322 | The Final Frontier

2023 | Studio City

I haven’t been showing others’ work here, because I am so far behind on my own, but well worth posting here is a print I recently got from my long-time academic colleague and collaborator Gene Kennedy, now living in Sacramento.

Even seen in the flurry of my memory-workboard at this small scale, Gene’s beautifully-printed picture stands out in its transparency and specific, gossamer depth. And I don’t mean that simple old railroad-tracks-to-the-horizon depth; as I look here, I can almost slide my hand through the screen, somehow penetrating the delicate foreground without disturbing the luminous and impossibly airy industrial masses behind.

Right now I’m thinking of the fantastic notion in Phillip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife. Pullman tells compelling stories and is highly respected; a kid wrote him a fan letter addressed to “Storyteller, Oxford,” and it arrived promptly.

Gene Kennedy’s work is worth many looks, especially his striking lyrical and cerebral human-altered landscapes in the natural unforced 2:1 format of his film back… www.genekennedy.com

320 | Eucalyptus

2023 | Santa Barbara

These trees don’t have much of a root structure. Evolved in Australia, they are really large weeds, fast-growing in drier climates, burning off in wlidfires every twenty-five years or so.

Their quick growth in dryness was considered an advantage, and they were planted up and down the California coast in hopes that they would provide quick timber for railroad ties and other construction projects. But the brittle wood was troublesome to cut and work, and many have survived to a dangerous old age. Insensitive paving causing hard-surface runoff and heavy pressure on their roots leaves them narrow chances of survival.

319 | Vision Fire

1995 | Mount Vision, Marin County

These trees were scorched and flattened by the roaring winds generated by the Vision Fire, which at its peak, burned an acre each second in West Marin. With the prevailing wind and the fire’s own incendiary turbocharging, it would likely have burned all the way to Mill Valley and the shore of San Francisco Bay, except for a crucial decision. The local strategic commander called the superintendent of the National Seashore, asking permission to take bulldozers into the parkland to cut a firebreak. The superintendent looked out his window, jettisoned the protocol of a call to Washington DC, and said, “Go!”

318 | Secretary Bird

2012 | Maasai Mara, Kenya

Most pictures on safari are made with long lenses, filling the frame with large dozing or looming predators.

As I prepared for my own first trip to Africa, Bernd Reinhardt encouraged me to take my usual gear and work in my naturally intuitive fashion. That was the best advice; my pictures have stood the test of time, and many carry a fresh, yet timeless, feeling.

317 | Concerning Construction

1975 | La Mesa, California

I might have made this in 1974; the decorations on the house across the street are ambiguous. I was busy then as a new father, and I began labeling my negatives at the time they were processed, not necessarily when they were taken.

But pictures like this prompted me to avoid using the word “composition” in my classes. For me, photographs are not composed, as a drawing might be, stroke by stroke, but organized, from all the material in front of the photographer, managed by the Big Three — Vantage Point, Frame, Moment.

If this picture’s structure looks familiar, it may well be; at this time there was a strong wind blowing west from New York, carrying the heady scent of Lee Friedlander. A lot of us were trying to figure out what he was doing, and how he went about it, gaining inspiration as we looked for our own open position in the guild. Ben Lifson intensively studied the masters of our medium, and he said that every time he saw a scene that reminded him of Timothy O’Sullivan, he pressed the button.

316 | The East Bank

2014 | Atwater Village, Los Angeles County

Leaving the Zoo we saw in the previous post, just across the wide, seething Interstate 5, and the broad, channelized Los Angeles River, is a strollable, post-industrial, riparian rehabilitation. Its eastern boundary retaining wall keeps loose earth out of the channel, but it’s apparently semi-permeable, allowing some art to seep in.

▹▹ Just released is INTO MY SCULL • OUT OF MY MIND: My first Year with oars.

Though I’ve been a sailor since early childhood, I only began rowing at the age of seventy-three; this is an illustrated mini-memoir logging my early scrambles up the lifelong learning curve of the sport.

https://www.mixeddocuments.net/books

315 | Now

2016 | Los Angeles Zoo

If seeing is believing, then believing might be seeing.

I trust my camera unconditionally. If I take care of it as I intuitively nurture the process, then it may happen that I get more than I see.

313 | Borderline Case

2021 | Marin County, California

This one might be either A-1 or A-2 in the W/D taxonomy, but the distinction or clarification may not matter.

Henry Wessel was forthright and brilliant in his verbal descriptions of his approach to photographing the ineffable, and his pictures proved even truer than his words. I’ve taken his encouragement to heart in my own practice, and my best ones feel true to my spirit.

I remember this message on the slip in a fortune cookie – “That which is genuine needs no explanation.”

▹ Continued from Post 311 & 312.

312 | Binary Sorting

1991 | Salton City, California

Here’s a second example of how the Wing/Demosthenes Binary Taxonomy works in practice.

Perhaps there are additional curious questions to be asked in Category A-2:

“What’s happening in that space?”
"”How can near and far be in the same place?”

▹ Continued from Post 311.