Memory

I am looking at the picture, which I have in front of me. It is a small one, an oval one. Old brass metal frames the woman in the picture gazing kindly out at me. In my early 20’s I took the snapshot of my mother on the beach in Nice, France on a sunny spring day. Nice still retained its quiddity in those days. Perhaps it was already late afternoon.

The warm Mediterranean landscape. The famous Promenade, with some afternoon strollers. The stony beach, empty. My mother is sitting on a rock islet, looking straight at me, smiling into the camera. Behind the brow were happy thoughts, thoughts that had to do with our trip. Whatever went on inside her head had to do with the way she looked, her sun-kissed skin and the faint freckles on her forehead and nose and the cool, sad blue eyes, hiding behind a big pair of sunglasses. Her left arm is on her chin, her light brown hair curled back toward her ears, cut short, not too short, because it was the style. The wind just blew a twist of hair across her face. Her reflection makes me think, makes me count. How old would she be? How would she look? Would she still be elegant, still able to go to the coiffeur each week?

Passion

  

Photography was always my passion. When I was six years old, I got an old camera from my grandfather and from that point on, I have been taking pictures. When I opened the box, either at Christmas or Easter, the time when kids get presents, I was disappointed. I was looking to get a fancy one, perhaps a Nikon with a removeable motor, one that when I put my finger on the shutter it would just take pictures automatically, one after another, until I took my finger off again. I just loved the noise it made ssssssssssss. I have no clue where I saw such a camera, but it stuck with me. Perhaps I saw it in an espionage movie. Mother gave me one of her gazes, meaning: give your grandfather a kiss and say thank you. No other words! But anyway, I started capturing pictures of the inner circle of my family. I lined them up,

the grandparents in the back,                                the parents in the front,
         the parents in the back,                       the grandparents in the front.

I put them in a circle, I made them kiss, took pictures of events, Christmas and Easter. At this time I could only get black-and-white rolls of film. A few years later I saved some of my allowance and bought color film for special occasions. As a teenager I got tired of capturing the inner circle of the family, grandparents and parents, so I moved on to the neighbor’s kid whose family occupied the house next door. The kid, a nine year old girl, had a brother too, but he was off with his new friends. I had visions of capturing her coming of age on film. In a magazine, I read of a photographer who took pictures of her children, but I am unable to recollect her name. An American photographer, Sally Mann, best known for her large black-and-white photographs of her young children came out with a book consisting of 65 photographs of her three children, all under the age of ten.








The pictures were taken at the family’s remote summer cabin along the river where the children played and swam in the nude. It was an idyllic place for kids, and I think a natural way to run around nude. I had exactly the same idea. I captured a typical childhood theme of my neighbor’s girl, from dressing up, napping, playing in the garden. I tried to capture and explore the child’s insecurity and loneliness; however, I was afraid to explore her sexuality. I did not want to ask her to undress for me and there was never an opportunity like the situations from Mann’s work. Mann’s book, however, created an intense controversy, child pornography was even mentioned. Looking through her pictures, I think they are outstanding, beautifully made. I studied the images when her book was out in the stores. The opportunity was at her doorstep and she had and has a special passion to capture the children in a way I think nobody could repeat. The perspective, the balance, the use of focus and depth of field, the proportion, the shadows, and the highlights are all arranged to lead into the perfect perception of art. There is the fine line when a photographer has to decide when the image will create pornography. Mann herself “considered these photographs to be natural through the eye of a mother”.

Art

Art is a risky deal. Wars happen; economies fail; and we spend so much energy trying to control what’s around us. Art is part of that control. We furnish our lives and homes with beautiful things to create a cushion of support and stability. Art is the illusion of a cohesive past, the promise of an unclouded future. Art is aesthetically pleasing; art is a meaningful arrangement of colors, shapes, values, textures, and spaces. It expresses the forms of human activity whose chief character is determined by such arrangements as painting, sculpture, drawings, and pleasure.

Consequently, art plays many roles in our civilization and involves the encouragement of free self-expression. Expression of creative skill and imagination from humans, especially through a visual medium, explores varieties of visual delights that bring out instinctive pleasure in which we can enjoy the everyday experience. Culture is the condition of refinement. It develops in specific stages or periods during the evolution of a civilization. Arts cultivate the soul and culture of human intellectual achievement through collective cultural understanding. Photography developed from the earliest art form, the European cave drawings. Perhaps I am going far back in time but it is the idea to take pictures that represent life as it is. Photography is a modern version of painting. It is an expression which lays in my inner-self, deep inside me. I have struggled with my buried self, dug deep and lifted it out leading/yielding to my art. These emotions are the fuel that drive my photography. Without this drive I am uncertain that I will create anything of substance. The worst thing that could happen to a photographer is being discouraged. There are so many great works all around me; I have to admit, that sometimes I think I will never come close to producing such great pictures.


However, there are days when I tell myself not to cast sidelong glances and compare myself to these great masters. The satisfaction lies in the effort and to reveal great images after hours or sometimes even days of work will lead to sweet rewards.We are living with more art than we can think we do. Most walls of homes are decorated with paintings, sculptures, and photographs. We buy them, because we find them beautiful and meaningful.


We look around and take pleasure from all the artworks and modern creations. Our search for meaning through our devotion for decoration and aesthetic pleasures is only another part of our paradoxical nature that simultaneously construct culture while being composed by culture. The sensory world that the individual creates and inhabits impacts the larger collective culture.

Fashon photography

There are a great number of gifted masters of photography. I have the feeling that there are more photographers at work now than at any time in recent decades. As I look through different fashion magazines, like Vogue, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar, where the names are highlighted and mentioned. Who do I see? Annie Leibovitz, Bruce Webber, Meisel Steven, Mario Testino, Anton Corbijn, and Peter Lindbergh, just to name a few. Each contemporary photographer has his own style, theme, voice, and each one found his niche in the world of fashion photography.



One of my all time favorite fashion photographers is Richard Avedon. He died in the year 2000. An exhibition was organized in his honor by the International Center of Photography with the cooperation of The Richard Avedon Foundation. I must say, his was some of the most exciting and challenging recent work in photography. This project critically examined fashion and its relationship to art and other cultural and social phenomena. Through the lens of fashion – in its broadest conception – I saw the proliferation of photo work exploring the uses of style, images, and personal presentation. The exhibition was devoted to his entire career. It included 175 photographs, including his early work which was all in black-and-white.









He is the most significant and influential photographer who has made fashion one of his subjects. Going through the exhibition rooms, observing and taking his images in slowly, was a photographer’s delight for me to explore such great art. He created images with a youthful, spirited, and distinct style. If I should critique any of his pictures, better to say devour his pictures, each one looked alive, airy, and easy to produce, as if he used a point-and-shoot camera. For sure, this was not the fall, it took more than a snapshot. He took models out of the studio and photographed them in motion to exhilarating effect.









During the first decade of the 20th century, Italian artists launched an art movement called Futurism. Balla Giacomo created a painting that would celebrate motion, speed, and energy. Perhaps Richard Avedon was inspired by these paintings and took it to the next level. Working in France, he evoked a vision of Paris around his couture collections and with his imaginative outdoor images he created the most glamorous pictures. Constantly, he was pushing his boundaries of what was acceptable in fashion photography. He was inventive and creative and reflected the mood of the moment through his work. His most memorable and exciting images are the ones of the models in motion. One practical image stayed with me; a young couple on roller-skates, she is holding his left arm with her hands, looking into his eyes, revealingly as they glide with a kind of easy motion across Place de al Concorde. A photographer always hopes to catch this “one moment” on film, but Avedon has more than just one moment.

Shadows

I signed up for more classes at the School of Visual Art which helped me study and focus on certain methods and concentrate on the outlines of things like a play of light and shadow. Creating deep shadows, for instance, across half of an image and capturing reflected light as it bounces off on the opposite side of the shadow; one must see details in the shadows and highlighted area. I allowed the shadows to dominate as a highly effective and dramatic device. In order to establish this art, I used a Spot meter and measured the density of each side. A simple mathematical formula would give me the right F-stop for my camera. It was important to expose film correctly, and control the amount of light that enters the camera, because otherwise I would have a hell of a time printing the pictures. I was busy trying to catch images of the dancers, but it was very difficult; the stage was not lit up enough, therefore, I created a kind of chiaroscuro effect, with limited highlights and deep shadows, just enough to see details in the finished picture.

 As a photographer, I enjoy working with shadows in pictures, which integrate certain textural and compositional elements. Including shadows in black-and-white photographs adds interest and strength. Some artistic progress was evident in my images. However, there was a lot more to study and to observe when I went out with Marbeth.










The Italian painter, Caravaggio used this dramatic effect in his paintings in the 17 century. Chiaroscuro technique, Italian for light/dark, was developed by Italian artists of the 15th century during the Renaissance. Caravaggio and Vermeer, who also used dull and gauzy light, are my favorite painters and I tried to copy their technique and images to create similar black-and-white pictures as these two gifted masters produced.







The paintings of many great masters hang in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, including Caravaggio’s and Vermeer’s.  The museum influenced my vision and broadened my outlook artistically and socially. It provided to me a context in which I was exposed to radical new ideas, in sculptures, and in art in general. I tried to be inventive and find new ideas. I am a meticulous and exacting artist, and my mentor said I do have an instinctive sense of proportion and design.

Pentax

As a kid I rejected all the detailed paintings; I didn’t have the passion and talent to sit at an easel. The slow production of the painting drove me crazy; therefore, the camera was and is my vehicle to contentment. I have a Pentax 35 mm with different lenses to work with. I was and I am still happy with it and it perform its purpose, taking pictures. I was roaming New York City like a lion roams the jungle looking for prey. I felt free; it was just my kind of thing to do. I enjoyed doing street photography. I disliked flash or any other artificial lighting. As I mentioned before, I tried to catch shadows, if possible deep shadows, and highlights as they occur in New York City’s streets.


I can’t explain exactly what I liked, other than that I photographed to find out what something would look like photographed. It was and still is in me, there was a high, as if I had taken opium; or was a gambler in a casino, waiting for his cards to turn. Looking for the right moment always kept me on the edge, to be ready in a second. When the opportunity was in front of me and my camera, my blood was sizzling, like the sizzling of an espresso machine, my heart was pounding and it felt like it jumped up my throat. I forgot everything that was going on around me; I just concentrated on the object in front of me. Thoughts raced through my mind, what F-stop? What depth of focus do I need? Sometimes, I just picked up my camera and took the pictures, using every F-stop possible and just hoped I would get one image. Looking and searching for the right image is always a challenge. I hoped it would be the right moment, the right moment every time I clicked the shutter button. Still, it is a good idea to prepare for the moment. Being on the street, it helped to measure with the Spot meter the shadow and highlight on house walls, or direct on the walkway, or on cars, wherever I could see the contrast. I felt I was in control of my camera, and I knew how to get a perfect image (almost perfect) with my Pentax camera. Today, I feel that a new digital camera will control me, this small thing of machinery with megapixel, this drives me mad.


Later on, I got a Nikon 35 mm with a removeable motor. It turned out that it was not as practical as I imagined. It was good use for fashion shows, but I didn’t go to many because I refused to be in a crowd of hungry photographers who pushed with their left elbow to be in the center row. I enjoyed taking pictures in the studio, but not as much as I did on the street. In the studio I needed artificial light, a strobe, and a flashlight and perhaps a back drop. To change the mood of the image, I would move the light anywhere. For instance, putting a direct light on the floor in front of the model I could get a perfect image such as in one of  Alfred Hitchcock's movies.

Portrait

I took some awesome images of friends and family members, in fact I liked to go into the street and ask a random person to model. Yet, I remember I did have a great studio shoot courtesy of the father of a friend. He was in his 90s, a thin gentleman who was sitting in his favorite plush-covered, dark maroon armchair. He was wearing his white, but not so white anymore having been repeatedly washed over the years until the color morphed from white to grey, T-shirt under his favorite bathrobe with the collar. The chair was as old as he was, with holes and spots and worn down armrests; his old hands, with swollen veins and brown-spotted skin, clasped around them. Absentmindedly he looked straight into the camera, his eyes red, watery, and sad after a long life with successes and disappointments. Looking at his picture stimulates my memory. He worked in the theatre industry in public relations. I met him frequently for lunch in one of his favorite delis in New York and enjoyed his stories he presented to me in his high spirit. He came to life like a flower getting tickled by the spring sun.