Instant Gratification

palimpsest

1. a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.

   • something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.

     “Sutton Place is a palimpsest of the taste of successive owners”

 

I feel a little dirty.

I have abandoned my large and medium format cameras and have come to question my long-held beliefs in the principles of pure photography as laid down by the titans of the West Coast Photographic Movement. I haven’t touched any of my other cameras since I started shooting with a Fujifilm instant camera in November. Not my Mamiya C330 or my Arca Swiss view camera.

Setting aside the hyperbole…

Instant film is sweeping the nation; Instax film was the highest selling camera item on Amazon.com during the holidays.

And I’ve been trying to figure out why I caught the instant film bug.

Up to this point, I have couched my work in a term that photographer Edward Burtynsky coined — “the contemplated moment” — in contrast to Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment.” Burtynsky means to describe the slower process with his 4×5 and 8×10 view cameras. Because of the camera weight and numerous steps involved before exposing film, one is habituated into a state of accumulated photographic intentions. That is, tending to do a lot of the compositional, conceptual and camera placement deliberations “in the mind’s eye” as Ansel Adams would say, prior to photographing.

I have been working with large format film cameras since 2005, and felt that I achieved  competence with their technique in 2009 during a trip to the Midwest to photograph industrial architecture and create portraits for my American Traditions project.

Despite my attention grabbing in the beginning of this post, I’m by no means abandoning large format, but my reaction to using the instant camera is illuminating the motivations behind my practice and opening up new means for expression.

Additive is Addictive

Additive Instax image by Lewis Ableidinger.  Lew lives in North Dakota and works on film and digital

Here the photographer has added his Instax print over a surface and photographed it.  This creates a dialogue between the subject of the picture and the material with which it is combined, or overlaid. This additive technique is interesting me because of my background where the conceptual framework of a photograph lies between images within a series rather than a dialogue between two different picture elements within a single frame. Below are a few of my additive overlays:

 

Torn Flag and Abandoned Coal Break, John Sanderson

I’ve long held that reinforcing meaning in one’s work to be the most direct route towards effective meaning, and this additive technique with instant prints is a valuable tool in exploring how two picture elements can interact within a single frame. Whether or not you agree with Gary Winogrand’s assertion that pictures don’t tell stories, it would be hard to argue that pictures don’t describe things well; and I’m enjoying demystifying the surface of my pictures (for some I am drawing from the public domain) and breaking the temporal wall between two separate pictures.

 

Trees, West Virginia and Shelter Island, John Sanderson

Photography, often neither an additive or subtractive art form, is usually a three fold process: Capture the picture, edit it for impact, and place it within a series.  The identity of the original solitary picture is rarely altered. But when I modify the surface with another image, the additive element often reinforces meaning, and the white border found in the Instax material proves to be a simple and effective element to indicate duality.

 

“Let reason govern thy lament.” -Marcus, Titus Andronicus

 

 

 

 

 

Art on the Tracks : Nostalgic for the Future

As we are preparing to exhibit our student’s pictures created during the Art on the Tracks workshop, I’m thinking back on our three sessions and our final trip to Poughkeepsie, New York, and looking forward to the exhibition.

Establishing Art on the Tracks in conjunction with the exhibition Railroad Landscapes, Janina McCormack and I sought to bring together a group of young photographers to explore what social geographer John Stilgoe calls the Metropolitan Corridor, or as I have adapted it visually, the Railroad Landscape.  Our goals are twofold: photographic education and an exhibition of the student’s work created during the workshop.  We brought together a group of ten teenage photographers from a variety of backgrounds.  Some are enrolled in photography programs in their respective schools, others enjoy railroad photography as a hobby and a few others are new to photography.   

Over 400 pictures were taken over three sessions.  In emphasizing the divergent and unique perspectives of each of our student’s work, the exhibition’s aim is to display a composite portrait of the locations we visited.

Note: Thanks to photographer Jeff Brouws for his mentorship in introducing me to John Stilgoe. His writing helped reinforce the meaning in my own work.  I must also thank the Center for Railroad Photography & Art for their support.

Our final trip to Poughkeepsie was crafted to give the students a perspective of the railroad environment outside of New York City, since our prior two workshops were both within city limits: the Brooklyn Army Terminal and the abandoned Long Island Railroad Rockaway Beach Branch.

Much of my work depicts the railroad in context, and many of the views include architecture — tangentially I often feel that railroad tracks architectural in their own right.

At the Brooklyn Army Terminal the students experienced the visuals of rail in the context of constructed space.  The binary quality of images below, taken by our student Isabella Reyes, stood out to me.

Isabella Reyes (Beacon High School), Brooklyn Army Terminal Diptych I

Isabella Reyes (Beacon High School), Brooklyn Army Terminal Diptych II

Much of the army terminal has been re-purposed for commercial or artist’s studios.  The idea that many of these spaces surrounding the railroad continue to evolve, whether or not the actual tracks are in use, has resonated with me over the years.

During our penultimate workshop day we explored a section of the Metropolitan Corridor that has not been re-purposed like our prior location, except that it has been reclaimed by nature.  This section of rail once connected the Long Island Railroad’s mainline to the Rockaway Beach section of New York and has been inactive for over forty years.  The thick cover of foliage contrasted with the steel and concrete of the army terminal.

Molly Kass, Abandoned Right of Way, Forest Park, Queens

Molly Kass, Abandoned Right of Way, Forest Park, Queens

In traveling by rail to Poughkeepsie during our final workshop, the program gelled visually and topically: nature, railroad, architecture, and industrial infrastructure.  The town of Poughkeepsie, about a two hour trip from New York City by train, sits on the eastern shore of the Hudson River.  Its most conspicuous landmark is a former railroad bridge that spans both sides of the river.  Much like our first location, the bridge has been re-purposed in the last few years and has been renovated to carry pedestrian traffic.   The views from the bridge include two active rail lines: the Hudson Line on the eastern shore and the Riverline on the west shore, the latter being exclusively for freight trains.

Poughkeepsie concluded the point that the railroad is still an omnipresent factor in the American landscape.  Despite not being the object of folk mythology like yesteryear, the American railroad today is a rich source of visual material to describe our shared history.

Tom Grayson, Walkway over the Hudson

Stay tuned for more information on the upcoming exhibition of the student’s work at the New York Transit Museum.

 

Theme, Variations, and Sequencing

      As much as photography has influenced me, so too has literature, and music.

     I was introduced to Brahms at the age of 18 during a Music 101 class.  His Variations on a Theme by Haydn took me somewhere I had never gone musically, emotionally, intellectually.  Musical structure appealed to me.  A Theme and Variations is a medium length piece consisting of several sections.  At the beginning, the composer introduces the Theme, what follows are numerous re-iterations of this theme (usually a recognizable melody) in various soundscapes and development.

      A contrast to Theme and Variations might be Maurice Ravel’s Bolero which consists of a theme without development, only a gradual increase in pitch over the work’s average 16 minute running time.

     The nomenclature surrounding these compositions lasting for thirty minutes or more seemed to create a cartography of sound.   Symphonies in particular followed the idea of exposition, development, repetition, cadenza, coda and a myriad of other diminutive structural elements.  I was attracted to the names of these sections, as they clarified the function of the musical elements within the larger work.

     What followed Brahms were revolutions in sound by such composers as Mahler, who shunned the traditional four movement Symphony and added sections as he saw fit.

     Now begs the question, can these structural ideas of music be adapted to photography?

 Over a half century ago Minor White wrote of sequence:

 “With single images I am basically an observer, passive to what is before me, no matter how perceptive or how fast my emotions boil. In putting images together I become active, and the excitement is of another order—synthesis overshadows analysis.”

Minor White

     A sequence of pictures is no more canonized than in Robert Frank’s The American’s.   His street views from across the United States during the 1950s served to be a portrait of the country at its most crucial crossroad since the end of the Civil War.  Frank’s views of vibrant city life and small town America included such subtexts as segregation, politics, and life on the road.  As I said in an earlier post about O. Winston Link, America’s social landscape changed in the 1950s as small towns dwindled and suburbs overshadowed the city center as a hub of activity.

      If we look at the musical terms mentioned previous, such as repetition and recapitulation, we can draw comparisons with work such as Frank’s.  Much like a reoccurring a melody, in The Americans we see certain themes recur often — such as flags, roadways, and signage.  Flags seem most prominent as they often unfold new sections within the book.

     Delving into contrasting art forms and discovering their functions may help us learn to reinforce meaning in our own work.