Casing the Promised Land

So, in another post I talked about feeding off of the energy of a place, how it can set the tone. When I'm shooting in a place that feels right to me, every shot has potential. Or it seems as if images were created just for me and I happened to be there at the right time. Also that it doesn't have to be a physical place, either. Most often I rely on mental places - emotions, moods, memories, music.

Sunday night I saw an interview with Bruce Springsteen on 60 Minutes. (Bruce is playing this week at Meadowlands, so there's quite a bit of Bruce buzz flying around NYC at the moment.) I love Bruce Springsteen. I remember once saying that I wanted my photography to have the affect of feeling like you've been punched in the stomach. That's how so many of his songs hit me. Just this shock of recognition and then this emotional circuitry tying his words to my past and my memories to his melodies. It kind of hurts listening to some of his songs.

And it's not that I have the same stories as he does or that my life's trajectory is embodied in the lyrics of his songs - but that the energy of his music gives off reverberations of nostalgia, loneliness, regret, hope and love. And these are themes that I return to over and over and over. Trying to find a way to talk through them.

From the interview transcript...
""It's not just the singing. It's the writing, isn't it, for you?" Pelley asks.

"Of course. Every good writer or filmmaker has something eating at them, right? That they can't quite get off their back . And so your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions," Springsteen says.

His recurring obsession is the life that he knew as a boy, the harsh relationship with his working class dad who didn't think much of a rock and roll son.

"It was a tough, struggling household. People struggled emotionally. People struggled financially to get through the day," Springsteen remembers. "Small town. Small town world which I continue to return to. It's like when I went to write, though, I put my father's clothes on. You know the immersement in that world through my parents and my own experience as a child and the need to tell a story that maybe was partially his. Or maybe a lot his. I just felt drawn to do it." "

When I was in Montana - now quite a few summers back, I was in a beautiful place. Every day, I could take pictures like these.





But they weren't my story or my obsession. And so shooting landscapes such as these seemed too easy. Not to minimize landscape photography - others can and have told stories and obsessions through landscapes. But they were not stimulating or thought-provoking enough to me.

In one of my photography classes that summer, we had to pick a song and illustrate it. It didn't have to be a literal illustration - it was a demonstration of inspiration - where it comes from, how to use it. I only had a few CDs with me that summer (before the ubiquity of ipod...) but I knew without thinking that I would use Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" and try to capture the teenagers I would see drinking beers and cruising Higgins Street on weekend nights. These kids could have been anywhere - it wasn't about Montana.










Energy, misdirected enthusiasms, seemingly lifetime friendships, desire, a feeling of being trapped, a nagging twinge that perhaps they might never come to see that of which they've dreamed.

Concepts (part 2)

ok - so the second thing I want to remember is something Wong Kar Wai said in an interview at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City sometime in 2007 - after My Blueberry Nights came out. I finally saw the movie about a week ago and ... it was perfectly awful, unfortunately. And Christopher Doyle wasn't the cinematographer on it either so the visuals weren't as stunning. So... you know, not everything is going to be a masterpiece.

Anyway, one of the special features on the DVD was this interview.

"SCHWARTZ (interviewer): One thing that runs throughout your
films is this idea of the fleeting nature of time, and it
seems to be tied in with the process of how you
work—always the sense that you can only live in
the present, but you can never really capture it.

WONG: No, no. Actually I’m not... I think what I’m
trying to say is about timing. I think this is very
Oriental thinking. There’s a Chinese poem about
how the blossom is the same but the face is
different. It’s always about timing. It’s like things
happen in the right time; or the wrong time, but the
right [people]. But I think this is a very universal
theme for dramas. Right? It is also a theme for
tragedies or comedies. Depends how you put it."

You know, reading this transcript is different than my memory of him saying this - it sounded like there was much more there. I must have been filling in with my own associations. But I enjoyed Wong's clarification in light of his movies - it clicks that he's constantly pointing out the vagaries of timing - its indifference, coincidence or intransigence.

Looking back I wonder about how things happened, how timing has worked or not to my advantage. Is it fate or chance? I don't know. Sometimes I think it's fate, most of the time I believe in chance.

The more important question for this entry though is... how can it be depicted?

Concepts (part 1)

I need to catalogue a couple of things I've read/seen recently, before they disappear in the absent-minded fog I'm currently living in. Both of these items hold concepts I try to reference or want to reference in nearly every project.

The first bit comes from a New Yorker article from the June 30, 2008 issue. The article (true story), titled "The Itch" is about a woman who has an itch on her scalp that she cannot get rid of. No matter how much scratching - no matter what the doctors tell her - it persists and (understandably) drives her crazy. One morning she woke up and found she had scratched through her skull - just the thought makes me shudder. Nearly every doctor she visits believes it's a psychological issue - that she has obsessive compulsive disorder. One of her doctors believed differently - that it could be one of two things - constantly active nerve fibres or the triggers in her brain had gone haywire and were constantly sending itch signals.

Okay - all that's kind of interesting, but just backstory. Turns out no one believed that it had to do with the brain - they tested various theories regarding the nerve fibres with no lasting results. The woman still has the itch. So now, the article posits that it's actually a brain problem - that there's so much about the brain we don't know, or are just beginning to find out. The thing that triggered my interest - apart from the horrible grossness of scratching through your skull into your brain - was this idea:

" The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor - a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you'd expect that most of the fibres going to the brain's primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty percent do; eighty percent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety percent memory and less than ten percent sensory nerve signals."

Visual perception is more than 90% memory. What we see has mostly to do with memories of what we've seen. If I feel as if I'm "finding" photographs - it's because I am. I'm in the process of recovering memories.

(The next bit has to with a similar topic but this post is rather long... so I'll break it up.)

Saving old images

We've been engaged in a massive clean-out-the-apartment operation, beginning last weekend. Right now our apartment is an obstacle course of various things pulled out of closets and boxes and shelves and stacked in piles in the hallway, kitchen and living room. It's hell. And mostly, it's my fault. I keep nearly everything. And while I really do hate clutter, I also become confused about what to do with it. Making a decision to throw something away involves such weighing of the scales. So, usually I just end up stuffing it somewhere out of sight and walking away.

But not this time!

The process is also slowed by the amount of time it takes me to read over old cards and letters, school papers, pictures... I found this old photo ID inside a pouch in an old date book. I'm 20 years old in this picture. And I love how I used to think of myself as "tough" - like that was seriously how I carried myself for a while. It makes me laugh looking at this expression as if I'm saying "yeah - what?"

Although I showed it to Anthony and he told me I looked like I am 14 years old in that pic. So... that makes it even funnier as it takes a little bit of the air out of my "tough" posture.

The first modern sports photograph and the latest

Scanning the New York Times this morning (online - I hardly ever pick up a hard copy of the Times. Which means that, more often than not, I’'m scanning headlines instead of reading articles. Totally changed my habits. When I was very young I used to get the comics section, spread it out on the floor and practically lay on top of the paper reading them. The paper seemed enormous to me then. And also, a time apart –- based on my dad’'s example. He’'d sit and read the paper in his chair before breakfast or dinner and he was gone behind it. It seemed like such a nice little wall between him and the racket going on around him. Anyway...), I came across this picture.



It’s a shot of Queen Quedith Earth Harrison moments after finishing second in the women's 400-meter hurdles at the Olympic Trials for track and field. Although this photo seems to depict “the "agony of defeat"” she'’s actually very happy with her finish. She has just come from behind, deftly avoided a fallen competitor in her lane and qualified - becoming one of the youngest competitors on the US team.

It’'s a very emotional shot. Something I love about sports photography. It's eminently possible and easy to capture the essence of the thing, the story, the inner thoughts and emotions written right across the face and sewn into the body language. Winning and losing, trying your hardest and succeeding, trying your hardest and coming up short, giving up, seeing hope fade, witnessing the improbable happen, making the unbelievable believable. What we'’re experiencing or watching has to with some of life'’s largest lessons - hope, faith, and determination. In real life, it’'s harder to see these play out. You don’'t necessarily know what trials and tribulations people go through, how they approach them, how they pick themselves back up and keep going. In sports,– all of this can take place during the course of one meet, one tour, one trial, one game.

Morris Berman, a sports photographer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is considered the genitor of this type of shot. In 1964, he captured the now famous image of Y.A. Tittle –- legendary New York Giants quarterback -– kneeling, battered and bruised in the end zone, after being hammered by John Baker of the Steelers. The ball was picked off by the Steelers who returned it for a touchdown, giving them the momentum to ultimately claim the win. This image was not chosen by the photography editors at the Post-Gazette to run in the paper accompanying the story on the game. Instead they chose an action shot of Tittle in the midst of being taken down by Baker right after the ball has left his hand. That'’s what sports stories of the time demanded –- the action. Berman's non-published image ending up winning awards and notoriety for the way it depicted Tittle'’s story, the game’'s story, beyond just the action. Sports photography has not been the same since.

Time and energy

I had a minor computer glitch a couple of weeks back that made me go back through my photo archives. (I spilled a bit of coffee into my laptop. Nothing, thankfully, was lost.) Looking through so many images I was reminded of how I’ve thought at different times about being inspired by the “energy” of a place. So many of the images that were taken in New York or Brooklyn are not ones that I particularly like. The energy is off – it doesn’t inspire me.

New York is movement, striving, hustle – a pastiche of ethnicities, histories, and ambitions. It is not a soft place, or a slow one. The mind moves quickly here, even in moments of reflection there’s antenna picking up outside vibrations. The people move quickly here, sparing little time for absorption but constantly attuned and scanning what’s up ahead.

I do a substantial amount of street shooting and many times one image can spark a whole project or series of work. The only time that that has ever happened for me in New York was the Grand Army Plaza series. And even that was an attempt to quiet the environment, to recall the past. It’s not that I don’t find the people on the street here interesting – there’s always something to look at in wonder. But that’s part of the energy – I’m not particularly interested in the freak shows, or in all the ways in which New York has been shot and is now canonized.

Tourists also complicate the energy of a place. They’re not of that place, and their presence is a reference to that energy. They are here, after all, to experience some of that which defines New York – or any place they visit. Tourists might fit in better in other places, I don’t know. But here, they’re obvious; their slower pace makes everything else seem fast, their timidity makes everyone else seem hard, and – well, their clothes are louder somehow. Somehow what they’re wearing makes everything else seem stylish.

Maybe it’s much simpler than I’m making it – New York’s energy is outer-directed. I’ve always been more interested in exploring the place of inner geographies and terrains. And there’s no time for that.

Influences: Wong Kar Wai

I haven't yet seen "My Blueberry Nights" by Wong Kar Wai. I've been dismayed that it's receiving some decidedly mixed and outright negative reviews. Of course, when I see it, I won't much care about plot or story line because the magic of Wong Kar Wai and his director of photography Chris Doyle are in the lush images, the blurred beauty, and ethereal color. He's been an influence and inspiration in everything I've seen of his but especially "In the Mood for Love," "2046," and "Chung King Express." I always hope my images can capture the tension or moodiness, the unspoken emotion, the small gesture rendered epic. Though... he gets an immeasurable assist from his music choices. I particularly love the use of "California Dreamin" in Chungking Express.

I'd have to put the duo of Wong Kar Wai/Chris Doyl in my top five influences. If I was to count them...


Chungking Express


Chungking Express


2046


2046


In the Mood for Love


In the Mood for Love