Carlton Watkins

Recently I discovered in my research that Carlton Watkins photographed most of his landscapes using glass wet plate collodion plate negatives. I think I knew that, to some degree, but learning about photo history in a sequential way from the very beginnings to today has been illuminating. Specifically of interest is that wet collodion is only sensitive to blue light. Well, when shooting in the landscape, Carlton Watkins was aware that skies, no matter how many picture-perfect, Toy-Story-style big puffy clouds inhabited them, would render as all white because of the blue wavelength sensitivity. 

AND SO: He didn't include them in many of his photographs. I think that's so interesting considering my thoughts in my last post about what I include or don't include in my pictures. 

Also interesting were the solutions that Edward Muybridge discovered to this very problem. He would essentially dodge the exposure in the sky in-camera with a special tool he developed, and also photographed reflections​. 

The Marsh

Growing up and living on the North Shore of Massachusetts, tidal marshland in Ipswich, Essex, Newburyport, and the coastal region in general: the Atlantic, the movement of the tides, it resonates.

View Larger Map

​I grew up going down the Essex River almost every weekend with my family. We'd hope it the boat, cruise downriver, and most of the time end up on the backside of Crane Beach. We'd spend almost every weekend swimming, playing on the beach. Later, as a teenager, I started hunting ducks with my father "downriver", but I stopped hunting for over 10 years as my school and travels brought me out west. When I moved back east I worked on a radio documentary with my dear friend Ashley; photographing the landscape to accompany a slideshow and live listening party. You can listen to it over at http://essexriverproductions.org. It was a fine piece of radio journalism, but I'm afraid my own interest in the project wasn't as serious as Ashley's. I made some pictures, but they weren't that great, and weren't really congruous with the story. But now...

Two or three years ago I picked up waterfowl hunting again. ​Almost every Saturday (no hunting on Sundays!) during hunting season, I'm downriver hunting the great American Black Duck. It's a fool's enterprise, really. You're allowed to kill one​ duck per day. And if the weather's not just right, you won't see any anyway. We spent probably six or eight hours for every duck harvested this past season. That's time spent in pre-dawn winter hours loading up a tiny boat, navigating the winding estuary, sometimes in blinding winter white-outs, in the dark, with layers of heavy waterproof camouflage to go and sit... Again in sub-freezing temperatures. Sometimes you don't even see any ducks. You just sit. Sometimes you talk, sometimes you sit in silence. Occasionally a duck or two will fly your way and you'll take a shot. If you are any good, you'll get your limit of one and that'll be it. Often times I would just scare them...

So. What? ​

Well sitting out there, walking out there... Most of the time it's just waiting, watching, observing, listening, experiencing​ the landscape. Rarely another hunter or clammer will be out. Rarely a duck or two will fly by. A field mouse might show up, flushed by the rising tide. If the weather's nice, a kayaker, oblivious to the cold, might paddle by. And every single time I'm out there, I wish I had my camera. After hunting season was over, that's exactly what I started doing. 

I've been out almost every week, trying to capture the landscape. And that's where the first hints of the complexity of the place start to crop up. One of the main issues that has come up in grad school critiques is my ignorance of historical and contemporary art movements, and for that matter, ignorant of any critical thought surrounding my own work... Devoid of commentary, and not challenging enough. Perhaps just not entering into a dialogue at all. I've been working hard to amend all of these things. One thing that I've been interested in is the "Male Gaze" and how it applies to my own work. As someone who is unequivocally a member of the privileged class of white hetero men, how do I address an issue like this? Perhaps just being aware of it? When I say the word "Capture" in regards to a landscape image, I must be aware of the movement of Western Expansionism photography and the effort of early "pioneers" who in a very real way captured and destroyed the land and Native American culture.

A few weekends ago I visited The Art Institute of Chicago and viewed this image by Carlton Watkins:

Mendocino River, From the Rancherie, Mendocino County, California, c. 1863/68

Mendocino River, From the Rancherie, Mendocino County, Californiac. 1863/68

The image is beautiful; however, placed in the context of Western Expansionism critique, I find it impossible to view it purely as an aesthetic object. So how then to view it?

How then, to discuss my own work where I am out to "capture" the land? ​If I am not out to destroy or harness the land, am I using the wrong word? Another verb perhaps? I like the word capture precisely because it acknowledges this history.

Or ​how about the simple, but important trope of man's influence on the landscape, explored diversely from the New Topographics photographgers to contemporary artists like Greer Muldowney and Deborah Bright. Much of my landscape work up until now is about eliminating visual context. The idea of shooting photographs of "ruin-porn" or shiny modern architecture isn't my idea of fun. This is very interesting to me, but I don't think I'm going to be making that kind of work. 

Let's wrap this thing up shall we? Here's an idea I had while looking at some recent pictures I made in the Marsh. A question really. How narrow of a view do I have to present to see an image of a seemingly unaltered landscape? The image below reflects a view I've been noticing in a lot of my work, that is a view that is almost deliberate in its reluctance to see beyond the natural. This ​is interesting to me. This​ is compelling. It feels like it considers and acknowledges all of the things I want to address, yet remains authentic to my voice and aesthetic pleasure. This is but a beginning. I most emphatically do not present this as anything like a finished piece, but I do say that this is a response to that question.

​Untitled. Essex Marsh. 2013

​Untitled. Essex Marsh. 2013

This also marks the beginning of a collaboration with artist and dear friend Jeremy Miranda.​ More on that later, but I am very​ exciting to be working with him.

Well, that's it for now. On March 30th I'm planning to make a video from sunrise to sunset, in real time, on the marsh in Essex.​ There are some more pots on the fire and I hope to share them with you soon.

New Work

I'm interested in the landscape as meditation. At least that's what I said during my first residency. And I am! I really am. But I said that quite naïvely. One of the biggest problems in looking at the landscape is this. Deborah Bright describes the problematic nature of landscape, and proposes a higher goal for the genre. 

Landscape imagery has almost always been used to argue for the timeless virtues of a nature that transcends history—which is to say, collective social action. For many art photographers in the modern era, on the other hand, landscapes seem to be little more than stage-sets for private aesthetic experiences captured on film. As Lewis Baltz writes in a recent issue of Aperture,

The landscape…seems more a set of conditions, a location where things
and events might transpire rather than a given thing or event in itself;
an arena or circumstance within which an open set of possibilities
might be induced to play themselves out.

 

But landscapes needn’t serve such meager ends. If we are to redeem landscape photography from such a narrow, self-reflexive project, why not use it to question the assumptions about nature and culture it has traditionally served? Landscape is not the ideologically neutral subject many imagine it to be.

 

So this, my friends, is an attempt to do just that.

 

 

PRICE(LESS)

I’m interested in the juxtaposition of the blithe visual ataxia that exists in the current exponential aggrandizement of images and the purported sagacity of curators and gallerists. Why show a photograph in a gallery? With 40 Million photographs uploaded to Instagram every day, is the gallery an antiquated keepsake of an erstwhile era?

All of the pieces of this new project came together with very little effort on my part. I, like many of us, “photographers” or not, take pictures with my phone and share them on Instagram. My friend was curating a show about summer for the new Nave Gallery Annex in Somerville (held in the dead of winter) and asked if I would show some of my Instagram photos. This was literally on the first day of the residency. My first thought was, sure, this is an easy enough project that will look great on my somewhat anemic CV; with the residency happening I didn’t want to take on a time-consuming project, but over the course of the following 10 days the project emerged, largely as a result of the gifts seminar that I took with Cesare Pietroiusti. This was not going to be the same-old thing. The curators were on board and worked with me.

The project hits on many of issues I have with “art” and photography., specifically: the seeming arbitrariness of pricing, the art object (something I always thought was missing from digital photography), the clutter of visual information [a great piece by Penelope Umbrico that was recently brought to my attention that really nails this visual literacy issue is called Suns (From Sunsets) from Flickr], and the oh-so-important making pretty pictures.

The statement is below, but basically, I’m making 1/1 prints from my Instagram photos. Unedited, the images are 612 px x 612 px, which prints out at 2.55”x2.55” at 240ppi. This print is the only one I will ever make and sign. Next to the images is a link and QR code to download these images (the exact image that I printed from) and the option to download, for free, and a “license” to use the images any way. Each download page has a counter that tracks the number of times the image has been downloaded, and the price changes with each download. The idea was to try to get gallery viewers to interact with the art and present some tension with the act of downloading. Judging by my observations at the gallery opening, and the number of downloads so far, there haven’t been many downloads, so it’s not reading as well as it could. I think people are just conditioned to behave in a certain way in galleries and are scared to break with the norm. I submitted the work to ADGSA and specified the exhibition requirements to include a statement and labels to my specs. Maybe it will help… We shall see.

Many thanks to Tom Gearty and Jenn Harrington for these words:

PRICE(LESS)
-------------------
In an age of easy and endless reproduction, can a photograph be scarce? Is
an image unique if it is also ubiquitous? And how do you set a price on
it?

Artists and galleries often sell work in limited editions in order to
charge a higher price. It is not uncommon to increase the price as more
prints are sold from the edition and the work becomes less available.
Scarcity sells.

This project plays with this concept in two dimensions. I invite the gallery viewer to download an image via a link below the print. They may use them as
they wish, without restriction. The files are available to anyone,
anywhere, without charge.  In this sense, they could not be less precious.

But I'm only going to print and sign one copy. Ever. In this form, each
work could not be more unique.

Instead of setting price according to scarcity, however, the gallery and I
will assign the value according to how widespread it is. Or, rather, THE VIEWER
will determine its value. The price will change every time an image is
downloaded. And since any attempt to value art is inherently arbitrary, no
print will follow the same rules.

As soon as a print is sold, the unique will end my engagement with the
universal: I will close my offer of unlimited access by removing it from
the internet.

If you’d like to participate in this art project, here are the links to the digital versions of these images, with prices and further statement:

 

http://ow.ly/h6ms8

http://ow.ly/h6myc

http://ow.ly/h6mCP

http://ow.ly/h6mGr

Big update - MFA at AIB

So the time comes to update the blog. You know when you mean to do something, and then procrastinate, and it just becomes so big it feels impossible? Yeah… That’s about it.

 

This blog will now serve as a record of my experience as an MFA candidate at the Art Institute of Boston. My experience started just about a month ago, January 3rd, on the evening of orientation for my first residency. I arrived a wide-eyed, naïve undergrad, and emerged a stress-out, neurotic grad student. It only took 10 days.

 

I came into the residency with no expectations, an open mind, thinking that my work could go in any direction, and with very little preparation, research, or communication with other students. I described the work in my incoming artist statement as being meditative and reflective, or rather it was intended to be meditated and reflected upon. Many critiques, seminars, and artist lectures later, I think I was able to sort through my work, and my intentions. What I now realize is that I was making art in a naïve place, ignorant of what any other artists were doing. I was largely unaware of any historical or contemporary art movements. I remain so–to a certain degree–but I see my illiteracy now, and I see a path to understanding.

 

In a lot of ways, my photography is a solution to the terror of making work. My life is ruled by fear. Photography, in a sense is a medium to separate fear from myself and to address it. The fear itself is totally absent from the work. Rather than interact with or engage a viewer (which is the supposed intention), the work stands quite static and does little to challenge the viewer. In some ways too, the aesthetic distracts from any other engagement; it’s very easy to take the work at face value (and even if I’m lucky enough to get the attention of a committed viewer, the work doesn’t stand up to scrutiny).

 

So. What to do about it?

 

1)    Get a mentor.

 

I am grateful to be connected to many excellent Boston area photographers who helped steer me toward my mentor for this semester, Christine Collins. We met about a week ago, and we have another meeting scheduled for this coming weekend: a short time to try to implement a few of the many ideas floating around in my head, but enough to make it happen. Everyone told me she would be tough and hold me accountable for my work – exactly what I need! I’m looking forward to our meeting this weekend.

 

2)    Make work.

a. I completed a project for a gallery show at The Nave Annex in Somerville that was 100% conceptualized during the residency, specifically during a seminar on the intersection of art and gifts, led by Cesare Pietroiusti. The body of work is called PRICE(LESS), and the idea behind the work will be posted in the next blog entry.

b. I’m making time-based work. Not really sure how this is going to play out, but it’s interesting. Going to head out to the marsh Thursday to experiment with this some more.

c. I’m working in color. This isn’t new, but I haven’t made serious color work in about eight years.

d. I’m making portraits. Again, not exactly new, but also, not a serious endeavor in the past. I’m going to try my hand at making some bromoil prints. I researched and attempted this alternative process about eight years ago and was thwarted. It’s always intrigued me, so I’m going to give it a shot. I hope to get some quick feedback on it so I can know whether or not I’m headed in the right direction.

e. I’m making tintypes. Hopefully starting in March.

 

The only question that stands is: Is this enough? Is this enough of a departure? Is this enough of a strain? Am I uncomfortable enough? Am I pushing myself enough? These questions–I don’t want to say “haunt” because I would prefer to eschew the drama, but plague, dog, consume… pick your word–follow me everywhere.

 

3)    Stop being an ignoramus.

 

I’m sitting in on an art history class at AIB, Art Since 1945. I’m reading everything I can. I’m talking to everyone I can. I am making a dent. I hope.

 

Signing off for now. More to come.

Photobooths

So I have a studio. And it's right across the hall from a gallery. And when there's an opening for a show, I set up a photobooth. It's been a lot of fun. Check out the latest one from last night on the facebook page.

 

It's lovely weather for...

Photographing!

It's been a mild winter here in the northeast (at least by New England standards), but it finally snowed last night. While my students and I were all hoping for a snow day today, or at least a delay, inclement weather usually means great photo opportunities. Most mornings I'm up before the sun rises and on my commute I drive along a lake... It's lovely. Depending on when I leave, I can catch rich orange and pink colors reflected in the water, or if it's earlier, the flat, blue-grey pre-dawn light that renders everything the same color and tone.

This morning I pulled into the coffee shop and realized I left my wallet at home, so I turned around, drove back along the lake and saw this.

 

 

I see a lot of photographs that I want to make... I'll be driving or walking and see something, but won't stop because I don't have the time. I'm really glad I forgot my wallet this morning. This was literally right in front of me as I turned to drive along the lake, but I never would have seen it if I hadn't left my wallet at home.

Portraiture.

So I'm not really a "portrait" guy. I took several portraiture classes at school, I've shot portraits, headshots, weddings, and generally have no problem shooting portraits; but... I'm not a portrait artist. I shoot landscapes. That's my thing. I always have. But when some close friends asked me to shoot some portraits for them, for their new website, I jumped at the opportunity. See, my friends David and Ari, at Number 16, are two guys that I would just about do anything for. Go click that link and read a little bit about what they do. They're awesome. And what they do is important to me.

 

Check out the rest of the photos on the facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/stansfieldphoto

 

 

 

Gallery Opening Tomorrow!

Come to the gallery opening tomorrow! RSVP here.

If you would like a free print, yes, a FREE print, be one of the first five people to visit me at my new studio tomorrow night, and say the secret password, "Santa's got a brand new bag". THAT'S IT. See you then!

New Studio!

I'm excited to announce that last week I moved into a new studio space in Beverly, MA. It's a HUGENORMOUS spot on the first floor of The Studios at Porter Mill, a four-floor building filled with artists (and there are some openings in January or February, if you're interested). It's exciting to have a dedicated space for making and showing art, something I haven't had before, even though the pictures I make are exclusively done outside. I've always had a home-office for working on printing, post-production, mounting, etc., but I recently outgrew that space. My friend and colleague Jenn has been in the building since last spring; after seeing her work really take off after moving in, I realized how much I missed having a community of artists to share work with.

Right now I'm playing with some different ideas for the space. It's far too big to fill the space myself, considering I don't shoot in the studio much, if ever. I'm considering renting the studio as a shooting space on a daily basis, taking on a studio-mate, or using it as a gallery to showcase other artists' work. Or maybe all three! Or maybe something altogether different...

For now, I'll be there this month getting ready for open studios on December 3rd. More info on the Facebook Page. Come say hi, enjoy some refreshments, look at some art, do some holiday shopping, and maybe, just maybe, if you mention that you read my blog, or follow me on Facebook, or twitter, I'll give you a print.

More California

I have a thing with water... And rocks. I can't not shoot them. Some day I might be able to resist, but now, today, I've accepted that this is what I shoot. Slow shutter speeds, soft, simple, black and white images of water. This one is from Pescadero State Beach from our drive down the PCH. I took several different images, many with a lot of swirling water around the rock, but this one is my favorite, with the slight reflection in the foreground.

 

Shooting with infrared...

When I was in school I had my old Canon 10D converted to shoot infrared. These guys did it, and the camera's held up, so I suppose I should recommend them. Shooting with the camera is fun, and it provides a fresh look at the landscape. One of the things I struggle with is making sure the images I'm shooting stand up on their own and aren't gimmicky. It's really easy to take an infrared photo and just let the technology trump the image itself, but once in a while it works. This is from Tulomne Meadows.

 

California

I'm in the middle of a week-long road trip from San Diego, through Yosemite (from East to West), and today we drove down the PCH from San Francisco (hanging out with my little brother who just moved there) to Santa Barbara. This is  the first chance I've had to process and view a few photos from the trip. File this one under "Are you freaking kidding me?"

 

Half Dome at Sunset. July 4th, 2011.

A pond of lilies.

Yesterday I taught an outdoor photography class for REI at Rocky Woods. The weather was great and I was able to capture this image of lilies. I saw the image in my mind but after trying a few different perspectives and compositions I gave up. It wasn't working the way I wanted and I moved onto a different shot, but I was inspired to try again after seeing one of my students try a certain angle.

One best things about teaching is that I get to watch students get inspired and get psyched on discovering new things. Sometimes, that turns into me learning something new about myself or my photography as a result.

I'm happy with the way it turned out. I shot it with my Canon G11 point and shoot camera. The quality is excellent on this camera and I'm especially glad it has a pivot screen. For this shot I held it at arm's length and pointed the camera straight down to see the incident angle of the sun, but I wouldn't have been able to compose the image without a pivot screen. What do you think?