February 2009 Archives

Last November I invited a group of Portland photographers to shoot Panther Creek (the winery I sold a few years ago, but am still involved with).  They showed up armed with everything from 8 x 10 view cameras to medium format cameras with digital backs; plenty of DSLR's as well.  It was great fun for me to see them crawling all over the place looking for potential images.

I'd crawled in all those places myself over the years at Panther Creek.  I'd shot so many images there, I quit "seeing" the stuff I saw everyday.  Then I saw a number of the images taken by my photographer guests.  What a whack in the head!  They saw things I virtually tripped over, yet missed.

So while familiarity may breed contempt, it also breeds visual laziness.  I realized it was hard to find anything new to shoot in that familiar environment because I was looking with my memory instead of with my eyes.  Here's an image of the jacket of a stainless steel tank I've walked by a thousand times without seeing it.  Daylight was coming in from the left, and dim tungsten light from the right.  I was finally walking slowly enough to see it.

As I look at many of my recent images, particularly those that don't look like photographs, I notice an increasing number have an intentionally ambiguous anchor point in time.  All photographs capture a moment in time, but what time?  I'm not interested in simply making an image look old; rather, I'm trying to evoke the feeling of an earlier time.  Here's the strange part:  I leave anachronistic clues.  I like the ambiguity.  I don't know why this fascinates me.  Maybe I'm getting old.

Here's an image I'm currently working on, the church of San Giorgio Maggiore on the Venetian island of the same name.  Work began on this beautiful church, designed by Palladio, in 1566.  In a sense, however, the church "existed" centuries before in the form of a 10th century monastery on the same spot.  The sailboats on the left side are of relatively recent design, but I'm tempted to leave them in.  In a way they connect us to the site, literally and figuratively, as did their ancestral sailing vessels over a thousand years ago.