Normandy Exercises
When I was an architecture student, we had a colleague of Mies van der Rohe (I can’t remember the guy’s name, or even his relationship to Mies) come to the college and give a series of lectures. Mies is one of the fathers of modern architecture. You know his work whether you realize it or not. He’s famous for his statements that “less is more” and “God is in the details.” You’ve also seen his Barcelona chair in more movies and tv shows than you can imagine - odd because it now costs over $6,000 (it was never cheap) and it appears in “government buildings” in movies all the time, though I’ve never seen one in a real-life government building. Mies was one of the innovators of glass-walled, open space steel structures that help define modern architecture and where proportions are everything. And he was a master of his craft.
At one of the sessions, the lecturer mentioned one of the exercises that Mies would always have near his work space. Mies would have a large sheet of blank white paper, and would cut thin strips of black paper “lines” and, with with a couple or more strips, move those lines on the sheet to create proportions that were visually balanced and pleasing. In short, learning about the relationships between line, line thickness and the spaces in-between and around the lines. Exercises that he would do pretty much daily until he got it right, then he would cut up new strips of differing thicknesses and start anew, perhaps with a sheet of paper of different proportions. The lecturer said one day he stopped by to visit Mies, unannounced, and was taken to his office . . . unfortunately having to wait until Mies was done with some business. With a smile on his face the lecturer said that, as he walked by the table where Mies had his exercise sheet of paper and lines, he stopped and then lowered a horizontal line by 1/8”. Then he sat down and waited. He said that Mies eventually walked in, smiled at his friend and told him how glad he was for the visit. As Mies passed by the table, he stopped. Mies looked at the sheet of paper again, then walked over to raise the lower line, just a bit. When the lecturer laughed, Mies realized what his friend had done. Note however, it did not go unobserved.
Exercises; we all need exercises to refine our vision or any skill for that matter. Mies had his paper and lines. A musician has scales, practiced over and over. Not just for dexterity, but to better understand the instrument and even music itself. Exercise and practice. It pays off in so many ways and, in many ways, is absolutely necessary for improvement. It is not coincidence that the years where I’m photographing a lot are when I feel my image-making improves.
So it was with that in mind that I set out to examine details of what I immediately knew to be a rich environment of forms, textures and juxtapositions at the farm in Normandy. Not necessarily with with the goal of making an outstanding photograph, but with the thought of exercising my eye, exploring, learning . . . visually playing with what was there. Practicing my scales.
The resulting images are less about the place or even the thing itself than they are about the graphic nature of what is there and how to frame it in a way that it feels right. Or at least not wrong. Developing my visual sensibility.
here’s something freeing about photographing in this way. It’s ok to make mistakes . . . so long as you learn from them after the fact. Which is part of the work, learning what works and what doesn’t, and why.
As I mentioned in previous blog posts, it was a rich environment for this type of image-making. And while hand-holding the camera made it really difficult to square things up once I’d decided on the framing and various relationships/proportions I wanted each element to have, not having a tripod allowed me to move and move and move until I was satisfied and decided to depress the shutter. As much as one tries not to, all too often I think one (read: me) settles for a less than ideal camera location because that is where one (read: me) has placed the tripod.
Invariably the exercise spread into more organic forms, less structured than the human built environment. Though this image came from a freestanding rock wall by a garden.
Sometimes that’s all one needs - a bit of exercise! You’re rarely the worse off for it.