61 | Bombay Beach

October 1, 2020 David Wing

1983 | The Berm at Bombay Beach, Salton Sea

The Salton Sea, even in recent history, has been rising and falling dramatically over long precipitation cycles. At one point, here was the largest lake in North America, but only in area, since the basin is wide and shallow. Modest changes in rainfall generate huge changes in the sea’s footprint; it’s in a broad tidal plain without a shoreline. It was originally formed when the Colorado River, laden with silt from the entire Southwest, plugged its own channel and the flow pooled in what came to be called Lake Cahuilla.

This evaporated entirely centuries ago, but in 1905, unmanaged human intervention again diverted the river’s flow, and the present Salton Sea was formed in just two years, in spite of efforts to realign the Colorado. As this frantic activity progressed, the river was rapidly carving a waterfall upstream, which grew to some 80 feet high before the flow was rerouted into a working channel.

By the 1950’s, the Salton Sea had become an inland salt-water resort, sporting developments including a yacht club designed by Albert Frey, but agricultural irrigation drainage flushed salts and pesticides into the sea’s collected volume. With its surface some 235 feet below the ocean, water had no place to go but up, and evaporation left salts, concentrated hostile chemistry, and the sadly rotting carcasses of fish and birds.

When I visited again in 1983, I checked on this enormous berm which the Corps of Engineers had built to save part of the tiny town of Bombay Beach from the rising sea level. I had to drive my car up the slope to the launching ramp to photograph fishermen prepping their boats.

60 | Denver Art Museum

September 29, 2020 David Wing

I always try to leave a museum before I become saturated. My strategy is to head straight for the exit after I have been fully taken in by an exceptional work or series. This way, I can keep the experience clear, on top of all the other museum layers.

I can’t remember what I last saw here in 1976, but it may well have been the view of the Front Range tightly framed through one of the slit windows in the west walls of the galleries, which surprise visitors as they view a series of nearer flat works on the adjacent walls. That startling switch of frame and focus to the mountains is what I remember today.

So I was waiting for a companion and took a seat on the bench which paralleled the flow of visitors in architect Gio Ponti’s ‘tube’ entrance. I always advised my students to avoid trying for pictures while sitting down, since mobility is a valuable asset for the photographer – the right place at the right time is hard to reach, feel, and choose while rooted on a bench. But if that’s a “rule,” here’s an exception. I was witness to a grand flow of in-and-out patrons from my perch as the rainy-day crowd came past me like migrating salmon past a bear’s favorite streamside outcrop. All I had to do was choose.

Many photographers have proven that pictures made in museums can be as interesting as things shown in museums. I offer my own evidence here.

59 | Panel Man

September 24, 2020 David Wing

OK, I admit that I have taken more than a few street pictures while sitting down. On this occasion, I had been traveling north by train, catching up with family members as far up as Seattle. This day, I met my brother in Portland to deliver his ‘new’ old Volvo, which I had sniffed out for him during my stay in Oregon.

We met at a falafel place for lunch, taking a strategic corner-window table, which I had learned to do from Art Institute pals at the old Columbus Cafe in San Francisco, where the best seat would command a street view from the narrow pie-slice corner of the building.

I had my good vantage, my camera beside me, and my lunch in front of me. As I began to eat, this man carrying his panel moved across my ‘preview’ window on the left before he turned our corner. I put down my sandwich and picked up my camera, timed two frames, then put down my camera and picked up my sandwich again. It was all one sweet sweep, as if my whole practice had come to bear on this brief performance. For me, a nice thing about photography is how often I am able to prove that I can do it.

There’s something about using a camera to look at things like this man’s panel – the lens allows me to see more of what’s there, how the light defines materials, not how I define them. I get to see what could be there in the light, not what I think is there.

My camera teaches me that I don’t know. Photography is my best guide; it gives me a chance to discover unknown unknowns.

58 | Window Man

September 22, 2020 David Wing

This picture was taken when my good friend Bernd Reinhardt was just four years old. Since then, he has grown into an astute photographer. After we met a few years ago via a long chain of remarkable happenstance, we became a local two-man tag-team, exchanging experience and inspiration. Bernd had recently been engaged in online critiques with Ben Lifson, forty years after my time with him at CalArts, so care and insight continue to flow through us from that shared source.

I showed this picture to Bernd, and he wondered how people might ‘read’ the large window frame and my own reflection. For me, the window’s corrugated patina is elegant, luminous, an ornament as well as a frame. (I am also fond of the fire department connections, which are nicely-scaled accents complementing the yellow ceramics). Every picture is framed by its own edges, so I think it’s fair game to step back a little more, to see how the world frames itself.

And my appearance suggests to me that the full mass of the large figure inside the window is suspect, that he might be only half-there himself – just look at him holding the reflection of the branch out of the way so he can clean under it; is he a plane-shifter, alternately inhabiting two worlds?

Over a hundred years ago, Eugène Atget made the photographer’s world safe for reflections, and fifty years after that, Lee Friedlander made a small living off his own reflection and shadow. Ambiguity stands the test of time; you could ask an Irish poet.

57 | Oaxaca

September 17, 2020 David Wing

Driving south from the astounding capital of Mexico (a huge city then of eleven million people, half its present number) toward the isthmus of Tehuantepec, where nothing at all seems to be in the way of the gales flowing freely from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic, along the way we stopped in Oaxaca after passing through eight or ten distinct regions of climate. For me, this town turned out to be exactly Mexico. We arrived in the early evening, and our travelers’ angels provided us with the last accommodation, a palatial bargain suite carved out of the old convent – veranda, sala, cocina, dormitorio, y baño.

The next morning I walked over to the marketplace, looking for a good hammock, and I haggled vigorously in my weak Spanish and made a sharp deal for ten dollars. I carried off my prize with satisfaction, but as I turned into the next aisle I found another, twice as fine in color and craft, already marked at half the price. So I bought a spare and got a story.

I did want to make pictures, so I stepped out of the close and dark market (this was during my Kodachrome period) and what I saw on the sidewalk was my first click. I like to think that even out in the open space and the bright light, Mexico always offers its mysteries.

56 | Unfolding – Just a Sec

September 15, 2020 David Wing

1980 | Tijuana, Baja California

Among the many ideas from Ben Lifson, his evaluation schemes for looking at photographs have stayed with me. He looked at description, organization, and then emphasis – these became the three visible facets of the cornerstone of my own discipline.

For me, description is key; figure-field relationships draw the forms and define the picture’s illusion of space. And as to organization, a picture can look any way, but it has to look like some thing and some place. And how is all this stuff prioritized? Where might it take the viewer and, over time, how might it reveal its meaning? A photograph rarely tells a story, but it can show a crisp cross-section of one. So for me, the street is the best place for infinite possibilities, where I can build intuition, regularly fail, and then keep going ahead.

The first picture here might be ok, but something was yet to unfold as I attended to this mix of pedestrians. I stayed in the scene and eased up, and the second* picture came to me. I think it’s a better one; some of the characters have developed more, as the mash of ‘bystanders’ reveals more individuals and participants, like there is a kind of chorus supporting the primary actors.

So these two pictures might show a preview of one of life’s special tableaux, and even if the second one does not have the feel of a polished performance, I’d say that this little play is coming along nicely in rehearsals.

* Run your mouse over the picture to compare my two views.
*Touch-screen users can just touch the picture to swap, then touch the white border to revert.

55 | Mariscos

September 10, 2020 David Wing

To find more of life in the streets, I would drive eighteen miles south to Mexico, another country in every way, with a different way of living, much of it out in the open. I would park and walk across into a new world of direct expression and experience.

The international border is distinct across the two Californias; in spite of the blurring names of towns like Mexicali and Calexico, it’s more than a line on the map. Even before the fences and walls were erected against friends and neighbors, you could see the hard line from the air, with settlement pressing north and big agriculture pressing south, alternating regions of hope and opportunity.

The year before this picture, I drove the length of Mexico with my pal Alberto Lau. All the way to Guatemala, it seemed every few minutes, a northbound bus passed us with TIJUANA on its headsign – everyone in western Mexico was heading there! Later, back home, when I wanted to see more of life, I just dropped into Tijuana, open and engaging. Even as a norteamericano with a camera, I could fade pretty well and even feel nondescript as I feigned inattention. Every day there was a carnival for my open ears and eyes.

Although I had chosen this particular frame early on, I am finding many more pictures on the old contact sheets. They confirm that I had been in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing.

54 | Penguin Plunge

September 8, 2020 David Wing

Even after growing rapidly beyond its military core since World War II, San Diego seemed to act like a small city. It’s a diffused place; when I arrived at UCSD in 1965, there were 500 undergraduates. After grad school in L.A. and alternate service in South Dakota, I returned in 1973, finding scant signs of life – street photography had to be worked up, as gatherings were smallish and infrequent. The grand Balboa Park had been established in 1868, but over a century later it seemed to draw a small attendance except on fair-weather Sundays.

So I sought out parades, competitions, lifeguard trials, sandcastle contests, any occasion where two or more people would likely gather. This day, the first of January, the old-timers at the San Diego Rowing Club met at this location for their seventy-ninth annual Penguin Plunge, just about the coldest thing you could do in the city.

I arrived early but was disappointed to see barricades and yellow crowd-control tape holding back a number of onlookers. I was an uncredentialed onlooker myself, but I swung my camera out in front of me and approached the gate monitors to shake hands, “Hi, I’m Davi…” and was interrupted with an enthusiastic “Oh, you’ve come to take pictures!” I was ushered in, directed to the beer and chili buffet, and encouraged to go right down onto the float to get good pictures.

That’s when I began to learn that for every ‘no’ that I may encounter, there is a possibility for an unexpected ‘yes.’ My medium is special, since it allows me to gather precious evidence of these opportunities.

Soon after this picture was made, the aging clubhhouse building was condemned by the City of San Diego; the Club’s lease had not been renewed for some time. The Club relocated to a suitable recreational shoreline on Mission Bay, and the old clubhouse was refitted as a nautical-themed restaurant. Later, the restaurant changed hands and themes, but a lot of personal and civic influence was required to retrieve the historic trophies loaned to the Chart House and then held hostage by the new proprietor, Joe’s Crab Shack.

53 | Field Trip

September 3, 2020 David Wing

During the regular semesters, I didn’t lead a lot of field trips; instead I encouraged my students to go out and photograph what they cared most about. The view camera class seemed to require extra encouragement though – setting out with the larger camera and tripod and getting under the cloth was different work at a new level. So I would choose challenging locations, then show ways to work in any terrain, looking first, then setting and checking a strong base against slippage and wind.

I did not often bring my big camera along, though I sometimes carried a few film holders of my own, just in case anyone asked me how I would take a picture there. Then I might move or adjust their camera a little and expose a sheet, so we could compare our results back in the lab. But since I was outdoors, I did carry a Leica.

So here is Anita Burkett, between efforts, getting to know her camera. Looking back, I see that I was getting to know mine as well.

52 | Towne Pass

September 1, 2020 David Wing

1995 | Towne Pass, CA-190 toward Death Valley

It’s been two years since my last visit with Henry Wessel. We were going through a roadside set that I had sequenced in anticipation of his comments, which he always gave me straight, always generously. I had been surprised at how well these pictures fit together for me, how consistent they seemed even though they had been made over forty years of travels. Hank was a master of selection and sequence, and I was looking forward to our talk.

He gave me significant encouragement that day, soundly validating my instincts. When he came to this picture, the coda in my series, he said, “Yes, that’s how it is !” And then, “Isn’t photography great? We can do all of this, and then we can go out and do it again!”

See if you can find Henry’s modest yet marvelous slipcased set, FIVE BOOKS (Steidl, 2006)