Old Work/New Work

Old Work/New Work

As most of you know I was a high school photography teacher for 24 years.  I loved the job, working everyday with young people who were intrigued  by and creative with photography. Teaching them was fun. I have now retired from that job.  I hate that word retired.  It sounds as if I am off  to bed to do nothing for the remainder of the days I have left.  For me retirement is not about that.  I developed a good work ethic over the years as a high school teacher which continues to pay off now:  I get up and drink coffee with my work.  I honestly do not know how I had time do the high school  job.  I spent at least 60 hours a week working including with the commute (which involved a 30 minute ferry ride). On top of that I tended to my studio and did what I could with my personal work.  I had shows and grants and sold photographs but it was “on the side.”  Now it is all about  simply producing for the pure joy of it.

So what am I doing right now?  The Pinhole Landscapes of course.  The Innards Portfolio as I have come to call those images. I am also working on a cookbook of my Mother’s recipes, the DSLR images I randomly take, the Pinhole Project,  and two personal pinhole projects called Getaways and Home (a future post is in the works) and I of course am updating my two websites and applying for grants. The Pinhole Landscapes  involve a lot of post-processing:  the negatives are very dusty and the color is off.  Sometimes I reverse them horizontally.  Sometimes I change things in photoshop:  the aspect ratio, the background among other things.  I want these images to knock me for a loop, just like the darkroom has in the past.  I refuse to be judgmental about post-processing decisions.

I just spent 17 days in November in New York City photographing the archive of my dear deceased mentor from graduate school, Judy Seigel.  Many things amaze me about her work.  She produced a huge, incredible body of images from the about the time I met her (in the early 1980s) until about 2015. Her work ethic was so strong.  She was not always easy to be around.  She asked me hard questions and got impatient when I did not have an answer. Yet I learned so much from her and I have continued to learn from her looking at her images while I photographed them.  She produced a strong and unappreciated, odd body of work. She had an unique vision.   She was experimental and fearless.  She thought a regular silver print without any “post factory manipulations” was boring.  Her work inspires me to go into the darkroom with the Innards Portfolio.   They are film negatives after all.   I have an idea to transform these images and make them both about process and the image.  I will let you know how that works.  Meanwhile, the studio is glorious, depressing, exhilarating,  Some days I do not go out:  I mean I do not go outside at all. Forgive me if I have canceled a date with you.  But  now that I have the gift of time, I am using it.

In the past I eschewed the DSLR. But in fact I am shooting with it now and again, especially when I am on a road trip.  Here are some photographs with the DSLR from my recent trip to the Grand Tetons. I did shoot a lot with the pinhole camera as well, and I took along a telephoto lens (a rarity for me) for the DSLR.  I used it to make studies for the pinholes.  Maybe you will see some sort of relationship between the two types of shooting.  Maybe not  Let me know.  You can see two of the trip’s pinholes in the More Innards post.  Another post on them later.

 

To the Grand Tetons and Back, 2018

grandtetonroadtrip_247 . grandtetonroadtrip_110

 

grandtetonroadtrip_112 . _DSC0664

 

grandtetonroadtrip_048 . grandtetonroadtrip_011

 

grandtetonroadtrip_360   grandtetonroadtrip_335

grandtetonroadtrip_317   grandtetonroadtrip_370

 

These images are but a few of the 500 or so that I made with the DSLR.  It will take some time to sort them out.  The images above have popped out as favorites.  The featured image is from inside a cabin near Jackson Lake with the Grand Tetons in the background.

 

The Pinhole Landscapes

The Pinhole Landscapes

I am pleased to announce that six  of my Pinhole Landscapes will be on view this summer at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (bima.org) in a  show called Women in Photography;  I am one of ten women being exhibited.  When Greg Robinson, the curator asked me to be in the show, he wondered how being a woman had influenced my work.   It was an apropos question.  I have long wanted to photograph the landscape but not in the way it had historically been done.  I did not want to work in the same vein copying the greats, like William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan and yes even Ansel Adams.  And it seemed that all the greats had been men.  Making the urban night photographs (Nighttime)  had inspired me to try the landscape in a kind of crooked way (see asterisk below).  I wanted color, mostly because I love the way the long exposures at night shifted the colors and recorded a certain kind of movement.  I knew I could not get that feeling  during the day with the a lens camera.  The pinhole camera allowed for both a long exposure and color.  I have owned a  4 x 5 pinhole camera for years with which I had mostly made still lifes (loupe-holes).  I began with an all night long exposure, and it was a perfect negative (a happy accident I later discovered).  I scanned that negative and printed it digitally. There was something about that image (Tomales), a seven hour exposure that made me realize that I could do the landscape both at night and during the day.  In a crooked way, with the pinhole, with film.   The long exposures, in the wind, rain, snow, darkness,  make the images soft;  the pinhole records light and time like no other type of camera. Mostly when I am making images with the that camera, I am pushing the exposure envelope hoping to get enough light on the film, hoping for the image that I see before me, but it is always turns out differently once it is developed. Sometimes I am constrained by the available light.  Sometimes I am in love with the light and the moment and simply hope for the best.  All in all, I am well into making the landscape my own way.  I am happy not to see the image immediately.  Not to be able to actually look through the camera.  I love the mystery and the uncertainty.  The crookedness of it.

I am beginning to understand that  photography is as much about time as it is about light and the pinhole  records both.  Each image seems to happen against the odds.  Usal Beach, below is an example. Taken on the Lost Coast in Northern California, on a dreary, gray evening. It felt creepy, with the  abandoned campground, dried-up river to the ocean, high crashing surf, strange noises one could hear but not see.  A whole town once existed on this site. The three mile drive on a treacherous dirt road keeps most people away.  Yet on the evening I made the image, it seems there had been many people on the beach that day, there were lots of footsteps in the sand. No one was there when this image was made.  The waves were close with a steep drop off yet the surf looks deceptively calm in the exposure.  While making the image, I had little hope it would turn out.  When I saw the negative a month later, I knew I had something.

Usal Beach, CA

I don’t mean to take creepy landscapes but somehow end up in creepy places. Usal Beach was followed by several more images but the one below taken near the Dyke Access Road on the Columbia River speaks to the same aesthetic.  Cottonwood Tree, Columbia River was made with the camera perched on a plastic box near the water.  It started to rain about 15 minutes into the exposure. A big ship came up the river, in from Astoria. It moved slowly and I decided to make the exposure the length of time it took the ship to come past the camera, about an hour. The cottonwood tree was a victim of flooding and erosion from a very wet winter. I was surprised how it seemed to be growing out of the water. The wake from many boats on the river must have created that effect because the tree looked like it was growing out of the mud when the photograph was made. Again, none of the boats appear in the photograph, because the exposure is too long to record their speed.

Columbia River, WA

There are four other images in the show.  One made three years ago, the others within the last year.  I hope you can stop by BIMA.  The show will be up the entire summer.  The work of the ten women included in the show is diverse and interesting.  If you are in the Northwest, the opening is on Saturday, June 24th, from 2-5 pm for friends of friends of friends, all are welcome.

Featured Image: The Little Klickitat River