Well, I’ve more or less lost what I used to think of as my sanity several times before. In this case I won’t talk about that, but all the new images I just put up. I’ve been really pent up in terms of working up new images. I’ve started printing them too. I’m working with the photo black ink on Canson Baryta paper, and next I’ll work on more textured papers with the Matte Black (there is some overhead to switch). So this is the biggest dump onto the site at once I think I’ve ever done. Madness.
I won’t go through them all here, but a few of the “semi-panoramas.” As I mentioned in another recent blog post, these are aggressive crops from (usually) high resolution sensor cameras to achieve a strip crop composition — a different kind of space to work in. So rather than make exposures in an arc to include a vast landscape, this is more like so, a vertical (I still need to work on the website to get these verticals to size gracefully for a screen without scrolling on the real web pages):
And another vertical: a Dicentra flower with a bokeh fiddlehead in the background:
OK, I also added several in more standard format, like this bucket of sunflowers
And this infrared photo of a four way foot bridge in Iceland
The rest of today’s upload are among the images on my New Photos page
Of course, the shape of the photograph is important. I had stopped seeing panoramas and making them so much, partly because I was having trouble framing them so it would work. Using sturdier frames and better framing technique, and cutting my own glass I’m able to frame them in a sturdy way and without going (as) broke doing it. So I’m seeing them and printing them again. Yay! I’ll be hanging 3 panoramas at an upcoming show at the Eversource headquarters in Manchester NH through the spring, and also some different ones in the gallery in hallway 4F at Dartmouth Hitchcock medical center in Lebanon NH through April and May.
Part of what I like about the pano format is the way the eye can move in a different way. There is something a bit more free, call it “vast” feeling about the space, for me.
Compare to the extreme opposite, a square composition (which I also love, and used a lot in the days when I had added the use of a medium format film camera along with my 4 x 5 view camera main-axe. In this composition, as in many squares, the eye moves back in, it’s tighter, it feels more boxed-in. Which is OK. It’s always a box of some sort.
I think somehow the sense of composition within a box has a subtle pointer to outside of the box. It points to a bigger scene, and the boxed-in detail evokes a larger space. Since that larger space is here undefined, the space is purely mind. Our mind is bigger than the box.
When I was in college, I remember talking to a friend about people who were “in the boxes” and “out of the boxes.” (Where are you now, Steph?) In the boxes was our way of referring to purely conceptual, standard, and habitual ways of thinking. There was plenty of in the boxes thinking at Dartmouth when I was a student there. Out of the boxes was more emotional, less habitual, open to new experience and ideas. It was rather rarer. The thing is, you need the boxes in this world. We need concepts, defined ideas, a reality that works in its framework. But ultimately the truth has its home out of the boxes as well.
Since those days I’ve become a meditator and a Buddhist; I’ve lived a lot of my life in conceptual terms, I’ve composed photographs that exist in their limited spaces. But I’ve also rested in what Tibetan Buddhists would call “space,” embraced the view of emptiness. My teacher, Tsoknyi Rinpoche literally talked about the framing I’ve done here. To paraphrase (I’m working from memory of a retreat with him), “You need some boxes. That’s why we give you lots of boxes (concepts). But let’s have the boxes be made of butter, so they melt.” (We need to go beyond concept).
These new (and new-ish) photos are available for sale:
Tonight at the League of New Hampshire Crafts Headquarters Gallery, in Concord New Hampshire, from 5 to 7:30.
One of three of my photos hanging in the show of new juried members into the League of NH Crafts is the one above, which I’ve never framed up before. It’s a 20 inch wide print in a 22 x 28 maple frame.
I’d already posted this as a photo of the week from about a year ago, but I just got some copies of a beautiful book in the mail. It’s a book of “Essays, maps, and calligraphies” by Kazam Ali, called Silver Road, published by Tupelo Press and designed by Ann Aspell. Though my own fine prints of this image have a little more contrast and depth than this book cover as printed, this is printed book is very handsome indeed.
It just happens that I included this photo in the show that is currently hanging at Long River Gallery. I thought I’d try printing it pretty big and matting it, and it did not disappoint me. It’s not framed on the wall, but matted in a 22 x 28 rag mat in a bag in the flip-bin.
