I was doing some Sunday tub reading and found this in my Art in Theory book:

Coincidentally, I found that I had come across some photographs by Eliseo Mattiacci from Vergine’s book not long ago.

I can’t think of anything to write.

Your opinion on what’s the greatest, any criteria can be applied.

I believe the most recognizable one is Joe Rosenthal’s  Flag raising at Iwo Jima, and as an ex-Marine*, that’s hard to disagree with. By recognizable: at one time I saw a poll showed that more people had seen that image. That was 20 years or more ago so that may have changed.

What? Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings?

I’ll reveal mine later, I don’t want to bias the selections. As a hint it shows the very moment the modern era began, early 20th century, that’s another hint.

*Some say there is no such thing as ex. Once…. always.

–Dick

Don’t call, it’s not for sale yet! We’re working on that.

You might ask, what’s an oil print?

It was the precursor to the Bromoil. It was invented by G.E.H.  Rawlins,  c. 1905. It is a process closely related to the lithography and the collotype. In brief: it is a sheet of gelatin coated paper. It is sensitized in dichromate, dried and exposed. The exposed portions harden the gelatin. It is then soaked in water and the gelatin absorbs more or less water depending on the effects of the hardening, that is, the darks are harder and thus aborb less water than the lighter areas. This is called the matrix and it is inked by roller or brush with an stiff oily ink. The ink sticks more to the   drier dark parts than the wetter highlights and thus an image is formed. The image is made up of pigmented ink and is therefore very permanent.

Bromoil came into existence due to the fact that cameras were getting smaller. Enlarging was coming into vogue so large prints from smaller cameras and smaller film was possible. The oil process was a contact process and thus was the conundrum, no one had any big negs anymore. Now there is a twist in the history. Cameras are still small, film is disappearing, but we can make large negs inexpensively and quite simply on a desktop printer.I can safely say that there are far more desktop printers in the world than there are enlargers and darkrooms, so we are now back to point “A.”

Gertrude Kasbier — Iron White Man –

Courtesy of the Library of Congress Neg c. 1905

Image Dick Sullivan 5/11/2012
Image size @ 8×10 — Oil Print — Machine Coated Stonehenge White
GC&I Sennfelder’s Black

Sensitized 4% Pot Dichromate, brush coated

Exp. 75 units Olec 50000 watt

Coated High density 6 inch foam roller

Soak cool water 1/2 hr

Note: The image was taken when the paper had dried overnight but the ink was still wet. The print cannot be flattened in this state as the ink will smear.

The negative was made for albumen so even at 4% there is too much contrast for my liking. This took about 2 or 3 minutes of rolling to ink. It did not go totally black and then lighten as I have seen some do. I also did not do any brush work as I decided to leave well enough alone at this stage.

 Where are we going with this? Some have said that we have Bromoil so why bother with this? First off, let’s look at some of the aspects of where this fits into the pantheon of historic and alt processes:

Cheap  — relatively. When you buy the paper you are buying the Stonehenge which would be an added cost if you were to make your own. This cost of the base paper comes with most alt processes. You buy a kit and then have to buy the paper. The added cost here is for the consumables, basically the ink. Start up cost might include a mulller, plate oil and pigments if you are making your own ink. (This we are exploring very soon.)

You can make oil prints in virtually any color you want. Multi colors even. Early workers even brush applied some shadow or highlight tones and even made very complexly colored images.

They are exceedingly permanent. It’s ink and pigment. They are essentially an oil painting on paper.

You can exact lots of local control. It’s a merging of painting and photography.

It’s on art paper –When compared to Bromoil they do not have that commercial look of silver paper.

They ink up incredibly nice as compared to Bromoil.

No enlarger or darkroom needed. These items are becoming rare. There was a time when you could sign up for a photo class at your local community college and have a darkroom to use. Duh!, That’s pretty much gone as well. Yes, some still have darkrooms but they are dying fast.

Stonehenge imparts a very nice texture under the gelatin as compared to Bromoil on the extremely limited variety of papers now available.

I believe very large prints are possible due to the ease of using a roller.

Oil is supposed to transfer in a press much better than Bromoil. Yes, it is a printing process as well! Twofer-One!

The same paper may be used for final support in transfer.

The future and areas we will explore:

Matte surfacing with silica or alumina

Hand prepared ink with muller, and dry pigs.

Machine coated canvas.

Explore transfer technology.

Below shows texture on the Stonehenge.

As I was telling Richard, I’ve been spending my last days of freedom before starting a new job tucked away in my fort eating blueberry scones and becoming immersed in tumblr. I’ve only had my tumblr for about a month but it has affected me in…weird ways. I find myself dreaming about images I post, which made for a couple of nights dreaming about dead babies.

The first week I just starting posting pictures I liked, even scanning some in from books if I couldn’t find them online. That’s fine until you start looking at other tumblrs and realizing that yours is lackluster. Suddenly images that were once inspirational to you become relative. If you find one of your favorite images on someone else’s tumblr which is constituted of half-naked nuns making out and upside-down crucifixes, you start to rethink your aesthetic choices. After a couple of weeks you find yourself incapable of being shocked by anything gruesome or disturbing anymore. I feel that in the coarse of a month I have at once become desensitized while simultaneously hypersensitized.

Here are some rather embarrassing musings from last night. I find it necessary to include them….for some reason I will attempt to make later.

the thought of writing about tumblr makes me self-conscious about mine. i feel it is forced, that it is not me. but i like those images. but they are not me. so i am misrepresenting myself. i can represent myself how i choose, but i don’t want it to be the wrong way. but what is wrong about it? has it affected my aesthetic? or just how i view others’? it makes things less mysterious. i feel like i’m just copying. mine is no different than the others. i should make it more meaningful and personal. perhaps the internet wouldn’t be a scary place if i approached it the way i do people. how to be personal on the internet? why do i have to figure out how to do this now? cause its just the way things go. you have to have a relationship with it and be the best at doing it to get yourself across now. is it ok to publish your inspiration? or is it advertisement?

Some day I am going to have a nervous breakdown over how I represent myself on the internet. Ive been thinking about technology a lot lately and how beneficial and destructive it can be. I would like to be able to use the internet as a tool for shaping the trajectory of my art and sharing it with other artists, thereby networking and meeting people I otherwise wouldn’t have. On the other hand, I set myself up as open for criticism from both peers and potential employers, as well as subjecting my work to theft. Well then, you could go all schizophrenic about it and create different identities for different aspects of yourself, perhaps feeling smug about it because no one has to know about it but you.

I used to hate Facebook and took a two and a half year break from it. Now I’m back on because sometimes its so bad you just can’t look away, and other times it really is nice to know what is going on with old friends back home. Now I’m on tumblr and into it to say the least. I’m just fascinated with the way people represent themselves. I used to ignore technology, badly, but eventually my intellect crept up on me and said I couldn’t be so naive anymore. How much could/should your life on the internet align with your “real life?”

Metaphysics?

*A Frenchman once told me that I was like a bad German philosopher.

I published this on the blog last fall. Like, man, this is a cape to die for. 100% spider silk from Golden Orb spiders. Big downside: you can’t wash or dry clean due to extreme shrinkage. It is also the natural color of the silk. They say a tassel made of it so light that it can’t be detected if blindfolded in ones hand.

I thought it worthy for another an update.

The bigger news is science is getting close to being able to reproduce this amazing material which lighter and stronger than any other known  material in many ways. The properties are amazing, and from my view, this stuff is going to  be as revolutionary as the laser. a strand long enough to circle the earth would weight 500 gm, or a little over a pound!

I am thinking that you could possibly make a full sized parachute that you could carry in your back pocket. This is just a thought on my part but this alone could be amazing in itself. Even some small aircraft carry parachutes just for the plane itself. Yes, really! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a8cntPdRtk — Pretty amazing, take a look.

I recall when I was a technician at Spectrolab we got a very early laser and wondered for about 5 seconds what could we do with it. By the end of the day we had aligned a complex optical system of lenses and mirrors in less than an hour that would have normally take 2 weeks. I don’t think anyone at the time thought of a laser disk or DVD.

One quality of spider silk is that it is “stronger.” The term stronger has a lot of different components. Among them from Wikipedia on spider silk:

Strength

In detail a dragline silks’ tensile strength is comparable to that of high-grade alloy steel (450 – 1970 MPa),^[13][14] and about half as strong as aramid filaments, such as Twaron or Kevlar (3000 MPa).^[15]

Density

Consisting of mainly protein, silks are about a sixth of the density of steel (1.31 g/cm³). As a result, a strand long enough to circle the Earth would weigh less than 500 grams (18 oz). (Spider dragline silk has a tensile strength of roughly 1.3 GPa. The tensile strength listed for steel might be slightly higher—e.g. 1.65 GPa,^[16][17] but spider silk is a much less dense material, so that a given weight of spider silk is five times as strong as the same weight of steel.)

Extensibility

Silks are also especially ductile, with some able to stretch up to four times their relaxed length without breaking.

Toughness

The combination of strength and ductility gives dragline silks a very high toughness (or work to fracture), which “equals that of commercial polyaramid (aromatic nylon) filaments, which themselves are benchmarks of modern polymer fiber technology”.^[18][19]

Temperature

Whilst unlikely to be relevant in nature, dragline silks can hold their strength below −40 °C and up to 220 °C.^[20]

Supercontraction

When exposed to water, dragline silks undergo supercontraction, shrinking up to 50% in length and behaving like a weak rubber under tension. Many hypotheses have been suggested as to its use in nature, with the most popular being to automatically tension webs built in the night using the morning dew.

Highest-performance

The toughest known spider silk is produced by the species Darwin’s bark spider (Caerostris darwini): “The toughness of forcibly silked fibers averages 350 MJ/m³, with some samples reaching 520 MJ/m³. Thus, C. darwini silk is more than twice as tough as any previously described silk, and over 10 times tougher than Kevlar”.^[21]

Details are here:
http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/25/world/europe/spider-silk-cape-on-display/index.html
It took 6000 hours just to embroider the cape.

I suppose this would get them twitterpated on Antiques RoadShow!

_____________________________________________

Update by Jack Lloyd:

The above is a screen print of the Grand Central Station Concourse. Quite obviously done with a lot of manipulation. Perhaps a little too clever for my tastes.

When I first saw the announcement about this I got pretty excited. New York City just a few weeks ago announced that their photo collection was online.

There are a few news stories about announcement of the 870,000 images recently put online but surprisingly almost none of the stories posted the link. With some digging I found it. http://nycma.lunaimaging.com/luna/servlet

So the big bah humbug is that they are not hi-res scans like you can get at the Library Congress. They seem to “sell prints” though so far that dog isn’t hunting. At least with my cursory exploring of the site. So it seems OK for the online photograph as that is what I am finding for the resolution. I suspect they are keeping the higher res for themselves so they can sell prints. I clicked on “Buy Print” and went to the cart and even to checkout and no price was given for the 8×10 I was trying to order. I even agreed not to broadcast or publish it without written permission which is problematic since the courts have ruled that mere copying of a public domain image does not re-establish a new copyright for the entity that scanned it,  so this is interesting. They are not claiming a new copyright but obtaining an agreement. This is not legal advice but I seriously doubt one can agree not to publish a public domain image. Suppose someone named bill posted it on a web site and I found it. Suppose I agreed and downloaded it but found one in the “public domain” on a site, can I use that one?

For a bit more on the copyright issues  see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.

Google “bridgewater” “corel” and “copyright” for some interesting information

–D

You can go to:

I just discovered this open letter from Richard Dawkins to Prince Charles and found it fascinating. It is still timely though over a decade old.

I need first to explain where I am coming from on this. I am a liberal. I have been most of my adult life.I have restraining orders from the 60′s over sit-ins to prove it. I am concerned about our environment and corporate exploitation of it for profit. Corporate Capitalism is based on short term gain and not the long term. Sure, I suppose, I could just get mine now and to hell with what I leave for my grandchildren.

My political leanings tell me that I am supposed to be in favor of certain things. Organic food and its production is one of them. However I have always been a bit leery of the aura of politics surrounding it. And I am also skeptical of organic food production implementation. For instance, it has always troubled me that you can’t objectively test an agricultural produce to see if it is really “Organic.” And then there is the glaring deficiency that there is no audit trail. No one would buy a diamond just on the word of the seller. Even then you can easily test a diamond to see if it is real.  We have to go on “faith” alone that an organic farmer heading for Saturdays’ Farmer’s Market  in her pick-up truck is not spiking the load with some conventional stuff picked up at Safeway. We are told that we have to have faith that organic farmers are honest people and would not do that.

Then there is all the: “things that are natural or organic are good.” This is an idea that has gnawed at me for some time. I recently dealt with a young women who was planning on starting up a natural paint company. I asked what she considered natural, and therefore safe. She said it had to come out of the ground and not be artificial. “Arsenic, lead, and selenium come out of the ground and are very natural,” I said to little effect! The more one learns about nature, the more one learns that nature on its face is brutal. Not killing a cow and eating it is not going to make the world any better. I am told that animals kill quickly and mercifully. I am sure the speaker of this wisdom has never seen a cat torture and play with a mouse with a full food bowl on the kitchen floor.There is a blood fest going on out there.

So coming across this well voiced opinion of a person, whom many would list as the greatest biologist since Darwin, struck me as right on target. It’s a kick in the gut and I find it hard to argue with many of his points. Dawkins is hard to pin down politically. A skeptic to be sure but there is a streak of socialism there along with a dose of libertarianism*. I think he may represent the new thinking person’s politics.

Many of the same issues that Prof. Dawkins discusses are pertinent to what we do in photography. Issues of chemical toxins and other things are rampantly misstated in the art world. and we have discussed them before.There are real dangers and then thee imagined dangers. When too much crying of wolf goers on people will then just shut it off and that is the real danger. Bathing in dichromate is a real danger but one does not breath dichromate fumes as some have suggested, but then there is a profit motive there as some sell plastic gravure materials and need to create a negative market for copper gravure. I seriously doubt anyone has been harmed making copper gravures in the modern era. There are processes that need a well informed maker. Dagguerotype for instance, and anyone working with mercury and cyandides, but then those dangers are well known and are real. Crying wolf about “dichromate fumes” is another thing and is quite dangerous as it clouds what are real dangers.

Prof. Dawkins does take to task the romantics about GM food production. I confess, I do wax romantic about the handmade art work and photograph but not about the dangers of the chemistry we use.

Prof Dawkins, by many accounts is far past the point where he should be putting “Sir” in front of his name and looks like it is not ever likely to happen.

Help me out. What do you think?

[*Note: Modern libertarianism has run off the tracks due to one glaring philosophical flaw. That is they grant corporations personhood. Remove the rights of the artificial formation of persons by paper proclamations and the idea of libertarianism becomes quite different. It is still, as many philosophical constructs are, removed by leaps from reality. Adam Smith never mention corporations in his works. They existed but were as far as economies went, insignificant. Even Ayn Rand was blind to this very problematic issue. as she fails to distinguish this separation in her famous work “The Fountainhead.”

_____________________________________________________

Don’t turn your back on science  -  An open letter from biologist Richard Dawkins to Prince Charles

Article in The Observer Sunday May 21, 2000

Your Royal Highness,

Your Reith lecture saddened me . I have deep sympathy for your aims, and admiration for your sincerity. But your hostility to science will not serve those aims; and your embracing of anill-assorted jumble of mutually contradictory alternatives will lose you the respect that I think you deserve. I forget who it was who remarked: ‘Of course we must be open-minded, but not soopen-minded that our brains drop out.’

Let’s look at some of the alternative philosophies which you seem to prefer over scientific reason.First, intuition, the heart’s wisdom ‘rustling like a breeze through the leaves’. Unfortunately, itdepends whose intuition you choose. Where aims (if not methods) are concerned, your ownintuitions coincide with mine. I wholeheartedly share your aim of long-term stewardship of our planet, with its diverse and complex biosphere.

But what about the instinctive wisdom in Saddam Hussein’s black heart? What price the Wagnerian wind that rustled Hitler’s twisted leaves? The Yorkshire Ripper heard religious voices in his headurging him to kill. How do we decide which intuitive inner voices to heed?

This, it is important to say, is not a dilemma that science can solve. My own passionate concern forworld stewardship is as emotional as yours. But where I allow feelings to influence my aims, whenit comes to deciding the best method of achieving them I’d rather think than feel. And thinking, here,means scientific thinking. No more effective method exists. If it did, science would incorporate it.

Next, Sir, I think you may have an exaggerated idea of the natural ness of ‘traditional’ or ‘organic’agriculture. Agriculture has always been unnatural. Our species began to depart from our natural hunter-gatherer lifestyle as recently as 10,000 years ago – too short to measure on the evolutionary timescale.

Wheat, be it ever so wholemeal and stoneground, is not a natural food for Homo sapiens. Nor is milk, except for children. Almost every morsel of our food is genetically modified – admittedly byartificial selection not artificial mutation, but the end result is the same. A wheat grain is a genetically modified grass seed, just as a pekinese is a genetically modified wolf. Playing God?We’ve been playing God for centuries!

The large, anonymous crowds in which we now teem began with the agricultural revolution, and without agriculture we could survive in only a tiny fraction of our current numbers. Our highpopulation is an agricultural (and technological and medical) artifact. It is far more unnatural than the population-limiting methods condemned as unnatural by the Pope. Like it or not, we are stuck with agriculture, and agriculture – all agriculture – is unnatural. We sold that pass 10,000 years ago.

Does that mean there’s nothing to choose between different kinds of agriculture when it comes tosustainable planetary welfare? Certainly not. Some are much more damaging than others, but it’sno use appealing to ‘nature’, or to ‘instinct’ in order to decide which ones. You have to study the evidence, soberly and reasonably – scientifically. Slashing and burning (incidentally, no agricultural system is closer to being ‘traditional’) destroys our ancient forests. Overgrazing (again, widely practised by ‘traditional’ cultures) causes soil erosion and turns fertile pasture into desert. Moving to our own modern tribe, monoculture, fed by powdered fertilisers and poisons, is bad for the future;indiscriminate use of antibiotics to promote livestock growth is worse.

Incidentally, one worrying aspect of the hysterical opposition to the possible risks from GM crops is that it diverts attention from definite dangers which are already well understood but largely ignored.The evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria is something that a Darwinian might have foreseen from the day antibiotics were discovered. Unfortunately the warning voices have been rather quiet, and now they are drowned by the baying cacophony: ‘GM  GM  GM  GM  GM  GM!’ Moreover if, as I expect, the dire prophecies of GM doom fail to materialise, the feeling of let-down may spill over into complacency about real risks. Has it occurred to you that our present GM brouhaha may be a terrible case of crying wolf? Even if agriculture could be natural, and even if we could develop some sort of instinctive rapport with the ways of nature, would nature be a good role model? Here, we must think carefully. There really is a sense in which ecosystems are balanced and harmonious, with some of their constituent species becoming mutually dependent. This is one reason the corporate thuggery that is destroying the rain forests is so criminal. On the other hand, we must beware of a very common misunderstanding of Darwinism. Tennyson was writing before Darwin but he got it right . Nature really is red in tooth and claw. Much as we might like to believe otherwise, natural selection, working within each species, does not favour long-term stewardship. It favours short-term gain. Loggers, whalers, and other profiteers who squander the future for present greed, are only doing what all wild creatures have done for three billion years.

No wonder T.H. Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, founded his ethics on a repudiation of Darwinism. Not a repudiation of Darwinism as science, of course, for you cannot repudiate truth. But the very fact that Darwinism is true makes it even more important for us to fight against the naturally selfish and exploitative tendencies of nature. We can do it. Probably no other species of animal or plant can. We can do it because our brains (admittedly given to us by natural selection for reasons of short-term Darwinian gain) are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences. Natural selection is like a robot that can only climb uphill, even if this leaves it stuck on top of a measly hillock. There is no mechanism for going downhill, for crossing the valley to the lower slopes of the high mountain on the other side. There is no natural foresight, no mechanism for warning that present selfish gains are leading to species extinction – and indeed, 99 per cent of all species that have ever lived are extinct.

The human brain, probably uniquely in the whole of evolutionary history, can see across the valley and can plot a course away from extinction and towards distant uplands. Long-term planning – and hence the very possibility of stewardship – is something utterly new on the planet, even alien. It exists only in human brains. The future is a new invention in evolution. It is precious. And fragile. We must use all our scientific artifice to protect it.

It may sound paradoxical, but if we want to sustain the planet into the future, the first thing we must do is stop taking advice from nature. Nature is a short-term Darwinian profiteer. Darwin himself said it: ‘What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature.’

Of course that’s bleak, but there’s no law saying the truth has to be cheerful; no point shooting the messenger – science – and no sense in preferring an alternative world view just because it feels more comfortable. In any case, science isn’t all bleak. Nor, by the way, is science an arrogant know-all. Any scientist worthy of the name will warm to your quotation from Socrates : ‘Wisdom is knowing that you don’t know.’ What else drives us to find out?

What saddens me most, Sir, is how much you will be missing if you turn your back on science. I have tried to write about the poetic wonder of science myself, but may I take the liberty of presenting you with a book by another author? It is The Demon-Haunted World by the lamented Carl Sagan. I’d call your attention especially to the subtitle: Science as a Candle in the Dark . •

Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.

I haven’t been able to forget about this Francis Bacon image I discovered recently. Actually two images. More like three. Frankly I feel embarrassed that it has taken me this long to be affected by Bacon. I have a friend that has been into his work for years. Perhaps I was less intuitive, then. Perhaps I was less consumed by my obsession with the artifice of human behavior, for that matter. Yet when I look back on my journal from that time, I seem to have been well aware of it. The difference now could be that I have become all too familiar with it, to the point where it just hangs there like an extra toe. I live with it now, unconsciously, occasionally fondling it. There was a point, about halfway from then and now, when I was in fact, consumed. And I thought “This is where it goes wrong.” And it did. And it kept going. Now it is a glorious toe which I am so very proud of. Which? WHO! Fred who.

You see, Bacon seems to be well aware of Fred. But who wouldn’t be? There seems to come a point in most lives where Fred first pops in to say hello, and either you are intrigued and develop a relationship with him or you drown him again and again until you’re left smiling like some sort of psychotic. This is not what we do.

I still cannot look away and I am developing a sadness because of this. I’ve never been affected this way by a photograph. Photography is supposedly my chosen medium. Maybe it used to fit my needs. It has taken me quite far. Now here I am writing on a photography blog about my disenchantment with the phenomenon. But I can’t draw or paint anymore. I used to do nothing but that as a child. I cried for twenty minutes last night because I saw the end of Toy Story 3. I mourned the loss of emotional and creative immediacy. Perchance now things are coming full circle. All because I chose to pay attention to Fred.

There is a point of redemption here. And it lies in Bacon’s process. I’m sure most of you know he painted from photographs and found “lower media.” Let me think about that. What is different about painting from a photograph as opposed to real life or memory? Perhaps the photograph is most revealing in its inherent layer of artifice. It is taken with a device in the midst of objective reality. (I could put quotations marks around the word objective, and while I was tempted, I’d just rather not go there.)  It therefore alters what we once believed to be the most truthful of representations.

Onto portraits.

And here he is. So alive. Like Maggie the Cat.

He’s beautiful. I wish only that I could be so. And I must say that there are some rejected prints of mine that are promising in this regard. This ilk. Mood. That’s what I’m after: mood. Because there are some moods which just gestate thought and feeling of the purest kind.

I’ll leave you with Bacon’s thoughts on the creative process:

“You see, one has an intention, but what really happens comes about in working – that’s the reason it’s so hard to talk about it – it actually does come about in the working. And the way it works is really by the things that happen. In working you are really following this kind of cloud of sensation in yourself, but you don’t know what it really is. And it’s called instinct. And one’s instinct, whether right or wrong, fixes on certain things that have happened in the activity of applying the paint to the canvas. I think an awful lot of creation is made out of, also, the self-criticism of an artist, and very often I think probably what makes one artist seem better than another is that his critical sense is more acute. It may not be that he is more gifted in any way but just that he has a better critical sense.”

I have on many occasions been accused of being overly-critical. There’s hope for me yet.

I  am amazed at how the links keep cropping up every time I am on the Internet. Besides that, I am also amazed at the things that pure chance bring to the links.

A few weeks ago I was moving an old set of speakers to my front office. I moved my office about a year ago and the old sound system was still in the back office. After getting the old Kenwood and speakers hooked up I renewed my Pandora subscription and voila, we now have music in the lab again.

Somehow, when setting up Pandora I accidentally clicked on a musician or somehow accidentally created a Zydeco Station in Pandora. I had a station before so I just may have somehow set it up as the primary default station. OK, no mind, it’s good music, so I left it. That was a while back, maybe a month or so. Now Angelle-Leigh comes aboard as a blogger. Angelle-Leigh is from Lafayette Louisiana and is a Cajun. So we have an accidental (or maybe not) link happening. So I decided to look up on the Library of Congress website to see if there were any photographs in its collection dealing with the Cajun culture. Bingo– there are a few.

The photograph above from the LOC archives:

• Title: [Luneda Commeaux, Cajun singer, half-length portrait, facing left, New Iberia, Louisiana]
• Creator(s): Lomax, Alan, 1915-2002, photographer
• Date Created/Published: [between 1934 and 1950]
•  

Now Alan Lomax, along with members of his family was one of the great musicologists of American Folk Music. (Most would say the greatest.) His circle included Bess Hawes, his sister. Prof. Hawes taught at Valley State College (a bit to be California State University Northridge) and ran the Anthropology Department while I was a history major there. She did a guest lecture stint in a cultural and intellectual history course I took.

 So we link  Pandora->Cajun->Angelle-Leigh-> Alan Lomax-> Bess Hawes-> CSUN->Dick Sullivan.

 It gets better. I went to high school with Chris Rosmini nee Baxter. When I married Melody Bostick I found Melody’s sister was good friends with Chris Rosmini. I met her husband  Dick and we became very close friends until his death in 1995. Dick was a folk guitarist and recorded for Moses Asch on Folkways which is now part of the Smithsonian. Dick also worked with Alan Lomax and played (unaccredited) on the Kingston Trio’s hit song MTA, written by Bess Hawes.

 Sooo….Pandora->Cajun->Angelle-Leigh-> Alan Lomax-> Bess Hawes-> CSUN-Dick Sullivan–>Melody Bostick->Chris Rosmini->.Dick Rosmini ->Alan Lomax-.Bess Hawes->Kingston Trio.

There were around 8 of us who met a Dick’s house on Friday nights for over 20 years for coffee and chat. Dick told me that he had been invited to join a group but he was already committed for a tour as second guitar for Joan Baez so he had to turn the offer down. Dick, for the most part was not a group player in the long term sense. He played tons of sessions and, besides his own recordings, he is unaccredited on numerous recordings. He and Glen Campbell were considered two of the best sidemen in the industry. So Dick was forced to turn down the offer. The group decided to go with just three and called themselves the Kingston Trio.

As I said before, the links can get amazing.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.T.A.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bess_Lomax_Hawes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Lomax

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Rosmini 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DfERb98kGk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Asch 

http://www.sseubert.com/index.php#mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=15&p=6&a=0&at=0

That cap the singer is wearing is interesting. Anyone know anything about it?

Sunday, Gordon Mark asked me to join him and two others on a collodion outing. I agreed, hesitant because I had not practiced the process for four years. I brought with me a custom made back for my 8×10 Eastman Kodak by Star Camera which I had never even used before. All the wet plates I’ve ever shot have been with other people’s cameras. I was interested to see what my favorite lens would do to a wet plate, which Gordon quickly pointed out was a projector lens, a matter on which I had been mistaken for years, thinking it was a portrait lens (Darlot). I proceeded to frame up a pond reflection, hoping to get some movement from the wind. I developed that plate and nothing came out. Then I tried the same shot again. Nothing. Everyone else was getting an image, though no one was quite happy with them. It was possibly too hot. The last plate I attempted was a portrait of my boyfriend who had accompanied us. The following is the resulting image:

Now I would like to pose a question. Does an image like this have a place in the world of alternative processes? Or art in the broader sense? While I left the shoot in a rather foul mood, when I got home I scanned it into my computer and sat there looking at it for awhile. It seems that practically everything I shoot lately, which has been film, develops into something almost completely abstract. Is this the “angel of uncertainty” that Sally Mann talks about? I believe the best artists pay close attention to the accidents that happen to them. Take Jackson Pollock. And I have already mentioned my admiration for Rothko’s work. My tastes in the last two years have run into the abstract, and my own work followed suit shortly after, though unintentionally. Still, I can’t help but feel that somehow I’m less of a photographer. The above plate is only one example of my portraits turned abstract. I shoot with my Darlot wide open, and while I have a packard shutter, I press the bulb two or three times or just leave it open for awhile. I don’t own a light meter and I don’t want one. I know it sounds cheesy, but I want to feel out what I think the exposure should be.

At the moment I have a considerable distaste for conceptual work. Unless you’re operating on the same level of genius as Dali or Boch, it just winds up being a transparent attempt at depth. Which in turn is shallow. I’m worried. Have I just set myself up as being a hypocrite? Is my decision to shoot the way I do not a concept in itself? I’m looking for freedom, but is it here? I want something naturally occurring. It is my search for this quality that lead me to reconsider images on old contact sheets that can most obviously be described as awkward. This reflects the conditions in which I shoot, since I’m using a large format camera and a person. Who is disturbed in front of my big camera.

I used to look for grace and beauty. Then I matured somewhat and discovered that life isn’t that way. But I still want it to be there. Perhaps the awkwardness that occurs when trying to attain this is in fact most revealing. I’m not the kind of photographer that can take a camera out into the world and photograph in the wild (be it nature or society.) I’ve tried it and failed miserably. My boyfriend described my body language at the shoot Sunday as “sloppy and confused.” In these situations I just can’t break out of my perpetual amazement with the interface of interacting with multiple people at once. Yet, I’m confrontational. I’m a contradiction. Like everyone. Like the best poetry. Is this what I’m after?

I promised myself that my contributions to this blog would not be as egocentric as everything else I conceive. But I’m narcissistic. It’s exhausting. Much like most of the people I know of my generation. Another topic for another time.

Queen Jane Approximately