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27 Mar 2010

Ducktown, 1974

Ducktown, TN, 1974

Hold the edit!

A few posts earlier, I posted a comment by Garry Winogrand about saving your contact sheets for a year before looking at them. His reason was to separate the act of taking the photographs from the photographs themselves. This really makes a good bit of sense and I personally find that I have a hard time selecting images from a recently shot set, especially street photography.

Going back through an archive can often yield overlooked gems. The older the better? Street photos naturally aquire a patina with age…call it retro if you like. Naturally, because they depict a time gone by.

In 1974 after selling our photo studio, Valbuena and I went separate ways. I went north. That summer I packed most of my belongings into my 1967 red Volvo and like Lincoln Duncan, headed down the turnpike for New England. I took my time and as many backroads as I could find. There ain’t much to photograph along the interstate! After heading north through western Georgia I found myself in the curious copper mining berg of Ducktown. It seemed to me then a strange place, perhaps because of the mining activities at the time.

A few weeks ago I came across this shot while looking through some boxes of contact sheets and negs for a specific photo. Somehow I had missed it 35 years ago. It had never been printed nor was the contact sheet marked for printing it. Today, I really like the image. The hat and the cigar make it, but he is also nicely joined to the lightpost by his shadow. I like the minimalist building which may be a post office, but I don’t recall. The final bit of humor that appeals to me is the exiting man with his bowed head. What else does one do in Ducktown but “duck”?

08 Jan 2010

Odalisque

A year or two ago I had a section on my website of tattoos that people had sent photos of. All were done using images from the Orchid Photo Page as reference. One of the best examples of tattoo art is pictured here. Fortunately she lived in South Florida and even more fortunately, was willing to participate in a recreation of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ famous Odalisque. Ingres was one of my early heroes from art school days so it was especially rewarding to create the photo…with a modern twist! The photo was taken two years ago.

Looking at Ingres’ painting today, it has the look of Audobon’s birds: something about the anatomy seems askew.

29 Oct 2009

Garry Winogrand

Country Photography Workshop
L to R: Winogrand, ?, Jill Grossman, Me, Bill Cottman, Mike Pretzer, Peter Gold

In 1973 I was fortunate enough to take a week-long workshop with Garry Winogrand. It was at the Country Photography Workshop in Woodman, Wisconsin. His point of view of what a photograph actually is, is bizarre, yet infinitely true. Light on surface. Period. We would go out shooting to the small towns in central Wisconsin, Prarie Du Chien, Dodgeville, Lancaster…come back and process our film and make prints, then critique the work after a family style country dinner. It was a great period of growth for me and the train ride there and back was an adventure in itself. When he died in 1984 Winogrand left behind thousands of rolls of undeveloped film, and thousands of unedited contact sheets. This 1982 interview with Bill Moyer offers some insight into the personality of the photographer and his views on what photography is and is not.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl4f-QFCUek&hl=en&fs=1&]

Here is the second part