Wabi-Sabi and Zen in Photography

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?

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.

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.

(photograph for Mother's Day)

This is from back in the summer, taken with an Ilford disposable camera.

I love this particular configuration in my little town.

Madonna and Child (child aged perhaps four years old).

They were preparing to cross the street and he was afraid So she waited for him, with him. A century or so.

I like the strange aureole that formed.