Story Time - Shed Wall
Some things are almost irresistible for a photographer; well, at least for me. And the opportunity to photograph on an old farm with dilapidated vehicles and well-aged structures was just too good to pass up when I first stated lugging around a 4x5 camera. Come check out one of my first 4x5 color transparency (slide) photographs.
One of my favorite courses in architecture school was taught by Yuji Kishimoto - Concepts in Japanese Architecture. It was interesting because it was more about concepts that permeate Japanese culture and arts than architecture itself. Each student took a concept and presented that concept to the rest of the class. Mine was “ma,” a critical space between things that creates a tension and/or sense of “rightness.’ It’s sometimes described as negative space in the arts, but it’s not empty space, there’s a sense of energy in it. It can be the spacing between stepping stones in a garden, the pregnant pause in the downbeat in music, or the tension between an element in a photograph and the edge of the frame. Perhaps my favorite discussion of ma comes from DT Suzuki’s Zen and Japanese Culture, when he discusses that a master Japanese swordsman knows how to manipulate ma so that his opponent thinks he is outside of striking distance when he is, in fact, not. Talk about consequential applications of concepts.
Another concept that was presented in the course was wabi-sabi - the notion of the beauty of things as they age and wear, and the special qualities things acquire over time. It harkens of the impermanence of things, but also of the value and appreciation of things as they are used.
So those concepts were in my mind as I approached this shed wall, with its rusting metal sheeting and the old, torn sticker. There was nothing more to do than to figure out where to place the sticker so that it created a bit of tension, but at the same time allows the eye to wander throughout the frame.
That’s how much of my photography is done - identify something to photograph, and then work it within the frame until it’s “right,” usually by creating a sense of tension or balance. And, for whatever reason, doing so gives me great joy. Sometimes that is all one needs.
Well, this is the last of my scanned test images. This was the color transparency and, in many ways, it easily had the best quality to it. Taking a picture of a picture was fairly straight-forward and didn’t require any developing gymnastics to get a decent result. The color negative (White Sands) was difficult to reproduce and I think still needs some real color correction, and the black and white images (Canyonlands and the Mt. Tabor farm) were a nightmare to work with and lacked any subtlety in their tonal characteristics. Working with those black and white negatives gave me a renewed appreciation about just how special a cold-head diffusion enlarger was for helping to produce elegant prints back in the wet-darkroom days.
As I noted with the first story time post, I’m not sure if I’m going to continue trying to make copies of these images using the same technique (if so, hopefully after figuring out some improvements), or whether I will try some other approach. So for now, this type of post is going on the back burner. There is plenty of other work to do and show.