PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL: I used to think that art was as natural as crabgrass, hemlocks and rabbits; to ask its purpose was to miss the point. While I still believe that, I also believe that art which is lasting explores ones relation to oneself and others, to the planet and nature and to universal forces. Art which dazzles, fades quickly. Art which touches us with some truth has a chance to hold our attention longer and even stay with us.
After a weekend photographing lobstermen, harborscapes, water and sunsets in the area around Bass and Southwest Harbors I drove to Rockport for a weeklong workshop with, photographer, Keith Carter. His work as represented on this web site (https://www.keithcarterphotographs.com/ghostland) had touched me, and I wondered who the man behind the lens might be, and what he might do to help me open new work. There were 14 of us, and I suspect we all sought the same thing, the path forward. Class time was largely spent reviewing the portfolios we brought and learning about the pictures that most inspired Keith and about many he had made and why.
Each day we also reviewed photos we’d taken in response to daily assignments which were completed outside class time. Keith provided poems as a springboard to seeing/making new images, but mostly the places around Rockport looked to me as they had looked on previous trips. On the second afternoon, however, we went to an artist’s barn, home and studio where four models were ready to pose for us among an array of curios. My best photos were made there.
One of Keith’s pleas was to ignore the rules. I recalled Freeman Patterson describing the beauty of a roll of pictures that one of his students thought she had ruined by overexposing. Keith told about his own discovery of the power of accidental blurring in his first recognized image. For whatever it’s worth, prior to this workshop I would have rejected this image and not thought to develop it. Although I recalled the moment when Maya’s hands came into full blossom, I had hoped to have stopped them still; I never would have developed the softness of their motion or the moving catchlight in her eye.
By the end of the week we had seen much of Keith’s excellent photography, but it was clear that the roadblocks to new work were at least as difficult for him as for us, and that our most important answers lay in ourselves and in our work.
I was helped in my photo by Maya who was as much an artist in her modeling as I struggle to be in my pictures. She internalized each of our requests to her as if it was part of a story she was living. Much of the credit for this image goes to her.
After a weekend photographing lobstermen, harborscapes, water and sunsets in the area around Bass and Southwest Harbors I drove to Rockport for a weeklong workshop with, photographer, Keith Carter. His work as represented on this web site (https://www.keithcarterphotographs.com/ghostland) had touched me, and I wondered who the man behind the lens might be, and what he might do to help me open new work. There were 14 of us, and I suspect we all sought the same thing, the path forward. Class time was largely spent reviewing the portfolios we brought and learning about the pictures that most inspired Keith and about many he had made and why.
Each day we also reviewed photos we’d taken in response to daily assignments which were completed outside class time. Keith provided poems as a springboard to seeing/making new images, but mostly the places around Rockport looked to me as they had looked on previous trips. On the second afternoon, however, we went to an artist’s barn, home and studio where four models were ready to pose for us among an array of curios. My best photos were made there.
One of Keith’s pleas was to ignore the rules. I recalled Freeman Patterson describing the beauty of a roll of pictures that one of his students thought she had ruined by overexposing. Keith told about his own discovery of the power of accidental blurring in his first recognized image. For whatever it’s worth, prior to this workshop I would have rejected this image and not thought to develop it. Although I recalled the moment when Maya’s hands came into full blossom, I had hoped to have stopped them still; I never would have developed the softness of their motion or the moving catchlight in her eye.
By the end of the week we had seen much of Keith’s excellent photography, but it was clear that the roadblocks to new work were at least as difficult for him as for us, and that our most important answers lay in ourselves and in our work.
I was helped in my photo by Maya who was as much an artist in her modeling as I struggle to be in my pictures. She internalized each of our requests to her as if it was part of a story she was living. Much of the credit for this image goes to her.
