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.

I'm an Examiner

     I've just become the Photography Examiner for Examiner.com's Tucson pages.  Examiner is not a blog site. It's a news and entertainment site with comunity pages in cities around the country, and in each city writers (called Examiners) write targeted articles in various areas of specialization.  Mine is photography and the arts, which means that I'll be writing about photography related events and issues in the southwest, as well as general photography information. 
     Writing for Examiner isn't easy -- you apply and provide writing samples, and then you go through a background check. After that you have three days to post your first article within Examiner's publishing tool.  Once your first article is approved you can write on whatever you like within your topic area.  My first article was on astrophotography, an aspect of photography that's especially easy to do under the dark skies of the desert.   Now that it's live on the site, I'll be getting ready to post my next article, which will be about the Casasola project, a collection of Mexican photographs chronicling the Mexican Revolution, now showing at the Arizona State Museum.  I'm making a list of future article ideas --ten and counting so far!
You can follow my articles at www.Examiner.com/Tucson _ Photography.