Editors Note:
This will be my first editor’s note, but not my last. I have been remiss in writing intros for many of the essays here. I cannot do much of an introduction for some of the essays where the photographer is unknown to me nor have I been a part of the development of the story. Interestingly and surprisingly most of the work published on BURN so far has been from photographers I have NOT known at all. Not them, not their work. But, I certainly can write a heartfelt intro for Patricia, Panos, Anton, Angelo, Kyung-hee, Victor and my old buddy from college days, Medford (damn right he is emerging..no joke!!)…Patricia and Panos are totally manifestations of online mentoring. We all met here. There could not be two more different photographers or personalities than these two. Anton, Kyunghee, Victor, and Angelo come from my world of personal workshops and well, Medford and I met when he tried to crash into my darkroom space back in grad school..enough said.
Yes yes , this is an intro for Bob Black (and appropriately long!) (and full of referencing!)..Bob does not match any of the groups above…I did not have Bob as a student, he is a teacher himself. Nor did I mentor him online. Bob is who he is just because. As with all of the photographers here, I rarely or barely edit. I want this to be a forum to let the photographers run free. A crazy concept in publishing, but the one set of words I absolutely do not want to hear are “he didn’t run it the way i liked…he did not run my best pictures”… So, I may not always completely agree with a photographer’s edit on BURN, but I will stand by photographer’s rights and creative freedom over all other things. You are always seeing basically the “directors cut”.
At the end of the year when we do our print publication, you will see a tight edit from me. Or, at one of my presentations at photo fests. Like Look3 in June where the Emerging Photographer Fund grant winner will be announced. But for here and now BURN is raw. Sure , I choose carefully the work. Some of you have already figured out that I do a bit of it just to see where YOU will take it. This is your edit after all. BURN is nothing without the comments. This way both the photographers and their audience have the ultimate amount of freedom. I do not edit the photographers nor the audience. Photographers show their work. The audience is the judge.
With Bob Black you have now an un-edited writer and an un-edited photographer. Bob thinks things. Bob knows things. Bob is a biblioteque. He writes to each and every picture or essay presented on BURN without fail. Nobody has been HERE more than Bob. Now since I have gone this far (BB style) I just have to mention Marina (Russian born wife) and Dima (well behaved polite teen-age son). Yup, cool family.
Ok, now I am running..Bob Black style.. and Bob Black style is where we go now…
- david alan harvey
PARTIAL EXCERPT FROM
BONES OF TIME
“What we see is not made of up of what we are seeing but rather from what we are.”–Fernando Pessoa
“I am a reflection photographing other reflections within reflections. It is a melancholy truth that I must always fail. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.”–Duane Michaels
I
“The son remembers what the father wishes to forget.”–Yiddish Proverb
…and so this morning darkness spreads thin the winter light and soon the pliable silence is more limber with memory as it enters.
And what began as a small ache, a tap of ash and rough bone, soon morphs into a presence that fills the elongated space between the chair and desk at which I sit and the throat of the corridor that scaffolds the space between these words and the commonwealth where my wife and son now sleep. It is because of this tract, this early-morning quiescence, that specific beat between the rum of my ticking head-heart and all that has gathered between the un-counted clicks of thought and waking, that I am at unrest. Now with a receipe of words, as if counting upon alchemy and gestation, I try to make sense of a description, try to make sense of an arrangement of pictures (photographs I have taken and images pin-tacked in my head) that are born of a remembering. At the moment, I am sifting through all this and am failing.
It is six in the morning and my body is crowded by the sound of my sleeping wife and son: and all begins to drift. Then, the swallowing of their impressible, morning breath. As if my own. As if. As. And then.
We are, if nothing else, small bursts of memory.
And it comes like an avalanche. We are comprised of this, a negotiation. The moments between that which was and that which tumbled into an accolade of what is and what will become, vigilant. Pictures meant to speak of that which is here, the now of this quiet morning when I feel bereft, all that I am scrabbling to hang upon like beads on an abacus string. Without the sound of my wife’s hum or my son’s sleeping acuity, grounding disappears like vapor. Have the photographs that I spent the last six months making and wrestling with counted upon this morning impass? Is it possible to convey this doubt, the missing part of that which I am and all that I shall be as a simple thing? The description of that space housed by the corners of a morning, of the purloined arrangement beween solitary lull and what is bound. Seamlessly another thought pivots.
Between the silence and the space of their bodies and the lives apart that have shuttled into my own. The ‘we’ metamorphosed from the separated each. I ask myself a simple question: “Have you yet threaded the silence from which your life is built?”……
……
II
Our bodies carry, like flotsam and drift-wood upon the back of a slow-articulating river, the memories of those who came before us. Along the curve of our spine, tickled beneath the hinge of our jaws, along the fan of space between our fingers, from within the resonant sound of the shape of our teeth, memory seeds itself and grows with a fecundity we seldom acknowledge properly. What grows happens in the silent snap of a moment. That moment , however, may occur in the lick of a lifetime. We contain the entirety of the lives that came before us, bestowed to us along ligament and hair lick, tongue and tissue, wobbly vocabulary and vocal chord. We are, even in our muted silence, the spoken history of those lives lived gone, only too-often the songs written upon our bodies remain choir-less, the stories cast along our limbs unopened, the mythologies archived in the chambers of our cranial corners still un-categorized. Yet, we hunger to remember. But there still the faces and the traces, the sounds of the rounding of days, the pictures and tinctures of the already lived and lost, recomposed inside our own seemingly inimical lives. But are we unique or an amalgam? We grope to understand within the shape of our hunger to remember and to retrieve, to understand and delve, research and relinquish. We contain. We sift. We burgeon. It is, in fact, all there inside us though often at a loss of approximate distance. Remedy this, we tell ourselves, remedy this.
So, take into your hand something small and weave it into the movement of your thoughts. See how it enlarges all of you and all that you have not counted upon; see how a small artifact reminds you of what once was and what still resides inside: a book, a story, a pen, a signature, a piece of cloth, a word, a scent, a glimmer of a shadow or a speck of light, an imprint, a sound, a comb, a shoe, a tattered lace, an indent, a forgotten taste, a photograph: all the small things that trigger obdurate things. How much could be unbelted if what we longed to retrieved were unhooked. Those places and faces and spaces, ancestor and parent, that sit like an unadorned and unopened book upon the shelf of your gathering. If only we but reached out and opened, would we begin to recognize ourselves more clearly? To snap the spine that has woodened from age, the whelp into the world of recognition. Crack it. Shellack it. You were born of it: desire and duty. Look at the rings beneath your eyes, nibble upon the the carving along the back of your hands, focus on the nimble notes of your voice, take up the photograph of the woman standing on the bridge with her back turned and catch her, the curve of her hip suggesting the loss of love, wander over the TV screen in front of you as that unknown but somehow recognizable woman speaks to you of what has gone missing, distilling her life’s tale as if sung from Scherhazades, know not the name or the details of the forlorn awakening but speak upon them regardless. Arrest that which has rested too long. Remember what you had forgotten to remember while you see what it was that you were meant to see. The ache of a quick snatch gone fleeting. There, in that moment in front of you. Have you begun to remember? Picture this: a photograph as a map of your life pre-drawn.
Bones the size and shape of your once-remembered life.
,,,,,
IV
Time scatters like voices weaved about the autumn grass, small pebbles of hardened mineral rattling like a cup of teeth, bricking and bracking inside the circumfrence of each of us. How can I begin toe pass along to you all those small pockets of eves that now seem so often to make up the pitch of my waking thoughts and stumbles? How can I begin to give you all that has made me the person I am and because you are of me, in me, gone from me, have begun to kneed and wittlemade you the person you too are becoming. Shall I begin with a memory?
We fall into earth long before we begin our step into flight and we are transfigured. If we understand anything, anything at all, it might be this simple truth: we migrate, continually, inside and out. We are tempered and transposed and tampered with by land and sky and sea. It shifts and shapes and sifts inside us, sitting until it (the trees, the water, the dusty earth) becomes us: the metamorphosis. Though is it really us who are transformed or have we been, all along, the transformer. Maybe it is we who bewitch and beguile the land and sea and sky. Maybe we ensorcel that which is around us, shape and hex it so that it resembles us, is defined by us, elliptically wakes inside us because it, place, is of us. We stain the land. We scent it with our hopes and fears and memories; we carve out from this migratory and shifting path, something else. We mark place with our scent, bend light upon its slippery back until it alights. A sky is dampened with yellow because we dream it to life. A sea opens wide its hilly mouth, small dots of cyan and amber teeth, because we have instrumented its awaking. Do we sense this?
….
VII
“Does the world have nothing inside but sorrow?”–Andrei Platonov
Now, trying to finish this essay, these thoughts, scrambling to cull the photographs together in a way that makes sense, tossing them out into the world for others to see. Failure of the images to coalesce. Failure of the story to rhyme in a way that tints the head. Failure of the photographs to add up, to dream-catch the memories I ‘d had, the expectations for them I’d benchmarked along their ragged edges. A house of cards these images and I let them go. The words here have faired not better as I have struggled to pitch words against the silence of the photographs: ash and dust and bits of light and swatches of shadow, poorly calibrated exposures and thumb-stung negatives, dropped cameras and forgotten words. A mess, a wreck of pictures and a tempest of words. Back and forth between what I had seen and what I had remembered, coalescing. I am trying to offer something to my son and to my father, a gangway, a path, a constellation of moments that most likely only make sense to me, a double helix of words and images, of memories and calculations, or prescriptions and assides. I am lost to explain any of this but am trying to stitch my memories to the thatched stitching of my life’s body.
For the first time in years, I get out of my chair and walk to the store to buy a pack of cigarrettes. I smoke one and all, like a cornucopia of taste and sadness, of joy and illusion, of hope and despair, come funnelling into my body. How much time I have spent to say a simple thing to my father and to my son, how many words and photographs I have carved up to say a simple thing to my father and to my son, how, how to speak simply. Let me know, I ask myself in the dark coat of the winter night, how to tell them something simple: that I am made of them. That, beyond this, something simpler. The words and the photographs have failed and all along I had wanted only to say something simple.
Dad, of you I am made and without you I am nothing. Son, of you I am made and without you I am nothing.
A long, such a long time to understand a small balled thing, such a long time taken to enunciate a very simple thing. It is not DNA from which a family is constructed but time, bones of time enwrapped in the skin of a heart. This, the two of you have taught. Renegade pictures, grandiose, ineloquent words. All that banter. All that time. All those winged memories. Such a simple, fucking thing.
All that gaining and going. All that and all that I am
and so this morning darkness spreads thin the winter light…..
some gorgeous photography here, bob. we waited and waited and are rewarded. good on ya.
consistent, beautiful, heartfelt and uniquely yours.
it would be wonderful as a small format book where you could pair the images, and where one could move along at one’s preferred pace (these slide shows are POKEY, and disabling the music and clicking one by one is still soooo slooowwww.)
(could do without the music on this and on most essays — let the images stand on their own.)
bob, you need an editor — if not in your photography, then in your writing. so so much, too much, who’s letting this wash over them in web-world? not many. maybe mr. harvey, maybe some of the loyalists on this blog. i assure you. we have short attention spans — what was i saying? — on the web, it’s not the place for this kind of writing. well, it is the place but not the place where one will revel in it… maybe in a printed piece you’ll have some interested readers. you sure can craft a sentence, a thought, no doubt, you’re gifted, no doubt. cut it short; challenge yourself to say what you want to succinctly. wonder if you can do it.
all respect bob b. i’m sure the following comments will, for the most part, gush.
Wow, that’s so cool!!!!! finally, long awaited. very very happy for your beautiful work, mr Black :)
i have been waiting a long long time to see this… and now it is here. this work is amazing to say the least. these images bob are amazing… truly breath taking…
Bob…
I’m in the car… iPhone / no flash..
I can’t wait to go home and see this edit…
But I have seen part of it up in Brooklyn
and I can’t wait…I can’t wait to go in
a real computer and see this slideshow..
Congratulations..
Bones in Burn.. Where it deserves to be..
:))))))
Driving..
BOB!
a wonderful collection of photographs. love your use of depth / reflection / refraction. you’re in a class with kyunghee lee. that’s a compliment :-)
- j.b.
BOB,
Thank you. I really enjoyed Bones. I have to say I have been eagerly awaiting this… esp after missing the preview a while back.
Beautiful mood, delicate alluring images.
We are very different in that I am a man of few (written) words, but this work to me was more of an emotional or spiritual experience rather than purely visual… and words don’t really go there. It’s feeling.
You got me! I was in your world.
…(its actually comfier than I thought) ;)
Boring technical note: The music stopped early (around image 30). Kind of ruined the spell a little. Can this be fixed?
Again, grateful thanks! and congratulations on this work.
Also no poster frame at the start of the slide show?… Made me think it hadn’t loaded.
Just took a second look… I would consider loosing frame 33. Doesn’t fit with the etherial quality of rest of the images in my opinion.
I watch the grain of images float by. I read words, dense in meaning, dropping like the grey rain outside my window. I watch again. I read again. Something alights in my heart, memories perhaps. Something unthought, unseen until now. I shall return. Again and again. For I know there are hidden here truths I need to uncover. How to critique a vision? I cannot. I will not. I only hope to catch a whiff of its scent, to let it permeate my soul.
Thank you,dear Bob, for daring to go here yourself, for reaching out your hand that we might join you. If we dare.
Patricia
bobbro
i have no words to say anything about the essay in concreto, because i don’t feel i can add anything more meaningful through writing here, than you have already done with your images and words. congratulations. i experienced this as a very solid essay.
picture all 89 (i know you must have more :-) side by side in a huge grid, say, 10 by 10 metres, hung up by steel cables, and a scaffolding at an appropriate distance to climb up and watch. in an abandonded medieval french church. with the music, and the words. naturally.
a
Bob, your autofocus isnt working right
O.K. I don’t get it. A bunch of fuzzy, noisy, blury high contrast images. Clearly way beyond my sophistication level.
BOB ;))
For you, for bones, I must say…
Have no doubt. You have succeeded. Images, words and music. It all came together. Past, present and future all here. Perfectly revealed. If my words don’t convince you, I hope my pounding heart will.
Congratulations.
bob,
breathtaking!!! thank you for making the familiar new and wonderful and mysterious.
as dads, we are nothing without our fathers before us and our children in front of us…thanks to you and to bones for articulating this truth that’s been in my heart for the last 7 1/2 years.
in the words of your wise and wonderful wife, “well done br. black!”
your friend,
marc
Bob, I’ve watched your essay twice — for me it’s both haunting and soothing.
your pictures – moody. mysterious. your music – exquisite.
your words, I will read again and let sit for awhile…
**********
congratulations mate! (heavy on the aussie accent, just for you bob black)
p.s. I agree with James Chance on image #33
What would have been surprising, Jim, is if you had you said anything but what you did. Jim, try something new… take a different way to work tomorrow, spend a day without your glasses, try a meal with wine instead of beer, go to a museum, read a piece of poetry. Life’s too short to be spent locked in a box.
jb
Bob, I like to make a short note first. I am following this blog for a long time – on and off again. You were there most of the time and you wrote, you wrote, you wrote. So many words I couldn’t read them all. Within all these words there were great thoughts, deep thoughts and ideas. And there was so much to discover – a real treasure! I blame my lazy eye, my cerebral limitations. So I missed much of the discussion about your essay “bones of time”. Some of the images I have seen before, but I never went into it really. Today I looked at these images with a reasonably fresh or perhaps new or innocent eye – more or less.
Bob, this is an honest answer, my very personal answer. In my life I have seen many pictures, but this series of images really made me scared. I felt afraid. These strong contrasts of black and white, these faces, that I couldn’t see, this heavy music from ancient times, from a mystic, almost tragic past – it gave me the creeps.
The music stopped at image 37 – my slow web connection. Silently the images continued. The mood stays heavy and I remember some of the images and my uneasyness with them when I saw them the first time. Perhaps it is my own fear? So, it was hard for me to continue until the end. Is it my own past? Bob, I am almost too afraid to look again.
Please excuse me that I haven’t read your text, I didn’t read it, because I simply wanted to see the images without a comment. See what they do.
Heavy stuff. My gut feeling tells me there is so much depth behind this essay. And I can only guess what is behind. Your images sent me on a roller-coaster ride that I rarely had before. Not from images so far. Certainly something that is not easy to digest.
I would like to finsih my comment with something light, but I have no adequate words. Sorry.
Thank you very much for this essay and thank you for your courage and your seriousness!
I love this blog so much because of people like you Bob!
Chapeau!
Reimar
Seriously, I guess I don’t understand it either. At what point do my images move from blurry and noisy to “art”? When it’s published, recognized/picked up by an editor? Do I have to be consistent?
Lawrence and James, I think Bob would be the first to say that his work in image and word will not speak to everyone. In fact it will speak to a distinct minority of folks. And that implies no value judgement of either photographer or viewer. We just see things differently. And that is as it should be. How boring it would be if we were in lock step, here on Burn or in the world at large. Yes, we can try to expand our vision but we don’t need to become someone other than ourselves.
Patricia
JEN…
i do not know you, but i would like to….thanks
cheers, david
Reimar…
You just reminded me that old silent movie..
“Jean D’Arc”…
When I first seen it as a kid..
I had nightmares.. and I developed a Fear
for silent movies in general..
Even Charlie Chaplin with all his funny movies..
couldn’t remove the creepy feeling that I developed
in my early years..( especially the scene that set
Jean D’Arc on fire… The scary faces of those priests/judges…
I know what you mean.. Like the feeling I get in a circus
when I see a clown.. Any clown
can freak me out.. Even now ,
in my 40ies…
But I have to admit that
Jean D’Arc is a masterpiece…
And bob’s world or subconcious is like that..
Not the “easiest” or “safest” world to get into…
Bob also belongs to that category of tormented artists..
Like Nick Cave or Hunter T…
or kurt Cobaln.. or even F.Nietzche…
or…
Well done bob, nice slide show. I was sceptical when I watched the first few images, I didn’t have my sound turned up, so didn’t realise there was music that went with the slide show. So I watched again with the volume up. The images went well with the music, it felt dark and passionate.
I’m not sure if all of the images would hold up on their own as individual shots but as part of a body of work with great music they work well. This was obviously your intention. I’ve yet to read all of your words that go with it, sat at my desk at work so will spend some time this evening reading over it and watching again.
Above all it had a clear theme and abstract style that ran all the way through the show. The people around you truly mean a lot to you as this piece demonstrates.
Yours
richard
Holy, you can write…and shoot! You have made my evening. You’ve taken me on a beautiful journey of poetry, raw images of grain and emotion. You’ve made the bones talk, you’ve awakened them. They dance in your photographs and I can almost feel their vibration. As much as your images are romantic, there is this lingering feeling of void and an awkwardness that makes me want to pull away. Almost afraid that there is this hand that will come out and grab my arm and pull me in. I think that’s why it all works. Your way of shooting, the grain, the black and the white – no need for greys, your alternate medium of the images (35mm or square), your honesty…it’s what it is and I think it is absolutely great. So when does the book come out?
Thanks Bob.
Boring.
for me this just doesn’t work as an online presentation. i can see how it might work as prints or a book, but online, no.
too many pictures for a start. i mean after 15-20 images, i didn’t really need to see anymore. i can imagine how the repetition in style/subject could work in a “real life” situation – anyone who saw Antoine D’Agata’s show at the Photographers Gallery in London will have seen how powerful a wall of images can be. but as a drip feed of photographs this left me cold.
i feel that this is an example of how the internet isn’t a particularly great medium for showing photographs or even writing. I have to confess Bob that I flick past the majority of your written posts on Burn because I haven’t got the time or energy to read them, particularly on a screen! I will however regularly read a broadsheet newspaper from cover to cover.
the internet (for me anyway) demands a more succint final product. for me this beats around the bush until there are no leaves left.
It makes me sick. I’ve thrown my whole life away. I’ve gone the wrong way. Bad decisions. No decisions.
These photographs make me mad. Bob has feelings. I ignored mine. Ignorance.
Ben, I have to agree about those long comments.
I have no time to read the above explanation either.
After the 10th image I had enough. I quickly went to see
the last 10 and there was no change. Repetition.
It is like seeing the same photo 60 times.
Mr Bob why the name bones? With all my respect but it
make no sense.
i’m with you ben. 100%. and the first poster. too too many photos for a presentation like this. although there are at least 20 excellent pix.
re: bob’s writing above and in the comments. he’s a smart smart fellow, you can tell. seems like a great guy, too, we need more people like this on the planet. no question, he’d reach a lot more people if he could focus his written thoughts more tightly, stop riffing and showing off so much, always wants to say how deeply he’s felt about x photographer for-like-ever. (it would also be nice to read just one post from bob in which he didn’t tell us how special his family is. we all have special families, don’t we?)
Jay,
with all my respect.. I don’t know u but…
What do you mean you ignored your feelings??
What do u mean by saying you threw your
Whole life away????
Sounds very interesting!!!!
Congrats Bob! I haven’t had time for the words yet but will soon. Love the haunting Japanese portraits. Want to watch again.
Take care,
CP
What is the connection between the Japanese portrait and the prehistoric skeletons?
I’m not trying to be sarcastic at all. I’m trying to get it but I need some help from the photographer here.
v.S.
Charleees!!!
Is it raining or snowing in Seattle ????
You know you have to post a “Felix”
slideshow soon…;-)))
BOB
Fantastic- I can see a HUGE difference between your preliminary set that you sent me a while back and this edit. I’ve never seen the ROM look so mysterious, even when I was a kid running through those old halls and up and down the stairs near that huge totem pole.
My personal favorites are 13, 26, 28, 42, 47, 48, 51. Especially 13, which I think is a killer shot, and 51 in which the dino actually looks like some humanoid skeleton with really long arms stretched out!
I will add that I had some jazz blasting while I was watching, and it just made your photos seem even more lyrical! In fact I think your vision and style are not dissimilar from how a jazz virtuoso performs. May I suggest you watch your essay with “Free Day” playing (by the Yellowjackets)???? The live version would be even cooler (on their “25 Live” album).
Congratulations, and of course “hugs”!
Asher
Memories as the skeleton of our life when we remember it. Sometimes like monsters stalking through our minds, dinosaurs they are. – “Bones of Time” is a perfect title to your essay. Didn´t get it at once, but then read the intro. That was tough and I still don´t understand everything but nevertheless it opened your essay to me – and the title.
Why should this essay need editing? As this is a journey through Bob´s world, this is what he wants to say- or (in my understanding of the intro) struggles to say. For me it´s absolutely not too long. Memories come and go. Bob shows them as mighty and raw creatures. In addition the photos of the dinos please me all as highly asthetic. If the beautiful woman in 06 and 50 is your wife, Bob, then I´m moved that she appears a little bit sharper in your mind then others… Even the at first glimpse “totally blurred and fuzzy pictures” reveal a hint the more you look at them. They fit into it – whereas it appeared to me as helpful to look at them in thumbnail size. Also interesting (for me)that a smaller picture reveals more …
I think it´s irrelevant if an essay here is being rated as “works better in print”. Burn is an online forum. Surely every essay shown here will have a different look in print – so what?
I found I could scroll through the images like through the pages in a book, just by going through the thumbnails and enlarge pictures here and there just like to finding references in a book.
We do have this opportunity to play with this (and other) essays online. You don´t like the music – turn it off. I did. Why bother?
Thank you Bob for sharing this and for your courage to do so. It is mind opening, an unexpected but a journey revealing so rich insights.
It´s like apnoe diving. In the beginning you don´t make great depths because the pressure on your ears is to high. Once you stop trying to balance the pressure by swallowing and start to leave your ear channel constanly open -you get deep down. Your essay demands and teaches openess.
I think you are becoming a bit of a parody of yourself James. Seriously. I dont even really care that you disliked it but this “critique”…about the laziest critique Ive seen on here or anywhere. Open the box Jim, photography isnt only about the literal.
So I should lie and say I like it to sound sophisticated? An entire essay of fuzzy, grainy, high contrast images seems lazy to me.
Riffing and showing off. Great description. Exactly my reaction to the words. I kept thinking that the writer was trying to overwhelm me with the sheer quantity of words, trying to substitute vocabulary for content.
how is it lazy? Why are you so adamant that a TECHNIQUE is lazy? Its a technique or rather an artistic license. You seem stuck in the literal. Would you call d’Agata lazy? He too has grainy, fuzzy images. If you dont like it nobody is going to ram it down your throat, but a one liner with a sarcastic tone for a critique is what is lazy in my mind. Looking at this essay, it is obvious to me that a) a lot of work was put into it and b)a lot of thought was put into it and finally c)it is the result of a deliberate and thought out artistic approach. These are things that take years to develop. Theres a real authorship here, like it or not, its your choice, but calling it lazy is lazy.
Bob,
there needs to be a cover image. I too thought something wasnt loading correctly.
Ah Jim, it’s one thing to offer a well-considered critique of a photo essay and quite another just to call it lazy. Besides how in the world could you look at these photos and read the text and even think of the word “lazy”? But now I’m guessing you probably didn’t look beyond the first few photos and didn’t read a word of the text. If that is so, my friend, who is the lazy one?
Patricia
Well said Ben.
For me, all content on the web needs to be more succinct and better edited. There is so much photography related noise on the web these days that it’s making people completely tune out. What responsibility do the ‘new’ editors and curators have in making this noise manageable for the audience?
shapes..
shadows..
light
dark…
black
and
white..
I immediately get a sense of past..
past lives..
dinosaurs..
make-believe..
make me believe…
memories..
scattered..
broken…
soft
and gentle..
healing..
confusion,
yet peaceful…
your visual diary..
thanks for sharing…
**
haven’t read your text yet, as I like the images to speak to ME…
and now I will read your text and hear what you saw…
First and foremost, let me say a simple and succinct thing:
THANK YOU VERY MUCH TO DAVID.
Originally, I had wanted to wait a day or two before writing beneath Bones. It feels a bit awkward to write about one’s one work, for the work itself and the words that accompany work, for me, are the instruments through which i’ve tried to tell a very simple, verbose as it is, story. However, what I cherish about photography and ideas, what I value about contact, what I love about this awkward and sloppy life is that we have one another. I promised David that when Bones was published that I would be here, engaged and interested and willing to talk about it, to answer questions, to discuss the work, to shed some light upon it’s pretty obvious failure and also to talk about what photography means to me, to answer questions and commit myself to dialog, for all photography is and all that photography has become is just that: a story by which we speak, sometimes eloquently sometimes inelegantly sometimes narcissitically, as a way to make lift and luft of our lives and passing ways. I’ve read all the comments and appreciate all and will try as best I can to answer and to talk about all your thoughts, both the supportive and the critical, but as usual, a digression…..
I want to say a word about David and this project. A way to offer ‘context’, the story behind this story and what it means to me as a way, if interested, for people to not necessarily like (that isn’t that important, ’cause we all like and dont like shit) but to get a glimpse into the way another photographer things and works and reconciles pictures and editing and writing and transformation. This story, and it is a simple essay that was made exclusively for David and for Road Trips originally. I have not tried to publish the work, in full or parts, nor have I tried to exhibit the work without David knowing about what I was doing because this work was made specifically for three people: my son, my father and david and was born of David’s call for photographers to shoot an assignment for Road Trips and so I did. Here is that story:
Last april, I returned to the US to attend my younger brothers’ wedding. I was excited and nervous as it marked not only the first time that I would travel without my wife and son since our marriage, but also it was to be the first time that I was to see my father since I’d been married and moved to Canada. My father has had years and I was afraid that I would be crestfallen when i’d seen him. In O’hara airport, I sent David an email and told him was i was experiencing and that I had decided to take only 1 of my cameras, my Lomo LC-A and a single roll of Tri-x, 36 frames, that is all, that is all I allowed myself and I wanted to photograph, i did not yet know, what that trip meant. I went, I photographed, my heart wobbled, wearied and was broken. I stayed in North Carolina for 3 days. On the morning I was to leave, my wife informed me that my son and a friend, the day before, had been mugged at knife point in front of his elementary school, on a bright and clear Sunday afternoon. There was nothing I could do but crawl and carve the frustration and fear and sense of failure (i was gone when my son was hurt) as a father and that elemental fear, the same fear that my entire life I have worked hard to protect my father from feeling. I was 1,000 miles away from my son and I had to wait nearly 14 hrs to see him. when i returned late that night, both my wife and son were asleep, and i just over the lip of my son’s bedroom’s doorway and listen to him breath, and i cried, for, cried for my father and for my son. That night, I decided that I would make a story about my father and my son, but I did not yet know what it would be.
3 weeks passed, and David announced that he wanted photographers to ‘tell a story’ to tell him about an ‘assignment’ that they wanted to do for Road Trips, as a way of branching off Road Trips into producing work for the blog, dedicated work. Initially, I wanted to do a story on Chris Anderson’s Magnum Workshop for the toronto Contact festival, shoot it differently that it had ever been shot before, but the more i thought, the more time I started to write about my son and father, I realized that I wanted to make the story about my son, the new ROM museum, about bones, and about my own childhood memories at the National Museum of History in NY, a museum I’d spent a lot of time in as a child and a place my own father had taken me to in a profound time of crisis in my family’s life. So, I wrote David and started to shoot. The first day my son was to meet me, he was 3 hrs late, and within the recent moment of his assault, i instinctually paniced: ‘fuck, what now has happened to dima…”…i was, at first, angry (the pompous photogrpahy shit), then worried, then just flat out scared as my son is a pretty punctual guy….i called home, he was gone, out. so, in a moment of odd panic, i walked into the museum and started to photograph, alone. later, he told me he’d just forgot. I continued to go back to the museum 4 more times, 2 times with him and 1 time with students and 1 more time alone….after the 2nd trip, i realized that the story was changing, as i shot differently, as I thought and reacted differently, as I watched my son and others, as i photogrpahed without him, as i photographed students and strangers and children and myself….i realized that this story wouldn’t be the literal story i’d originally intended to photograph, but something different…parts of which are connected to my entire life’s work (faces, memory, self-portraits, negotiation of sight, blindness)….even now, i see parts of this story that you see before you as just that a failure…..
you should know also that i am legally blind….thought that isn’t the reason why much of my pictures are blurry, or the focus or depth of field is skewed….those reasons are for another day….
i spent only 4 weeks shooting….and then i did not develop the film for almost 2 months…but I started to write the ‘story’/essay that i knew would accompany the photogrpahs….part of which you see above….later, i developed the pics, scanned the negatives, and begin the wrestling/editing/fighting alone….
I used 5 cameras: old 35 mm, Lomo LC-A, Holga, Diana and a pin-hole camera. I shot all Tri-x and the negatives are pretty much cooked….i wanted, stupid ambition, to make a story not only about my own memories within a limit time (3 weeks, limited rolls of film, 4 locations, etc) but about the conditions of making a document, testing the what a picture carries and what different cameras can do, what all that I was feeling and seeing, the archaeology of memory….a failure….
let me just say this (i know this has been long winded, i just returned from a friends exhibition), Bones is a complete failure. I can’t even look at it anymore. In fact, I have not looked at it tonight because I am afraid that I will loathe it. Every photography I have ever taken has disappointed me, every essay and story and body of work that I have made (and that’s a lot of shit) has disappointed me, it is the nature of photogrpahy and our ambition to fail. The essay is too long, the photographs are too clausterphobic, there are not enough enviornmental pics, or pics with middle distance and far-distances, the story is too hermetic and of all the pics that i made as a cut, i ‘feel’ now only 5. I am not writing this as an apology but as an explanation. failure is the reason why we all continued, why we all burst our pulpy selves to make something of our lives, of the goodness and the sadness around us. I photograph only because I know how to do a couple of things and I continue to try. My life’s legacy is for my wife and son, to be good and to make work that speaks upon what this meant to me and how things tilted and tossed and tanked.
I am so happy to talk and engage with you all, which i’ll try to do as best i can over the next couple of days. I APPRECIATE GREATLY all your comments and criticisms, it means a great deal to me. And please do not thing that I disdain or discourage negative points of view. There is not a single commentator who could write as negatively about the work as I often feel about it and your insights and concerns and comments mean a great deal to me. I’ll try to answer as best as I can.
A word about the ‘LONG’ text…it’s a fragment. I’ve written a long essay and I bombarded Burn and David with it. The entire written essay is long long, but it was written to be part of a book, not an internet site and so, god bless David, I dropped it upon y’all. I am so thankful for your patience….
And DAVID: THANK YOU SO MUCH for this amazing opportunity, not only to show the work, both the written and the photogrpahic, but to allow me this unfettered opportunity. the ‘length’ of this work was part of the trial, and I cannot thank you enough for the largess of your spirit and trust in me. You mean the world to the 3 of us….and this sloppy mess is for you! :))
All the failures of length are mine, .
bob
ANONYMOUS :))))
thank you so much for your kind and generous and patient thoughts. YES, i do need an editor…how about a 1/2 dozen ;))))….
the text is is an excerpt from a very long essay i’ve written, written as part of a book. It was my decision to submit this long long version, knowing full well that most people would not have the patience, or endurance or interest to finish it. Mostly stupid vanity on my part, but i also did want to challenge the readership of websites….it is true that most people don’t want to read this kind of thing on the web…nor see an essay with 50 plus pictures….and I totally get that….
but i still read long essays on the web and im still a succor for long photo essays and i guess that’s part of the vanity, to offer something different…
by the way, i have a 100 word version, which i submitted for a grant…i guess i could have submitted that ;))))….but then it wouldnt be as the same ;)))…
thanks so much :)))
cheers
bob
hey, congratulations on your news today too! :))))))))))))))…..i can hear you breathing…will be there soon soon :)))
ochen lublu
b
amigo :))…thanks so much…sorry we missed you tonight at rita’s show :)))….anyway, i appreciate your eyes….and soon your ears :))))…
hugs
b
Brother P :))))….
when aren’t you in the car brother, you’re homeless! ;)))))….thanks so much and well, whenever you look at it or try to read it, make sure the cobpipe is close at hand, makes more sense then :))))
hugs
b
thanks jen so much…appreciate that a lot :))))…each of us, all of us, are measured out by our own Islands :))))…cheers, bob
James :)))
thanks so much…i think the poster frame is now up (i see it on this computer)….anyway, originally, i wanted the music to stop dead before the ending and finish in silence, so if that worked, well…if not, no biggie…I appreciate that if it makes sense, the spiritual side, than i’m pleased :))))….a kind of living in the cemetary with joy ;))))…hugs, bob
thanks so much Patricia :)))))>..i appreciate that a great deal…now, if i can get you some wine and a wide sky, and just some sweet sifting grass-seraphins, oh the world would be large :)))))….im happy we’re there together for the ride :)))….hugs, bob