Blog

When I first began to seriously shoot black and white in University, my parents gave me the three Ansel Adams books – The Camera, The Negative and The Print. In them Ansel says something like the negative is the musical score and the print is the performance. Many years later I saw a video of Ansel printing in his darkroom. Up until then I imagined he projected downward then dodged and burned with tools of some kind. But in the video you can see he projects horizontally onto the paper and literally stands… or dances in front of the projection, using his body – and other items to block the light while he dodges and burns the print. What a revelation.

I was trying to fall asleep the other night with my mind racing and eventually thought about this idea of score and performance. For me the print is not the performance. It was, perhaps when I first began in the darkroom, but I came to realize it would take me a lifetime of practice in the darkroom to attain the consistent results I sought. I wanted precise repeatable control over my “performance” and I got that in 1995 when I bought my first computer to work digitally. That too was a revelation and that’s when the file became my performance.

Since then I complete my work entirely within the computer and the print is really just a recording of that performance – true this recording can change and improve somewhat over time as new inks, papers, software and printers arrive but the essence of that performance remains the same even with these updates.

There’s an element of chance or accident to what I do that I welcome and embrace. I’ll have an idea for a project and work out the parameters and methodology to execute it, but during the execution I’m open to chance and accidental happenings that might lead to something interesting I hadn’t envisioned or thought to try. Like perhaps some equipment failure or slippage that causes the perspective to shift. In the end it becomes part of the development of the project and usually leads to good results.

As with all the other things I do, when I make images I don’t think too much while I do it – or maybe I adopt a benign neglect as I perform it and perhaps that helps the images work out. The problems begin, for me at least, when I think about what I’m doing while I do it. Thinking clutters the process, interferes and causes hesitation.

Although I do spend a lot of time thinking about and analyzing what I’m doing – I do that separately, afterward – not while I’m working. Photography is an intuitive process tied to opportunity – has to be.

Lately I’ve had several people stop and ask me about the somewhat crazy looking rig I’ve got clamped to my bike for making these images – even in traffic while riding. It always surprises me that anyone would notice but how could you miss it, I suppose. It’s a large black camera with a hefty lens perched on top of the steering post of my bike with a remote trigger strapped near my right hand.

Often I do stuff that seems logical to me and don’t even think about it until someone else points it out and that’s when I realize just how unusual it is.

Still not entirely certain where my ideas or reasons for making this work come from, although I wonder if some of this might resemble some raw internal visual input. Perhaps this is akin to the raw signal from our optic nerve before processing and assembly in our visual cortex into something more recognizable… or ignorable.

The Convergent series is up on my site — (click here to have a look) – which includes a new group of previously unpublished images!

I’ve got a lot of work ahead preparing all the Convergent image files for printing but feels good to have the series complete and out in the world.