May 2009
It has been a while. Regarding Pecha Kucha Night…
The point was to start conversation––which is also the point of PK. I did not want to present new work, because, as the text makes clear, there isn’t any, at least none that I want to share at this point.
The slides do relate to the text, but less and less obviously as the I get into the presentation. I discarded the idea of making the slides easy to follow. I was just having fun with some of Delany’s ideas.
And to give you an idea of how disorienting he can be: I found a typo somewhere in book 3 or 4. But then I wasn’t sure. It could be a typo, but maybe it is not. And it doesn’t matter––at all.
The Sontag quote repeats because it takes a full minute to read it, and it is the most important part of the 6:40. When you understand it, then you understand my creative issues.
January 2009
As I write this statement, I consider that you will be reading it on my website. I think a website should change from time to time. At least mine should…it is not an archive, a closet full of my work. Even if it were, I do clean out my closets from time to time.
January 2009
Right now this site is designed for submissions to juried exhibitions. It shows “a coherent body of work”, although I hope that you will see the hints of a larger body of work.
As of now, all the work that you see is digital capture. I am working on a very large project that includes digital composites, images composed of many separate images, not all of them captured with a camera. That project is about memory, what we remember and how we are remembered.
The point of the DETAILS show was to take some of the full-sized images that are merely “details” in the larger project and give them a life of their own. The “story” of DETAILS is that as we are born, we begin to die, and the progress from the beginning to the end is beautiful.
The “Botanicals” (except for Ella’s Lotuses), “Shoes” and “Significant Objects” are not traditional photographs. I am using a flatbed scanner for the ”capture”, setting the actual objects––shoes, roses, orchids, hats––directly onto the glass and taking them into Photoshop for development.
I like the instant gratification of using scanners. It is a little disconcerting to work upside-down and backwards, except that it is like using a view camera. And I love the light. I had been working with a single light-source in my studio, testing some lenses on flowers, pretending to be a Dutch flower painter. It was a slow day. I was entranced by the light fall-off, and also by the way light wraps around.
A scanner is designed to reproduce documents, so the light falls off dramatically as soon as it passes through the plane of the glass. You can see the effect most clearly in “Bavardage” and the “Deconstructed Roses”, where the edges and “noses” of many of the blossoms are touching the glass and the rest of the flower is no more than an inch away from the glass.
All the images from DETAILS are c-prints on metallic paper.
If you want to risk your scanner, try it yourself. Taking the picture is almost easy; the rest is not.