Onward From The Fair

Foot Bridge White Mountains — Foot Bridge in White Mountains

Well. It sure has been a long time since an entry. A wild long time. Some big things happening have kept me from posting here, but I’ve just added six new photos to the site on my New Photos Page. These new ones are some of the many pieces I worked up in the frenzy of printing for the fair. Something about the possibility of having an audience to see real prints sends me into a frenzy of creativity, and I always want to make new prints when my focused task should be to make prints I already know are good. The more focused I am on something I’m supposed to do, the more I want to do something else, like work on new photos or old files newly rediscovered. I ended up making a much greater diversity of work than I was able to show in my 10 x 10 booth — wall space and two flip bins. I’ve been working through the backlog of that frenzy ever since. I have a lot of prints to put away, or mount, or frame. They are on shelves in my work space, and I need that space. The one above is not from the pre fair frenzy though, but from the following bit of context:

These days I’m working up about 300 prints for a hotel in North Conway, New Hampshire. There will be about a hundred and fifty 19 x 19″ prints framed in 30 inch frames, and the same number in 11 x 11 frames. I’m doing the framing as well! The photo above is one of the 19 x 19 prints, and I’m quite pleased with it. Most of the images are from older exposures, but this one is from a trip to the White Mountains right after the Sunapee fair, a decompression trip. It is exposed on my

For this project I’ve been upgrading some of my production infrastructure to good effect. I’ve added an Epson P7000 printer in order to be able to make big prints without out-sourcing those bigger than I used to be able to print myself (with a limit of 17 inches for maximum width before). I’ve also added a wall mounted glass cutter, which also can cut board to size (not bevels), so my framing just go a lot quicker and less frustrating, especially as regards cutting glass.

The latter device is an interesting intersection with denial. I don’t fully understand why I didn’t allow myself to get it before. I’ve wasted the cost of the device in broken glass in the past few years, not to mention the time and tears, setting up and then breaking a large sheet of expensive Tru Vue glass. I don’t fully understand, which is the nature of denial, but I guess I always thought I was getting better at cutting glass. This time it would work out. Last time it sort of worked out, right? I had to cut right through that denial nonsense about the glass cutting though. Breaking a lot of expensive glass would destroy me in a job this size.

More soon! I’ll take a break from framing and printing to write some more.

Sunapee Fair in Full Swing

John Lehet's Sunapee booth — My booth, 111 in Tent 1

I was wrong last week: I am not in booth 10, but booth 111!

I’ve been getting good response. I guess my best complement, not meant as such, was when a guy asked me what I do to make my images different from anything he’s ever seen before. Considering I’m showing a broad range of my work and representing all years (you can’t see in this photo, but I have a very big print in the back from a scan of 1981 4 x 5 sheet film and printed on my brand new Epson p7000 huge honking printer.) I’ve been finding that the big prints are getting a lot of the most serious attention.

The best thing, best thing of all has been the kindness of friends and strangers. My friends and family have been supportive in ways that melt me, and my fellow artists and crafts-people have also been kind to a somewhat surprising degree.

Come visit me at the fair!

Coming up! Sunapee Craft Fair!

I’ll be in booth 10 in tent 1 from August 7 through 11. Please come say hi!

The above image is one of many new ones that I’ll have with me as prints, an image I’ve never had hanging before. It’s hard to keep track of all the images I’ve got framed and matted, but I’ve been busy putting stuff together. My problem/virtue is that in the context of preparing for something like this I get very inspired to work on more images. I don’t know why this happens — I guess there is a space for the new visions to pour into. No show, and it seems that space isn’t there.

I’ve also been distracted by getting up to speed on my new Epson P7000. A client wants quite a few large prints, so it was worth getting the behemoth that can handle them. It should be a slight improvement in some ways in my future prints, though I’ll keep my old printer for as long as it runs. I’m finding that some papers and tones on some papers look a bit different on the new ink set, some better possibilities but also sometimes hard to hit the same notes with the same files using manufacturer’s profiles. At least some of the Canson profiles are a little different. Paper handling is certainly a big difference. I’ve got some 24″ wide rolls here and more on the way for my usual paper stock, so I’ll be making some bigger prints.

As usual, time is the big constraint in this life. It’s funny, somehow we feel there is not enough time. But we swim in an infinite ocean of time. It’s like a fish in the ocean saying there isn’t enough water. You know the feeling of not enough. I hope you also know the feeling of infinite space. I’m trying to remember to touch in with it.

Weeds

Jewelweed, Monarda, Dew — Jewelweed, Mondarda, Dew

I’ve been fascinated by weeds for a long time, as a gardener, as a landowner, as a meditator. Weeds pop up with such exuberance, live in spite of all odds with strength and fortitude. We might consider them “bad,” but that is just a matter of perspective. They are often very beautiful in their way, and have virtue whether growing or as compost.

The photo above features the mid summer phase of Jewelweed, also known as “touch me not” because of it’s exploding seed pods. I remember seeing it at my grandmother’s farm as a child; back then it was both beautiful to me and providential, as it grew along the shady creeks I used to like to explore while looking for salamanders and frogs. In the right kind of ground and a bit of shade, it grows like mad. It is extremely beautiful in all phases of its life, with leaves that collect dew in an interesting way, luminous semi-transparent stems, and orange flowers with different phases from bud to seed. I wonder if I would plant it on purpose if it didn’t come up on its own. Of course it is a weed, we must pull most of it, even if we’ll never get it all. And then in the background of this photo the clear red in the background is Monarda, Bee Balm, which we consider a garden plant and not technically a weed. You can buy Bee Balm at the garden center. But it is as weedy as the jewelweed. They both create a beautiful display with only the effort of keeping them somewhat contained and not displacing more fragile forms of life.

As a gardener, of course, I fight weeds, but it is co-existence more than a battle I win. I will never eradicate all weeds. I only have so much time, strength, and stamina to cut and pull them. So there are always weeds in my garden. And as a photographer, sometimes I consider them to be a blessing as well as a curse. They can be beautiful in their way. I have also come to bad places by indulging weeds for too long, letting them slide because they have beauty. My garden now is plagued with years worth of seeds from White Campion and Johnny Jump Ups, plants I considered to be harmless and beautiful. I did not fight them much for some years, so they have put down so many seeds and are really hard to eradicate. I now I consider them a higher priority ongoing problem.

As a long term meditator I also have dealt with the idea of “mind weeds.” I remember reading a passage from Suzuki Roshi a long time ago, long before I really knew what he was talking about. If you work with an awareness practice directly with mind for a while, it is clear though. We want some kind of purity of mind, but what we encounter is instead our actual mind, often more like a monkey’s mind than any ideal one might start out with. The Suzuki Roshi quote comes from a talk in 1965: “We say ‘pulling out the weed’. We make it nourishment of the plant. We pull the weed and bury the weed near the plant to make it nourishment of the plant. So even though you have some difficulty in your practice….even though you have some waves while you are sitting, those weeds itself will help you. So we should not be bothered by the weeds you have in your mind. We should be rather grateful to the weeds you have in your mind because eventually will enrich your practice.” A version of this came up later, from Chogyam Trungpa, just as provocative; at the time I first heard it, I also didn’t know exactly what the meaning was behind his pithy words: “No neurosis, no enlightenment.” Really he is saying something a lot like his friend Suzuki Roshi. Our actual life, our actual experience is the path. There is no other path.

The idea in working with mind, as in a garden, as in all of our life — where unwanted circumstances always arise with the vigor of weeds — we take this all as the path itself. There is no other life than this imperfect life, no other garden than this one with weeds.

The Continuing Evolution of Printing and Seeing

This is one of the oldest digital images on my site, and I’ve finally developed my eye and abilities to print it in a way that pleases me very much. When I look back at the time after I made this exposure, over a dozen years ago, this digital file serves as a sort of signpost, stationary through moving time and change. It’s the same image, but everything has changed, including how the image manifests on paper.

At the time I opened the shutter, seasick on a boat, to let some Hawaiian misty light onto that relatively crude DSLR sensor, I was a different photographer and a very different printer. I probably see everything differently from that time — my vision has developed overall along with my mind and life and practices. But my printing has developed quite a lot; I hesitate to say it has changed the most of all in my photography of all the ways I see.

When I was new at digital printing I got a high-ish end Epson pro grade printer and some fine art paper. I was looking for sharpness. I did not yet have good control of color, of how to get the color in my mind and on the screen to show up on the paper. Besides the technical details of evolving a color managed workflow, I think it had to do with fear. I was wasting expensive paper and ink, and rarely getting it right, so I lacked courage to just assert my vision. It’s a little hard to explain, but if you look at Van Gogh’s brush strokes up close in a museum, they are very brave. I had some courage before that in the darkroom, but probably not as much as I have now. Early ink-jet printing I had very little courage.

Early in my photography I had an epiphany about the malleability of photography as a medium. I was in college, working a very little bit in the college pottery in stolen moments and the darkroom in other stolen moments, and also as extra curricular reading trying to understand a book about the Zone System for black and white photography. Maybe the book wasn’t so good. Partly, as a Dartmouth student, it was hard to find bandwidth in stolen moments like that. Then one night I had a dream where the negative was conflated with the pottery clay — it was malleable like that, could be bent and worked. It was like I could smush the tones around with my fingers. Darkroom photography is far less tangibly squishy than digital photography is — you have to work methodically for any departures from defaults. I think that dream changed everything. Sometimes that happens in my photography — I’l have a dream about something strange that is in the realm of photography, and then I see differently. I still have a back-burner project I’m working on based on a dream with yellows and form and texture a few years ago.

A couple of years later from that struggle with the zone system I did a workshop with Ansel Adam’s then-assistant, John Sexton, where we got to learn Ansel’s technique and see prints of his develop from straight print all the way through final print as he changed paper, chemistry, dodging, and burning. So I worked that way in the darkroom after that more than I had before, the Zone System very clear — with more courage in my brush strokes as it were.

So anyway, over a decade later, I’m revisiting this print above with amazing results. I actually had a print I had made over a decade ago of this image in my tiny office, flopping around clipped to a 16 x 20 mat board, in the way. It wasn’t on the wall, one of those things I just really should put away — it was in the way. But I think I kept it out, maybe, so it could work on me, provoke my dissatisfaction so I could evolve. I was not completely satisfied with it. I liked it, but… but… but…

I guess in some way I had been pulling back the string of a bow. Tension. I was developing my technique and vision. So a couple of weeks ago I just let the arrow fly from that bow and re-imagined the way this gets printed. I don’t know if I kept the old file or remember exactly what I changed in the color and tones, but I know in the printing I moved from a semi-gloss paper, probably the baryta paper I often favor for some prints, to an etching paper surface. Something about the way this Canson Etching paper takes these colors and renders these tones and details. Wow.

Direct Experience, Not Conceptual

Flowering Trees, Tulips, and White Hat, 2019

I’ve just made some spectacular prints of this new photo on Canson Aquarelle Watercolor paper. The 15 x 20 print is especially drop-dead gorgeous, but they all are good. Purchase here.

One commonality between my practice of photography and practice/experience of Buddhist meditation is a practice and aspiration to experience directly and non-conceptually. This applies to perceptions, emotional experience, logical process, physical sensation. It’s a trick that will take a lifetime. I won’t go into the Buddhist philosophy and practice behind this, assuming you are on the site for photography. And there are better Buddhist teachers than me.

So in photography, a conceptual approach might be fine. Many photographers have succeeded with a conceptual basis for their approach. In my opinion, quite often these often fail. There are photos in major modern photography galleries of, say, a tree with cheese doodles stuck around the trunk with toothpicks. Then in the blurb it will say the artist is exploring the post-industrial relationship to nature, or something like that. It doesn’t work for me, but then they are in those galleries and I am not, and probably won’t be.

I find though that as I work in any situation different levels of conceptual approach, in one way or another, will creep in. I think ideally working with a camera might be like a master jazz musician improvising on an instrument, that kind of transparency, being able to instantly hit the notes without thinking about it. The musician might think, “what if I went into that dark key right here?” — and that is a kind of conceptualizing that works in the service of the playing. I will think, “What if I tried that old Olympus 90 at a wide aperture?” — and I know what kind of a “key” I will be playing in then. You’ve got to think, think on your feet. Just don’t over-think and make it a formula or purely a concept.

So in the case of the photo above, I had gotten to some extent into the conceptual weeds. I was working with this composition: the branch of the flowering tree in the foreground with a shallow depth of field, the tulips and large background flowering tree beyond the focal plane. Trouble is that people kept coming into the composition, sometimes looking good with umbrellas, sometimes with that clunky tourist vibe. I was usually waiting for them to pass out of whatever frame I had. I had come to be pretty boxed in by the concept of what I thought I wanted to be working with. But then this woman popped into my viewfinder — the orange shirt echoing the tulips, looking up, the round hat perfect. I wish I had been able to work more quickly and fluidly with her there. I did what I did, and I was glad to have made this and a few other exposures of that situation.

A Tale of Two Exhibits

Ah, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It has been a busy rough stretch framing up about 37 prints now hanging between two shows: one at the EverSource corporate headquarters in Manchester, NH and one at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, NH.

One of my personal goals for these shows was simply to frame up some good work to have as inventory for the Lake Sunnapee crafts fair next August, so I made them completely different. The Eversource show is something of a “best of” show, some older work that I know is solid. The Dartmouth-Hitchcock show was a chance to stretch out. In fact, since I had a show of similar size there in 2015, I am hanging all new work that hadn’t hung there last time (including the image above).

Hanging a show is hard and exhausting, partly just the work of doing all the framing and matting, but then also at least I personally go through a kind of creative thrash. I’ve got a blank slate, and I can fill it with anything. That makes me start printing up new pieces like crazy. I have a lot of new work, a lot of stuff I didn’t even squeeze into this vast space I was given. I probably squeezed prints tighter, not giving them enough space to breath, because I wanted to hang so much. There are a lot of images waiting in the wings and still getting worked up. So that’s kind of an interesting process, and strangely different from my process when I’m not hanging a show.

Usually, if I’m not hanging a show, I’m excited about making exposures, but then I have a hard time printing up new work. The Photo of the Week is usually meant to put some pressure on myself to come up with something new, and it’s often hard. All of the huge backlog of work I’m excited about suddenly looks not good enough, when it’s time to pull one out for the Photo of the Week. And part of that has to do with the way I pair writing with the images. I will admit that over 70% of the time, I would guess, the photos I post on this blog happen because I’ve got something in my mind to write about, and there may be an image tied to the writing or one that fits somehow.

Hanging all the framed pieces on the empty walls is different: pure visual, no writing. I think that works actually better to grease my creative gears, even if writing may be part of my process as well. After all these years, it’s a mystery.

I’m thinking I will post a web page showing at least the Dartmouth Hitchcock show soon-ish, after I finish my taxes.

Anyway, check out one of these two shows if you can. They both hang for the next couple of months.

New Show, Manchester NH

This is just a short post/announcement, not my usual ramblings.

Yesterday I drove to Manchester NH to the EverSource corporate headquarters to deliver some photos. Ten photos, and actually none of it is newer work. In the first week of April I’ll hang a larger show at Dartmouth Hitchcock hospital in the same gallery I had a show a few years ago. I’m not hanging any of the same work (in the huge space), so this EverSource show had the pieces selected by default, sort of — work that wasn’t in the Hitchcock show. It’s something of a Greatest Hits Oldies show I guess.

This show happened through an invitation from the League of New Hampshire Crafts, who works with EverSource.

The interesting thing about hanging it was that it was professionally hung by Frank Graham, who does this for a living. I’ve never met a professional art-hanger before, so that was interesting. He’s a great guy, full of interesting stories, and also an old time darkroom/view camera user, as I was. Like me, he even used infrared sheet film a lot back in the old days, as well as a polaroid back that produced negatives as well as positives. Lots to talk about! And interesting that he gave the pieces so much space in this big room and nice space.

Anything not sold in this show (I don’t expect to sell very much in this corporate space) will be wall inventory for my booth at the Sunapee Fair, where I’ll have a booth in tent #1 from August 7 – 10. I’m also going to give an artist talk at EverSource, as yet unscheduled. So stay tuned for that.

Boxes Made of Butter

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:

Four Birch Reflections in New Blue Ice

Dewy Garlic Scape and Roses

Orange Foliage Reflections Puddles, Riverbank Rock

Balance: Doing and Not Doing

As a meditator, I’ve spent a lot of hours sitting on my butt and not-doing. Sometimes that is a very hard thing to do (or not do). The value though is to cultivate another side of our experience: being.

Lately I’ve been gearing up and rather overwhelmed by all that I have to actually do. I have a lot of prints to make, a lot of framing and matting, a couple of shows to conceptualize, which are due to hang all to soon.

So now when I sit to meditate I’ve got that itchy got-to-do-some-things feeling that is the bane of every beginning meditator and sometimes well seasoned ones as well, as I’m discovering.

So of course I’m writing this here because it relates to photography. As a photographer, you’ve got to “do.” If you didn’t have a camera with you, no photographs would happen. You’ve got to use the thing, and maybe you are even hauling lenses around, making a special trip, using a tripod — and then all the other work of sorting, evaluating, maybe printing matting and framing if you want those photos to escape the confines of a monitor and spend some time out in the physical world. Lots of work, lots of doing.

But the thing is, there is also some pure being that seems to be involved. In fact as a young man looking at successful photographs of famous photographers in galleries and art books, what struck me often in the most successful ones was a quality of presence. The photographer fully inhabited some kind of mood, situation, manifestation of light, life, humanity, experience, even maybe something like “transcendence.” Qualities like insight and wisdom, wit, brilliance manifested in those photos, and those don’t come just from doing. They are coming from someplace else.

This is why working with a tripod is sometimes helpful. It slows you down. You stand there with your camera ready, you might work with it quite busily, but there is also some extra time and space in the situation. But the time is not so linear when working with a camera, and fully being is not a linear function like a physical commodity. You can fit a lot of that being into the moment before the shutter trips, while it trips, and just after. That moment stretches out and pulls from eternity, pulls some eternity into our experience.

Maybe, through some balance of being and doing, you can pull some eternity out of wherever it lives and get it to bleed out through what you make in with that balance. Whatever it is you can manifest with that balance, doing and being, can manifest qualities beyond pure commodity and show insight, wit, wisdom, compassion, humanity and bring some non linear value and eternity into a ticking clock commodity world.