Waves and Rocks

Waves crashing.

Oceans fury.

Down here  -  too close  -  I am afraid.

The swell of sound – it starts as a low rumble, then gathers strength with the approaching mass.  At once, it explodes!  A huge white wall comes crashing against the rocks.  Each new wave, a note in this rhythmic melody, inches closer – a cool watery mist lingers in the air.  The waves are coming from both sides now – each pounding harder against the edge.

I am affraid.

I retreat – higher – protected by these rocks.

We are not afraid, they say.  You are safe here, among us.

We were here long before you, and here we will remain long after you are gone.  Do not be afraid, among us, you are protected.  Sit here with us, and begin to learn our story – let us teach you about time and memory…

To Print or not to Print

I’ve really enjoyed using Flickr and a website to share the images that I’ve taken this semester.  I think the web is a great resource for the final essay as well, in part because it’s so accessible to so many people.  This morning, however, I got a little “print envy” when we took the undergraduate photography class to the MFA’s Morse Print Room to look at original prints.  We got to look at works by (in no particular order): Vik Muniz, Joseph Kudelka, Nick Nixon, Walker Evans, Walker Evans, David Hilliard, André Kertész, David Hilliard, Robert Frank, Richard Avedon, Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Man Ray, Sally Mann, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Abelardo Morell, Charles Sheeler, Weegee, etc.

As an experiment, I think I’ll print out my images at the end of the semester to see how they hold up against those on the computer screen.

Invincible Cities

Camilo Jose Vergara, Invincible Cities

I just noticed while writing the post title that it’s actually “Invincible” Cities… Upon quick glance I had been navigating through the images under the incorrect assumption that the title was “Invisible” Cities… and that surly changes my reading on how the images are linked to one another and form a narrative.

Harlem, New York:  ’Transformation’ is the first word that comes to mind upon viewing the set of images taken at 65 East 125th Street.  For one example, the same store front was photographed from 1977 through today with the changes (and what remains) recorded throughout the years.  Some of the occupants include:  ”Purple Mirror Bar,” “Fish-N-Chips,” “Looking Glass Boutique,” “Discount Varieties,” “Smoke Shop,” “Kitchen Cabinets,” “Sherman’s Unisex Boutique,” ” Sissors and Stylz Beauty Stop,” “2001 Top Gear-Clothing and CDs,” and  ”Sleepy’s.”  There seem to be so many transformations… but in context, this is just one address of one street of one area of one city…

Camden, New Jersey:  The category captions add to the powerful juxtaposition of this set of images: “Textures of Decay,” “Stable Neighborhood,” “Things Left Behind,” “Survivors,” “Drugs,” “Commerce,” “Fortification…”  The “Pair” images of houses are also incredible.  919 N. 24th Street for example shows a well kept home on the left… inches away and attached to the home on the right which has been severely damaged and burned from a fire.  908 N. 24th Street is also an example of the juxtaposition with a boarded-up, run-down home on the left attached to a well-kept, modernized home on the right.

Richmond, California:  The images from this set that stand out for me are the ones from Canal Street, and the others from the southwest portion of the city.  The subject of these images are of shipyards, boats, cranes, and other port infrastructure similar to my site at Massport.  There is a familiar scale of the objects in the images as well as a feeling of use and wear from industry and work.

Death of a Valley

I think this reading (“Death of a Valley” by Dorothea Lange and Pirkle Jones) is a good precursor to working on the essay because it is exemplary in the way captions, text, and images are combined to tell the story.  The images and text don’t overpower each other, but rather work together to make a more powerful essay.  I particularly like how there seems to be just the right amount of text – nothing more than what’s needed.  Often times I feel that text and captions dilute the stand-alone power of the images, but I feel that this essay has a good balance.

Trusting Significant Details?

I wasn’t sure what to think following the significant details critique when my images were thought by some to be “untruthful.”  The opinions were unexpected because to me, those images are the essential truth.  What I’ve tried to capture in my photographs is the beauty and above all, dignity, of those objects and places.  I want to show that if we look carefully and without prejudice, the dingiest of places can be magical.

Upon discussing the “truthfulness” of my work with a close friend, he may have gone a little far by commenting that it would be in mediocrity to see in my photographs a propaganda “for improving the world” through recording the assumed/implied “ugliness” and “dinginess” of the site.  Or maybe not?  Either way, I think I’ve learned even more about my own process, motivations, and how I see things.  In the end, my friend summed up his comments by quoting Pissarro:

“Happy are those who see beauty in the modest spots where others see nothing.  Everything is beautiful, the whole secret lies in knowing how to interpret.”

Journal

I’ll have more comments on the reading when I finish it – I was only able to scan through the chapter to get a basic understanding before going out and shooting the poetics assignment (before leaving for my studio trip to China).  My time at the site, which I think I will call “Massport,” was amazing.  The usual ship in the dry dock was gone, and a gigantic cruise ship was in its place.  I learned that the cruise ship was getting a new unit for generating power (for when the ship is in port).  It’s supposed to reduce the amount of fuel consumption greatly.  To get it in, however, they have to cut a huge hole in the side of the ship, take the old unit out, and then put the new unit in.  To make matters more difficult, they only have five days to do it because “she sails down to the Caribbean next week to spend the winter.”

The rest of the port was alive as well.  For the first time (since I’ve been visiting), a large cargo ship was there being loaded with containers.  The motions and sounds of the operation were incredible!  The huge blue cranes, which looked so lonely and static during my previous visits, were alive and moving with such grace and speed.  A semi-truck with one or two containers would drive up to the side of the ship while a worker in the crane above would slide to the edge and lower wires for attaching to the container.  The wires would be clamped on and the container would soar off of the truck and into the air.  The truck would then zoom off to repeat the cycle while the container continued on it’s journey across the ship.  The sounds of motors and mechanics was everywhere.  As the containers were lowered onto the stacks below, a huge bang would echo loudly throughout the port.  Four or five massive cranes along with a dozen trucks were involved in the dance.  Meanwhile, a plane would roar and pass-by overhead (only a hundred meters away or so) every two minutes to land at Logan.

It was a little chilly at Massport, but the sky was clear and the setting sun painted a golden yellow across the site.  The colors and the activity combined for a truly compelling visit.

Journal

After reading the passages on scale in The Language of Landscape, I revisited my site in my mind, and thought of the various scales it has.  I first began to think of it at the smaller scales – that of the broken windows, chipped paint, rusted metal – probably because I’ve been examining the significant details of the place.  The port seems to be a perfect site to step forward and back in scale.  When I read the passage, “A seed is part of fruit, fruit part of tree, tree part of forest,” I couldn’t help but think of a similar example from my site:  A cargo container is part of the ship, ship part of the port, port part of the city.

While I was there photographing the significant details, I suddenly came across a massive (exponential) jump in scale.  When I came out of an abandoned warehouse, I biked a little ways towards the water, and two gigantic cruise ships were leaving the port.  They were only 25 meters away from the side of the wall/dock as they passed by, backing out into the ocean – it was breathtaking.  Suddenly, the significant details became the tiny little people on the side of the ship waving to the fishermen and me below on shore.

I found the concept of “nested context” also relates to my site.  There are so many things happening around the port, and they all contribute to the landscape there.  They all seem to rely on each other as well, like a giant machine.  There are also the forgotten areas as well, and they’re as important to the site as the thriving regions.

 

 

You mention Frank Lloyd Wright’s experiments with order for Taliesin, Ocatilla, Johnson Compound, etc.  From my experience as a student/resident at Fallingwater, I would venture to suggest that the order there is homogeneous and coordinated, and composes a highly complex landscape.  Everyone cites how well the house relates and becomes one with the surrounding landscape, and that’s true, but the longer I stayed there, the more and more I was impressed with the order found at the scale of the building (a scale one or two factors less).  Take for example the careful construction of the living room and its four corners.  One corner is the entrance and is dark, cave-like, and of the rocks from which it is formed.  The next corner contains a stairway that descends from the living room down into the river below.  Across from the stair is the third corner which opens to a terrace that overlooks a clearing from the river, and the surrounding woods.  And finally, the fourth corner which contains a large fireplace and hearth of the home.

As I often sat there sketching, I wondered how many people ushered through on the tours understood the fundamental order to that living room.  Maybe they couldn’t necessarily put it into works, but it was hopefully something they could sense or feel.  There seemed to be a complexity to the space that was derived from its simplicity – the order in arrangement and the purpose/meaning from each corner.  For me, the living room was where Wright made the landscape come together in its most basic elements:  earth, water, air, and fire.

 

Journal

The night following Wednesday’s exercise I had vivid dreams related to the place I went back to as a child – the basement of my house growing up.  I also started to remember more and more details.  I started to recall more smells, noises, and textures from my place.  It was a wondrous world where I created imaginary places and things.  As a cross between construction site and experimental laboratory, it could become anything I wanted it to.  Most importantly though, it was my place (save for the occasional visits to the laundry room or workroom by my parents or sister).  I remember spending hours down there, looking through boxes and building things – inventing my own worlds as I went along.

I found an old picture of me in the basement from when I was about seven (I’m guessing).  Here we can see my early interest in structural engineering and architecture.  This is an area of the basement that is more open, but it gives you an idea as to the things I had to play/work with:  skis, bikes, old sheets, boxes of stuff, light bulbs, wood blocks, old toys, materials, tools, etc.

 

I find the comparison between my basement and site for the semester sort of eerie.  Both are these kind of (seemingly) unkept industrial places that are in themselves their own little dynamic worlds.  Both places are like little cites that are constantly changing.  They are colorful places which rely on their intricate significant details, but also simplify into basic geometric shapes and forms.  The boxes of stuff in my basement are similar to the cargo containers that come off of the ships to be sorted and organized at the port. 

As a small kid, my basement always seemed larger than it probably was – an endless maze to be explored.  I have a similar feeling now when I visit the port.  The geographical area is probably not that large, but after visiting warehouse after warehouse, and ship yard after ship yard, I felt the same as I did in my basement as a child.

I did the looking assignment last week before class, but after I submitted my journal entries.  Here are some of the notes I took on my favorite images:

Joel Meyerowitz, Creating a Sense of Place:

Provincetown, 1977 (page 27) – The implied motion in the way the sheets are blowing is wonderful.  The white beam cuts the photo in half, and my eye keeps being drawn up to the sky.

Provincetown, 1986 (page 28) – This image is very complex in its simplicity.  In the introduction, Meyerowitz says, “you go someplace to be there,” and I think that this image captures that.  I like turning this image 180 degrees with the reflections pointing up and reality pointing down.  A little more than an arms length away though, and you can’t tell which is which.

St. Louis, 1977 (page 35) – Significant details are very important in this image – the Arch, the moon, the light band on the building, the shadows, etc.

St. Louis, 1977 (page 36) – The first thing I wanted to know about this picture was – What are those people talking about?  They seem just as static as the buildings.  The shadows seem to be the most dynamic element of this image.

Michael Kenna, Le Notre’s Gardens:

Vaux le Vicomte (Plate 3) – Just like Meyerowitz’s “Provincetown, 1986” image.  I must really like reflections.

Allée D’Honneur (Plate 10) – Reflections again!   Here the trees are reaching out over the river, presumably reaching for the light.

Chariot of Apollo, Versailles (Plates 20 (study 1) and 27 (study2)) – These two images have the same subject matter but are completely different (in feeling) because of the weather/atmosphere.  The haze in study two blurs the trees and causes the reflection to be muddled.  In study 1, it’s not as hazy, and the reflection is crystal clear.  The leaning tree in study 1 is a great significant detail as well.

Equestrian (Plate 24) – From this angle, the equestrian is marching up the constructed stair landscape towards the buildings.  I’m drawn to the texture and rhythm of the stairs.

Conical Hedges (Plate 30) – The contrast is fantastic.  The trees have become simple geometric figures suspended between the light ground and sky.

Journal

The scenery during the drive to MASS MoCA in North Adams was beautiful.  While there was a language to that particular landscape, another landscape inside the museum stole the show for me.  I found it in a piece by Jenny Holzer entitled:  PROJECTIONS.  Her landscape was not of trees, plants, or even the built environment – her landscape was that of words.  Thus the Language of Landscape becomes a landscape of language.  I took some photos of the exhibit, but they can’t do justice to the experience of the place:

The exhibit consists of a large, dark, empty warehouse-like space approximately the size of a football field (Building 5 Gallery).  There are two great projectors – one at each end of the room (in the long direction) that flood the space with light in the form of moving text.  “While the texts systematically scroll like the credits at the end of a film, letters expand and contract, and words seem to escape their once-determined order.  Meanings shift depending on the viewer’s perspective (Mass MoCA description handout).”

For me, the experience of the work was amazing.  I will never again have the wonderful and awe-struck feeling I had when I stepped through the doors into the exhibit for the first time.  There was a sudden immersion into the landscape, and it just pulled me right in the way many natural landscapes do as well.  The words soared by and moved over every surface, revealing each texture every so briefly.  Large bean-bag chairs on the floor absorbed the letters as they went by, distorted and stretched until they met the concrete floor again.  When on the bean-bags, one has a difficult time in reading the text as the distortion is greatest from that vantage point.  The way the landscape reveals itself and the way the words define the space, however, is spectacular.

When one gets close to the confining walls of the gallery, one becomes a part of the language landscape.  From a distance, my shadow was merely a fuzzy shape on the wall, but as I walked closer and closer, I came into sharper focus, and could be read just like the words.  From a higher vantage point (first photo) one can read the language clearly.  The text scrolls by, confined by the shape of the room.  It feels, however, that the walls and ceiling are not really there.  They seem more as a result of the landscape, than part of it.  The light of the words is so strong that they seem to stand on their own.  I think, as a landscape however, that the one needs the other.

I stayed in the exhibit for over an hour, and kept coming back throughout the day.  From the very beginning I thought of the space as a landscape, and discovered more and more ways to justify that as I experienced it.  Even for a rectangular room, the space was very disorientating.  One enters on a sort of raised platform at the end of the room, and a series of steps descend to the ground level.  You find yourself having to squint, and close your eyes as a letter or word shines/scrolls directly and brightly across your face.  The only way you can see other people is when, as part of the landscape, light scrolls across their bodies and back onto the building surfaces. 

I want to write a general “Light” entry from this past weekend.  On Saturday it rained for most of the day, and today (Sunday) it rained for only part of the day.  The leaves of the trees have started to turn, and they were brilliantly bright against the dark gray and cloudy sky.  The greens growing on the trunks of trees popped against the dark wet bark, and all of the colors in the woods seemed very saturated.  On both days there were low clouds and a good amount of fog at times.  The fog on the drive back to Cambridge tonight seemed to blur everything together in a very painterly way.  The colors were all there, but the details were lost.  I always feel a heightened sense of mystery and danger when traveling through the woods while it’s foggy and dark. 

Journal

09/15/2008 – 10:15 AM – My apartment – The light is bright, and shadows are ever changing as a strong wind is blowing.  It’s the kind of light that comes in and out of brightness because there is small amount of cloud cover that is quickly passing.  One moment it will be gray and shadow-less, and then just like that, it will become bright and yellow with the sun shining down.

09/15/2008 – 1:37 PM – Studio – Someone mentioned last week about the influence music has on imagery, and what we see… I find myself staring up at the skylight in studio, and a beautiful song has just begun to play on my music player.  The clouds are passing overhead, and the sky is deep and blue.  I wonder how long I’ve been staring up, because I seem to be lost in an afternoon daydream…

09/15/2008 – 3:04 PM – By the river, and building 10 – The shadows are sweeping across the lawn in front of the great dome.  The huge trees are making their presence known for sure.  The color of the water in the Charles is the darkest/deepest I have ever seen.  It’s a mix of blues and browns, shimmering on the surface as it reflects the sunlight.  The wind is still very strong, and while that may not have direct impact on the light, it has an effect on how the light feels.  It feels more dramatic, more alive and dynamic.

09/16/2008 – 12:09 AM – Mass Ave. – I observed an interesting phenomenon on my walk home tonight.  I was going down a straight stretch of Mass Ave, and the air was so clear that I could see every street light, stop light, etc., all the way down, probably more than a mile or so.  The interesting thing was that all of the lights were the same brightness, and it was if they all appeared on the same plane.  If one could only see brightness, and not note the size of the glow, one wouldn’t be able to tell which lights were closer, and which were further away… quite interesting effect I must say.

09/16/2008 – 8:30 AM – My apartment – The light looks to be cool, and the shadows are very long.  Blues and grays dominate the colors I see out my window.  The grays of the trees are particularly interesting and reveal a surprising amount of detail and texture.

09/16/2008 – 1:44 PM – Building 7 – The clouds have and amazing texture to them, and contain a wide array of grays.  Since they’re not colorful, the word I would use to describe them would probably be ‘tonal.’  The atmosphere seems a little darker than normal, which is a result of a thicker cloud cover.

09/16/2008 – 4:30 PM – Student Center – Something interesting happened on my walk back from the Student Center.  I was about to come back here and write about how drab and gray it was outside when as I started to walk up the large steps into building 7, the sun peeked thought the clouds, and cast my shadow precisely in front of me.  Most of the time, it seems as if our shadows are at an angle, or to one side or another.  Today, however, it was perfectly in front of me, and it felt different.  The best part was, after I chased my shadow up the steps, when I entered the building and my shadow shot all the way across the floor, maybe 25 meters or so… really long.  That was so unexpected that I actually stopped and looked back to see how low the sun was in the sky.  As I turned around again, however, the sun managed to slip back behind the thick covering of clouds, and my shadows was lost.

09/16/2008 – 6:59 PM – Outside of Building 3 – The sky is a mix of pinks and blues and is quite inspiring.  There are still a few light clouds streaking across, but it is otherwise very clear.  The buildings still have a golden color to them and the windows are bright and reflective. 

09/17/2008 – 11:27 AM – Building N51 – While it seems on first glance to be another fine and clear day, there is a high haze in the air that is muting the colors ever so slightly.  It’s the kind of haze that one probably wouldn’t even notice until they were at a high vantage point and looked out into the distance, disappointed from not being able to look ‘as far as the eye can see.’

09/19/2008 – I was thinking back to the Meyerowitz reading today, and specifically the passages that dealt with the photographer and the concept of “luck.”  I guess I thought that a lot of times I’ve just been lucky to be where I was when the light was as it was.  But I when I think about it now, I’ve learned more and more, and often times have a sense as to where I should be.  Has this instinct made me luckier?  I suppose there is also a thin line between luck and probability, and with experience, one learns how to see and where to be quicker and more intuitively.

I was also interested in the story Meyerowitz told regarding one of his students who was able to take beautiful pictures of flowers, but whose landscape images were mediocre at best.  It turned out that the flower images were very calculated and to some extent almost staged, or fake.  It’s something that we deal with on the architecture side as well.  I guess the danger is being seduced by the image while not considering the concept or any other aspect of the project.  The more I think about it, the more examples of student and professional work I can think of as being similar to the calculated pictures like the flowers.

09/20-21/2008 – I’ve been catching-up on my reading of The Language of Landscape.  A passage on page 18 related to a discussion I had today, “Every phenomenon, thing, event, and feeling has a context.  A valley is not a valley if it has no ridge or plateau, no up and down.  Motion is imperceptible without rest, sound without stillness.  Without sense of past and future, there can be no present, without threat no refuge…”   The discussion stemmed from my girlfriend’s comment… that while she was happy that autumn was almost here, she was also sad that it would soon be winter and the leaves and nice weather would be gone.  My comment was that (growing up in the extreme seasons of Wisconsin) without the heat of summer, or the cold and grayness of winter, the fall and the spring wouldn’t be as wonderful as they are.  That the wonderful fall season should not only be remembered for what it is, but also for what it won’t be.

It seems that one theme of the class and of the book is spelled out on page 22, “A person literate in landscape sees significance where an illiterate person notes nothing.”  This reminds me of the Mark Twain quote about how the face of the Mississippi became a wonderful book for him with a new story to tell every day.  I think that after the “Light” exercise, and the light journal entries that I have begun to see light in a whole new significant way as well.