cycle of life, 2020
fabyan forest preserve - olympus em1 mkii - m.zuiko 60mm f/2.8 macro
Of course autumn is all about the color. But that color is actually there all along just hidden by chlorophyll when the leaf is alive. I frequently see this same thing in older adults, as ego starts to melt away and the beauty of what is underneath, what's always been there, is allowed to shine through. What beauty are you hiding now?
gaze of orpheus, 2019, artist’s proof
fine art digital print on gampi torinoko handmade by seki-san
movement collaborator: emma kury
My love affair with Japanese papers is nearly lifelong going back to when I first saw Frank Lloyd Wright’s collection of Japanese art many decades ago. It also stems from the concept of wabi-sabi (侘寂), or accepting, if not delighting in imperfection, something which was essential to me when I was a painter and sculptor. It's ironic that years ago, when I first visited Hiromi Paper Inc. in search of Japanese papers to try with inkjet printing, I used printers loaded with custom grayscale inks, and used exotic workflows and drivers in quest of the perfect digital fiber-based “silver” prints, no wabi-sabi allowed. It took years for commercial printers and papers to evolve, but now we have the ability to make beautiful archival fiber-based BW and color photographic prints. But in spite of all of these “perfect” prints that I produce on a daily basis, I still crave wabi-sabi.
Recently I’ve been working on printing work from three different series of art (Moving Meditation, Take the No. 9, and Collision of Moments) that both formally and conceptually called out for Japanese papers that partner with the images to make them more than just photographic prints. I’ve tested more than 30 different Hiromi papers at this point including both machine and handmade papers made from a variety of fibers both inkjet coated and uncoated. The papers range from tissue thin to more substantial washi. Currently I’m printing in both color and grayscale using Colorbyte Software’s Imageprint Black RIP with a Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000 17-inch printer.
In this article we focus on prints from my Collision of Moments series which are color. The images are light-painted time exposures that I began to experiment with about two decades ago. They involve collaborating with movement artists (yogis, modern dancers, belly dancers, or artist’s models) who move through space for up to 10 seconds. During their movement I hold the shutter open and watch, triggering several flash heads placed around the room to punctuate moments, glimpses of mindfulness, in a stream of movement. The process is very rich and I’m forever grateful to my collaborators for their experimental spirit.
An essential aspect of this project, and also of my love for photography, photographic printing, tea, and all things Japanese is a now more than 20 year friendship with Antonis Ricos. I trust Antonis’s eyes (and brain) more than any other human to evaluate a print both technically and artistically. He’s been more than generous to pour over my print samples, evaluating the papers, profiles, and most of all the wabi-sabi to give you a glimpse into what you can expect from inkjet printing on Japanese washi. He has also beautifully photographed the samples to demonstrate all of these features and provided detailed observations on what he sees. See his comments as well as demonstrative photographs here.
There is still much to do in the project including selecting the final paper for each series and fine-tuning profiles and images, but the journey so far has been most rewarding, and I look forward to showing these once we are again free to roam the planet.
bricked, 2018, ap
fine art digital print on handmade gampi paper
collaborator: corah
photo: antonis ricos
full circle, 2004, ap
fine art digital print on japanese washi
collaborator: shahina
detail photo: antonis ricos
mindful flight, 2019, ap
fine art digital print on gampi tissue
collaborator: marley hornewer
detail photo: antonis ricos
Olympus EM1-MKii with Zuiko 60 mm f2.8 Macro - South Loop, Chicago
Photographers have always had their tools, Ansel Adams, the legendary landscape photographer, spent hours upon hours in the darkroom light painting his images, experimenting with different chemicals used during the development process to cast different tones on his BW images. People have even speculated that he merged different negatives to create final images. When an artist uses a camera they find themselves like a painter or sculptor in the present moment with an imagined image and materials to work with. That moment is a rush of creative explicit and implicit decisions—composition, luminosity, reflection, depth of field, shutter speed and more…each will affect the possibilities in the final piece. Now with the digital darkroom, photographers have all the tools that they used to have in the chemical darkroom and more. Like in a well planed experiment, the best results usually come by knowing your tools well and balancing that with taking chances and luck. In this "shot" I wanted a shallow depth of field to get the painterly effect sometimes referred to as “bokeh” the blur caused by a limited depth of field. But the flower was so small, not even 1/2 inch across, that I needed to move in very close with the macro lens, not more than an inch and a half away. To get both the peripheral blur and the center image in focus I knew I was going to have to focus stack. So I captured eight images that were focused on different parts of the central flower at a relatively wide aperture (narrow depth of field). The images are then adjusted for color, levels, and contrast just like you would if you were printing the photo in a darkroom. Those settings are then applied to all the photos in the stack and they're exported into Photoshop as layers of a single file where they are aligned structurally by an artificial intelligence algorithm and then blended by another algorithm. After this process I use another image editor, SilverEfex, which is specialized for BW conversions and editing. There I simulate a particular BW film. Each BW film had its own way of rendering light, so different ones produced different effects depending on the colors and light present. In my film days I shot a lot of Fuji Acros Neopan 100 and Kodak Tri-X. I used Ilford Delta 3200 (pulled to 1600) at night and occasionally Konica Infrared Film for a radically different way of seeing.. It's interesting that I usually choose the same film profiles now that I shot with 20 years ago, because my brain has gotten used to seeing the world with that type of filtering. When I see a scene that looks good for BW its partly because I know how light will be translated by a particular film. My wife can see it in my eyes and facial expressions, the moment of insight, when I'm looking, and she knows the camera is going to come out! The final image is then dodged and burned, regionally sharpened and then toned digitally to match the type of toning I preferred in the chemical darkroom. Final output sharpening for either computer or paper are typically done in Lightroom. In the end, I got pretty much exactly what I wanted when I looked at the initial flower. This time the original artist's vision worked out, of course it doesn't always. Sometimes during editing I see a better way to realize the image much as when I used to be a painter/sculptor and I would see new possibilities halfway through creation. Probably way more detail than you ever wanted, but I think it's important for people to realize that in the age of the cell phone camera, that the art of photography is much more than point and click.
Olympus EM1-MKii with Zuiko 60 mm f2.8 Macro - Northerly Island, Chicago
When one falls away - Olympus EM1-MKii with Zuiko 40-150 mm f2.8 Pro with x1.4 Teleconverter - South Loop, Chicago
Los Angeles - 2019
Today the teacher said close your eyes, lay your head on your hands, and become a crocodile. No time goes by and I'm in the first grade. My young classmates are there but I can't see them. Mrs Stow said bury your heads so there was no light. She wears silky bell bottom pants which magically hide her patent red high heel shoes. It was a wonder when you are seven, and yes, it was a crush. After rising to sphinx I become an old child and see her golden shoulder length hair while my rotator cuffs say hello and the warmth of my breath reflects back from my matt. I don't know whether she's alive, but she's here now, when we were both much younger. I shiver with sensation and image, no division between body and mind, past or present. I'm overwhelmed with gratitude for this moment of me.
st. petersburg, 2000
Attention is a human faculty we typically take for granted, but its successful functioning is essential to our experience of the world. Meet someone with Balint Syndrome who can only experience one object in their vision at a time and you start to realize how important attention is for our typical understanding of the world. So when the brain's networks turn their eye on you, and your eyes work only for them, things can change very quickly. In July of 2000, for 24 hours in St Petersburg Russia all I saw were crosses. None of them were actually crosses, but go ahead and try to tell my neural networks that. My trigger finger was their slave. Maybe it my Reticular Activing System, more likely something went funny with my frontal lobe. It ended at 23 hundred hour twilight near the Malaya Neva, when my frontal lobe was put to sleep with a fifth of vodka.
silver ghost & square ghost - hollywood, 2003
We all know that Art is not truth.
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand.
The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.
Pablo Picasso
Cognitive scientists have known for many years that human memory is not veridical. Our memories are not records of what we've experienced in the past, but rather they are constructive combinations of those experiences with what our mind has made of our past and perhaps most importantly our goal state for the present moment. Memory is intrinsically creative.
The work of the cinematographer is to shape the attention of the viewer with the mind of the director. Filmmaking, after all, is not theater where the viewer is in control of how they experience the moment, rather its a lens made from the mind of another.
In my practice, making art with a camera is somewhere between these two. Not as explicit as the action of the cinematographer, but certainly not just about capturing "the perfect moment" in some disembodied, automatic sense. My unique mind, after all, is what has brought me to this moment of possibility. It has motivated my feet to the place where I stand and directed my vision towards light and color and form. It raises my arm to my eye in possibility, but most of all it gives that image concept, frequently imbued with emotion. My mind makes my heart beat faster and brings a tear to my focusing eye when I realize what a gift it all is and my shutter pulses in response.
On a good day it's a lie that tells the truth, and on the other days it's just the way I experience the world.
bilbao, 2011
In 1999 my friend Ed visited Bilbao to see the Museo Bilbao Guggenheim designed by Frank Gehry. Museum mastermind Thomas Kerns humbly declared the museum to be “the greatest building of the 20th century,” but Ed referred to his first visit to the museum as a “Pilgrimage” with a capital “P." I had visited significant sacred spaces before, and many since, but Ed’s reframing of this “secular” space as sacred really changed something for me. The spiritual in human culture was much broader than what religion said or did. The spiritual was incarnate in the mere acts and creations of humans reflecting our intrinsic divinity. In our spaces and food, our collections and creations, even what we value and where we shop, was the sacred. The things that make our mark, maybe even survive us, these are our Temples of Culture.
chicago, 2019 - pigment print
At 3:06a on Sunday morning my entire body jolted me awake. It felt like my heart was literally going to leap out of my chest. I summoned my Yogi breath and took three deep breaths and got my nervous system under control long enough to realize that these were really intense diaphragmatic contractions. My pacemaker, which had recently been replaced, was a new fancier model with lots of options and the option that it had been tuned for apparently wasn't the right one. The little bit of charge that goes through to help my heart beat in synchrony was hitting a neuromuscular junction in my diaphragm nearby and every time I took a deep breath my whole diaphragm would suddenly contract in synchrony with my heart. Until you've experienced this you have no idea how disconcerting it is. This went on for most of the night and for the better part of the next two days until I was able to get into the device clinic and have the program changed. As the title suggests these photos are what you see when you are trying to keep your heart and mind from jumping out of your chest.
A hand at your back, what’s a thousand years - Toned Pigment Print on Japanese Asuka Paper
A couple of decades ago I was a sculptor, making ideas out of mixed media - objects bought by people and put in their homes, yards or places of business and shown in galleries and museums. I loved making things and thinking about ideas behind them, but I rather hated the solitary life of the artist, stuck in the studio by myself for countless hours every week. I much preferred to be where the art was meant to live. Museums and galleries were ok, but I preferred parks, or living rooms, or coffee shops where the art was just hanging out watching the people scamper about their everyday lives, where it became animated as people looked and talked and preferably touched. Oh how I crave standing or sitting in such a place right now, surrounded by people and art living together.
Old sacred objects are a particular interest these days. Ultimately they are just made of stuff like us, but we imbue them with such significance, putting them in special places and even treating them like they were idols, much like we do of our own minds. What if they were looking back? We stare at them for a moment, but they stare back at us with an unwavering, omniscient gaze, looking right through our transience? What would they say of our moment in time compared to their thousands of years of witness?
Take the No. 9, 14 - 3 Plate Pigment Print on Handmade Gampi
In March of 2001, my best friend and I went to Manhattan to celebrate our birthdays. I'd been going to NYC a few times a year for the past decade to visit galleries while I was working as an artist and I knew the city and subways well. But I'd moved on from that phase of my life and was now in graduate school, living in Los Angeles. Now going to New York was about academic conferences and binging on theater and jazz, and most of all staying with my beloved 75 year old truth teller Sonya, on the upper west side.
One night after a play near Columbus Circle we took the subway to Soho for a nightcap. Coming up from the No. 9 station on Houston I quickly decided which way to walk when we hit the street. We walked about a block when a woman stopped us and asked which way to the World Trade Center. I confidently told her to turn around, and in a block she could “Take the No. 9,” which ended at the World Trade Center. She smiled, thanked me, and was gone. A satisfied look on my face, we kept walking. A couple blocks later there was a gap in the buildings and I saw the Twin Towers clear in the night sky. Suddenly I realized we were walking the wrong way. We shared a knowing look, turned around, and were quiet for the rest of the night as we sipped martinis and listened to jazz.
Off and on in my life I’ve struggled with anxiety. In spite of the amazing weather in LA near the beach I found it incredibly difficult to get out of bed in the morning. Everything was okay if I just started doing something, but it would be many years before I learned the power of Vinyasa, linking breath to movement, and then the dread of the start would keep me paralyzed sometimes for hours. My mentor said "do less and care less," my therapist chuckled at the suggestion, but I was learning how to lead in a new world, and it was hard.
The day after being lost in Soho I flew back to Los Angeles and I called my muse Marlene and asked if she could do a shoot later that afternoon when I got back from NYC. We spent three hours in her loft as she threw herself out of bed over and over again from stillness to motion, with no idea where she would end up. I watched with my camera and flash trying to understand her courage, to feel it more than just on film or sensor.
Rehearsal and catharsis.
And then six months later they were gone: The Twin Towers, The No. 9, and of course our victory in surviving the cold war. When Dylan sung “With God on Our Side” the children of the cold war all knew to whom he was referring, and somehow the final war never came and we were alive. But we didn’t know, and we didn’t survive.
I heard when my mother-in-law called to see whether we were alright living just 5 miles from LAX. Groggy and not really understanding I threw myself out of bed to get my oil changed. The TV in the dealer's showroom, that surreal video. Peaceful floating and fire. I called my wife to tell her what I had seen. The Towers and the No. 9 were gone. What of Sonya, busy signal. Was the woman that night on Houston also gone? Had she taken the No. 9? Had she found what she was looking for?
I hadn't even looked at the photos of Marlene after we shot, the watching was what I needed in the moment, but now I needed more. Bush started a war while I spent nights collaging: collecting and arranging moments to make meaning of anything, looking for a woman who needed directions, wondering what I would say if she found me. In the confusion of calamity Take the No. 9 was born.
