Lessons from the Rodeo

I've been writing a series for Examiner.com on photographing the rodeo, and in the course of researching this photographic niche I've had some interesting conversations with rodeo photographers.  Louise Serpa, who lives and works here in Tucson, is a pioneer of rodeo photography and the first woman photographer to be allowed into the rodeo ring. Her photographs are famous, she's written a book about her work, and she's in the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. I called her gallery expecting to speak to a secretary about getting a publicity packet for the article and ended up speaking to Louise Serpa herself. She's 84 and coping with cancer, and yet in a couple of weeks she'll be taking her camera down to the rodeo grounds again.  She'll be photographing from the stands, not the arena this time, though. She talked about how she just started photographing because she wanted to make pictures of horses and was surprised at how many cowboys wanted to buy them. She spoke lightly about the awards and the retrospectives and the publications as if she couldn't see why all the fuss.
Then I came across the website of Rick Madsen, who was a corporate photographer until he attended a rodeo in Wyoming in 2004 and was hooked. He says that's when he discovered his passion -- capturing the images of the rodeo and its participants.  His site says "rodeo and Western photography."  On it he discusses techniques and practical issues of rodeo photography, but he also emphasizes the importance of following your passion in photography, saying that if you do, the work will come.  What do Rick Madsen and Louise Serpa teach me, whose closest brush with their kind of photography comes from photographing a cutout Stetson on a rusty fence?  I think that both these people took to rodeo photography because they loved it, followed that love, and found a very satisfying life within that niche.  And for me, whose passion is metal and leather and weathered wood, broken chairs and rusted motorcycles, the lesson holds true, as it always must:  be true to what calls you, for you can do no other.

Welcoming a New Artist

Today I want to welcome a fellow artist to the network of creative artists on the Web.  Norm the Nomad, my partner in life, love and art, has just created his own arts blog, which will showcase the astonishing digital abstracts that he creates using Photoshop and his own heart and soul.  I'm helping as much as I can to create a place where viewers can explore his work and (we hope) make it their own.  Here's the signature piece from his first blog page.

New Things

I've begun looking into how to make slideshows and DVDs of photographs, using them to create a narrative or to tell a story in pictures. In order to do that, I'm building a collection of images on my theme of street art. My next challenge is to find a musical piece that would fit.  It's a new way to work with images and I'm finding photographs I'd forgotten or tucked away in a file folder.

I came across this pic of a door with random paint strokes on it behind some forbidding ironwork, and with a bit of Photoshopping ended up with this piece that suggests the digital abstracts of my mentor and teacher, Ken Milburn.  The door and iron gate were photographed in normal light. Then I increased the brightness and contrast and applied Photoshop's neon glow filter at full opacity.  A bit of grain sharpened the image and provided a little texture. The end result looks as if the paint strokes are floating -- an unexpected but intriguing outcome.

Take It To the Streets?

I've been reading a discussion on Photocritic.com about the future of street photography. One poster asked if there were markets for that kind of photograph, and if there were ways to make a living from it. The responses were largely negative -- several people said that kind of work was of interest as a hobby or with limited local exposure, such as in a coffee house or craft fair, but that nobody really buys it. Others observed that street pix are problematic because of the issue of model releases -- fear of legal repercussions tends to stifle the kind of candid street shot that made people like Cartier-Bresson famous. The other question raised had to do with the genre itself -- is "street photography" as it's been traditionally understood actually dead?

I've been asked many times what kind of photography I do, and it was difficult to describe it until terms like "urban dereliction," "urban decay" and "urban landscape"  came into currency.  Photographers like me are interested in what happens on the street itself, when there are no people around, and what we find there. One dereliction photographer pointed out that what is fascinating to us is the traces left behind by people -- buildings, found art, abandoned items and so forth - which creates the urban landscape. This ornate trash can on Tucson's bohemian Fourth Avenue is one example.

Street photography, on the other hand, is something different, focusing on the candid capture of street life and the movement of people.  And in our litigation happy society, when people are finding inconvenient images of themselves all over the Internet, the person with the camera becomes a threat and the  shot is something to be feared.  Stifles creativity just a tad, I'd say.  So maybe street photography as it's been traditionally known really is dead, or at least moribund, and street photographs have lost the impact that they once had.  Related types of photography like the photoessay or photojournalistic work do seem to be flourishing though.  Maybe it has to do with that blending of narrative and image.

Anyway, although I've always counted the great street photographers to be my main inspiration, I'll stick with photographing that gutted couch I saw in the alley the other day.  I don't think it's too concerned about signing a release.

Among the Ruins

I'm writing a piece about little-known scenic places in Tucson, and one of these is the Fort Lowell Historic Neighborhood, just west of the better known Fort Lowell Park at Craycroft and Fort Lowell. It's a little stretch of street where time seems to have stopped, or at least overlapped itself - a place where satellite dishes sit atop adobe houses in a style of a hundred or more years ago, a place where the crumbling walls of the Mexican settlements around the original fort stand alongside utility meters and recycling dumpsters. I walked along this stretch of street last week, photographing many things I hadn't noticed when driving through to preview the shoot.  It's been said that the camera forces you to slow down and see, and see I did -- the dry little wreath atop a stake in the ground on the side of the road, the line of trees, palo verde and mesquite, lining a walkway alongside the street, each with a marker commemorating a death or passage; the fresco of the Madonna inside La Capellita, the little chapel on the grounds of the larger chapel of San Pedro midway down the street.  I talked to a couple of residents selling firewood, and they told me their families had lived here since the 1930s, and they'd grown up on this very street when it was a desert. Yes, and they rode their bikes out into the desert to shoot their guns. You can't modernize your house too much, they said. Got to keep the look of the neighborhood.

I love the look of this crumbling building.  I've added a bit of grain to the original image (captured in RAW, then converted to a JPG for the web), which has the effect both of sharpening and of adding a little texture. 

My Review of Flashpoint 22" 5-in-1 Collapsible Disc Reflector, Translucent, White, Black, Silver & Soft Gold.

Originally submitted at Adorama

Flashpoint 22" 5-in-1 Collapsible Disc Reflector, Translucent, White, Black, Silver & Soft Gold.

Flashpoint 22" 5-in-1 Collapsible Disc Reflector, Translucent, White, Black, Silver & Soft Gold.

I'd buy this again!

By cyberwitch from tucson, az on 1/10/2010

 

4out of 5

Pros: Good Color Value, Durable

Cons: Case is hard to open

Best Uses: Low Light, Indoors

Describe Yourself: Pro Photographer

These reflectors are really handy little things for controlling light in tight quarters. I also like the way the set is packaged, giving you several options in one. The most annoying thing about them, though, is the little black case that they come with.The zipper was sticky and it was hard to pack them back inside for storage. Overall though for the price they are very functional, especially for macro and small product shots.

(legalese)

Street Walking

On December 25 I did a photo shoot under the best conditions -- the streets were deserted, and in the clear brilliant light late on a winter afternoon I photographed street murals, facades and gargoyles without having to deal with traffic and crowds.  I collected a number of new images for a collection I'm hoping to put together on street art.
Street art covers a lot of things, from  community-sanctioned murals to guerrilla art on sidewalks and signs. The artists may be known or only guessed at.  Some of my favorite images are of the blue dogs on a long-gone construction fence downtown: carefully drawn and colored, racing off into the cracks in the wall. Who did that? What other art did that person make?  Why? We'll never know. It's art for art's sake, to leave a presence in the world, or maybe to make a bit of beauty on something so functional and impersonal as a fence. Anyway, for the most part, these artists create their work on houses, walls and other public and semi-public places without a wish for fame or even acknowledgement, just for the sake of doing it.  And so I suppose that my love of photographing that kind of thing comes from a wish to capture and preserve those pieces of anonymous creativity that pop up to decorate and personalize even the most prosaic things in our day to day world.

This piece is a new favorite -- a wild little bear that's part of the facade at Hippie Gypsy on 4th Avenue. 

See more from this shoot on my Facebook page. I'll also be talking more about street photography this week on Examiner.com

Living the Work: Chuang-Tzu and Steve Meckler

A couple of unrelated bits of information can come together sometimes to create an insight that's greater than the sum of its parts.

This week for Examiner I interviewed Steven Meckler, a commercial photographer in Tucson who lives and works in a huge studio on Fourth Avenue south of Downtown.  He was a witty, engaging interview who spoke candidly about the what he sees as the relationship between art and work.  He said he was apprenticed to an artist in New York who lived in his studio and when he came to Tucson he wanted to do the same -- "to live the career."  We discussed his work in education, his teaching career at Pima College (he teaches Digital Photography at West Campus) and his efforts to create scholarships and opportunities for art and design students in local art programs.  "Photography is about the doing," he said, and it's that seamless integration of art and life that seems to direct his work.

I also picked up a book I've read and re-read numerous times since returning (or should I say "coming home"?) to photography -- The Tao of Photography: Seeing Beyond Seeing by Philippe Gross and S. I. Shapiro.   This book, like numerous others relating Eastern philosophies to the arts, discusses the importance of flow and oneness in creating art, in this case specifically photography.  Gross and Shapiro illustrate their points using my preferred genre of street photography and the urban landscape, referring numerous times to one of my great gurus, Henri Cartier-Bresson,  and to the Tao as expressed by the Chinese philosopher Chuang-Tzu.

Gross and Shapiro point out that the best work is achieved by abandoning goals, that the way of the Tao is the way of discovery. They discuss Chuang-Tzu's  teachings in light of what we are told are the "rules" of photography and point out that these very rules create rigidity and block true seeing. What interested me this time around was the distinction made by Chuang-Tzu between Great Understanding and Little Understanding -- between seeing the larger picture of unity and focusing on the small, limited world of the day to day.

Steve Meckler, I think, is living in the world of the Greater Understanding -- the work, the life, the worldview, are all integrated in a way that is enriching and creates flow between his photography and the community he shares with so many other artists.  And while we can't all live in our studios, we can certainly live our art and, as Chuang-Tzu advises, "leap into the boundless and make it our home."

Read my interview with Steve Meckler and other articles at: www.examiner.com. Oh, and look for me on BestThinker.com as well  writing about photography, creativity and the arts.

Tripods and the Cityscape

A recent post on MalekTips  offers reasons "Why You Should Avoid Using Tripods in the City."  When I was a photography student, my teachers were pretty firm about the reasons for using a tripod. Ken Milburn, my Sessions mentor,  once said that if you dislike tripods, too bad.  Better pictures trump everything.   But this posting raised some valid reasons for leaving the three-legged friend behind when photographing in the city.

According to MalekTips, using a tripod for cityscape photography can attract unwanted attention and even lead to problems with the law.

The posting points out that amateur photographers using hand-held equipment rarely have problems with security or police on city streets.  Set up a tripod, though, and your status may change from tourist to professional in the eyes of post-9/11 law enforcement, opening the doors for anything from general hassling to arrest.  In some areas there are restrictions on photographing certain landmarks, government buildings and transit stations. In others, a permit for professional photography is required.  So since it's important to be able  to photograph the urban landscape unobtrusively,  the MalekTips piece concludes with advice on avoiding camera shake with your handheld equipment.

The question of using a tripod or not actually speaks to some bigger issues about what urban photography (cityscape, street photography, dereliction or whatever you care to call it) really is, and what we who practice it really do. I think that the element of surprise, of finding the art in everyday reality, is key to this kind of photography. In a way we're practicing stealth photography -- capturing images unposed, unstaged, without the artifice of stage direction or deliberate composition.     And if that's true, then using a tripod might well interfere with that spirit of spontaneity and photographie verite that characterizes the best of urban landscape photography.

Comments, anyone? Have you run into problems (legal or otherwise) photographing city streets? What's your take on the tripod debate?

Photographing the Ruins

I have the opportunity to photograph a burned Harley!  And I'm going to the railroad yard to explore the graffiti covered cars.  Rust, decaying wood,  the skeletal remains of a collapsed building -- these are the subjects of my heart, the targets of my trusty Rebel with its Sigma telephoto lens.

A student asked the other day why I was so excited about my shoot at the abandoned warehouses in the barrio. Why didn't I want to photograph babies, she asked, or sunsets, or puppies?  Well ... there's beauty in everything. And what can I say?  A collapsing shed just draws my eye.  

I was pleased to see the recent (September 09)  "Dereliction Special" issue of Practical Photography, which showcased photographs of rusting cars, abandoned houses and decaying barns -- just my style!  Photography like this goes under various labels: urban decay, urban dereliction, urban landscape, industrial, grunge.  What it all has in common is a fascination with the remnants and traces of human creation and a love of the strange beauty left behind when things are abandoned, trashed or left to decay.

Search the web for galleries; browse the stock sites using any of the keywords I just mentioned. You'll find some stunning images, offering glimpses of  a world so many never notice. Over the next few weeks in this blog I'll be talking more about dereliction photography, how it's done, and where it can be seen.  I'll include links to galleries and photographers and discuss images of my own.  There's an old quote: "Rust never sleeps."  And sometimes -- it creates art.