproducing it in a two-dimensional form on some substrate, is in itself abstraction. While the artist using pure shape, color, and form in a non-mimetic way, may more quickly be recognized as creating abstract works, every artist is conscious of the effects those elements play in visual expression.

(c) 2010 Paul Grecian - Is this abstract?

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Identity

Recently I’ve become conscious of something that should have been obvious, my identity is tied to what I do – photography. Of course I know I’m a photographer, but in the last couple of months it’s become clear that other people around me identify me as a photographer.

I’m “my husband the photographer” to my wife. I’m “my dad the photographer” to my daughter (even more so after her new camera purchase). I’m “my friend the photographer” to several including one I sold a used camera to. In fact we met for breakfast this morning and while talking about her photography, our waitress told me about her new camera (I’m “my customer the photographer” to her). And of course there’s the “my son the photographer”, “my son-in-law the photographer”, “my brother the photographer” and “my neighbor the photographer”. The neighbor identity really took off when the company my neighbor works for recently approved a new camera purchase for his job. We went over models of camera, lenses, and flash, software, methods…..and so on.

In my previous work in biology, I didn’t have such a far-reaching association between who I was and what I did. I like the association though, it just seems to have taken me by surprise a bit lately. I am to a greater extent now identified by what I do.

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Life Imitating Art Imitating Blog

A recent blog entry I made here, generated a bit of discussion. It even made its way to dinnertime discussion with my wife and daughter at my house. A couple days later my daughter (7th grade) brought me a book she was reading to point out a particular paragraph to me. One line really caught her attention. On page 128 of Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life, author Wendy Mass writes

“Mom thinks that art is a personal thing, and Aunt Judi believes that art isn’t art until it’s appreciated by the public”

My daughter recognized the close relation to the discussion here  and thought it interesting. Our dinnertime discussion on this topic added relevance to her reading. I suspect the passage from Mass’ book would not have had as big an impact on my daughter otherwise. I don’t know fully how that line related to Mass’  book, but I’m glad it was there.

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If a Painting Falls in the Woods…

You know the riddle, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it does it make a sound?” I subscribe to the reasoning that it does not make a sound as there is no person to perceive the sound.  A falling tree only creates a vibration in the air. It is the human ear that translates that vibration into a sound.

I feel the same way about art. If there is no human to perceive it and translate the experience into an emotion, then there is no art. Art is a strictly human concept and requires a human presence to be perceived as such. Maybe it is enough for the creator of a painting, sculpture, photograph, poem, to perceive the work for it to be art, but how much more is it art when there is a second, third, or ten million observers, readers, listeners.

So just as a falling tree needs to be heard in order for it to make a sound, art needs to be heard, seen, felt, in order for it to be art. It seems clear to me then that there is no art without a patron, they make art “heard”. They are the human ear that registers the “ sound”.

I was so pleased to receive an email recently from a collector of my work after receiving a framed print from me. She wrote:

The Arrival “arrived” today and looks beautiful on my wall as I knew it would.  One of the things I enjoy so much about your work, is that since I spend so much time outdoors, I identify immediately with the beauty that you capture in your images.  If that is one of your goals as an artist, you have succeeded.  Thanks again.  – Sue

I love that sound….

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