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.
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.
Illustration Mike Luckovich
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…
Florence Alfonso by Kristen Ashburn
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 exhibit is in view until March 6th.
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.
Graffiti on sand
Credit: Nasa via Associated Press
Is there anything new that can happen in photography? Far are the days when photographers were pioneers in their emerging visual field and inventors of new forms. Who can relate to the excitement that Berenice Abbott could have felt when she broke new ground with her work on science photography? To illustrate a magnetic field or the law of gravity, she had to design new photographic equipment and create unique lighting systems. The medium looked then filled with promises and new possibilities.
Today everything seemed to have been explored. Hordes of photographers have captured the world, inside and outside, working with anything from back-to-basic pinhole cameras to the utterly sophisticated digital cameras, pixeled images measured in gigabytes eventually manipulated by elaborate software systems. So what can be new in this overpopulated field?
As I was pondering this question in my head yesterday, I came across an article on the New York Times reporting that two teams of astronomers succeeded in taking pictures of extra solar planets circling distant stars. This particular picture, for instance, shows the dust ring, seen in reed, surrounding the star Fomalhaut (located at the center of the image but not visible.) The news has excited the scientific community.
“Every extra solar planet detected so far has been a wobble on a graph,” comments an astrophysicist. “These are the first pictures of an entire system.”
“The new images are the fruits of a long campaign by astronomers to see more and more of the unseeable,” writes the New York Times. Recording planets 25 light-years from Earth, this is the ultimate photographic experience! Something new, definitively.
Post Sscriptum: An exhibit on Berenice Abbott, including some of her scientific photographic work, is currently on display at the Lumière gallery, here in Atlanta (in conjunction with another exhibit of another woman photographer, Imogen Cunningham) unti lDecember 23,2008. For more information, check www.lumieregallery.net.
This wall of rock that I photographed this summer at Capitol Reef National Monument reminded me, strangely, of a statement recently read about the great russian painter Serge Poliakoff (1900-1970), known for his subtile monochromes and his work on volumes and colors.
It was said that Poliakoff “understood that color finds its sonority in superpositions and in transparencies by scratching a sarcophagus at the British museum in London.”
The expression from French photographer Bernard Plossu still makes me smile but apparently a lot of photographers have looked for this kingdom and …found it: that is a safe place to entrust their photographic archives. Its mundane name is the Center for Creative Photography and its physical location is on the campus of the University of Arizona in beautiful Tucson.
The goal of this place is ambitious: from the beginning it has been to “change the very nature of research in and appreciation of the history of photography by doing something no other institution had attempted – the Center would collect, preserve and make accessible the complete archives of photographers who had made significant contributions to the art of photography in this country,” according to Terence Pitts, its past director.
The idea was launched in 1975 with the commitment of five living master photographers, all between the age of 63 and 73: Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind and Frederick Sommer. The collection has never stopped to grow. Today, more than 60 artists, young and not so young, have their work archived at the center and more than 217 archive collections are represented (that is a photographer or an entity such as photography societies, galleries, publishers and so forth.)
But exactly what is collected? It depends, says Britt Salvesen, the newly appointed director. “For some photographers, it is a body of work, for others, it is everything that is printed!“ The essential idea behind the collecting work is “to show all the different facets of a working and creative life of a photographer.” That includes photographs, of course, correspondence, notes, diaries, contact sheets, but it can also mean tax returns and cleaning bills!
After more than 30 years in existence, the Center has not only become a gold mine for researchers, it has worked diligently to make its collections available to the public at large. With a collection of nearly 80,000 photographs, the Center has an infinite resource for exhibiting talented work as well as for loaning part if its collections to museums around the world (such as the Callahan exhibit recently presented at the High Museum in Atlanta.)
Even better, it has established print study sessions – available by appointment – where one can select prints (up to 20) to his/her choice, based on the center’s catalog. Plossu was right, it is heaven!
On August 23, Scott Kelby, the guru behind the Photoshop training programs and president of the National Association of Photoshop Professional (NAPP), envisioned a worldwide social event, where photographers would gather one day, and one day only, in every possible city in the US (and beyond) to meet each others, share ideas and eventually have fun. Some 8,000 participants signed in… so did I.
I signed up for the Photo Walk in Buckhead, the glitzy, upscale district of Atlanta, where high glass-and-steel buildings emerge from the ground quicker than mushrooms after the rain. We were some 50 photographers to take the street and shoot Peachtree Rd. in all possible angles.
A collection of pictures can be viewed on Flickr : http://www.flickr.com/groups/851112@N23/ ( I am signed up under virginiek2008, if you are interested to see my pics.)
Check it out: the diversity of shoots, angles, points of view are quite interesting. Thank you to photographer Judith Pishnery for leading our group.
I like to spend time checking other photographers’ websites. It is often a source of inspiration and a way to opening up to new ideas. Recently, I found the site of Alain Briot, a French photographer based nearby Phoenix, AZ (www.beautiful-landscape.com ). He has a gallery and offers workshops in Arizona (where he resides with his wife) and in Southern Utah. Beautiful landscapes make beautiful photographs. I guess this is the reason why so many photographers spend time there and make a business in running (expensive) workshops.
Alain Briot has this bit of wisdom that I would like to share with you and on which I have been meditating since I read it:
“If you have just started photography, and are not satisfied with your current results, don’t despair. I took me 25 years to create the image quality you can see on this website (the actual prints look much better than the web pages of course). If it takes you ten times less than that to create images that you really like, you will be “burning rubber” in the field of art and photography.”
A bon entendeur, salut!
