craziness

I'm having fun, and I'm too busy to enjoy it. Make any sense?

The call came in from a new client a bit over two weeks ago: "how quickly can you get here, and how long can you stay?" A few days later I was in Chicago, on a very large and very rush project... can't say a whole lot more just yet. I've been home once since then, last weekend, for about 28 hours with a side daytrip to the Bay Area... and have a few more days in Chicago before being able to take a bit of a break. It's one of those work-eat-sleep-work again trips, with breakfast and lunch catered in to a dedicated project office, dinner with the large and ever-changing project team, except on days with meetings or field visits (like today). It's challenging stuff, but exciting.

But it means, for now, no time for writing, or photos, or visiting with friends, or almost anything else. Ah, the joys of consulting...

It slows down a little in just a few days, I think... although who knows, today has already brought two surprises and two almost immediate resolutions of those issues. But gotta go now... early meetings tomorrow.

web

The update of my photography website is almost done, it's mostly uploaded except for the new index page. I still need to work out a few glitches, fix a couple of internal links and some general QC. But I'm probably going to go ahead and put it out there soon even though a couple of the galleries don't have quite as many images as I'd like in them yet... it's always possible to add to those later, and after the next couple of evenings I'll be on the road for a week and with very limited time.

Almost all the images will be different. It's a somewhat different approach this time both in feel and in the way the images are presented; a little lighter look, and a less abstract presentation of subject matter, grouped in more conventional categories but also running together a little. This reflects the fact that I'm in a phase of seeing connections again, that each subject seems to lead to and fade into another.

things

I need to go back to Chicago later this week, had a call a few days ago from a new client and I need to take care of some rush things for them. It's going to be a busy 6 days, I'm getting off the plane and going straight into strategy meetings with project managers and lawyers, and probably working straight through the weekend. Not sure how much time if any I'll have to do anything related to photography. But I did take a few minutes today to think about what to bring, and so far I'm leaning toward keeping it simple. One Leica, a couple of lenses, a handheld incident meter. No digital except for my consumer level pocket-sized little point-and-shoot, and that only in case I need to do any project site documentation.

The reasons: At the recent shoot with Claudine, I took more digital shots (about 180) than film (about 72). And I fell into the trap of shooting quickly just because I could. End result: 40 of the film images made the first cut for editing, only four of the digital images did.

A line in the Weston movie last night brought it to the surface, a mention of the creation of 1,400 negatives (on 8x10 sheet film) during an entire summer of California travels.

I'll bet some digital shooters routinely capture more than 1,400 images in every shoot they do... and that not one of them has, or ever will, even remotely approach what Weston did on that trip.

Another issue has surfaced repeatedly, including in the last two location shoots. I like to shoot in low light, and the little rangefinder lets me get away with it. With no mirror to create vibration, and with the exquisite balance of the Leica, and with the precision of the split-image rangefinder for focus, I routinely handhold at 1/15th, 1/8th, even 1/4 of a second while shooting at dusk or at night, and almost all of the images are sharp. That's led me to try doing the same thing with digital, and... it doesn't work. Shooting at those same speeds results in lots of shots softened by camera vibration, lots of shots with the focus just-barely-off because of the darker, less-crisp DSLR viewfinder and no depth-of-field margin of error at f/1.4 and with the 1.5x crop factor. Yeah, I know, kick up the ISO... but digital noise isn't as pleasing as grain, and I tend to push low light limits anyway, give me more speed and I'll shoot in less light.

I've shot the two cameras side by side, gotten 95 percent success with the Leica, and 25 percent success with a brand new Nikon DSLR, both of them with top-end fast prime glass.

So increasingly I'm shooting digital when speed matters, which for me isn't often, and film the rest of the time.

Another bit of simplifying: Shooting film while on travel allows me to carry my smaller/lighter/easier to use/ancient Mac laptop.. a 12" Powerbook, only 4 pounds. It's too old/slow to handle the huge download files of the current crop of DSLRs, but functions just fine as a word processing and web machine. So that saves me a lot of bulk and weight.

Now if only other things in life were so easy to simplify.

timeless

About 4:30, taking a break from scanning, I grabbed the papers off the front sidewalk and skimmed them. Two days to look at, because yesterday had been such a busy day.

In yesterdays paper was a notice of a screening, a documentary on Edward Weston and Charis Wilson. It gave a time, 6:30 today, but not a place. Fortunately, the correction was in today's paper, the Morris Graves Museum in Eureka. I was there by 6:15.

Edward Weston died five months after I was born, but he was one of my early photographic influences. I'd known of his work very early, because my father often spoke of him. The real influence happened in the late 70s though, when I read the two-volume set of Weston's Daybooks. They were so direct, authentic, down to earth. They inspired a renewed interest in photography, one that very possibly contributed to the documentary work I began doing on the Chicago punk scene just about that time. There are references to the Daybooks in my journals from that period. I also first learned of Charis from reading the daybooks.

I'm not sure when I saw my first Weston prints. The first extensive exhibit was, I believe, one I saw in New York in the mid-1980s, but I probably saw a few scattered examples much earlier than that. I've rarely passed up an opportunity since then, and have studied those prints many times, enjoyed the subtle tonality, the beauty.

The Daybooks of course deal largely with the earlier days, the transition from pictorialism to modernism, the formal compositions. I always preferred Edward's later work, from the 1930s on. Not very many years ago I found a copy of the "California and the West" book, the one with the 1937 to 1939 Guggenheim Grant images, the one with the forward written by Charis. I've paged through that book so many times since then, and it sits in front of me now. It's so much more subtle than the earlier work, less idealized. This work includes death and decay, an acknowledgement of mortality. It's not easy work to look at, it takes many views to fully appreciate. And it gave momentum to my concepts already underway, my nudes in the human-modified world of disturbance and decay. It was the kiss of death for the already mortally wounded myth of pristine nature, at least as seen through my eyes.

So I owe Edward and Charis a bit of an intellectual debt. They're only one influence among many, and perhaps not the most important one, but they're still an influence. Both of them.

I arrived at the screening in time to grab a seat. The room rapidly filled, the final count was 238, more than four times what had been expected. The crowd was mostly older, refined, well dressed, with a scattering of younger artists.

The director introduced the film, then let it roll. The core was a series of interviews with Charis, 90 at the time of filming (now 94 and living in Santa Cruz). She's still sharp, and some things were easy for her to talk about, even fun; other were more difficult. The re-enactments of the shoots and various other events, with actors, were surprisingly believable. The authenticity... any experienced nude model, any experienced photographer of the nude, will smile, will recognize certain rites of passage, certain experiences.

The film really clarifies the importance of the model-photographer connection, really demonstrates that it's not just technique, not just a pretty body. The personality, the emotion, the energy, is so evident in these images. The creative collaboration requires two. The changes over time, these too become evident. The photographs mirror the relationship.

Charis as rebel also brought a few smiles to my face, given how many rebels I work with. The images of her unshaven, natural, at a time when postal regulations forced most models to shave because mailing an image which showed pubic hair was illegal... and the shift over time from in-your-face rebellion to just being who she was, authentic, with Edward's encouragement and as she matured. Then, the increasing distance as she came into her own, as Edward apparently struggled with that level of independence.

I didn't know until tonight that Charis lived in Eureka from 1945, after she left Edward, until at least through the 1950s.

I recognized the muse. I saw an earlier version of so much of what I've come to experience myself. In some ways, these two personify so many of the traits I've come to know among the many models and photographers I've met and worked with. It's no wonder that I keep crossing this path.

choices

Today began as a relaxing day. I rode my bike down to Main Street for breakfast, ended up sitting down with two of the locals, both a lot older than me. I very much enjoyed the conversation, as well as a few that followed on the sunny but windy sidewalk, warm and cool at the same time.

After returning home I dove into scanning some of the negatives processed last night. From the two rolls of Claudine, 72 frames, I scanned 40 images... many more than usual. One example is above, but I've barely begun to actually work on the images, it's going to be so hard to choose from all the keepers. What an amazing shoot.

modern myths

Yesterday I did a google search for some local demographic data, and found what I needed pretty quickly. While on one of the source sites, I saw a link to a forum, and followed it, and in turn followed a couple of links to threads about the Eureka/Arcata area.

What I found there was a series of responses to questions about this area, about what it's like, what the job market is like, etc. The responses were almost entirely from out-of-state people, some of whom had visited once.

Some of the responses were reasonably helpful. But there were several which commented on alleged trashed out front yards, abandoned cars, homeless people; and there were a couple of comments from locals about a "depressed economy."

Two things bothered me about those responses. Let's tackle the ones about the economic situation first, because the answer is simple: Those comments are untrue. They're speculative, none of them cited any actual data, and often they were based on 20-year old information. The "problems" they mentioned are smaller and more localized here than they are in the places those writers are from. But it's a misconception that I still hear sometimes even from those who should know better.

A lot of the problem stems from the 1980s decline that accompanied the transition away from a resource based economy. The logging industry sagged, jobs were lost, some people left the area. People who visited then remember that... I was here briefly in the mid-80s, certainly I remember. We're past that now. The glory days of logging are over, it's a specialty market now, the old days are never coming back. That's a good thing, because it's forced the economy to diversify.

The most telling and most recent sign of that is the beginning of service by Delta Airlines this summer. I was there for the arrival of the first plane, and had a very minor role in making it all happen. It means that we now have three major airlines (the others are United and Alaska/Horizon) flying into a county of only 130,000 people. Clearly, that would not be happening without solid economic justification, especially when times are tough for airlines.

And the airlines are right. The unemployment rate here is currently right around the state average. Median incomes are a little below the state average, but the cost of living is also lower... about 80 percent of the national average. The "Targets of Opportunity" report published a year or two ago by the county identifies six growth sectors, areas which are growing rapidly, and which in general are creating jobs which pay well. I've tossed my copy deep in some pile of paper and don't have time to look for it right now, but among those growth areas are professional services (engineering, architecture, etc.); niche manufacturing; and health care services. There are increasing numbers of telecommuters who have fled the big city (for six years I was one of them), and more information and management workers. Thus the need for those airplanes.

Growth is slow but steady and sustainable. At a time when many rural parts of the U.S. are shrinking, that's a good place to be. We're continually being named to some magazines "best places to live" list often on the basis of outdoor recreation and clean air.

The people who are whining are the ones who have missed the chance to ride opportunity, often the ones who have failed to notice it. The rest of us have been too busy to point it out.

Admittedly, I'm in a better position to see it than most. I sit on the local economic development commission, so I see the numbers firsthand. I know, at least casually, a lot of the city and county decision makers and policy setters. I work for one of those fast-growing professional services firms. Maybe most importantly, I've already watched a variation of this happen in Chicago, 25 years ago... and remember all too vividly the naysayers, the ones who saw the fading days of the rust belt, but never recognized the emerging opportunities... the ones who were left behind. Sometimes the Phoenix can't arise until the ashes have reached a certain critical mass.

The too-rapid growth in the midwest created both good and bad... too much traffic, too much shoddy development. Hopefully, with our more sustainable pace, we can avoid repeating some of those mistakes here.

The second disturbing thing about those comments is a bit more ambiguous. In sum, a few people saw only the fact that we don't all obsess over perfect lawns and shiny new things, and they just didn't understand that. We aren't as materialistic as many parts of the nation. And I need to think on how to really express this adequately... because they didn't see, didn't accept, that we've done some things differently here by choice; that we (or at least many of us) just like to live a little more simply, and don't need to keep up with or impress the Joneses.

That's helping us as the financial bottom falls out of so many other places. Our economic peaks aren't as lofty here. But our chasms aren't as deep, either.

rain

The rains have come early this year. Yesterday was a warm gentle rain. Today is less pleasant, not all that much rain yet but cool and raw and windy.

Still, I enjoy the rain. It makes for a more somber and thoughtful mood.

bail

Like so many, I'm following the bailout closely. As a management major in school, I took more than my share of economics courses (known as "the dismal science" for a reason). I've also met at least one of the major players in attempts to resolve the current crisis, and know members of his immediate family quite well, so there's a bit of personal interest.

Obviously, failure to find a resolution will have profound consequences. I have little sympathy for the Wall Street players, although there's plenty of blame to go around they certainly need to shoulder a major portion as the front-line participants. But the pain won't stop on Wall Street. It will also hurt lots of small investors, lots of people with 401(k) plans, and indirectly... in job losses and inability to get credit... a lot of people who had little or no personal involvement in the fiasco.

And yet, the unthinkable occurred to me the other day, and I can't get it out of my head: Maybe, in a perverse sort of way, a collapse of the financial system could be the best long-term thing that could happen to our economy. Maybe that's the only thing that will break us of our materialistic addiction, our binge of buying things we don't really need with money we don't really have.

I have one additional concern, one that I so far haven't seen much discussion of. As banks and investment firms fall like dominoes and some are acquired by larger banks, a significant consolidation of the financial industry is taking place. Banks like Wachovia (which got in trouble partly through acquisitions of its own) are now in turn being swallowed by titans like Citibank. Yet acquisitions and the dealings of mega-firms contributed to the crisis. Are we simply reducing competition and setting up at a minimum a future of distant dealings by huge impersonal and out-of-touch corporations with huge political clout, and which too often outsource jobs overseas? Or at worst, are we setting up the next crisis? In finance class, they taught us to diversify to reduce risk. Yet here we are, consolidating, creating oligarchies.

Maybe we'll draw back from the precipice this time. Yet it's important to remember that our current economic system is essentially a 150-year old experiment, that in it's present form dates back only to the post-WWII years. Even within the relatively short span of recorded human history, it's little more than a blip in time. One can't help but wonder how long a system predicated on never-ending economic growth can be sustainable. The cliff is out there someplace, we just don't know how far in the distance it lies; and we can't see much in the dismal darkness.