Where am I? -- Where I am.

My photography has slowed lately, and stopped for the past week due to life circumstances.  Reflecting on those facts I decided to look a little closer at the reasons.

The slowing has taken place over a period of several years, partly due to some decreased mobility.  Most of my photography has been done over the last twenty-five years in the course of walking around, snapping some pictures of what I found and then sharing them online. So, less walking and fewer pictures.

The sharing part is probably as important as the pictures; my photographs are most often accompanied by words.  I have maintained this blog, Photography and Vintage Film Cameras, and before that a website since the turn of the century.  I have also contributed pictures and some comments to several online photography sites including Photo.net, Flickr.com and Rangefinderforum.com.

People sometimes advocate for keeping words and photos separate.  I have no real objection to that idea, but it just is not my choice.  I got to reflecting on that fact recently while reading Edward Weston's Daybooks, a journal he maintained about his ambitions and accomplishments throughout most of his photography career. Weston reused some of the entries from his journal to accompany his photos in exhibits and in articles and books. Mostly, though, he seemed to be trying to explain the creative process to himself and to create a context for his photographs. I have tended along the same line, though I have more often thought of the writing and photographs as being integrated into a single product, not usually with a commercial objective.

Not all of my photography has been primarily ambulatory.  A lot of my involvement with picture making has been motivated by an interest in the history of photography, often expressed in a focus on the instrumentation which has evolved over over the past two centuries. I have acquired a large collection of film cameras and have been motivated to attempt to get the best pictures each is capable of producing. I have not spent much money on any of my old cameras; the limitations on the size of the collection are more to do with storage and exhibit space in a small house.

Pictures of people, including portraits of friends and family, have also been a source of inspiration for my photography.  Such pictures represent only a small percentage of my production; they are a concrete expression of my way of conducting social relationships and they rank high in the reward I get from them. I find myself now wishing I had focused more over the years on portraiture and social documentation.  In fact, those kinds of pictures are probably better suited to my current circumstances, so perhaps my efforts will bend in that direction now.

Photography's place in society has undergone some changes over time.  Weston and some others of his generation had something of an obsession over getting photography accepted as a form of fine art.  That concept has had its ups and downs, though is probably mostly accepted these days. To me that issue of status has seemed not of great interest and seems mostly self-serving.  I have always been more interested in the discipline's capacity for illustrating and explaining nature and society, and as a vehicle of self expression.

Attitudes toward photography are revealing of trends in social and political relationships. It seems that people in recent years have become more critical and even paranoid about the practice of photography in both private and public realms.  I encountered a good example of this recently one morning while making some pictures of trees in a nearby park.  Half-way though my walk I was approached by a fellow about my age with a small dog.  

"Why are you taking pictures of people and their dogs?", he asked loudly.  "I haven't made any pictures of people and their dogs", I responded.  "I saw you", he said "what's that hanging around your neck?"

"You are wrong", I said as I walked away. 

I briefly thought about pointing out that the law was currently on my side regarding photography in public places, but it seemed a futile effort.  My impression is that this is more a phenomenon in Western cultures as I don't see much evidence of it in Japan and the East.

Another gauge of people's attitudes toward photography is an effort to censor or suppress the exhibit of pictures perceived as somehow inappropriate for public display.  Sally Mann's pictures of her children have periodically been targeted by such initiatives; recently she and a Texas museum were threatened with charges of pornography. That attack was short-circuited by the state's justice system, but similar efforts are ongoing.  It is of a piece with the resurgence of racism, misogyny and xenophobia which I had hoped the country was moving away from.

Weston, Volume II, California

Weston's Daybooks are intermittently maintained journals that provide a unique opportunity to appreciate an artist's creative trajectory.  The judgements he makes about his own work tend toward the mystical. Tina Modotti commented in a letter to Weston on his mysticism and portrayed it to his approval as a strength. I think that if you want to evaluate Weston's impact as a photographer in his own time, it is more profitable to look at what the Daybooks reveal about his photographic techniques.

Weston began his career doing gauzy portraits in the 19th Century pictorialist tradition.  He and a few others then rebelled against that attempt to imitate painterly styles, choosing instead to use the capacity of large format photographic gear to yield images with a wide spectrum of tonalities and extreme resolution. The primary tool in producing such images was the smallest possible aperture behind the lens which yielded images with great depth of focus, making everything near or far in sharp focus.

What made Weston's images stand out from others in Group f.64 was the frequency with which he made frame-filling closeups of subjects which included vegetables, shells, bones, rocks and household utensils. Dark backgrounds removed any reference to the object's normal context and emphasized abstract patterns. Since Weston nearly always used only natural light for his compositions which were recorded with low-sensitivity films, his exposures were commonly 30 minutes in length and sometimes as long as three hours.  He even used these exposure and compositional techniques as far as was possible in making portraits.  He talks of hand holding his cumbersome medium format Graflex camera for sunlit portraits at a 1/10 of a second shutter speed.         

Weston did a lot of nudes, some full figure, others closeup with resemblances to his still life work. Those images seem to have been well received at the time and sold well. Weston devotes a lot of space in the Daybooks to his work with nudes and generally gives himself high marks for his efforts. I think a case can be made that he was objectifying his subjects and that this judgment is bolstered by his attitude toward the women in his life (many of whom started out as his models) with whom he could never seem to make a lasting and meaningful connection.

In regard to personal relationships Weston redeems himself to an extent in the second Daybooks volume with lengthy entries about his four sons.  Although Weston and his wife, Flora, lived apart for most of the time the boys were growing up, Weston maintained a close relationship with them all as they grew toward manhood. In a 2017 Lumiere Gallery interview Brett, Cole and Neil all spoke fondly of their father and his parenting efforts.

Thoughts about Weston's contemporaries in photography did not make their way into the Daybooks. He talks about painters, sculptors, dancers and musicians that he met over the years and shows no hesitancy in judging their competence. Imogen Cunningham and Roi Partridge were neighbors and friends.  Consuelo Kanaga took a selection of Weston's prints to New York to be seen by Stieglitz. Weston showed his work in a San Francisco gallery owned by Ansel Adams.  However, the work by those photo greats receives no attention in Weston's journal.

Weston refers briefly to an aspiration to have his writing recognized and published.  He did use excerpts from the Daybooks to go along with some of his exhibits, and his writing is easy to read. However, he never shows any real progress toward self knowledge in all the years he devoted to the Daybooks, and his awareness of the world outside his studio was skimpy at best.  Much of his career took place during the Great Depression, but he made only very fleeting references to it.  There was no indication of an awareness of Cartier-Bresson's observation that "The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!".

The Daybooks saga ends with a note about meeting Charis Wilson, who managed to stick by Weston for over ten years.  For anyone wanting to understand Weston, the book by Charis is everything the Daybooks are not.

Portrait of Charis Wilson by Edward Weston, 1935

Reliability

 

For a recent visit to Phoenix I decided to take along my Olympus Infinity Stylus because of its pocketability and always-reliable performance.  I only took time to shoot a few frames on the roll of Arista 200 I had loaded in the camera.  Back home, I took a walk through Albuquerque's Old Town to finish off the roll.

The camera was made about thirty years ago and I've put over 50 rolls of film through it since I found it in a thrift store.  It has never missed a beat in all that time, and I may have only replaced the three-volt battery once, even though the auto-everything camera must draw quite a bit of power.

I found several examples of the Infinity Stylus in thrift stores over the years and never paid more than ten dollars for them.  I was initially incredulous when I saw them going not long ago on ebay for well over $100.  On giving some thought to the issue, however, I'm thinking now that the combination of quality output and never-say-die reliability makes the current prices quite understandable.

I only got around to using the Olympus Infinity Stylus once in 2024.  I'll try to pay more attention to the little jewel this year.

At One (point five)

 

Weston, Volume I. Mexico

 I got talking recently with a friend about The Daybooks of Edward Weston. I said it had been a long time since I read Weston in his own words and I resolved to read him anew.  When I turned open the cover I found that my copy was a gift from friends in 1978! It was not surprising then that much of what I read this time around seemed completely new to me.

 

I enjoyed re-reading about Weston's first year in Mexico where he was accompanied by his young son, Chandler, and Tina Modotti.  Much of that narrative is focused on the process of getting to know the extraordinary group of artists who had assembled in Mexico City while the country was still in a very turbulent state following the 1910 Revolution.  Some in the community of artists such as the muralist, Diego Rivera, identified with the aspirations of the Revolution, but all were fundamentally dependent on the patronage of the moneyed class which found a mostly comfortable refuge in the country's capital city.  Weston made a living there primarily by making portraits of upper class Mexicans.

Weston devotes quite a bit of space in his Daybooks to discussing his development as an artist/photographer and he also provides some interesting details about his photographic techniques.  Though best known for his large format work he actually made a lot of pictures in Mexico using a 3-1/4 x 4-1/4 Graflex.  Weston had an enlarger of some sort, however he used it not to make prints directly from those Graflex negatives, but rather to produce enlargements on glass plates which could then be used to make contact prints on 8x10 paper.

 The last chapters of the Daybooks reminded me of why -- in spite of my regard for Weston's accomplishments as a photographer -- I have such a thorough dislike of him.  Although there are abundant indications of his character throughout the Daybooks, they are somewhat easy to overlook amidst his enthusiastic accounts of his artistic trajectory.  He was in the end a serial exploiter of all of the women who were close to him, even including the young servants in his Mexican household.  You have to wonder what were the thoughts of the Daybooks editor, Nancy Newhall, as she assembled those final damning chapters.

Bumps in the Road

 My Nikon FE has made some good pictures for me, but I haven't made a lot of use of it.  I decided to rectify that neglect with a trip to the zoo on a fine morning.  I made all the shots there with the Vivitar 3.5/70-210mm macro zoom.

  I grabbed a quick still life the next morning and then took a walk in Old Town with the Nikkor -P Auto 2.5/105mm.

When I got to Old Town I found that the meter's batteries had died, so I switched to manual exposure to finish off the roll of Fuji Neopan 400.  Back home, I processed the film in HC110b.  About a third of the zoo shots were blank frames.

The short series of shots from Old Town were ok, so I'm hoping the dying batteries accounted for the missing zoo shots.  I'll shoot another roll of the Neopan 400 to test that theory, and maybe also try developing in PMK to comapare with the HC110 results.

Old Town

 I have been walking around Old Town with my cameras since we moved to Albuquerque about sixteen years ago.  A lot of little shops have come and gone in that time, but the character of the place has largely endured.