Wabi-Sabi and Zen in Photography

Serendipity

Antiques malls are my Gothic cathedrals, my Metropolitan Museum.

I go there to stare in awe at the relics of lost lives of those who might not have been saints or great sinners, but who, nonetheless, lived gorgeously.

I really need several hours (if not all day) when I get in a larger Church of Lost Whispers like that.

Yesterday, I visited one I hadn't revisited for some six months or more.

There was a new booth dedicated to old photographs. I fell into a swoon, then a trance. I had to look at all of the thousands of photographs, which were only a dollar apiece, even the larger ones.

After a while, I started doing vertical yoga, because I had been standing there so long that my skeleton started to suggest he and I might have different agendas for the day.

I found numerous unusual photographs for my own personal collection. I was so happy to find these lost moments.

Then I noticed some larger portraits of posh personages, children posing alone and with their families. It was instantly apparent that the photographer had exceptional skill. As I removed this set of photos from their display box, I saw the pencil signature at the bottom of the lovely portraits: Marcus Adams.

Adams photographed the Windsors and many other notables. His photograph of the young Elizabeth later appeared on a Canadian banknote.

I haven't yet identified the people in the photographs, but that's for another day, I suppose.

There were a number of interesting paintings by probably unknown artists, many of them in the naive style, and I usually make a purchase along those lines, but nothing quite made me jump yesterday. There was a pair of paintings on boards by an artist working in the seventies that I almost snagged, but there was some slight damage to each painting which turned me off the purchase. It's a shame, because they were both Matisse-inspired and colorful to the psychedelic max. But I didn't feel confident enough to color match and do the restorations myself.

When I go through more than a thousand photographs, I like to do "themes," where I create groupings of photos which seem to go together. Yesterday, I was able to assemble a nice set of early to mid-century photos of kittens and cats alongside a grouping of photos of soldiers (mostly WW II) with the rough theme "Disport Yourself."

I don't just look at the old photos. I invariably get fiction ideas as I drift through each vanished world. I found myself coming up with quite grim stories for some of the odder photos.

One small cabinet photo I bought simply because the woman looked more like an Edward Gorey drawing of a questionable governess than any other living human ever did to my eyes.

The Seven Principles of Wabi-Sabi (and How they Influence my Visual Art)

I realize there's a typo in the video. I saw it too late, fixed it and re-rendered, but didn't want to re-upload since I had already posted it.

In zen, errors just pinpoint problems with categories usually, right?

Suggestion to M.O.M.A. for Ongoing Art Project

Install a small, quality film developing lab in M.O.M.A. Accept undeveloped rolls of "found film" from across America (or the world). Watch art emerge, accidentally (vernacular photography) and otherwise (conscious art photography). Or if M.O.M.A. is the wrong venue, perhaps one of the venerable museums of photography? It would be interesting to see the prints emerging in real time if this were a "glass box" type operation.

Ren Hang

The guardian said No
You cannot eat the creator body
It is dead and on the highway
It died of fever
It pullulates in the night sky with stars
You cannot see astral bodies do that swarm
But they do
Right under the highway of your eyes
As the boiling blood of the animal
Cools down at last
Becomes temperature of a morning green leaf
An hour     a soft bending green sword
But waits to flare in another
Rash enough to insert a tongue
Keep your mouth      the torture clear
Or it will turn leathern
As this angel's        the one still punting
With something   a mockery of desire
A disease
And I look at the supine creature
It made me hungry    I locked
My lips      held tiny stars
I cleared the barter up

Ren Hang Speaks about Repression

Repression and depression were two battles this young artist had to face.

It's amazing to see how simple his working process was.

My mind was blown that he was shooting in such a dark little room with the flash cranked up to heaven.

And these are the photos seen around the world.

Ren Hang Has Died

I wake up and learn from a friend that one of our greatest contemporary photographers has killed himself.

At twenty-nine.

Someone please tell The New York Times. They seem not to know

This is such a depressing period. I think about George Michael's genius and the loss every day and now this near-kid.

Michael, too, might have been a suicide. (He might have been murdered; we just don't know yet.)

Ren Hang's reputation is assured. He must have known that. I hope he knew that. Maybe he didn't care. Depression is awful. I wonder to what degree politics played a part in this tragedy. Chinese government officials consistently attacked and removed his work.

There's your next Francesca, world. Sadly.

I wonder if his Flickr account is still up. He was a cynosure on Flickr for years.

Artists who suffer from depression, please get help and choose life. We need you. Now more than ever.

Eulogy and memory at The British Journal of Photography.

My Analogica on Frizzifrizzi

I really love the company with whom I share the virtual page in this week's Frizzifrizzi photography feature.

I've spoken of my love for this Italian journal before.

Thanks to Simone Sbarbati. I always enjoy his curating.

You can go through and see previous weeks' selections there.

It's book-quality work throughout.

For the Image-Makers

The stains on a wall
I mean the photographs come to mean so much
The fractions of being
An arm cut off……….but not a head
You understand the distinction
Don’t you, painter of the mind of algae
You green fraction of being you

The fly’s armor
Admittedly soft and ridiculous
Nevertheless is a sort of ecstasy
You can’t hold back
The stains on a wall might actually be edible
If you are a fly

If you are a half-lost photograph

(aspect ratio ish ish)

People Generally

People (even artists, even good ones) generally don't know how to photograph animals yet. I don't either. It's because of our spiritual sickness. It's because we are not evolved. We stand before these beings the way we stand before the ocean, pretending we understand what is happening before us.

Check Out Bill Dane's Website

Bill Dane, c. 1970

If the lights are on, he's there in spirit even when he's not in body, moving other's minds and spirits around with the ideas implicit in his photographs, which quite often do not actually look like photographs. Often they look like paintings or drawings or collages or readymades. You tend not to want to call Bill Dane a photographer, because he seems much more of a "visual artist." Photography is supposed to be a subset of the "visual arts" and not the other way around. But Bill sort of turns that set theory on its head. He makes no bones about the fact that he considers himself a street photographer foremost, and more is our wonder at the results.

He's recently launched his new website,, and if you visit I think I can guarantee you'll have fun.

Bill's never hidden his age on his Flickr profile or anywhere else and I found that refreshing and encouraging, because I love seeing artists up there in years (Bill was born in 1938) who are still working, who still clearly "have it" and whose work might be confused with the work of someone very young, not because of any lack of competency, but because of the freshness of ideas and the ability of the work to keep stride with the contemporary--to be the contemporary.

I had no idea of Bill Dane's ridiculously impressive pedigree, and pedigrees don't usually impress me much, because I know so many world-class talents working out there who don't have any pedigree. Bill never felt the need to post any of that on his Flickr profile. He just appeared on the site one day and began interacting in a very generous manner with photographers and other visual artists. What I never did forget from the first time I read his profile was the close to his greeting, which reads, "Good luck for all of us."

That's the sort of thing which stays with one. When you only have a few words to speak to a stranger, those are a pretty choice few words.

And he enables sharing of his work, which is a pretty generous thing to do. I can't count the number of times I've used his work over at The Visual Virgin and on previous incarnations of this blog.

His site is also a sales gallery and there is a sale on. You aren't going to beat the prices he's offering there, a flat rate (no editions). So if you'd like the sort of art that's not just going to be a great investment, but is also going to be sure to jazz and confuse (in a good way) those folks you allow into your inner sancta, then you're sure to find something great for this or that sanctum in the ole compound. So feel free to make inquiries there about any prints that catch your eye. The work is organized by decade. 

I was just looking for stuff for the Tumblr today by Garry Winogrand and here Winogrand comes up in Bill Dane's C.V., right alongside Diane Arbus, who also spoke some nice words about Mr. Dane's work back in the day. He didn't just get a Guggenheim. He's received two. And then match that with a double-scoop of N.E.A. and you can see he maxed out there (that's the new lifetime limit, unless they revised the policy when the Dems got back in).

Check out where all he's collected and the MOMA and SFMOMA connection.

But what comes through Dane's art, first and foremost, is not its ability to attach to or "fit in" to this or that cultural institution. It's the sense that we are looking at a soul constantly on the move, constantly on the open road, and constantly spotting the unreal arrangement amid the the real things (or the real arrangement in the unreal things, if you're a mystic). 

In a strange way, I think the majority of the work I know by the artist (and I know the more recent Dane, which is probably a smattering of the whole lens trip) seems to almost present images as aquariums. There's a constant theme of voyeurism. Even with the material goods and shop displays and vintage advertising which probably constitute the majority of his favored subject matter, there's often a confusing sense of what's truly domestic and what's on display, what's for real shelter and what's only play shelter, what's truly vintage and what's anachronism playing vintage. The concept of the simulacrum dominates Dane's recent work. And there's a strong componenent of self-referentiality in the photographs of photographs or of images created with earlier methods of photography or printing methods which have fallen into desuetude. Yet for all of this, the work is never nostalgic. The photographer manages to keep the compositions on point. Nostalgia is rendered meaningless in light of the ability of these symbols, even the discarded ones, to marshal new aesthetic force and to create new disturbances and new pleasure in the mind of the beholder. That many, if not most, of these images have their roots in commercialism lends a strange quality of aesthetic recycling to many of the pieces. Aesthetic recycling is not nostalgia. Dane's aesthetic strategy of restylizing the visual past and finessing new composition out of received composition is closer to Mannerism, but it doesn't quite feel like that either. I want to say his recent work feels more like a phenomenological analysis of the process of image-making.

For me, the big paradigm shift in the avant-garde (in photography and elsewhere) was the shift away from surrealism and towards irrealism. And Bill Dane is definitely an irrealist. It was precisely this deconstruction-through-foregrounding-of-illusion which drew me to his photography when I first encountered it.

Well, visit his Flickr and his website and see for yourself. Form your own views.

(Note: This is a slightly edited version of a 2013 post which I migrated from a blog which is no longer public.)

(grain grain grain)

Prints of My Work are Now Available through Dan Skjæveland Gallery (Norway)

I'm quite happy to be represented by Dan and I love the company.

Please check out the work of my fellow gallerians Bill Dane, Sotiris Lamprou and Dan Skjæveland.

We are planning an exhibition as well.

I'll add a link at right.

In other news, I have discovered a new printmaking process. Actually, it's a print "unmaking" process, and it's all about dissolving the pigments in photographs to turn those photographs into paintings. I just made a new set and loved the results on a few of them.

I ordered boatloads of antique/vintage photos on Ebay to work with now that I have the chemical process doing what I wanted it to do.

(exist)

friend deer at the bottom of my street, early morning...

(addresses are dreams)

(singing) ..."fancy poultry parts sold here..."

(make everything great again)

Photographyby "nothingofinterest" on lomography.com: https://www.lomography.com/photos/21285532

(trust)

Accidentally Ended Up Watching This Documentary Today

I didn't know it existed.

Salgado has such a spiritual connection to his subject matter. It's very moving to hear him speak. So much difficult viewing here, especially his photojournalistic work in Africa. I don't know how he could spiritually survive witnessing and experiencing firsthand (at length) the starvation in Ethiopia in the eighties and the genocide in Rwanda in the nineties. And that's not even the totality of the war-torn theaters Salgado has photographed at length. He admits he completely lost faith in our species for a period. Who wouldn't, really, seeing such human suffering, such massacres and torture? And all of it could have been avoided. Almost all of the disasters he covered were the work of mankind and not of nature. Even where starvation was caused by nature, the relief (food) that others sent was denied them by other people. His work documents the ongoing madness of the world.

I'm Rereading

I'm rereading Slow Burn: A Photodocument of Centralia, Pennsylvania (University of Pennsylvania, 1986) .

I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Copies can still be found on Amazon, ABE and other online bookselling sites.

Jacobs took an interesting approach to her subject. She lived in Centralia for some time as an embedded artist and journalist. She came when there was still very much a town to speak of. Many had already fled this small town in the Pennsylvania coal country by 1983, the year Jacobs arrived, driven out by the hellish gases that emanated from the mine fire that burned below and threatened to engulf the town with the various sinkholes and subsidences that had resulted from the inferno under everyone's feet. Centralia has since utterly vanished with the exception of a very few buildings. There is no more town. What were streets are overgrown with trees, hard to even discern. Possibly the form of what was once a town can be seen from the air on a fly-over. Even the zip code was revoked by the government. This town (and a neighboring small town) were given the Sodom and Gomorrah treatment. But most of the destruction came in the form of bulldozing, which was done by the United States government. The mine fire itself did not get the opportunity to physically devour the town. Ironically, the air quality in Centralia today is reportedly better than that of Pennsylvania's capital, Harrisburg.

Jacobs was such a good set of ears, such a good listener, as well as a great set of eyes. She uses many quotes by citizens of the beset town as she follows them in their tribulations and in their reckoning of the political process in which they are all forced to participate. There is initially a big division between those who want to stay, to claim the land of their ancestors, and those who are willing to leave. We now know how this ended, how the choice was taken away from these citizens. Jacobs' photographs are often stunningly well constructed, even as they go about their business of stark witnessing. The poetry and narrative qualities of these images are never at odds. They are felicitously joined in Jacobs' art. Often, these images are quite tender. Many of them are unearthly, as Centralia in that period often did look like the surface of some alien planet or some quarter of the Underworld. These photographs are of much more than archival value.

The (then) young Centralia resident pictured here is Todd Domboski. He is the teenager who fell into a hole in the earth that opened up below his feet as he was walking through his grandmother's backyard. He was very lucky to be pulled out, narrowly escaped death, as the hole was determined to be several hundred feet deep and filled with carbon monoxide. Just now I confused him with the citizen who made a valiant stand to keep the town going long after everyone had vacated it, following government orders. Actually that civil disobedient  who remained so long was John Lokitis Jr.  He held out until 2009. If you search his name on YouTube or Google him, you should find the same really interesting documentary I found some time back.

Postscript: I see this book came out in a new edition in 2010.  I hope Photo-Eye Blog will not mind my sharing these two photos they snapped of the new edition of Jacobs' book.