virtualDavis

Tailings #30, Sudbury, Ontario, 1996, by Edward Burtynsky

I’ve just returned from the Shelburne Museum where I spent a couple of air conditioned hours soaking up Ansel Adams and Edward Burtynsky: Constructed Landscapes. Are you nearby? See it. Are you far away? It’s worth the trip! Seriously, this exhibition is that good.

I’d love to pass along some of the stunning photographs, but an enthusiastic security guard cum docent spent about five minutes explaining to me that strict copyright rules prevented me from snapping any photographs. Fair enough. But if you follow the link above to the exhibition you can see some great images including the one I’ve included here and “Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine, California” which I included in my last Ansel Adams post.

So, until you meander over to the Shelburne Museum’s Webb Gallery, you’ll have to rely upon my words. Or perhaps not rely upon, since the verbal journey you’re about to experience is impressionistic and highly subjective. Consider my stream of conscious reflection less review, even less blog post than a composite Ansel Adams and Edward Burtynsky twitter stream…

Data Stream: Ansel Adams & Edward Burtynsky

You with me? When the guard welcomed me into the exhibition and then launched into his routine about why photography was prohibited, I asked if I could tweet my way through the photographs. He wasn’t so sure about this Twitter business, but he agreed. Victory! Or not. I quickly discovered that the Webb Gallery is a “zero bar” Verizon black hole. Strong signal outside, but zilch inside. So, I resolved to jot my Ansel Adams / Edward Burtynsky impressions on my Blackberry to post later. Here’s the soppy mess with a few links, etc. added in for good measure.

Ansel Adams (Credit: Wikipedia)

Spectacular photo: “Dunes, Hazy Sun, White Sands National Monument, New Mexico” of wild grass, yucca and a dead shrub drowning in cascading sand. (Tiny version of this the The Art Institute of Chicago’s website.) What’s grabbing me here? Nostalgia? Yes. I’ve been there. Envy? Sure. I’ve shot hundreds, maybe thousands of images at White Sands National Monument, influenced like millions of others before me by the photographs of Ansel Adams. Humility is good. But there’s something more. The tonal range is impressive. The totally pedestrian subject and framing adds to the mysterious appeal.

And another, “Forest, Early Morning, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington” presents three layers of visual story telling:

1. In the foreground, black silhouetted coniferous trees march left to right across the entire bottom of the image. Small, uniform shrubs at left grow larger and more detailed as they near the bottom right. This is a diminutive vignette, never taller than about 20% of the image.
2. The middle band, occupying nearly half the height of the image captures two jagged mountain peaks like portraits. Shear angled stone faces, some portions veiled in snow.
3. Above the mountains contrast-rich clouds drift nebulous and taunting, part steam engine blast, part crumbling doily.

The three layers of the image coalesce, but just barely as if the photographer is conflicted about his subject. Or triplicitous.

I am drawn into Ansel Adams’ “Tenaya Creek, Spring Rain“, the movement (and sound) of icy water riffling over stones and around boulders in the shallow creek bed. The textures — of the pebble beach, of the cedar trees’ bark, of the diversity of leaves — beg me to touch the print, to run my the pads of my fingers over the various surfaces. I restrain myself. Glass will restrain those who can’t resist. I yearn for half an hour, even fifteen minutes in this place. With my fly rod. With my Labrador Retriever, Griffin. With no mobile phone, no twitter, no appointments missed or pending, no urgencies at all.

Other favorites include Ansel Adams’ “Aspens, Northern New Mexico“, “White Branches, Mono Lake, California”, “BridalVeil Fall” and “Trees and Cliffs“, the latter cropped compellingly if slightly unconventionally. It seems to be off kilter, and a branch reaching into the top of the image suggests a tree falling out of celestial nothingness. Two trees (perhaps sequoias?) roughly divide the image and the asymmetrical massing of the stone mountains behind contribute to an effect furthered by the wispy clouds which radiate away from the center of the image. An eruption. An uprising. A rocket.

I remember studying Ansel Adams’ zone system. I remember frustration. Then amazement. “Dunes, Oceano, California” coerces me to linger while I trace the contours of the dunes, blur the wavy surface of the sand like a zebra in motion Laughing. Then lying down to rest. With the sun dropping nearer to the horizon.

Ping Pong: Ansel Adams & Edward Burtynsky

A sort of emotional schizophrenia ping-ponging back and forth between Ansel Adams and Edward Burtynsky: black and white, color; small prints, large prints; pristine, untouched nature, nature transformed by industry.

A dramatic Edward Burtynsky photograph, “Shipbreaking #24, Bangladesh, 2000″, showcases a cross section of a dismantled ship. A slice of steel vessel still bearing the name Kingfisher painted on the hull. The caustic pallet of hazy, pale blue and orange is unsettling, disturbing. I find myself wondering about the chemicals saturating the mudflats upon which ship carcasses are strewn in various stages of butchery. I worry about the health, the safety of the half dozen laborers who stand near the hulking Kingfisher. Smoke or exhaust lingers in the air. What is burning?

Burtynsky’s “Densified Oil Drum#4” intrigues me as much for the title as the stack of compressed steel drums. They remind me of clothes and rags packed into cubes, so untrained is my eye to seeing cylindrical steel drums so totally distorted, compressed, densified. So many colors of paint, crumpled, chipped paint homogenized by the patina of orange rust which — together with the geometry of the cubes stacked with some sense of order — unifies so many parts into a whole. Not an accident of industrial waste. Not a practical side effect of recycling. But a post industrial igloo, perhaps better suited to a globally warming world. And “Nickel Tailing #5” offers an even more colorful, even more dramatic, even more alarming refrain to Burtynsky’s anthem. It’s disheartening and defeatist from where I stand. Alone. In a cold gallery. Torrid July weather awaiting me outside.

Scenery is for Profit, Nature is for Reverence

As I wrap up, I reread one of many quotations printed on a wall:

“Scenery for Adams is a dirty word, an invention of the tourist business, an oversized curio. Nature is something else. Scenery is for profit, Nature is for reverence, and the fewer tracks of man there are in it, the better.” (Wallace Stegner’s foreword to “Ansel Adams Images, 1923-1974”)

This is a familiar notion. And an unmistakeably potent underlying theme in Ansel Adams and Edward Burtynsky: Constructed Landscapes. But it’s not the only theme. I’ll wait for you to help me unwind some of the others. Now I’m going to dive into the two delicious books I purchased before departing the Shelburne Museum: Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs and Manufactured Landscapes: The Photographs of Edward Burtynsky.

Related articles

• Ansel Adams and Edward Burtynsky (virtualdavis.com)
• The Creative Process of Ansel Adams Revealed in 1958 Documentary (openculture.com)
• Edward Burtynsky – manufactured landscapes (migrantstreet.wordpress.com)

Tile pattern? Sacred mandala? (credit @thedoodledaily)

“Every now and then when I’m on the phone I grab a post-it rather than a sheet of paper and while solving some acute problem, whip one of these up.” ~ Warren (The Doodle Daily)

Warren at The Doodle Daily shared a new batch of post-it doodles and this one was my favorite. Looks like an antique Portuguese tile. I instantly fantasized a Southwestern bathroom designed with these around a sunken tub, beneath a wall of glass overlooking the Sangre de Christo Mountains. And then I flashed back to amazing tiles we saw during our Splendors of Sacred India a year ago. And then even further back to Lisbon, Portugal in the autumn of 1999. How sad to see once magnificent buildings stripped of their famous tiles, stripped because they were more valuable for resale than as architecture and heritage.

The power of an image. The power of a doodle! Thanks to Warren (@thedoodledaily) for The Doodle Daily.

Related articles

• Daily Doodle: My brain on the paper (ashleyworley.wordpress.com)
• Daily Doodle #003 (notgrowingup.com)

The power of a photograph. And Twitter. And nostalgia. This stunning photograph of Vernazza by Slovenian photographer Ales Farcnik transported me back almost a decade to Cinque Terre.

I was living in Paris. I had spent August on vacation in the Adirondacks on Lake Champlain. A whirlwind romance. Then I returned to Paris and she returned to Manhattan. I think we were both a little surprised to miss each other. A summer fling. But the longing endured. I invited her to explore Cinque Terre with me over the Toussaint holiday. Within an hour she’d booked a flight. Within a couple of weeks we were falling head over heals in love with each other in Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, Riomaggiore and Monterosso al Mare. Four years later she became my bride.

Thanks for the memories, Ales Farcnik. And hat tip to to M. Faizan Sorathis (@Staticulator) who retweeted the “100 Beautiful Pics of Night” link that triggered this nostalgic flashback!

Too funny! A great ecard idea from someecards.com, but it’d be an even greater postcard. I’d like to order a dozen!

Robin Williams on Feeling Ignored

“I used to think the worst thing in life is to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.” ~ Robin Williams (as Lance Clayton in World’s Greatest Dad)

Mr. Cellophane

Chicago, the musical. Mr. Cellophane. It’s sort of become the anthem for those who are feeling ignored.

Cellophane, Mr. Cellophane shoulda been my name
Mr. Cellophane ’cause you can look right through me
Walk right by me and never know I’m there

But it’s too easy, too cowardly to feel invisible. Which is why people feel it. Say it. Believe it. The truth is worse. And better…

You’re not invisible. Far from it! What you are experiencing is worse, you’re feeling ignored. Visible but painfully overlooked. That’s not a reflection on you. It’s a reflection on those who are ignoring you. And it tells you everything, everything you need to know about the person or people ignoring you. They are sufficiently self-absorbed to erase you – intentionally or unintentionally, it really doesn’t much mate – from their presence. Accept them for what they are. Insecure. Narcissistic. And a total waste of your time and caring. It hurts to accept. Until it heals. And then it empowers you to move on, to gravitate toward more compelling peers. Easier said than done, but vitally important. Find friends, family, loves, colleagues, pets, even strangers who notice you and value you and honor you. Because you deserve all that. And then some.

And just so you know, those people are out there. Waiting for you. Go find them!

A visit to the New York Public library in 2006 by “an untrained eye” revealed this made-for-film moment. Too good. Almost too scripted…

The painting, the woman, teh bench, the floor, the pallet, the lighting, the woman’s action, the photographer’s framing all conspire to catapult would-be flaneurs into this arresting moment. Unstaged. Found art.

New York Public Library #5
Originally uploaded by an untrained eye

Highgate Cemetery
Originally uploaded by The Polstar

Strength or indifference. King of the living. King of the dead. Corona nodding toward classical architecture; living patina nodding toward the breathing, thriving, sun worshiping.

A lion by any other name. Perhaps on a headstone. Or a monument. In Highgate Cemetery. In London. A few years ago. Probably greener now. Features softened by time and photosynthesis. And eyes, lenses, cameras, flashes, monitors, internets, mobile browsing devices. The representations of representations.  Are you still with me?

Kieslowski’s world

A table, a cup over this table, a woman looks the raindrops outside the window. Then, an old woman tirelessly tries to put the trash into the garbage collector. The Polish movie director Kieslowski was a genius in turning trivial instants into poetry. Finding art in triviality makes art closer to quotidian and makes life less difficult to be lived. The writer Brissac Peixoto discusses about this theme in his book “Paisagem Urbana”. Brissac defends the art arisen from the moment, the stare at something banal turning it into art — and only the instant in the middle of the contemporaneity’s paranoia can put the sceneries in relief. (obviousmag.org)

Transforming the quotidian into poetry and discovering art in the banal, this is the flaneur’s gift and responsibility. To create. To curate. To discern and share what is human, what it beautiful amidst the maelstrom. To frame and share what otherwise would have been lost, and in so doing to reawaken that humanity in all of us. A heady task for an idler, you say? Perhaps. But undertaken with resolve and satisfaction.

As on Facebook, Intersect users create a personal page, [but] the big differentiator with Intersect is that stories get matched to a specific time and place, with visitors able to locate a person’s story on a map or scroll through an online timeline of a person’s life.

“Basically, it gives people the ability to tell stories collaboratively and in a way which we think is going to be really interesting and fun,” said Monica Harrington, who joined Intersect earlier this year as chief marketing and business development officer. “It is really about bringing storytelling to the Web.”

“Stories are how we communicate values, essentially how we connect with one another,” Harrington continued… “There’s no way to tell our stories in a way where we can be connected together,” she said. (techflash.com)

Perhaps claiming to bring storytelling to the web is a little bold, since there have been all sorts of web-based digital storytelling options for a decade or so. But it does sound like the first user-friendly community open to the public for sharing storytelling. And for searching out stories. An open archive for storytelling. Open source storytelling!

I’ve offered to participate in their beta launch, and I’ll post updates if/when I get the chance to play around with the prototype. Throw another log on the fire and let the stories flow… I’m contemplating a narrative meander around Crown Point fort. What story would you tell?

Sometimes the image says it all. And then some… “If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking permission.”

Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine, Calif., 1944.
Photograph by Ansel Adams (Credit: Shelburne Museum)

The Shelburne Museum goes modern! Again. No, not more motorcycles… The museum’s fist modern and contemporary photography exhibition, Ansel Adams and Edward Burtynsky: Constructed Landscapes, opened on June 19 and runs until October 24. I haven’t had the chance to see it yet, but I’m hoping to within the next couple of weeks. Here’s the skinny:

Constructed Landscapes… features over 60 photographs by Ansel Adams (1902-1984), one of the most influential and popular landscape photographers in history and Edward Burtynsky (b. 1955), a contemporary photographer whose images of “manufactured landscapes” such as mines, railway cuts and dams have brought him considerable acclaim in the past decade. The exhibit explores concepts of the natural world, wilderness and how carefully crafted images can lead the viewer to specific conclusions and ultimately shape public perception about land use, natural resources and beauty. Burtynsky and Adams are in stark juxtaposition in Constructed Landscapes. Ansel Adams’ classic and pristine black and white images of undisturbed nature contrast with Burtynsky’s stunning color prints of landscapes altered by man, including quarries in Vermont.

Almost twenty years ago I studied photography in Washington, DC with a protege of Ansel Adams. I’m not sure how much I learned, but I loved the course, and it certainly was impressive to hear that our teacher had apprenticed with and developed for the master. For a couple of years I was fascinated with B&W photography, and gobbled up opportunities to idle afternoons away in a darkroom. Do younger readers even understand that experience? I’m a huge fan of digital photography, but I do miss the magical mood, lighting, sounds and smells of a dark room. Perhaps I’ll feel the twinge of nostalgia while enjoying the exhibition at the Shelburne Museum…

Related:

Ansel Adams and Edward Burtynsky: Constructed Landscapes