Presences

After a week in which I spent a great deal of time thinking, it was something of a relief this afternoon, to pack up my camera gear and drive downtown a simply wander around with no particular time frame and no particular destination, just putting one foot in front of another and taking the pictures that presented themselves.

Now that I've walked myself out I'm having thoughts again, a different kind of thoughts (second thoughts?), this time about the pictures themselves and some of the implicit logic of the photo-making process. I don't have sophisticated tastes in artwork, but I've developed a few favorites over time. One of first modern painters with whom I felt some sort of tentative, hard-to-articulate affinity was Charles Sheeler. I was taken by his sense of composition, the way he would take something quite literal and present it as a kind of geometrical abstraction. Many of his pictures are in essence a kind colorscape, as opposed to a traditional landscape, and the subject matter is often, as in "Upper Deck," the painting at left, is often technological rather than natural. He seems to be documenting and in some sense celebrating the constructions of mankind.

Similarly, I admire the geometrical precision and balance of many of Edward Hopper's paintings, which seem to be aiming for that middle zone between representation and abstraction. From there it is not too great a step to the more purely abstract paintings of Clifford Styll, Mark Rothko, and Richard Diebenkorn, all of whom reside in a corridor in the back of my mind as presiding deities when I'm out with my camera. I'm not really consciously patterning my photographs after them, but they have colored the way I see things through the viewfinder.


Here, for example, is a picture I took at Ward Center today. While the subject matter is literal enough, a corner of the walkway on the second floor of Ward Warehouse, I saw it through the lens as a more or less as a study in form and color. Sometimes these pictures don't work out, but this one has a kind of drama that I like.

Similarly, if less obviously, is this picture I took a few minutes later, looking straight down from walkway at a little girl who was one of several children playing in the little ampitheater area they have there. Here Rothko was explicitly in my mind (those five, tonally related vertical stripes) as I framed the picture, but I was taken with the little girl and the implied geometry: she was looking sideways over toward her father and sister at the same time that I was looking straight down at her. I took several other pictures of the father and his two little girls, whose pure and un-self-conscious happiness resonated especially strongly for me after the events of the week.

I went back downstairs and was walking along when my eye was caught by a lime green t-shirt in the window of an old Ford Pinto. I was first interested in the picture as a kind of study of color and form within the horizontal rectangle, and then as I kept looking back to it I was, and still am, each time I look at it, arrested by the suggestion of a bodily presence which is actually a bodily absence.

(As I was writing this, I found myself thinking of William Stafford's poem "At Our House":

Home late, one lamp turned low,

crumpled pillow on the couch,

wet dishes in the sink (late snack),

in every child's room the checked,

slow, sure breath--

Suddenly in this doorway where I stand

in this house I see this place again,

this time the night as quiet, the house

as well secured, all breath but mine borne

gently on the air--

And where I stand, no one.

Presences. Absences. What it means to be present in the midst of absences.)

Walking a little further, I went into a kitchen-goods store, thinking to buy a wine-bottle opener as a gift for a friend of mine. They did not have the kind of opener I had in mind, but the place was an amazingly stimulating visual environment, and I walked around the store quite happily for several minutes taking pictures until I happened to look up and see the store owner giving me stink-eye.


I ignored him, but the next thing I knew a young woman began following me around. Then she came over to me and told me very apologetically that "There's a rule against taking pictures in the store." Really? A rule? And is that a rule that is written down somewhere, or what? "Well, I'm sorry, but the owner doesn't like you to be taking pictures in the store." Ah. A different matter entirely, to be sure. I told her I'd be happy to refrain from taking pictures in the store—and that the owner could rest easy, for I would not be back in a hurry—and took my leave. (Alas. I wonder what the owner was afraid of.)




I continued down toward Ward Center, the other half of the Ward Shopping Complex, and along the way came upon what will serve as the bookend for this reflection: another little study in line and color.




As I said at the start, I guess I needed this time to wander, and I guess that even in my non-thinking mode my thoughts were, inevitably, very much with me, and more or less insinuating themselves into what I was seeing.

There are many ways of thinking about photographs. I'd like to think of the photographs I've been taking lately as kind of testimony to, and celebration of, the small beauties that surround us everywhere, that we, that I, am so often likely to overlook. The title of the book from which the William Stafford poem is taken is "The Darkness Around Us is Deep." Photography is, in essence, all about the light. In the Geoff Dyer book I wrote about earlier, he quotes Dorothea Lange to the effect that "the camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera" (9). I'm down with that.

Art Credits:

Upper Deck: http://www.santarosa.edu/~jwatrous/art-history/sheeler-deck-big.jpg
Chop Suey: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hopper/interior/