Dec 11, 2018 | Blog
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
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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.
Jul 24, 2017 | Blog
As most people know, my parents both passed away recently. We celebrated their lives and their love on March 4th which would have been their 73rd wedding anniversary. They filled the lives of others with their presence, always involved. As children we had a big vegetable garden, chickens, bees, fruit trees. We camped, lived life in the NW, mostly outdoors. When I think about where they both started and where they ended up, their life together makes sense.
My mother’s father worked for a logging company in the Pacific NW. Her family moved 16 times before she was a junior in high school, living in logging camps around the NW. At 16, she decided to finish high school in one place, and stayed with friends of the family in Morton, WA so she could do this. After high school she went to college in California which was interrupted by WWII, meeting my father and then having four kids who came in quick succession.
My father grew up on a farm in the middle of South Dakota. The farm, now thousands of acres, is still owned and worked by family members. At 15, Dad decided that he wanted to finish high school, which meant living 75 miles away from his family in Pierre. the nearest town and also the state capital. It took him an extra year to finish because he had to work to pay his room and board. Both of my parents were determined to get a diploma, both were avid readers, loved to try and do new things, They both knew that they were destined for lives different than their parents had. When they met during WWII, at Keyport, in Washington State where my dad was stationed, they fell in love immediately and were married within a few months.
Upon their passing, my siblings and I started to go through their things and found an incredible amount of photographs that documented every aspect of their lives as well as a huge archive of photographs of their childhoods taken mostly by their parents, in particular their mothers. It was not a surprise that so many photographs existed, it was a surprise that I had not seen so many. For both of them, when they turned 90, I collected many of their photographs and made books dedicated to each of their lives. My mother had also made photo albums for each of her children and grandchildren, culling out the best from the past. But beyond the albums, there was a giant black metal trunk full of images, boxes of seemingly random images and many envelopes full of negatives and prints.
Photography was always a very important part of what we did as a family. In the early 1960’s, Dad bought a Polaroid Land camera that was seemed like a miracle. Instant photography!! That summer we took hundreds of those images. Recently, I found a taped together polaroid of our house, and yard. It brings back memories of that summer, shooting anything and everything that came along.
After that summer, Dad got another polaroid that made beautiful rectangular images. Dad always had a camera with him; when I was about ten, I remember his mother, my grandmother Bertha telling me to always have a camera ready, loaded and at hand in case any thing “came up” that needed to be photographed. During most of my childhood, Dad had an old Argus 35 mm camera with which he made Kodachrome slides. Since photography was important, it is no surprise that I loved it at an early age. I was given a camera at the age of 10 for Christmas and took it everywhere. I only got one roll of film at a time, but when I shot that, there was always another roll ready. Each image was precious and important and I think this is the way that my parents felt about photography too. Dad kept up on all the latest inventions in photography and in his eighties acquired a computer, a printer and a digital camera. He loved printing his digital images, loved taking photographs with that little digital camera, thought it all amazing and miraculous.
This morning, I spent some time going through what may be the last major box of images. So many questions for both my parents, so many mysterious, funny, really well composed images. I am grateful to have grown up in such an environment, so rich in image making. So here is my thanks to both of them for passing on this love of taking a picture, for acknowledging the importance of it and for never getting rid of any images. Our personal history is intact and so wonderful to view.
I post this blog with a handful of images from their lives; taken by their mothers, themselves and by me. I have written several other blog posts on the publication of their 90th birthday books, and my Uncle Bob and Grandmothers involvement in photography as well.
My Mother, her Grandparents, Parents, husband, Siblings and Childre
Jul 24, 2017 | Blog
Every year Photo Center NW in Seattle sponsors a fund raiser called Long Shot. Essentially everyone shoots within the same 24 hour period and a week later a pop show happens with one juried print from everyone who registered and submitted. It’s a great excuse to shoot even in the throes of life. This year, Saturday, June 10th, the Long Shot coincided with the Georgetown Carnival where I have manned the Spin Art booth for I don’t know the last ten years….In the midst of spinning records with lots of paint involved I took some pinhole photos. I used my old Zero 2000 and had it set on the inside for a rectangle view and advanced it as if it were set for a square view. I got overlap and no frame lines, just as I hoped I would. They negatives are dense and grainy and very very colorful. I submitted four images to Long Shot (LongShot) of which there are a few versions here. One was chosen from each person submitting for the pop up show. The top image on below might be my favorite of the bunch. My shadow, the Spin Art Booth made with the Zero 2000 on color negative film and it was chosen to be in the show!
Jun 6, 2017 | Blog
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
Feb 24, 2017 | Blog, Pinhole Wedding Photography
This past fall, I was invited to the wedding of my dear friends’ daughter, Rachel. I went not only for Rachel but for her mother, my friend Connie who passed away 3+ years ago. Rachel got married on Cape Cod, head over heels in love. I know this because a year earlier, after knowing the groom to be for only a month, she told me he was the one. Truly love at first sight. When Rachel asked me if I would take some photographs at the wedding, I laughed. I used to shoot weddings for money when I was young but quit the practice as soon as I was able to. I am not good at shooting those types of events and I say hats off to the professionals who are able to capture moment after moment. Rachel and Nick’s wedding was not going to like a normal one and I said I would be happy to shoot a pinhole image or two, one for sure, the length of their ceremony, what ever amount of time that was. In retrospect it was actually quite hubristic to imagine that such an exposure might work in the bright fall sun of Cape Cod. And I had no idea where they were actually getting married. But I packed my 4 x 5 pinhole camera and some color negative film loaded into holders and hoped for the best. The entire trip was bittersweet, full of laughter and tears. Missing Connie all the while but feeling her presence strong. I know she would have loved every minute of it.
The first image was made the night before the wedding-warm beautiful night on a Cape Cod beach. We ate great food, talked, laughed, watched the sun go down and yes, those are all people on either side of the sun. We dug our bare feet into the warm sand, everyone and everything aglow in that orange light. I was fortunate to get there in time for the setting sun and set up the camera and enjoyed
Rachel and Nick were married by a beautiful pond near Truro; The weather was perfect and the light beautiful. The exposures were so long, but people are recognizable in the blur. The landscape is intact. In those 45 minutes there was the magic that happens when two people come together in love and celebrate that with their friends and family. It turns out this was shortest exposure of the four that I took: the first image exposed for about an hour until well after the sun went down. The dinner image exposed for about two hours while incredible food was eaten; the lawn image exposed in the gray light of late twilight for about an hour. Rachel was a beautiful bride, and it so incredible to see someone I have known her whole life become an elegant, young woman. Here is an homage to Rachel and Nick and their love, so glad I got to make these images because you committed to each other.
The Party the Night Before the Wedding.
The ceremony.
After the wedding, everyone went to the home of Nick’s Aunt where we ate and danced and celebrated the beautiful couple. The lawn photograph exposed until it got too dark to see, about an hour.
Then, the meal! Fantastic food with lovely wonderful people. This exposure was about two hours. And finally when the dancing began, I closed the shutter.
Nov 28, 2016 | Blog
About six months ago I submitted some of my new pinhole work to the ƒ/D website call for work for a book on pinhole photography. A passion for pinhole photography by Kier Silensky gave birth to a book that will have ninety-nine images by pinhole photographers from all over the world. My image, Under the Tracks/Inside the Box was accepted to be a part of this book. Now the website Kier maintains, fslashd.com has started a Kickstarter site for the project in order to print the book as beautifully as possible.
On the Kickstarter site, Kier states, “while photo books are a great way to collect photography, the pinhole photography community is greatly under-represented on bookshelves. In response, we ran a call for entry asking photographers to show us what they’ve seen through a pinhole. We received an overwhelming response from around the world, and selected 99 photos to publish in a book created to celebrate pinhole photography. In all, the book features 60 black & white and 39 color photos. The photographs represent techniques that demonstrate the “pinhole look” in general as well as the unique ways in which pinhole works with motion and time, bent film planes, infrared, and other techniques and formats.”
I personally still do not have a name for the camera that was constructed to make the image that was accepted for the book. Basically it is a larger (2 x 2 x 2 feet) pinhole camera with a round hole placed right below the pinhole into which a digital camera fits to record the pinhole image inside the box. A kind of mini-camera obscura room, aka Abelardo Morell, one of my heroes. I am thrilled to be a part of this book and hope you will consider donating to the Kickstarter project so this book can be realized. You can go to the site and see for the project for yourself: the-f-d-book-of-pinhole.
I have made several images with this box as well as experimented with placing the DSLR inside of other giant camera obscurae and capturing the image that is made. I am not sure where this work is leading me but it’s been fun! I love the idea of making a pinhole image and capturing it with digital. Below I have added the image for the book and one other I’ve made with this camera.
Under the Tracks/Inside the Box
Outside the Sunny Arms/Inside the box
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