Category Archives: photography

photography, rambles

last Newport post: cameras/semi-mysterious tower

1 Comment

Walking around town when I get breaks between meetings I’ve dragged along one of two cameras. One is a trusty roll film camera that I’ve been using for years, and the other is this embarrassment of a digital camera, the first digital camera I bought John when digital cameras were just coming out. I haven’t gone shopping to Toys R’ Us lately but I’d guess that it has the same megapixel capacity as a My Little Pony digital camera today, if they make such a thing. At least it’s not pink. Maybe I should say that it has 1,300 kilopixels–certianly lots more impressive than 1.3 megapixels. And on top of the low resolution it eats batteries like crazy. Seriously I thought it had died and gone to digital camera purgatory until I dropped into the gift shop downstairs and fed the camera five bucks in batteries. Might have been a good excuse to finally get myself a real digital camera.

Since most of the pictures I took were with the film camera I’ll have to forgo the immediate gratification and wait to see the pictures until I get them developed. But here’s one of the random digital shots of a structure located just above the downtown tourist district. Though it’s called many things, it appears on the map I have as the Old Stone Mill, though it’s doubtful that it was ever attached to any operation like a mill. In fact, it’s apparently a bit of a mystery what it is exactly, and a bit of a mystery who built it. Apparently carbon dating of the mortar dates it to various dates, some as late as the late seventeenth century, some to the early 1400s.

Old Mill Tower

Call me a skeptic, but just like people who claim their hotel is haunted, what mystery there might be well could be overblown and might have nothing to do with reality, though it’d certianly be good for business. There are a lots of web pages where it’s discussed: wikipedia of course; Curt F. Waidmann’s nicely researched The Newport Tower: a Medieval Ruin in America; the Redwood Library and Athenaeum’s page on it; and the more scandal-/mystery-driven page on UnexplainedEarth. If any of those pages have any authority, Wikipedia points to the Redwood Library’s pages, and I might go with that evaluation: The library is located just across the street.

art, gardening, landscape design, photography

some japanese gardens

Leave a comment

I just ran across this cool site, a picture gallery page off of Bowdoin College’s Japanese gardens home page. Though my garden, with its patches of heavily assorted plantings, generally doesn’t have much of a Japanese garden feel, I have a real fondness for the studied natural simplicity of the Japanese garden aesthetic. This site has some amazing gardens, particularly around Kyoto, and includes the iconic Ryoan-ji raked sand garden, plus 28 others. Each has several pictures, a map, and introduction and a brief bit of history.

One of the artists whose photographs got me interested in photography again in the 1980s was David Hockney. I’m not sure of his level of infatuation with Japanese gardens, but he did do this striking piece in 1983, a big photocollage of the dry garden at Ryoan-ji. It’s a little hard to see in this reduced picture, but he’s pieced together bits of the garden, pieces of the surrounding temple, pilgrims to the site and the black plastic containers of the film he was using to shoot the scene. And if you look close you can also see his socks.

When he was doing these photocollages, the story goes that Hockney dropped off his film at the neighborhood quickie photo place. In this photocollage you can see the mismatched printing the place did, particularly obvious in the central sand area. After Hockney made the originals, these collages were then editioned, using Hockney’s negatives. The people making the edition tried to replicate Hockney’s originals, which in this case meant going through the headaches of doing an intentionally “bad” job of printing the negatives, trying to match the job the local photo place did for Hockney.

These works don’t have the same vivid colors that Hockney’s paintings do, but they for sure share some of the same sense of space and time. Inspired by cubism, things don’t fit together perfectly, but your mind pieces the scenes together in a sensible way anyway. For me these works are almost like sculpture in that regard: You can’t see them all at once. Instead of traversing the space around an object, though, your eye moves around the image, giving you a sense of space. Viewing the work–a collage of images captured over a certain timespan–engages time in a way a single photograph typically doesn’t.

art, landscape, photography

convergences

Leave a comment

Here’s an image I ran across in the LA Times this morning that I wanted to share:
tommyhilving.jpg


It’s a painting entitled “The Bridge” by Swedish painter Tommy Hilding in his current Urban View show at the Angles Gallery in Santa Monica. I haven’t seen it live in person, but the reviewer talks about how the image is constructed from “screen-printed dots, puddles of photo emulsion” with “smeared squeegee marks over the images.” In that way, the work references photographs, and more specifically photographs in reproduction.

In the way the rural landscape hangs over the banal homes, streets and gardens, however, it also strongly references the camera obscura and photography using camera obscura-like inverted images. The photographer most known for doing this currently is Abelardo Morell. He basically takes a room somewhere, draws all the shades, pokes an aperture into the shade, and lets the inverted image of what’s outside shine inside, turning the room into a camera obscura. He then photographs the dim image cast on the wall with a view camera using a long exposure, sometimes several hours. Here’s one of his camera obscura images that he made, this one here in San Diego County at the Hotel del Coronado:

abemorrell.jpg


Abelardo Morell: Camera Obscura Image of Hotel Coronado in Room, San Diego, CA, 1998

For me, Morrell’s camera obscura images are visually striking but ultimately unresolved. Yes, they play with the ideas of indoor/outdoor, public/private, but ultimately I don’t find the images to be particularly nourishing. (There are other examples of his work, though, that I really do like quite a bit.) Other photographers are now copying Morell’s technique, but what I’ve seen hasn’t gone into any territory not already explored by Morell.

Another photographer who’s mined somewhat related territory where a right-side-up image is fused with an upside-down one is Harry Callahan in some of his multiple-image experiments. These are shots where the featureless sky prints out white from the relatively intense amount of exposure the sky areas get in relation to the rest of the image. Since the sky prints white, and since he’s inverting the camera between exposures, the tops and bottoms of these images are white. The only thing that isn’t white is a band of information in the middle of the picture that consists of a small piece of a building with another superimposed on top of it, upside-down. I don’t think Callahan had anything in mind other than doing some formal studies, and these images succeed brilliantly in doing just that. He sets a goal, then creates some stunning images that exemplify his intentions. Morell’s images are graphically interesting, but it’s the intention part that I’m not sure I get. So his camera obscura series doesn’t gel for me in the same way Callahan’s works do.

Anyway, Back to Tommy Hilding. In using this camera obscura-like trick of right-side-up and upside-down, he’s made an interesting image graphically. But there’s a richness to his image beyond the formal qualities. Is the green inverted landscape the more pristine land that was bulldozed and chopped up to create the blight below? It’s probably not as literal as that, but the question hangs in the air as much as the landscape hangs over the little suburban homes and barren patches of garden space. In Beauty in Photography : Essays in Defense of Traditional Values, the photographer Robert Adams quotes Albert Camus, who wrote that the the builders of the City of Oran had managed to “exorcise the landscape.” Is this what’s happened here? Is the original landscape hanging over all of our heads in our squalid little cities like some indictment? Is it the ghost of something that’s lost to us forever? Or is it hanging over us like some dark premonition, ready to drop and crush us?

gardening, landscape, landscape design, photography, rambles

gardens, phonebooths, poetics and old maids

1 Comment

I’ve been rereading The Poetics of Gardens, a wonderful, witty, thoughtful book by architect Charles Moore, landscape architect William Turnbull and theorist William J. Mitchell. In two places it references Igor Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music, in which Stravinsky argues that sounds can’t be considered to be music until a human mind has organized them. (John Cage, of course, would argue you blue if you said that to him…) Extending Stravinsky’s argument, Moore and friends argue that a space can’t be considered to be a proper garden until it’s been shaped by human actions.

The situation at the Mojave Phonebooth brings their argument to mind. The Mojave National Preserve purports to set aside a piece of nature for the enjoyment of the general population in a way that mirrors the mission of the Yosemites and Yellowstones of the world. One of the main reasons that we go to these places is to commune with the wonders and pleasures of the world beyond our garden walls and city gates. We go to commune with nature.

But the very names many of these places gives away the real situation, with many of them called “national parks” or “state parks” or “regional parks.” And parks–think of New York’s Central Park–raise expectations of spaces under human control. The removal of the phonebooth was just an obvious symptom of this control, a control that goes througout the natural system, from the construction of roads and visitor facilities to restricting what kinds of activities a person can do in a certain place. Humans are now positioned so that they could exert obvious control anywhere on earth. The Amazon’s getting slashed and burned and there’s comfy year-round housing on the South Pole. And what’ not under control now could be with varying amounts of effort. I’m in some ways a gullible Romantic and I work hard to guard that precious naiveté, but–as much as I hate to admit it–this “nature” thing is now an artificial distinction.

I won’t try to answer the “when did nature end” question, but something’s that interested me is looking at the controls that ended it. It’s been said in various places that one of the methods of controlling something is to name it–Just think of how many mountains bear the names of people that have had political power and abilities to control people and landscapes. A distinct form of naming features is where features in the landscape are given bear names based on their supposed human characteristics.

Over the years I’ve been noticing places that have names like “Indian Head” or “Kissing Rocks.” The place that made me really stand up and take notice (and stimulate my gag reflex) was Chiricahua National Monument, in extreme southeastern Arizona, when I first visited it in the early 90s. Here, a 1930s trail goes through an area known as the “Heart of Rocks,” where there’s a concentration of features 10-30 feet tall bearing plaques labeling them in all sorts of distinctly human terms, using names drawn from a hodgepodge of cultural referents. This is where I saw Kissing Rocks, two just-touching formations with lip-like protrusions. Then there’s “Punch and Judy Rock,” and “Totem Pole,” and “Thor’s Hammer.” Mixed in with these, “Big Balanced Rock,” “Camel,” and “Mushroom Rock” seemed much more benign.

I returned to Chiricahua last Spring and decided that it would be and interesting project to document some of these formations. On the way up the mountain I was explaining what I was doing to a Park Service ranger. Of all the formations, one of the ones that she’d had the most negative reactions to was “Old Maid.” And, down the mountain a ways, be sure to check out “China Boy,” she suggested. Then there’s a whole mountaintop easily viewable from the parking lot at the top of the mountain that’s labeled “Cochise Head,” a questionable homage to Cochise, who held up for several years in these mountains before he was captured.

If you look at the Park Service literature for the park you’ll see “Big Balanced Rock” mentioned, but they’ve downplayed the other names. The plaques remain, however, maybe as a reliquaries to the1930s mindset that came up with most of the names. (The ranger I spoke to thought that Cochise Head might date further back, to the late 1800s.)

So why all these names? Sure, someone was having some fun with it all, but I’m interested in the questions bubbling below the surface. Are humans so scared of or alienated by “nature” that they have to project human traits on it to be able to begin to deal with it? Are we so blind to natural processes and geology that we can only understand it on our terms? Is naming something the beginning of a long chain of controlling actions that ultimately leads to its destruction?


chiricahua-china-boy.jpg
James SOE NYUN: “China Boy,” Chiricahua National Monument, Arizona, 2007
chiricahua-cochise-head.jpg
James SOE NYUN: “Cochise Head,” Chiricahua National Monument, Arizona, 2007
chiricahua-kissing-rocks.jpg
James SOE NYUN: “Kissing Rocks,” Chiricahua National Monument, Arizona, 2007
chiricahua-old-maid.jpg
James SOE NYUN: “Old Maid,” Chiricahua National Monument, Arizona, 2007

landscape, photography, places, rambles

the mojave phonebooth: part 2, i told you it was weird

1 Comment

[ continued from part 1 ]

My second trip to the Mojave Phonebooth was a few years later when I was leading a photography trip for some fellow photography geeks with the local Sierra Club chapter. My trips are often a little offbeat, particularly for people wanting to pad their portfolios with more photos of rocks and sunsets. (Don’t get me wrong–I still have a weakness for “nature photography” or whatever you call this West Coast, Weston- and Adams- and Porter-influenced way of seeing the world.) The people on this trip were a tad puzzled by my insisting that we visit this phonebooth in the middle of Cima Dome, but I promised them it’d be an interesting detour.

By this point the phonebooth had acquired an international following. I won’t repeat all the details, but through the efforts of a certain Godfrey Daniels, who called and called the phone until he got through to a human being, who logged all his attempts, and who detailed his craziness on the web, the phonebooth began to get a certain reputation for weirdness. People from all over started to make calls to this lost phonebooth, and people would go there to answer them. And then Europe found out. What better thing to represent a romantic European notion of the American West than a lone phonebooth, miles from anything, set in the middle of the desert with j-trees all around it?

My group finally made it there, but we weren’t the only ones that day. A DJ from a Florida radio station was there in a low, battered sedan with “Mojave Phonebooth or bust” signs all over it. He’d been camping out there, taking calls from listeners, and he was looking a little battered himself. In a more deluxe rented SUV was another group of people which consisted of a German film crew and an opera singer. Apparently the opera singer had made a certain reputation for himself by singing arias while standing in the phone booth. Maybe while waiting for La Scala to call him.

We weren’t there long before the phone rang and continued to ring. People from Texas, Florida, Italy, Germany, all over. We didn’t hear the opera singer sing, though the crew got some shots of him standing at the phone, answering a call. Then the film crew turned their attention to my group. Richard got some questions, then someone else, then me. What was I doing here? How did I hear about the phonebooth? Who was in my group? I had no idea if these people were the equivalent of the major American networks, some little cable outfit, or some precursor to Youtube. But what the hell, I’ve been on European television!

The phone booth that day:

mojave1.jpg

Nicole, one of my group, taking a call–in French–from someone in Europe:

mojave2.jpg

Postscript: All this was in the late 1990s, after the Mojave National Preserve came into being officially. The thought of having something so antithetical the mission of a natural preserve rubbed the National Park Service the wrong way, and with the collusion of SBC Pacific Bell (now AT&T) the phone was removed and the phone number ((619) 733-9969) retired forever. While the Mojave Phonebooth was definitely an unnatural feature in the landscape, it was no worse than golf courses in Yosemite or mega-lodges in Yellowstone. But through their greater wisdom the NPS saw it fit to kill off this piece of wacked Americana. So that’s one less thing out in the wilds to makes roaming the deserts such an interesting thing to do.

The Park Service’s action hasn’t ended the weird romance of the phonebooth, however. A film produced in 2006, Mojave Phone Booth, played the festival circuit in 2006 and 2007 and gathered a number of awards.

art, photography

coda: John Pfahl

Leave a comment

A few posts ago I wrote about the garden photography of John Pfahl. Four of the works from this series are in the exhibition, Picturing Eden, at San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts. The show runs through January 13, 2008.

The show has a lot of work in it on the general theme of paradises, whether they be gained, lost, regained or created. The show is curated by Deborah Klochko, and had its origins at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. I had almost no time to look at the work, but there were definitely some great images. I’ll try to write up something a little more extensive later…

art, landscape, landscape design, photography

when landscaping fails

2 Comments

Desert Center, California lies about halfway between Indio and the Colorado River, halfway between a hot, flat desert town and the Arizona border. Unless you need to stop for gas, you pass by it on I-10 at wide-open highway speeds. It’d be a blur like any other anonymous desert town if it weren’t for the palm trees.

The huge date palms there grow single-file in formations that describe wide circles, V-shapes, or a triangle that’s many acres across. Transplanted there by Stanley Ragsdale in the early 1990s, most of the trees now have seen better days. Even for drought-tolerant date palms, irrigation is essential here in the low desert. The watering proved inadequate and many of them died. In their current state of falling into ruins the trees are visually amazing, the vegetable equivalent of the Acropolis.

Palms 1, Desert Center

James SOE NYUN: Palms I, Desert Center, California

I first went to photograph the town and its trees in 2003 on a hot, breezy day in April. It was approaching noon, and there was no shade other than what a minimal palm trunk could provide. It’s not the sort of lighting situation that a lot of photographers consider acceptable, but for this body of work it was perfect. Besides, so many of the well-known 19th century expeditionary photographs of the American West were taken in harsh conditions similar to what I encountered. Palms I, above, and Palms II, below form a diptych: Imagine Palms I on the left and Palms II on the right.



James SOE NYUN: Palms II, Desert Center, California

There weren’t many structures there next to the interstate, not much beyond the obligatory cafe and gas station. The big surprise, though, was an abandoned school, compact, constructed of brick, and modern in its architecture. It had almost no windows in the classrooms except for high clerestories place beneath broad, sheltering eaves. Not that different from the schools I attended up in the Los Angeles area, I thought. In photography–and in painting for centuries before it–ruins are often a bit of a cliche, but name me a landscape photographer who hasn’t shot some at some point. I couldn’t resist:

Desert Center School

James SOE NYUN: Breezeway, Abandoned School, Desert Center, California

Both the palm trees and the town clearly had seen better days. Stephen A. Ragsdale, the man who founded the town in 1921, died in 1971. Stanley Ragsdale, the one who directed the planting of the trees, died in 1999. Without their energies, this area of the city faltered, and the palms began to fail. The town and these landscapes shot there function for me like Northern European vanitas paintings, reminders of life’s struggles, its shortness, and the certainty of entropy. Again, those aren’t transcendentally fresh ideas, but to see them particularized in a place that’s struggling though still very much alive fascinates me. Judging by the number of people who leave the highway, gas up, then drive slowly towards the palm formations, I’m not the only one who’s fascinated.

For more information on Desert Center see: Wikipedia / The Center for Land Use Interpretation.

For more information on the large series this images are a part of see: James SOE NYUN: Blue Daylight Project.

art, gardening, landscape design, photography

extreme gardening

3 Comments

In the late 90s I was fortunate to be part of a show of photography at San Francisco Camerawork, entitled Feed, that centered on our relationship with food. One of the artists in the show was one of my photographic heroes, John Pfahl, who in the 1970s produced his funny and quirkily beautiful Altered Landscapes series. In that San Francisco show he was represented by images of compost, Very Rich Hours of a Compost Pile.

The work that I’d to say a few things about are his documents of over-the-top gardenscapes, his Extreme Horticulture series.

Dr. Wadsworth's Tree

John Pfahl: Dr. Wadsworth’s Tree, Chatauqua, N.Y.

These are all beautiful, color-soaked images, most of them of the sort of gardens where “natural” isn’t a word that would immediately spring to mind. The raw plant materials are often gorgeous, but they’re sheared, arranged and manipulated in ways where the hand of the gardener or designer is in-your-face obvious. Often gardens like that give me the creeps. They and talk to a culture where a country’s President is often shown on his Crawford, Texas ranch, clearing brush, like he’s some sort of representative of good humanity battling the evil forces of nature that want to overrun our boundaries. Most of Pfahl’s gardens are testosterone gardens, gardens all about control, gardens all about domination. But at the same time, they’re often beautiful or funny in their overmanicured way.

Bare Trees and Topiary

John Pfahl: Bare Trees and Topiary, Longwood Gardens, Kensett Square, PA

Espalier Demonstration

John Pfahl: Espalier Demonstration, Longwood Gardens, Kensett Square, PA

Pfahl Getty Garden

John Pfahl: Cactus Garden, J. Paul Getty Center, Los Angeles, California

Maybe I’m overgeneralizing, but the East Coast gardens pictured seem heavy into shaping plants into topiaried sculptures. It’s a heavily European thing–Just think of the immaculately-worked gardens at Versailles. The Western gardens seem to show a little more interest in and respect for the materials. Plants are placed where the designer wants them, but they seem to be chosen more for what they can do in that location, rather than what can be done to them. The arrangements of cactus and succulents at the Getty, for instance, show clear thought about where the plants were placed. But the plants are allowed more to be themselves. (And I wonder if that freedom somehow also translates into freedoms that people are allowed to have…) Besides, have you ever tried to prune a cactus?

The tension of natural tendencies versus control is one that’s always interesting to me. Nature often isn’t convenient, and it’s often never where we want it to be. Scraping a hillside to put in suburban housing and pulling up an errant weed are part of the same continuum. But where do you draw the line about what’s good and what’s bad? Is keeping a garden inherently better than bulldozing native scrub to build more mcmansions? I think the answer is yes, but the question is a complicated one. There’s economics, notions of justice, respect for living things, and all sorts of other things that have to be considered. It’s an intriguing question that resides not far below the surface of John Pfahl’s photographs.