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2003 | Crest Fire, untouched polychrome steel sculpture
Yes, I am intrigued by the palette in this picture. The two worlds are faithfully described – burned or spared.
Then again, a monochrome version might lay out a smooth and delicate tension, a difference of treatment and character.
* Choose for yourself; run your mouse over the picture to swap color vs. monochrome.
** Touch-screen users can just touch the picture to swap, then touch the white border to revert.
2003 | iMac M8935LL/A, Cedar Fire, San Diego County
I dropped in for a few hours to help my friends dig out. Ron, who knows his way around a bronze foundry, looked at the kitchen cabinet hardware and estimated that the fire had burned through the house at about 2100˚F. This picture shows Janice’s computer, which had held her upcoming artwork. The firestorm ran out of oxygen after taking their house, so Ron’s studio, an adjacent building, was untouched as the advancing fire inhaled, then roared on.
With this, I recall Danny Lyons’s amazing and tragically prescient book The Destruction of Lower Manhattan (1969), for which he faithfully followed the removal of the 19th-century buildings doomed by the plans for the World Trade Center. Along with his remarkable pictures, Lyons wrote about the wreckers’ handwork as they unbuilt floors, then beams, then walls: “Workers on the walls pull out one brick after another and in this manner the building is lowered to the ground. It’s all just a matter of changing shapes.”
1993 | Coquille Falls, Coos County, Oregon
I was once again reminded that the Zen fisherman should learn to think like a fish, but I think that idea is too limiting – to catch more than one fish, he should strive to think like a river. This photographer, in such a manner, might learn to think like the whole of his material.
*This is an updated selection from a 1991 exhibition statement.
1996 | Steelblue Lodge, Elk River, Curry County, Oregon
Two radiologists and a fishing guide walk out onto a gravel bar...
1977 | Cambridge, Massachusetts*
Ben Lifson had gathered the work of some younger photographers into an exhibition at Harvard in 1977, and then all of us hung out in Boston and New York after the opening. Ben took me around one day, and insisted on showing me his favorite, unforgettable** Monet at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. (Thirty-five years later, I was to insist on taking my son to the same painting to share that same view.)
Later that day, we stopped in at Ben’s house, and as I was leaving, I made this picture from his front porch. He had been seeing some version of this view every day, and when I saw it for the first time, I did something about it. I am grateful for the many conversations with Ben over our years together, and for his challenging critique and thoughtful encouragement. I may regret that I did not ask him to show me any of his pictures which he might have made from here, but I am glad to have my own – from where I am now, it seems that Ben was lifting me up on his shoulders.
*I can’t find this Leica negative. Around the time it was made, I was fortunate to hear Tod Papageorge talk about his work; he was projecting ‘lantern slide’ positives, contact-printed from his 6x9cm negatives. This gave his audience a better experience of the enhanced surface descriptions gained from-roll film negatives, significantly larger than 35mm. I picked up on that, as I was also working in both formats. For consistency in my own talks, to accompany my 6x9cm positives, I enlarged my 35mm negatives up to 6x9cm size, onto the same Kodak Fine Grain Release Positive film. My projected presentations were big and bright, and they really got my point across.
These days, that process may sound arcane, and seem like a lot of work, but it was neither. That’s what we did.
I still have the lovely, long-scale, enlarged positive, and a good scanner, so I pressed just one button to recover my loss.
** La Japonaise (Camille Monet in Japanese Costume) from 1876. Held in the largest collection of Monet outside of France.
1978 | San Luis Reservoir, Merced County, California
John Baldessari might have had his sign painter carefully letter “WRONG” below this one, but I’m going with Garry Winogrand, who wrote, “A picture can look any way.”
*I urge you to look up Garry’s “Understanding Still Photographs” from 1974. Supremely taut and immensely practical.
1978 | Cabrillo Nat’l Monument, San Diego
At first glance, my photographs seem to show me where I have been. But in the best work that I do, there are substantial clues about where I am going. A camera is facile and intensely intuitive, so my pictures can be far ahead of my mind. A year, or perhaps a generation later, I can make more sense of them, and I can see much more clearly now, what my quick eye reached for then, when I was in the scene.
In this way, my eye and heart can lead me. If my mind catches up later, I am fortunate to feel whole, keeping my path in sight. As I work, I pluck slices of time and space from my world, hoping for good pictures. Later, these treasured bits fit together and help me to see my life and live it.
2015 | Strait of Georgia, British Columbia
I have taken up a meditation practice in the past few years, so I have spent more time with my eyes closed. An intriguing part of my process is dropping into a quiet state, and later, allowing my attention to ride out of it.
During these darkened bookend phases around the core period of ‘nothing,’ I am struck by bird songs, precisely located in the space around me. As I write this in L.A., with the urgent pandemic’s benefits of silenced traffic and clear air, bird life is resurgent. I hear not just bird calls, but bird conversations.
And then, with my eyes open, I can see the conversations. For me, bird photography is like street photography, with wings.
1994 | Mesquite Flat, Death Valley
I gathered with a few large-format photographers in January for a Death Valley week. I usually photograph alone, but the national park covers over 5,000 square miles, so it’s nice to have a few others along to share trail notes. We rarely get in each other’s way.
That year, we arrived in the valley after a busy holiday weekend. My friend Jim Noel had an idea of the kind of pictures he wanted to make, and he lamented the many footprints disturbing his classic sense of the dunes – the ridges, draws, planes, and facets can be ripe and rich material for pictures of dynamic serenity.
I don’t think Jim took his camera out. I was outdoors, so I geared up anyway and took a walk; I did not need to go very far to find an excellent place to work.
1994 | Along US-60, Salome, Arizona
In the months just before his passing, Henry Wessel generously sat with me to review layouts of several of my long-term projects, which marked the entire span of our long friendship. During these sessions, he handed me his gift – an intimate view into his highly-developed process as an artist – the workings of a sharp, free intuition synched with his open, precise logic.
With one picture, he cautioned me, “This one is too easy – don’t give it away.” A week later, I e-mailed him a replacement for that right-hand page in the spread, an odd one for me, and he was taken in by it when we talked on the phone.
I was unsettled about this picture, made with my eye, not my mind, at a rest stop on a long, hot byway in the desert. I asked Hank if it seemed contrived in any way. As quick as a major-league hitter reading an incoming slider, he replied, “No – it’s extraordinary; it happened. Both doors are open.”