acupuncture and sainthood…
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Category Archives: images / Bilder
William Blake and Hollywood…
I just saw this William Blake image again, today…
Every time I see one of Blake’s images I think that someday, maybe… I might actually get around to reading one of his illuminated books…
That would seem to be the most potent way to get a real taste of his mysticism…
Fat chance of that though…
There’s just enough Gemini in my chart making it nearly impossible to finish any one of the myriad creative projects I’ve got in various stages of in-completion…
Just to complete a thought here…this particular image had always reminded me of Hollywood and Busby Berkeley’s über-elaborate productions…
And then somewhere along the line I saw Vincent Minelli’s An American in Paris…
I guess that Busby Berkeley wasn’t involved in the production…
but somebody in Hollywood musta’ liked and admired Blake…
Hasn’t anybody ever seen the resemblance…?
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Courbet’s l’origine du monde…
all of this buzz about Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde just reminds me that cultivated gardens can be delightful…but a nice area of wild growth tends to inspire my deeper passions…
in other words…neat cultivation tends to remind me of a surgical field….
I just don’t understand any man’s fascination with shaving away the mystery of what an Italian might call “la bella selvatica.”
but then again…most american men don’t get the charm and raw beauty of natural underarms, either…
Starved Rock, Illinois © kristo
more roadside street photography
Pennsylvania trio of the 99% c. 1996
I can’t recall exactly where I took these photos…although it was somewhere between Altoona PA and Lanesboro PA.
After leaving the mountains, I passed some sort of factory where this affable trio of workers was maintaining a picket line. I don’t know exactly what drew me in, except that the pathos of the situation was striking. Probably because of the difference between their friendly demeanor and that of the security guards, who looked more ominous than the Walking Boss from Cool Hand Luke.
I also don’t know if I have any photos of those guards, since most of my negatives are in storage at the moment, but they were highly visible and not just intimidating. Even standing rigidly behind a barrier across that road / factory entrance, they managed to look threatening. So it just doesn’t surprise me that I wasn’t up for the possible consequences of another photo confrontation, even though they themselves had a video camera set up on a tripod and were taping the picket line (and me)…or at least pretending to…
I took a number of shots of the group, looking for an angle to capture whatever that ethereal, elusive thing that drew me in was. We chatted while I kept snapping the shutter, although I haven’t the faintest recollection of what I might have said. I think that most of the images were pretty nondescript and cluttered snapshots like that first one. Although I vaguely remember feeling that the clutter was somehow important…
A couple of weeks later, when I finally got back to the darkroom, I found this:
Locked Out... Pennsylvania c. 1996
Hooray!!
Not so odd, I guess, how the Occupy movement is an awful lot like a strike…
It just doesn’t seem to be costing the 1% anything…
Not even the salaries of all the sunglasses…
kristo
Street Photography…and my damn Aries Moon
As much as I love taking Sagittarian-type road trips to look for images to photograph, it’s still pretty much a variation on the Mercurial theme of street photography…
Stopping the car, getting out, and pointing a lens at someone or something is a busy, but compelling sort of enterprise that I want to explore here by sharing some of my more successful images…
One of the things road trips can share with street photography is the sense of danger, since it can, and occasionally does, cause unpleasant confrontations…
landscapes only rarely get you into trouble, but leave it to me and my Aries Moon to change THAT…
I suppose I don’t get flustered when a state trooper pulls up behind me on a country road and checks out my ID and plates on his computer because I’m photographing some wheat field…but I DO find it ironic that taking photographs is considered a more suspicious activity than hunting…
Of course walking around town…any town…with a camera around your neck eliminates the business of stopping the car and attracting state troopers, but I find myself getting more and more gun shy as time goes by… And that’s something I want to change…
This image is from 1993, I think… I was pretty cheeky back then, and not so afraid of confrontation, but the people I pissed off never got in my face…even if they glared…
But THAT sure as hell changed!
I don’t consider this a great image, but as far as photographs go, it certainly captures an archetypal moment we’re all familiar with… something to do with Mars in Capricorn or Saturn in Aries, I’d say…
Chicago: an innocent street photograph c.1993
Despite my Aries Moon, I tend to dislike confrontations, but I know from experience that getting the kinds of images I really want will often provoke them.
This post on Eric Kim’s excellent blog speaks to the heart of the matter as it addresses the fear of confrontation in street photography.
He offers some useful advice and encouragement, but there’s really no avoiding the fear.
Street photography just requires a hell of a lot of courage…even if the only bad thing that can happen is that you can piss somebody off, or get arrested, or have your equipment stolen, or get beat up…or even knifed…or maybe worst of all: lose your film.
I guess going digital changes that all important last part…
but it doesn’t eliminate the fear.
It also doesn’t change the risk and danger of the absolute worst thing, which is to never take the damn photo at all.
Even if it sucks, it’s still your vision…and you’ve got to keep working on getting that vision in the / a frame so that it doesn’t just not suck…but completely takes your breath away.
Because if you don’t keep trying, you’re just not being yourself.
I only wish I could be myself without all of that Aries business…
kristo
cemetery dreams and road trips…
my cemetery dreams of of the last few days have abated but that image of the grave digger from my last post was the direct result of a much earlier cemetery dream…
the year was 1995…
I was still in practice (gynecology, that is…) and was indulging my passion for road trips along the back roads of the midwest specifically looking for images to photograph…
this particular trip was on the 4th of July weekend and involved criss-crossing the Mississippi on the way down to Memphis…
the destination wasn’t so important… I had decided that it was going to be either Memphis and Graceland or Kansas City and one of only 9 Caravaggios in the USA… Elvis just happened to win out over Caravaggio…
the second night of the trip was spent in some motel in Carbondale, IL where I had a dream of needing to dig things up in a cemetery… whether or not there were bodies involved wasn’t quite clear, but I remember having to use a shovel and thinking that this would be a hell of a lot of work if a shovel was all I had…
the next day, after crossing the Ohio River into Kentucky, I was just passing a cemetery when I saw two men at work digging a grave, but using a backhoe… so I stopped.
not to be a voyeur, but simply to honor the dream and the synchronicity…
they were pretty much finished with the job, and were very friendly while I went about photographing them at work in that very rich and red-looking Kentucky soil…
my favorite image is in color, but I was mostly committed to cross-processing my color film in order to capture the mood, and wasn’t so worried about capturing facts like exact colors…
what happened next is why honoring dreams and synchronicity matter…
A woman left a lone house directly across the road, maybe 500 feet from where this grave had been dug. As she crossed the road, I could tell that she was distraught and ANGRY…
apparently, the grave was for her grandfather, and she was furious that some stranger (me) was walking around taking photographs…
she was so enraged that I really felt that her threat to call in the state troopers was going to turn into something uglier than it had already become… and fortunately, I was able to leave without things escalating further…
The way I see it, this woman was able to vent her anger and grief over the loss of her grandfather by projecting it all on me… after all, I wasn’t disrespecting anything or anyone… but I certainly became a psychological lightning rod for some very intense emotion that she might not otherwise have been able to deal with very easily…
Who knows…
maybe it helped, maybe it hurt…but I tend to trust that synchronicities like this do much more good than harm… and without following them, or following up on them, we lose something of absolutely immense value…to whit, we let our Intuition wither and die…
kristo
cemetery dreams…M3GNMBYBCC24
M3GNMBYBCC24
I’ve had a number of cemetery dreams lately…
At one point in my life, dreams like this would have completely creeped me out, but after doing Jack Miller’s Phoenix Project (in 1994) and visiting Graceland Cemetery in Chicago as a way of honoring all those dreams with their recurring theme, the creep factor had completely disappeared…
Now it seems to have been replaced by a sense of discomfort that I have difficulty placing… The only thing I have to go on is that I can definitively recognize the graves in last night’s dream as being certain computer files… I really have to hand it to Psyche, the comedian, again… Those silly gray file icons on my Mac look close enough to headstones to qualify, but it was the names on them that made identification so easy…
Something about BBEdit, which is the program I use to work on the various revisions of an introduction to my jungian interpretation of Hansel and Gretel…
So…why in the hell am I meant to equate working on this introduction with death and funerals?? I’m not so sure yet, but this introduction is turning into a real monster of a task as I find myself trying to explain (to myself, of course) just what the interpretation of fairy tales is all about…from a jungian perspective, that is…
I do a lot of looking around on the internet for research material on fairy tales, and I’ve recently run across more academic folklorists like this… something about it feels just a little unpleasant, but this still doesn’t explain the visceral sense of difficulty that a dream cemetery seems to conjure up…
Last night, in particular, I saw a small number of men who had apparently spent the night resting under semi-elaborate headstones…it was as if they were homeless men who had found shelter in the cemetery…but the more disturbing thing was that there had been a huge rainstorm in the night, and much of the cemetery grounds were flooded…
There was even a grave-digger who was knocking on the door of the main office, wondering if he was going to be needed at work that day, considering that flooded grounds weren’t quite fit for digging into…
After I woke up I wondered if those homeless men weren’t actually the dead who had been buried… Sounds creepy, but really just indicates a living presence of some sort…
In any case, this introduction I’m writing seems to require me to explain not just why I think art appreciation is important…but what it actually is…
I guess it’s my funeral…one way or another…
kristo
the king…
I don’t think it’s just me…
but doesn’t anybody else ever see the resemblance between these two guys??
it kinda cracks me up every time I see one those dumb commercials of the guy with the plastic head…
choice of eye candy
When it comes to candy…most of us (I suspect) tend to think that we’re selective and choosy…
something that Jean Shepherd was able to wax somewhat…um…sweetly over…
And maybe the same thing applies when it comes to other kinds of candy stores…
like this one:
I hate photographing people behind their back…
but I see an awful lot of pathos in this image…
most of it projected from the more painful regions of my own unconscious, naturally…
just look at the body language…
I found this kindred spirit staring at that tantalizing wall of slightly stale, yet still magical, adult candy and recognized the source of the pathos…
that not-so-secret worm that gnaws at the heart of lots of photographers (like me)…
which is self-doubt and resignation…
i.e. “I so desperately want the satisfaction of taking compelling photographs…but when push comes to shove, I all too often back down and never even try.”
yet hope springs eternal…
and yes, there’s always next time…
which…as clichés and consolations go, may or may not suffice…
but they’re a helluva lot cheaper than a new camera…
but then this is merely the stage of pathos…
not quite catastrophe…
and certainly not obscenity…
although it’s one helluva slippery slope…
which is what I tend to recognize whenever I see the sad corollary to this image…
which amounts to any would-be photographer with a camera around his neck, and the lens cap on his camera…
I mean…
there they stand advertising their not-so-secretly overwhelming desire to capture some spectacular, satisfying image…
and somewhat sheepishly carrying around the (often expensive) means to do so right in front of them…
but then what?
well then you just have to realize that we all actually die more than a little by virtue of them stuffing their creativity…
i.e. keeping a cheap plastic lid on it…
now potential subjects may consider that lens cap reassuring…
since it works like a leash…
even if it’s more like a condom…
but to a photographer, that’s no condom…
it’s an abortion.
plain and simple.
there’s just no candy sweet enough to console us for disappointing that deep, creative urge within…
regardless of the medium…
there may be all sorts of choices available for drowning the inevitable (if not recognizable) sorrow…
and they all cost us…
but that’s just plain pathos…
it’s that none of the consolations or pain-and-sorrow killers are truly satisfying…
but then that’s the completely paradoxical source of both the sacred…and the obscene.
isn’t it…
Giotto on the street
So…yesterday was marathon day here in Köln…
and naturally, a great day for street photography…
it’s just that I’m always a little gun-shy when pointing a lens at people without asking…
On the one hand, I feel like it’s the only way to capture the emotional moments I’m drawn to…
but on the other hand, there’s always that risk of pissing people off, and creating a scene I’m not necessarily up for dealing with…
No guts, no glory…of course…
and while this is far from being a remarkable photograph, I’m just enjoying some of the advantages of having gone digital this last year…
one of which being how relatively easy it is to play with cropping…
now I’m a guy who just HATES to crop…
but without cropping (and this handy-dandy super-duper zoom), I couldn’t possibly find the composition I was looking for without being far too obvious and intrusive…
See…not only do I hate to crop…but I also hate the idea of hiding from my subjects…
I’m used to using a 50 mm lens for working up close and personal…and usually head on…
so while this wild 18-200 zoom business gives me an awful lot of leeway…
I was still standing less than 2 meters from this group…
close…
but not a cigar…
At first, I was pretty annoyed with the persistent intrusion of camera-guy there in the middle…
he had posted up on that unfortunately conspicuous spot…
although once I started shooting, he quickly tried to hide himself behind the tree…
(uh…I guess he figured…just like a little kid…that if I couldn’t see his eyes, then he was completely hidden from view…)
and then I was disappointed that there was so much space between the three wise men and the lady…
not to mention the too-strong, dark vertical of that tree separating them the way it does…
But then in the cropping I found that I could nearly disembody the face on the far right…
and that seemed to be just the thing to turn this into a kind of biblical composition…
with camera-guy playing an unexpectedly pivotal role as a kind of sinister presence in the middle…
I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going to find the best art-historical match to illustrate this…
but I was pretty much thinking Giotto…all the way…
and then I found this satisfying little snippet of a fresco from the Arena Chapel in Padova…
Okay…so camera-guy is no longer in the middle…
I guess he…um…got shifted over to the far left in a medieval photoshop maneuver…
But hey!
Giotto even put in a couple of verticals…
gee…
if only my tree had been maybe a birch instead of a locust…huh?
d’ya think?