Reaching beyond photography

When I was first asked to jump in and finish teaching someone else’s semester, I’d never taught (or studied) photography. But it honestly never occurred to me that that might present a problem. That’s just the way one thinks at age 25…if you can call it thinking.

Anyway,  I just jumped in and tried to see if I could get photography to do for the students what it had done for me. I tried to get people to work in the huge space before the photograph,  a state of presence and imagination. Then we focused on the picture-taking.

So it was a class about creating, and I assigned students to make dozens of photos in which the light was the principle subject. Or sit in a room and speak out loud sentences that described everything they saw for a half hour before touching the camera. Or describe in detail a place they’d never been.

And in the course of that class wonderful photos emerged. The underlying idea was to stop thinking only of what might make a photograph and see everything that was there.  As Robert Rauschenberg said, “No subject for a painting is better than any other.”

One year I decided to do a workshop for former students, and I invited my artist friend Alan Magee to co-teach  with me. Alan said, “I’d like to get people to literally cut through the edge of their photos.” Great! Break the container and see where the contents flowed. We told people they could cut up and collage their photos, or paste them onto  a piece of board and extend the lines of the image outward with marks or strings or anything else they could find. And Alan gave directions to the nearby town dump, so that they could scavenge for the things that might be useful.

What they did went far beyond anything I would have dreamed. People began to flurry around and try things. Lots of energy was released, and it coalesced around the building of a great puppet, about 11 feet tall, with a large head, and a profusion of limbs.

But the real result was not the puppet, it was the expanded sense of possibility that participants  were left with afterward.

That’s what I took away too. And I began to give that assignment in some form or other from then on. One student wrote to me years later, saying, “I took some of your assignments as jokes, until I saw the beautiful work that others produced.”

I’ve been writing down a number of things that people did, and will post two or three on the blog at a time for the enxt week or two.  It still amazes me that people got to these projects by simply setting aside their habitual ways of thinking, and I want to share them, with all their surprise and exhilaration and energy.

I’ve never come up with a better name for the assignment than Extend a Photograph. It sounds a  bit prosaic, but it is quite a pure description, and it will do until I think of something more electric.

I'll be doing a workshop for former students again this summer, and I think this assignment will be a big part of it.

1. On a string

The class was asked to take hold of a piece of rope about 25 feet long. Then we were asked to close our eyes, and we were led out of the classroom, down a hall, out a door, across the parking lot and into a small garden surrounded by an adobe wall. Then we were told to open our eyes.

What we saw was a carpet of thick green grass that grew to the base of an adobe wall. A few feet in front of the wall were two old fashioned lawn chairs, the kind with metal  seats and backs welded to a sprung tube base. The metal was painted a kind of worn turquoise color. The sun fell down the wall, broken into streams of light by tree branches. Above there was a very clear blue sky with ice cream clouds. A light wind made the branches dance and the light shimmered and danced on the wall.

We stood for perhaps 30 or 40 seconds. Then we were told to close our eyes, and we were led back to our classroom.

The image of that small garden on that day is indelible.

2.   A violent event

The class was told to wait outside while the room was prepared. When we were told to enter, we found the room had been darkened. On the floor lay a flashlight. Its beam shone across a small plastic bag that contained some gravel  and a newspaper clipping. It looked like an evidence bag. Next to it there was a small tape recorder that was playing the sound of running footsteps. The clipping told the story of a young woman who had been jogging on a road on the desert edge of town and been attacked.

We all read the story, then waited, listening to the sound.

Abruptly, the sound stopped.

(To be continued.)



Does Robert Frank Tweet?

(This post is also available at the ASMP Strictly Business blog.)

Living in this blizzard of Tweets, I have to remind myself that doing really creative work requires a certain amount of silence, even boredom. There has to be space in which things can occur, and if you are constantly talking about what you are doing, you can’t really listen, at least not as much as you need to do deep work.  (Which is maybe why my earliest work was so loose and prolific. After all no one was chasing me to do other projects then. They didn’t know I was alive. Which was more desirable than I understood at the time.)

The first question that seems to pop up around about any creative idea seems to be, How can I support/sell this? It’s a fair question, but perhaps it shouldn’t be the first question.

Although it seems a bit cloudy just now, photography is an amazing mirror, and it can reflect the most subtle and broad phenomena. It still amazes me when a single still image, resonates it a way that takes one into other lives, other worlds, atmospheres, things that can’t be said any other way. Take a look at Roy deCarava’s Hallway. Try to say something about it. The closest I got was when I tried to write a poem about it, but believe me it wasn’t as powerful as the picture. It is a kind of photograph that I think can you can only get to by first being quiet. That’s how it works on the viewer too.

There’s a time to show, to promote, to “monetize”, but it’s not all the time, and it’s not the creative time.
Think of that old Zen koan. It may be that if a tree falls in the forest it makes no sound, but the tree sure knows things have changed.

Troubling the Eye in New York

First, I love the way I feel when I come back here. After all the years living teaching, working in and around New York, the city is striated through my mind, under my fingernails, in my eye making me blink. (You can’t go wrong with a grit metaphor here, right?)

But I actually came in to see a California show, specifically LA work, in a big white room so clean you could make computer chips in it.

The work was minimal, and included…well, what if I don’t use names and just describe a few of the things? See if you can guess.

So, a wedge of cast acrylic, 24” wide, 20” high, 4” thick at the bottom, narrowing and slanting to a very thin edge at the top. (All dimensions approx.) The view through the bottom is thickened by the material, and it shades to clarity at the top.

A triangle of bright red light projected into the corner of a darkened room. The effect is that of a solid, glowing structure, (strawberry Jell-O?)

A similar piece, green light that forms a seemingly solid rectangular wedge in a corner, (lime?)

A circular piece on a wall, perhaps 48” across. It bulges forward at the center. There is a gray horizontal strip about 4” wide across the thing, most visible at the center shading off to the same tone as the rest of the thing at the sides  And at the edges this disk more or less disappears into the same tone as the wall. It does not physically merge, but the finish is such that it just fades and becomes the wall. The effect is of a kind of goat eye bulging from the wall and staring at you.

Finally, a cast acrylic column, maybe 12 feet high, 10” wide at its widest. Different facets running vertically, polished, perfectly clear. The effect, as you move around it, is that whatever is behind it is…disrupted, disturbed. And the disturbance is what you notice. You can see the column itself if you look, of course, but your attention shifts back and forth between the column and it’s effect. and it is the effect that finally holds you. I’ve seen this piece twice now, in different settings, and it just knocks me out each time.

As the writer James Weschler said of this artist, “What stays in the (gallery) is only the art-object, not valueless, but not the value of the art. The art is what has happened to the viewer.”

Bingo! And I’ve been carrying it with me for years now.

So if you want to know who did the work, and to see some tiny, totally inadequate photos, click here.

Oh, and Carl Jung's hand-done Red Book at the Rubin Museum is a great contrast, as maximal as the other work was minimal.

Boredom helps the artist! I knew it, I damn well knew it!

For a while, ever since I had a little micro-epiphany, I’ve been overtaken by the feeling that it is really a serious mistake to seek to fill all our hours with doing, both the mental and the scurrying kind. True for the artist, certainly, but realy for everyone.  I realized that the great gift given to young artists is that no one gives a damn what they are up to, other than some friends. It doesn't seem like a gift at the time, but as a result of it they can wander around, look at things, order another espresso and sit there dreaming up stories or pictures or musics that they’ll never finish, that will be pushed aside by some other beginning that will also likely be left undone. They can do that until they do get something done.

At that point  expectation sets in and they start to put aside as unworthy that mental spaciousness that is the crucial ingredient of art. I was in my 20s when it happened, but I suspect it happens much earlier now. Just because the whole Baby Mozart thing turns out to be worthless doesn’t mean a child should just sit there. Dance lessons! Hockey practice! Hebrew School or Chinese lessons!

When I was in Uganda I noticed how often people everywhere kept checking their phones for messages, and how seldom they seemed to get one. Then I noticed how often I was checking mine, even though I didn’t know anyone there.

Now along comes Jennifer Schuessler, in the NY Times Book Review, with an essay on boredom and its uses in creative activity. Neuroscientists (those new Magi) say that boredom is “an important source of creativity, well-being and our very sense of self.”

In the state of boredom, Schuessler reports, “the brain is in fact firing away, with greater activity in regions responsible for recalling autobiographical memory, imagining the thoughts and feelings of others, and conjuring hypothetical events: the literary areas of the brain, you might say. When this so-called default mode network is activated, the brain uses only about 5 percent less energy than it does when engaged in basic tasks.”

It really is an argument for doing without trying to do. Lao Tzu had it right.

There are a lot of people you couldn’t sell this idea to in this world…like whoever invented the software that counts keystrokes. But if you’re an artist, or anyone engaged in trying to figure out any kind of complicated problem, I’m more convinced than ever that a little nothing is the thing to try.

The whole article is here.

Portrait albums of Facebook

Just put up several groups of portraits on a new Facebook Fan Page, here;

 The Romans, the Sudanese, theMexican project, Pura Cara,and some I like because of the way the people look back.

Portraits are one of my biggest passions, and of course, it's also nice to see them big on my regular site, but they're kind of scattered there.  These series are more complete  than they are elsewhere, particularly the Mexican series, which I dearly love.

I'll be adding more soon if people seem interested. And I will know if they are by the number of people who go to the  page and "become Fans" (weird thing to request, at least to me).

In any case, please visit, and comment if you'd like.