The Okefenokee Swamp is a jewel located in the deep south corner of the state of Georgia, a place inhabitated by alligators, snakes and incredible birds; lulled by the songs of frogs at night (and yes, infested by mosquitoes in summer time); painted with white lilly pads surfacing on dark waters, untamed wilderness of some 400,000 acres of wet prairies, cypress forests and pine uplands. The Indians named it “The land of the trembling earth.”
It is also a visual paradise for the photography inclined. The water is crystal clear and known to be one of the purest of the states. But, interestingly, it appears black on the surface and produces a mirror reflection of everything above it. This is caused by the high level of tanic acid in the water, resulting from the decomposition of organic matters. Paddling and taking photographs might be a challenge there; A company located near the Eastern entrance of the park(Okefenokee Pastimes ) offers photographer’s paddle tours of the swamp as well as the St Mary’s river, with a canoe especially equipped to fit photo equipment and during which most of the paddling is done by the accompanying guide. Worth checking.
Some of my photographic work will be on display this weekend, April17-19 during the Druid Hills Home & Garden Tour (www.druidhills.org). The artist market will be located at the historic Stonehenge Mansion, now St. John’s Lutheran Church at 1410 Ponce de Leon. Admission is free. So stop by and come to see me.
Painting with light is a technique that resembles the act of scratching a dark canvas and finding out what is beneath the surface. It is experimental (at least for me) and you never know exactly what you will get. Thus the fun.
This picture above for example was taken at night in the old Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta. Armed with two flash lights and a solid tripod, I literally “painted” with my flashlight the monument and the vase with layers of light, while my camera was recording the information with a long exposure (30 seconds). The challenges are to function in the dark, find the appropriate exposure settings on your camera and to not trip on your own equipment!
I sometimes lose faith in the power of photography, maybe because we are, I am, overexpose to images to all kinds. Good ones and bad ones. Then, I came across this video, seen on Mother Nature Network (www.mnn.com), showing photographers documenting the “Big Melt” by time-lapse images with such exhilaration and a genuine sense of accomplishing something truly powerful that I forgot for a moment my doubts on the media and gleefully applaud the performance.
American Photo Magazine has this month a special issue on ”Queen Annie” ( Leibovitz), as some like to nickname her. Great perspective on a so overexposed portfolio.
Among all her comments, one stroke me. She responded to the question, ” What advice do you have for a young photographer who is just starting out?” She replied: “I’ve said about a million times that the best thing a young photographer can do is stay close to home. Start with your friends and family, the family who will put up with you. Discover what it means to be close to your work, to be intimate with a subject. I guess what I’m really saying is that you should take picture of something that has meaning for you.”
I found the remark profoundly powerful, yet simple. On the same line, she was asked to choose her own favorite photograph, and she declined to answer. “I don’t have a favorite photograph,” she replied. “What means the most to me is the body of my work. The accumulation of photographs over the years.”
This picture of my son Thomas is my way to stay close to home and to find definitive truth in what has just been said.
This image comes from a recent trip I took on Ossabaw Island, off the coast of Georgia. The day was gray and the shapes of driftwood on the beach sent immediatly stimuli to my photographic imagination.
I love driftwood, the whiteness of their upward bark contrasting with some dark limbs; their shapes, surnatural and poetic; their verticality in fierce opposition to the flatness of the sea; their intemporality, remminiscent of the resilience of these trees. Live oaks, that is what they are called, because they are always green and “live” throughout the winter without becoming dormant. Dead live oak tree is no oxymoron for a Georgian…
Of course I am not the first one to have been inspired by such a beauty. The island has been studied and explored by many. The foundation that works to keep and sustain the natural state of the island has been promoting artists and scientists’ visits for a long time. No wonder. The place is special.
I have added a few pictures of my Ossabaw trip on my website. Check it out.
Also worth checking in the work of Savannah photographer Jack Leigh, who spent time on the island and produced beautiful images.
I had an interesting conversation the other day with my friend (and photography mentor) Clif about how to increase traffic on one’s website. Clif has a long experience as a photographer, beautiful images but some how his website does not get much attention. He is designing a new site in an effort to attract more viewers and among some of the advices given to him by website gurus is that of subscribing to “twitter.” I have recently blogged about twistter (in my other blog for those of you who read French, http://bubbly2.wordpress.com/2009/01/22/la-vie-en-140-characteres/), sharing my skepticism about the benefits of this type of social network. A little bit of research showed me that I was wrong and that Twitter is increasingly gaining momentum, emerging as one of themost used medium to share information and expand networking.
For Mark Hewatt, who is helping my friend Clif with his photographic site, “twitter is just anothe form of direct marketing. It helps to build up followers; …every time you update your status, your network will get a new message.” Hewatt promotes his Flickr site from Twitter and on average he gets 10-15 hits on a promotion of an image.
I found other interesting comments on Twitter on Mediashift, a PBS site on the digital media revolution, on how everybody becomes obsessed with Twitter and social networking in the media world. Journalists and photographers have different social needs, obviously, but eventually everybody is craving for attention. To me, though, the caveat is an inevitable dilution of the quality of information, of connection in favor of the quantity. A trade-off, in other words. Nothing new in this old world.
PS: Thanks to Switchie for sending me this cute twitters…
Documentary photographer Kristen Ashburn came to Atlanta last week to present her series of pictures on AIDS and family in Africa at the Atlanta Photography Group gallery. I had previously seen her multimedia piece on MediaStorm ( if you don’t know this website, check it out. It is one of the most interesting photojournalism site out there) but I found her explanations on how and why she did this work profoundly interesting and eventually it added up to the intensity of an already moving subject.
For one thing, she did this piece of photojournalism on self-assignment, going for no more than three weeks at the time to several African countries, leaving on a mango diet for the most part. At the core of her drive was the desire “to make sense of statistics” and to understand what was happening to a devastated Africa afflicted by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
She followed humanitarian organizations on the ground, because, she said, it was the ony way to get close. She captured the faces of many families in black and white mostly, with a Rollei and many, many rolls of film. Interestingly, she found the use of this type of camera (where you look down into the viewfinder instead of shooting in the face of people) to have allowed more intimacy in her portraiture. Ashburn framed and edited her work in a meaningful way, not limiting herself to one condition but trying to encompasse all aspects of the devastation of AIDS, from the poor, the rich, the child, the elderly to the caretakers.
The last time I went to White Sands National Monument was more than 12 years ago. The experience of a sea of white dunes left with me one desire: to go back one day, with a camera. That is what I did last month on a trip to Arizona and the neighboring New Mexico.
Located in the southwest Corner of New Mexico, close to nothing except the ugly town of Alamogordo and the Holloman air force base, White Sands is a natural wonder, wave-lie dunes of gypsum sand that have engulfed some 275 square miles of desert.
The park is nearby the White Sands Missile Range that still tests experimental weapons and space technology. The road to access it is therefore closed during missile range test, on average twice a week. it is somehow ironic that such beautiful wilderness coexists with elements of destruction. But it does, everlasting and changing with the southwest winds, evermoving dunes that grow, crest and slump.
The most distracting fact about the park is not so much the proximity of a military base but the crowd of visitors who comes to slide on the pristine slopes and left their marks and graffitis on the sand (see below). Finding serendipity is possible, though, once you hike for half an hour or so. In the heart of the dunes, you can feel for yourself the immensity of the landscape and let your eyes rest on the suble nuances and ondulations of whites and grays. A pure pleasure for the eyes and the mind.
Happy snowy day in Atlanta…
This image comes from a recent trip I took on Ossabaw Island, off the coast of Georgia. The day was gray and the shapes of driftwood on the beach sent immediatly stimuli to my photographic imagination.
