Website Update: Journals
Sometimes it’s not the best of the best of one’s photographs that will knock your socks off. I was going to say, “capture your imagination” but that doesn’t quite do the feeling justice. Perhaps an example will explain better. One of my favorite Ansel Adams photographs is not a landscape. I’ve never seen it in a book, and I’ve never seen it exhibited. I saw it hanging on the wall in the back “surplus” area of a gallery. Back in 1980 I took a short vacation to Monterey California. While I was there, I made a trip into near-by Carmel to wander around for the day and stopped by the Weston Gallery. There they had some Edward and Brett Weston prints (that’s where I fell in love with Brett’s work) as well as a lot of Ansel Adams prints. I took my time there because the photographs were amazing and I was just starting my photographic journey. They were the first high-quality photographic prints I’d seen in person, and these prints were by masters of their craft. Of course I couldn’t afford any of them, but I finally found myself in a back alcove where there were some more reasonably priced prints (none I could afford though). As I turned the corner into the alcove, there it was, “Woman Behind Screen Door, Independence” hanging on the wall in all of its 16”x20” splendor. If you want to see it, click here, but know that even though this is the best of the reproductions I could find on the web, it fails to do the print justice. It is a masterpiece of tonal values, textures and human character. Even today, after having seen original prints of Clearing Winter Storm Yosemite National Park, Moonrise Hernandez New Mexico, and many other Adams prints, Woman Behind Screen Door, Independence is one of my favorites. It was that striking.
I tell this story because that’s what I immediately thought of when Ann showed me the Journal page she had developed. You never know what someone else will be attracted to, so perhaps we should have a means of providing some of the images we don’t normally post. Ann, of course, came up with her own way for doing it and the reasoning behind the content of the Journals, but it makes one wonder why neither of us had thought of it earlier.
The Journals are a way of providing a viewer with a visual account of our year. It’s not quite like my Annual Portfolios, which are intended to be a collection of what I believe are my best images of the year. Instead of gathering the best images, they consist of a broader range of images that fulfill several functions.
The Journals are there to give one a visual glimpse into our experiences during the year (if you see something interesting, they’re dated by month and location so you can dig into a related blog post, if there is one, to learn more, or perhaps head over to the Trips page for that location), the places we’ve seen and the things we’ve done. It’s not just about the photographs, it’s also about our experiences seen visually.
Importantly, they contain a lot of the more personal photographs (photographs we may just like, despite the flaws), and some of the alternatives to the images we’ve decided to post. Because like Woman Behind Screen Door, Independence, we can’t always know what you’ll find interesting.
And when Ann says more personal, she means it, so you’ll see the pictures we take of each other in the Journals.
And naturally, once I saw what Ann had come up with, I had to go along and upload my own journal of images. In my case, you’ll mostly (but not entirely) find a lot of images that I don’t include in any of the portfolios, but you’ll be familiar with quite a few of them if you follow the blog. You’ll also find alternative versions of some of the images I include in the portfolios.
Ann even went high-tech (did you expect any less) with the description of what Journals are at the top of the page. You know she hates to write, she says I’m the one with all the words (I’m not taking that as an insult . . . or should I?). Well, she thought about what she wanted Journals to be, input that into a chat bot, which then spit out the description of what a Yearly Journal is that appears at the top of the Journals main page Welcome to the AI revolution (and after the last election, I think I’m ready for AI to take over, because I’m starting to think there is no “i” in humans).
You can access the Journals in the menu bar at the top of the page, located between “Ann’s Photos” and “Trips”. Click here if you want to go there directly.
As the header description says, these aren’t the most curated of pages, but check them out because you just might find yourself a gem or two.