Collard Greens

Growing up in Pennsylvania, collard greens were not something I knew about. Life went on...I lived in other places...discovered greens somewhere along the way, but didn't go out of my way to find or eat them. Moving down here to Chapel Hill from LA about 8 years ago, Southern cooking started creeping into my diet.
Actually, after surviving the shock of my first splayed out pig in that big cooker at a pig-pickin' party, I became a pulled pork slut.
As a point of perspective, I've been buying my greens - collards, turnip and mustard - at a supermarket or farmer's markets bundled in tidy bunches, or loose, small leaves to stuff in plastic bags to take home.
Today when I saw the homemade sign saying "collards for sale" by the side of the back road I was driving, I turned into the driveway along the garden of greens growing there. No one was around outside, so I knocked on the back door I saw was ajar. The lady you see in the photo came out and asked how much I wanted, and did I want to pick my own....I said it's just for me, so not too much, when she wanted to know how many people in the family, and she could get it for me, thanks. She then explained that the collards freeze well, so I should get a full portion for my $3 a bunch....Ok then. Out into the field she went, knife in hand. While she was looking around over there I pulled the camera out of my handbag figuring I'd so some shots while she picked me some greens....next thing I realize, she's got that huge plant draped over her arm, and is heading back with it intact. She was a bit hesitant to let me take a photograph when I asked, due to the fact her hair was all up under a scarf because she's going to Greensboro tomorrow and had to wash it today...but she agreed without me having to push too hard...she liked when I said I'd bring a print by.
When you bring a plant that size into a kitchen, you can really appreciate the size to which those collards grew.... elegant, vibrant, tactile, green elephant ear size leaves flopped onto the counter as I separated them. I ate many of the smaller inside leaves then and there, raw... fairly bursting with life energy from just being brought from the soil they just left, minutes ago. What a rush!
Btw, I usually don't combine color with black and white; I think it looks tacky, but I shut off one layer while working on the image and saw that I could selectively erase the black and white filter I had added, so I did....I think it accentuates my experience out there today.

Mostly San Francisco

Laytonville, CA
Sebastopol
San Francisco





Anyone following my posts for awhile know that I went to Pennsylvania this summer for a few weeks to do night photos in locations from my past. Since I returned to NC, where I now live, something shifted in my consciousness, sort of curtailing my obsessive shooting style, leaving me with more time on my hands, fewer images in my computer....not that I don't agree with the need to cut back the time behind a camera lens and get a life, but I found it kinda strange that about a month ago, I seemed called from within to San Francisco...another location that I lived for 6 years, back awhile ago.
My reason for making the trip was actually for another reason: to do a particular initiation with a spiritual master from India, on the weekend, up on a mountain top in Laytonville, 3+ miles north of SF. Figuring I was already all the way out there, I planned to stay with friends in the city for the following week.

Although the photographs I've chosen to show don't all have specific connections to the past experiences of living there, the trip did take me back into my past again. Specifically, the apple orchard...I stopped in Sebastopol to visit friends on the way back down to the city, and got lost....pulled into that orchard to call for directions again and spent time shooting photos. The next day, as I was leaving he said, "By the way, that orchard you went into was the same one we all picked apples in for the apple juice we bottled and sold at the farmers market"....being location and directionally challanged, plus many years later on top of that, it was quite a shock to have been deposited squarely into my past, with camera in tow. A few days later, standing infront of an apartment I lived in on Potrero hill, on a whim I knocked on the door, only to have the tenant open the door and invite me in to look around when I told her about visiting previous homes I've lived in. I shot a few frames inside, however it was daytime, and it doesn't count for my night series.

So, another part of my past came forward for scrutiny and enjoyment. I'm not sure what any of this means, if anything, but it was fun hanging out there, exploring places photographically I knew from before and others that were new.

Out on the Streets

Street photography's been going on since cameras got small enough to carry instead of lug. Historically and traditionally, after color film was invented, most streetshooting was done in black and white ...it's the way it is...gritty, immediate, "decisive moment" stuff. A long linage of shooters, such as Atget, Stieglitz, Strand, Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Kertesz, Evans, Levitt, Frank, Arbus, Winogrand, paved the way for what now has become a glut of everyone snapping everything every moment of the day in every way on everything electronic and digital. The new world culture is here, and it's pretty much in color. Color photography was presented to the art world when John Szarkowski curator of photography at MOMA put up the first exhibit of color prints by William Eggleston 1976. So much for the outrage that ensued over that breach of tradition...and here we are now.

The problem I myself am having with the color or black and white dilemma of street shooting is that in the "old" days of film, I'd put black and white film in the camera and would go immediately into the zone of seeing in tones....not so anymore with digital; even if you set the camera to black and white, when it's downloaded, those pesky pixels show up as color....you are forced, or at least, seduced into looking at your stuff in color. At bottom of this back and forthing, is that I've been noticing I've begun multi-seeing, or maybe it's multi-level-tasking when I'm shooting on the fly now, and it's annoying and confusing the intentions of being one pointed and focused. It's like parallel universes going on simultaneously as I intuitively shift back and forth between seeing in color and translating into black and white tones...or not, at any given time out there.....(confused and dazed yet?)

Last week I was in NYC and of course went through all this weirdness once again. In sorting through images I converted many that seemed to ask to be black and white, and that was that, and left many that were obviously only color images to remain where they belonged...that left a group that worked both ways, to my eye and inclination, so I put the two versions of each image together and will let you decide which works for you.....any feedback would be interesting for me to hear about. Ok?

Toy Camera

The last few weeks have been hard to pin down as to where my head's been. I've hardly picked up a camera since returning from the road trip productions in Pennsylvania...that just doesn't happen. I think my very cells are rearranging, readjusting, regrouping from the experience of revisiting those homes of my past. I'm not going to post any more of the images from this new series; the two previous posts are all that I can do for now. The rest of the files are in the hard drive (+ 2 backups)....and there shall they remain, sweet little pixels, until I decide it's time to view them with the fresh eye of objectiveness, which now is impossible.

So, in the meantime.. I was going through some toy camera images to gather a submission for an upcoming juried exhibition in Vermont with the subject of the show being "Dreams and Fantasies." By way of explanation, a toy camera is really just that; it's plastic, including the lens. The body doesn't fit tightly to the back, so it has light leaks. I love mine; some people tape their cameras but I don't. Also known as "crappy cameras" they have names like Holgas, Diana, Banner. Mine is a Banner and I've had it forever. it uses 2-1/4 film. It has a little lever that goes "click" and there ya go....

Night Shooting Road Trip - Night 3

Giving me directions to her house in Bath, PA., my friend Ruth said, "Look for an old barn with the word 'Sleep' written on it. Fascinating.The new night series I'm out here working on deals with memory, concealment, dreams...The barn was a really cool location, the image plan hatched, and in spite of a drizzle the next night, a crew of an old photo friend from Allentown, Ruth, and I went off into the late night. The barn is located on a two lane highway in what seems like the middle of nowhere, but is apparently the only way to get to somewhere, judging from the number of cars speeding through. The camera set up on the side of the road opposite of the barn, and time exposure of 30 seconds necessitated no traffic time every time we opened the lens. There are a number of red and white streaked frames, but it wasn't too bad. Coordinating and checking the varied strobe flashes, looking at each frame as it was shot, had me and my assistant Ron, running back and forth across the road, waving flashlights so not to trip into a hidden ditch along the side by the barn. All of a sudden, we see a cop car slowly drive up and pull into a turn out next to the barn by our car...it's past midnight. I'm standing by the camera at this point, dressed in the black night gown I'm wearing for the photo, wondering how to explain what we're doing out here without getting chased away. The cop doesn't get out of his car. I thought they're supposed to approach you, not the other way around, but this is Bath, PA for christsake so maybe it's different here. So there I am, flashlight in hand, traipsing across the road in a night gown in the middle of a drizzly night to face a cop. Weird. I came around the back of his car to the passenger side window to avoid standng too close to the road, and was about to tap on the window, when I looked in to see that the cop was absolutely oblivious to my being there....he hadn't noticed us there at all....not the flashlights, not anything....he was lost in his own world, focusing on the cigarette he was putting in his mouth. I just stood there, peering in at him for a moment, then turning off my flashlight, stepped back from the car window into the shadows to watch him turn off his dome light and drive off. Surreal.

Night Shooting Road Trip - Night 1

Months ago I wrote a grant proposal that I wanted to create night images that went beyond what I have been doing for the last three years, which is photographing scenes lit only by moonlight, or street lights or whatever source was already there illuminating the image I was making. My paperwork stated I'd now be working in a new way, adding my own light sources, and make a limited edition of 16"x24" archival pigment prints so please give me the money for a wide bed printer....and so they did. Now, beyond the steep learning curve of this new printer which is still in its very large box taking up much of my work room because I can't bear to deal with it, I had no idea what was gonna get lit up in the dark...
More about the series I'm about to explore in Pennsyvania, where I grew up, in a few days once I start it, but for now, here is last nights re-shoot of something I did in Maryland where I stayed for a few day earlier this month and again last night on my way north. After a lovely supper with his family, my photo friend Scott Robinson whom I've know since our days in the trenches called Los Angeles, and I re-shot this because I didn't like what I was wearing in the first version...hadn't paid attention to "wardrobe."

The important lesson for me to remember here is the need to sometimes really push yourself into action to get out the gear, set it up and know you'll hit stride, although it's late at night, you've had a bit of wine, and would rather just talk about maybe re-shooting some other time.

The day had just begun

Eating scrambled eggs the other morning....yes, with ketchup...my mind wandering inward as it often does, especially when a cup of chai is also involved, my attention suddenly snapped back to my plate. There, born of absentmindedness and a fork, was the Ketchup Rooster.