This is a series of Lightroom explorations. Taking free rein with the processing, my aim was to abstract the photographs to bring out essential elements like curves or textures. Most of these have been transformed into images quite different from what they would be if I processed them in a naturalistic manner. But most are still not pure abstracts; the subject is recognizable. There was no logic to the steps I took. I enjoyed allowing intuition to lead me one way or another.
Many of the photographs are of the ground or things on the ground like rocks and grasses; one is of water, and one is a window. One is a shutter misfire – my finger resting on the shutter made it fire unintentionally. Sometimes mistakes are worth keeping.
The unprocessed originals are below so you can see where I started.
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Originals:
Wood on the ground in Death Valley, NV; January/ 2018.
Bullwhip kelp at low tide in Bowman Bay, WA; January 2022.
Plastic garbage on the roadside in Anacortes, WA; August 2021
Rock at North Fork Skykomish River, Index, WA; February 2016.
Sand ripples at low tide at Bowman Bay, WA; January 2022
Shutter misfire on the Burr Trail, UT; April 2022.
Roadside grasses, Anacortes, WA; January 2022.
Grasses going to seed on Fidalgo Island, WA; July 2022.
Rock at Red Rock Canyon, NV; January 2018.
Wind on the beach at Devil’s Punchbowl, OR; May 2015.
Roadside grass and wildflowers on the Burr Trail, UT; April 2022.
Grass, twigs, and leaves on the ground in Anacortes, WA; July 2022.
Here is a series of nature-based semi-abstracts with accompanying text. Your reactions to the images are likely to be different from mine and my thoughts would probably be different on another day.
The title of this post has two meanings: first, it’s a return to abstraction because I published a post featuring abstract images earlier this year. Second, like many people these days, I find myself drifting back to the past. Aesthetically, the past for me means abstraction. As a child I was shown the standard representational fare, some of it very beautiful, no doubt. But change and rebellion were in the air by the time I went to college. I refused to attend a typical college and enrolled in a New York City art school instead. There, minimalism, conceptual art, installations, land art and performance art ruled. Fully immersed in that culture, I was very happy.
A thread had been dropped though, and it wouldn’t be picked up until much later. I never forgot that nature was vital to my being, even in a decade of full-throttle, staccato, subway-riding, sensory-overloaded life in the city. Nature just rode along quietly for a while, breathing gently like a hushed tide. When I moved out of the city the tide came in. I gardened, watched birds, learned botanical illustration, and eventually began wielding a camera to record the beauty I saw everywhere.
That brings me to the present, a present in which I joyfully hone my skills making photographs of lichens, landscapes, and everything in between. But abstraction lives. The habits of seeing that were refined in galleries, in classrooms and on the streets of New York may not be obvious in my work, but they underlie many decisions made behind the camera and at the computer.
In the spirit of creating something new while working with the past, I’ve been making drastic changes to photographs in my archives. I’ve been abstracting them and therein, I’m finding new delights. As Wikipedia notes, abstraction “strictly speaking…refers to art unconcerned with the literal depiction of things from the visible world—it can, however, refer to an object or image which has been distilled from the real world…” And that’s the space these images inhabit – the distillation and reshaping of the original image toward a new vision.
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I’ve been following a deviant route when I work with the photos on my screen. Before jumping into processing I get a feeling for the whole image. Then, instead of proceeding to refine what is there, I wonder what else is in the image. What can be extracted from it? What does it say? What permutations are waiting to be uncovered? Where can I take it?
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A paper appeared in my inbox one day that discusses a different, more philosophical approach to the photographic experience. Reading the paper, which was written by an art education professor, I stepped outside the world of photographers talking about photography for a moment. I realized that viewing photography through a different lens (sorry, I can’t help it!) could facilitate breaking habits. I thought about taking my typically representational images and mutating them.
“The encounter then operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and thus in our habitual subjectivities. It produces a cut, a crack. However this is not the end of the story, for the rupturing encounter also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world, in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently.”Thinking Through the Photographic Encounter: Engaging with the Camera as Nomadic Weapon by Cala Coats. Nomadic in this sense refers to boundary-blurring, creative, alternative ways of being in the world. As a nomadic weapon the camera assists the photographer in engaging with the world directly, resulting in new insights.
Is the camera only a representational tool? Certainly not. It can be a launch pad for a trip to an unknown place. If seeing the world with fresh eyes is desirable, then how can wielding a camera disrupt habitual ways of seeing? What can the person behind the lens do to break the spell of look-click-look-click-look-click? And later, what can the person tapping the keyboard do to break the spell of contrast-up-highlights-down-sharpness-up, etc.?
“Abstract” is a familiar word that is worth prying open and thinking about. It’s from the Latin abstractus, which means drawn away. Abstrahere (the verb) is defined as “to drag away, detach, pull away, divert.” The abstracted idea or object is dragged away from its physicality, diverted from its origin. In art, the word abstract has come to describe work that does not intentionally reproduce reality. Likewise, in photography, an abstract image does not depend on a real-world referent but relies on shape, light, form, and/or color to convey visual information and impressions.
Over a hundred years ago a man named Alvin Langdon Coburn had an idea for a photography show in which “no work will be admitted in which the interest of the subject matter is greater than the appreciation of the extraordinary.” (Rexer, Lyle. The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography. NY: Aperture, 2013.) That thought exposes the aesthetic crux that many photographers who work with “reality” (whether that means portraits or landscapes or street photography) are dealing with: is the photograph just a snapshot, or does it say something more?
I think for most people reading this post, reproducing reality is (still) a compelling exercise but “the appreciation of the extraordinary” is probably what keeps that finger clicking the shutter. It’s certainly true for me.
To convey the “extra” that I find in the ordinary, I like to explore different approaches; abstraction is one that can freshen the mind’s eye. The images here come at abstraction from a variety of angles and some are more recognizable as real-world objects than others. But in my opinion, there’s no need to name what you see.
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The urge to name what we see is hard to resist though. As soon as we see something, especially a two-dimensional image, labels pop into our minds. When we studied Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in school, we learned to ask, “What’s in a name?” It was a good lesson, but it barely loosened the knot of naming things. We are compelled to tie an identity around everything and everyone, and usually, we tie the knot pretty tightly. That identity, that name, inevitably drags waves of associations along with it – liking, disliking, evaluating, remembering, etc.
Of course, the propensity for identifying what we see is necessary and helpful, but it’s not a bad idea to question it once in a while. Names and identities may be more arbitrary than we realize. Questioning the connection of a name to its referent can open up space in our minds. Even just loosening the bonds of language to simply absorb images without labeling them can be rewarding.
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I’m not advocating slipping down into a world where meaning is entirely arbitrary and unique to each person. We need to agree on something, even if it’s only the names of things – times are tough enough! But I think it’s beneficial to step out of the familiarity of our language-based environment now and then. A little muddling and messing about with what we’ve come to rely on as firm and clear can be refreshing.
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12. If you identify this as “leaf,” “veins”, and maybe “fuzzy,” do those words change the experience of viewing the image? If I call it “dashu and crannen” do you look harder? (Or maybe you move along quickly!)
Lacking a brain, the black box doesn’t know that the flower in front of it isn’t just a flower, but is an infinite web of relationships. The awareness that a subject isn’t separate from its surroundings is something we are able to perceive, along with the awareness that we can choose to focus on any part of the whole, using our camera. Constantly becoming, the flower may be positioned at the center of the field that the camera encompasses, but in fact, the center extends infinitely through space and time, inviting a myriad of abstractions.
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These images have been altered by severe cropping, color changes, and tonal manipulations. I followed my nose towards different “meanings” of the scenes above than what the camera saw, subverting the black box’s stubborn insistence on one-to-one reproduction. No matter where I point it, the camera “wants” to make a faithful copy. This is the blessing/curse of photography. Of course, the camera does have a person operating it – a person with ideas, history, and intentions. A moment to record was chosen. And later, when we sit down with the camera’s rendition of reality before us, we’re free to play with it as much or as little as we want.
By the way, I’m happy to divulge the names of these things and whatever I can remember about the process of metamorphosing them into abstractions. Just ask.
This project has its roots in another project I worked on in 1972-73. I took a square pane of glass to a vacant field an hour west of New York City and placed it on the ground. It was a sunny day and soon condensation began to form on the plants under the glass. Everything under the glass took on a slightly blue cast. I photographed that and moved on to other manipulations, wrapping a plastic bag over a small bush and bending a square of aluminum foil around a barbed wire fence so the foil hung like flag. I was interested in reflections and other subtle changes in the light that I could make with gentle interventions in the environment.
The following winter I returned to the field after a heavy snowfall with the pane of glass under my arm. Dropping it onto the snow, I photographed the resulting square made by shadows cast along the edges of the glass. I stuck the pane into the snow on its edge and photographed it head-on, with its bright reflection on one side and its shadow on the other side. I kept going, playing with a ball of string and four utility candles – more white on white. The pieces (photographs of them) were submitted for a sculpture class at the School of Visual Arts, which I was attending.
Then the ideas went dormant for a long time. One of the pieces was titled “Disappearance” but the ideas never disappeared from my mind. The play of light on objects always drew my attention, whether I was working, walking across the city, taking care of my son or gazing out a window. Four slides of the work from the early 1970s survive. Those images and my memory were enough to nudge me toward the hardware store this month to purchase two squares of glass, cut to my specifications. I drove to a field again, this time in Washington State. It was another sunny day, but of course, conditions were different than they were in 1972. I’m different. So I worked with the glass square, took photos, thought about what I saw on the screen and went out a second time. The photos above are from these two recent forays. I expect there will be more.
The twin architects of our daily lives, time and space, occupy very different places in my mind/experience. Space is a concept I’m comfortable with; I can judge size accurately, I have a keen feeling for landscape, I relish the myriad permutations of form I come across in life. But time, that’s another matter entirely. Past present and future don’t always differentiate for me the way they seem to for other people. I am perpetually behind, I sometimes foresee what’s coming like it’s happening now, and I constantly get stuck in a mesmerizing present that puts me beyond the reach of the normal interruptions of daily life. Over the years I’ve learned to live with this mushy sense of time, and thankfully, people close to me usually tolerate the inconvenience it causes them.
Maybe my experience of malleable time and the erasure of boundaries promotes creative expression. Maybe new flowers grow in a place where time is not so fixed and the the border between now and then is smudged into oblivion.
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I want to tell you something
profound about time but
I have never understood it. They say one moment
is followed by the next. No,
this morning in dim gray light
the towhee ziggs-zaggs under the feeder – a
svelte, dark shadow
and junco’s white tail feathers flit in quick arcs
between the sword fern and the bird feeder, and
my grandfather smiles gruffly at the pretty redbird,
a cardinal gracing his front yard, and the Song sparrow pours
song into the air from a wire
outside my old apartment in Hastings-on-Hudson: the same
buzz-and-trill melody, over and over, and
the chickadee’s delicate claws
precisely grasp my seed-filled ten-year-old hand and
a thin, gossamer thread, twinkling rainbow colors in an
almost-felt breeze connects
all of it, here,
Now.
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The intention is for the images to convey a feeling of movement. Tempus fugit. Rushing ahead pell mell, turning back on itself in circles, the hazy fog where nothing is hitched to anything else….time is unpredictable and cannot be grasped. And at times it seems to stand still, but maybe not – as in the last photo of the German countryside seen from a speeding train car, where perhaps time is morphing into space.
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The photos
A flock of birds takes off across the bay at a refuge near Seattle. The horizon is tilted and the colors are distorted for effect. f6.3, 1/80th sec. December, 2016.
Blurred Atlantic ocean water washes a bone I found on a beach many years ago. The bone is probably a dolphin scapula. From an old slide, circa 1979.
The road rushes by on Big Basin Highway, Big Basin Redwoods State Park in California. Intentional camera movement on a Samsung phone. October, 2016.
Intentional blur and intentional camera movement from a car, colors altered. Avenue of the Giants, Humboldt Redwoods State Park, CA. f4.5, 2/5 sec. April, 2018.
A Red-breasted nuthatch flies away from a suet feeder. f3.2, 1/125th sec. Not intentionally blurred but I liked the effect. June, 2016.
The scenery disappears quickly through the window of a train in the Netherlands. Intentionally blurred. f22, 1/4 sec. April, 2019.
Carp at a conservatory in Tacoma, Washington. Intentionally blurred. f20, 1 sec. November, 2017.
Flowers on my deck at home. Intentional camera movement. f5.6, 1/3 sec. September 2016.
A blowing leaf at a park, intentionally blurred. Aperture information unknown – vintage lens. 1/800 sec. February 2018.
Rushing water in a creek in the foothills of the Cascades. Intentionally blurred. f11, 1/8 sec. September, 2014.
I don’t think this doubled image happened intentionally – maybe the photograph was taken through a window, I don’t remember. f3.5, 1/320 sec. December, 2008.
The view from Goose Rock, Deception Pass State Park, Washington. Intentional camera movement. f22, 1/3 sec. February 2020.
A roadside outside of Portland, Oregon. Intentional blur and camera movement. f22, 1/8 sec. April, 2018.
Fields seen from a train traveling between Cologne and Frankfurt. The view seems static but it’s actually blurred by the train’s movement. f3.5, 1/200 sec. April, 2019.
Han-shan Te-ch’ing, from The Clouds Should Know Me By Now ed. Red Pine & Mike O’Conner. Wisdom Press
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Who is this old image-maker
wrapped up in pristine forests and trampled leaves?
This week I took a walk in local park shortly after a band of rainy weather passed over the island. In the park a one-way, 2.3-mile road shared by foot and car traffic loops through thick forest with brief views of the water beyond. The 15mph speed limit discourages car traffic; most people walk. I like to drive part way around the loop, park at a pull-out, and take trails through the forest, which I did that afternoon. When I came back out onto the road I admired a bright spot where maple trees interrupted the evergreen parade. Pale gold leaves were falling to the ground, making soft layers in the woods, but all the leaves that had fallen on the road were trampled flat by the tires of cars. The leaves’ cells were breaking down in progressively ruined stages: just-crushed, flat and thin enough to reveal pavement bumps, becoming translucent, losing edges, skeletonized – many stages of decomposition were on display.
I wavered about photographing the leaves on the road. Part of me was drawn to the way the splayed and flattened shapes recalled graphic depictions of a maple leaf. Another part of me was repulsed by the dirty, crushed plant tissue. The textures were interesting but the colors had lost their life. I turned away, then turned back. The sun was disappearing and there was no time for second guessing. Photographers know that the phenomenon we view at any given moment won’t repeat itself: the smashed leaves at my feet would never look quite like they did that afternoon. So I made some photographs and I’m glad I did.
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I’ll look for the Bigleaf maples the next time I go to the park. Whatever I find it will be different next time, and the next. That’s part of the magic of walking outdoors. I’ll also be more likely to consider the aesthetic possibilities of crushed plant material the next time I come across it. That’s part of the magic of human imagination.
About the Bigleaf Maple
We are predominantly coniferous here on Fidalgo Island but we have our share of deciduous trees, trees that are mostly golden now as they work through the annual task of releasing their leaves. A standout among our deciduous trees is the Bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum), a well-named tree that’s hard to miss. With the largest leaves of any maple tree, it spreads its branches wide in the forest and frequently hosts copious amounts of moss on its trunk and branches. Happiest in moist climates that don’t get too cold, it ranges up and down America’s West coast where the weather is moderate, into the mid-elevations of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains and through coastal British Columbia.
Bigleaf maples turn yellow, gold and brown in the Fall as they cease food production and lose their chlorophyll, the photosynthetic pigment that green plants use to make energy from light. The same reduction in daylight hours that has me complaining prompts these trees to make layers of strong cells at the junction of each leaf stem and twig. The thicker cells allow weaker cells above them to break, severing the leaf from its home. The prodigious effort of food production that occupied the tree for the last six months or so is over; thousands of frail factories are floating down to the ground to gradually decompose. The process has its own intricacies; if you’re so inclined, here’s a study to about the mathematics of leaf decay from MIT.
Each spring before the leaves get started, male and female flowers share space on pretty, pendulous cascades that hang from branch tips. If there aren’t many other flowers out, the bees that visit Bigleaf maple flowers for nectar will produce a hauntingly fragrant honey. Last year I bought Bigleaf maple honey from a vendor at a farmers market and I savored every last drop until it was gone. I have to wait for another spring when I might be lucky enough to find it for sale again.
The flowers turn into winged maple seeds that ripen in the fall and are carried away by the wind for months afterwards to germinate in a moist, partially shaded spot when the time is right. A cut stem will sprout readily too. The little saplings are munched by deer and elk, birds and rodents eat the seeds, and various parts of the tree host a variety of insect life. Humans make use of the wood for furniture, veneers, musical instruments, crafts, pulp, and firewood.
The Bigleaf maple is an epiphyte paradise, gracefully supporting moss, lichens and ferns in great abundance. One study found that the trees carry an average of 78 ponds (35.5kg) of epiphyte biomass. They can actually grow small roots along epiphyte-covered branches to burrow into the rich substrate for nutrients captured from the atmosphere by the various epiphytes. Bits and pieces are always falling to the ground, enriching the soil.
These trees can live to be 300 – nothing compared to an ancient redwood, but an impressive number of seasons on earth. A photo of the biggest Bigleaf maple tree in the U.S. can be seen here. A person standing next to it makes the scale clear.
And here’s a photo of me holding an impressive leaf on a Bigleaf maple tree in July, 2012.
1. Roof lines in Klein Reken: a tight crop, with Funke’s pigsty on the left.
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One of the highlights of my trip to the northern Europe last April was an all-too brief stay with my friend Ule Rolff. During the visit we strolled through the picturesque village in Munsterland where she lives, and Ule showed me an intriguing old half-timber building, originally a home but later used for housing pigs. I dove into photographing the aged building that day, just as Ule had done before me. I had no idea that while on my journey through Europe, a stop at a small village would lead to another journey, this time a creative one. After I got home Ule and I decided to collaborate on a post about the building. “Funke’s Pigsty: a Double Eye-catcher” features photos and written history and reflection in German and English.
While working on that post we noticed that some of the photos we took were very similar – we both gravitated to the peeling paint, the rough timbers, the off-center lines. We wondered what would happen if we exchanged unprocessed photos with each other, then processed the exchanged photos in our own style. Would one person’s ideas for processing be similar to the other person’s, or not?
We decided to collaborate again, and over the past few weeks we exchanged photos and used google docs to record a dialogue about the experience. Luckily for me Ule is comfortable enough with English to converse via the written word as well as in person. She told me it’s “just” a matter of letting go of her native tongue and thinking in English!
Working with someone else’s photos and writing about the process has been a unique experience. I haven’t seen Ule’s results and she has not seen mine. I’m looking forward to the big reveal, as they say. We plan to incorporate our reactions to what the other person did with our photos by meeting online after publishing, recording our dialogue, then adding that piece to the dialogue below. *
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2. An attempt to find a compromise between respecting the integrity of the building and giving it a different overall atmosphere.
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A written record of our dialogue follows. Above and below you’ll find two processed versions for each of the four of Ule’s photos that I used. The originals are at the end of the post.
L: When we first thought about working with one another’s pigsty photos, I only had a vague idea in mind. It had to do with the fact that some of our photos were quite similar, and I was thinking that if we take almost the same photograph, then what is it that we are each doing, that makes that photograph different? As I thought about it some more it seemed like any differences in processing would probably be minimal. As long as we were aiming for a straightforward representation of what we saw, if we processed each other’s photos the outcome was likely to be different in only very minor ways. So then I started to think about what you have done in some recent posts, manipulating photos and taking an image to a very different place from where it started. I admire what you’ve done, and I wanted to try something along those lines. But I know you use Photoshop and I don’t. That would be a limitation. With all this in mind, I took two of your images and “messed with them” as much as I could in Lightroom, while still yielding a result that I liked. It was a struggle at first – it’s just not what I’m used to doing.
U: As we both tried to show more documentary photos of the pigsty, you are right: they would come out quite similarly. And this kind of work flow is more a thing I also prefer doing in Lightroom.
But in this second posting, my idea was to go beyond documentary limitations, to show what isn’t to be seen at first glance in a picture. This is what I am especially interested in these days also in my other work, published or private. And this is where Photoshop comes in with its wider manipulation effects on image data. When I understood that PS is not your favorite tool to work with, I tried to mostly do what was possible with LR also, so our thoughts about processing wouldn’t go too much apart. Just when compositing photos or altering structures, I had to go further, and I’m really interested in talking about photos that are further from where they started by editing… so I hope you do not feel uneasy with what we thoughtlessly agreed upon…so I hope you do not feel uneasy with what we thoughtlessly agreed upon.
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3. Timber and bricks, leaning towards becoming waves and clouds.
4. Playing with color and texture.
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L: I like that idea – to show what isn’t seen at first glance in a picture. I’m going to think about that when I work on another photo. A LITTLE unease is a very good thing. Only when it gets extreme does it become negative, right? This pushes me into something I haven’t done before, and whether or not I continue in the same direction, what I learn will probably inform me going forward.
U: This is what I love about you (above many other things) that you are so open-minded to new experiences and new thoughts. In photography, I often find it so easy to open up to other people’s concepts by viewing their photos. And I’m always afraid of losing my own way by these impressions – in your case also, I found myself afraid you might damage your poetical and emotional approach to photography by too much technical experimenting – but then again, I’m confident of your strong character and I think you have a feeling for what does you good.
L: 🙂 Please! Too many compliments! I will say that open-mindedness is an important value to me, I strive to keep an open mind and I try to be aware enough of myself to know when I’m not being open-minded.
I understand what you mean by the danger of being influenced too much by someone’s work. That’s something we have to live with and to be aware of. Hopefully, we are influenced positively and can maintain our own individuality in the process. Don’t you think that the older we get, the less that’s a problem?
As for the emotional and poetical sensibility, that is something I struggle with. I think it’s because I’m also drawn to a more documentary scientific approach to what I see. Part of me is always happy to just make a good record of something interesting. But another part knows that to relate to other people, to communicate with and move someone, there needs to be more than that. I’m happiest when I think I’ve created something with some emotional power, and that doesn’t happen very often. Lately I’ve been in the documentary mode – traveling for three weeks certainly strengthened the desire to document and didn’t leave lots of time for emotional expression along the way. There were too many new things to see. Lately I’ve been wanting to get back to pure feeling.
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5. The pigsty roof with the village church steeple in the background.
6. A romanticized look at the pigsty rooftop and steeple, with a touch of fog.
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U: I agree: the older I get, the more I grow aware of my cultural roots and I’m thankful for influences that happened throughout my life. Nobody lives and develops a character without personal impressions. Maybe it is a question of organic integration and consciousness, as you describe, not to lose the individual core.
What you say about your different modes I can completely see in your latest publication about Leiden, but instead of one or the other, I see you integrating emotion in documentation, which often happens in your posts. But it is always a frail balance, I feel that for my work, I always need enough time to keep to myself to escape too much distraction. And traveling always throws me completely on new paths, mostly documentary ones.
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7. A straight black and white rendition of Ule’s color photo, to keep the viewer focused on the odd juxtapositions of materials and the variety of textures.
8. Carried away with color for the pure fun of it.
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L: I haven’t thought that much about my cultural roots, but the trip to Europe prompted me to think more about that, more as a New World/Old World comparison. Maybe I AM thinking about it, just not quite in those terms. Organic integration – that sounds good! If I’m integrating emotion and documentation, that’s wonderful. My inner critic says I need to emphasize real emotion a bit more. We’ll see how that evolves. 😉
Yes, we need time to ourselves, and that’s the great thing about not having to spend 40 hours a week working for someone else. At least we don’t have that distraction now. I think traveling can be a kind of addiction, not in a medical sense of course, but thinking about my own desire to travel, I’ve been aware lately of the benefits of not traveling, of being more rooted. But now I’m straying away from the topic at hand.
U: Not really. The question also at stake here is basic conditions we need for being content with our photography. So if it is traveling addiction with you, it is kind of an allergy with me …;-)
L: And to get back to what we need to be content, we are also interested in shaking things up a little, in this project, right? Right now there is not much to be gained by restricting ourselves to trying to do the best job in accurate documentation.
U: We are not competing, but doing something together, it is no question of better or worse, but of finding out possibilities together. And I have to admit: sometimes I love taking a little shower of bad taste 😉
L: A little shower of bad taste – that’s funny…
U: Wait until you see what I have done to your photos! I sometimes like overdoing things a bit, out of joy about what is all possible in editing photos – beginner’s disease, I think.
L : Now I’m scared. And it’s interesting how, along with the delight, there is always a shadow of competition there – like, uh oh, how will my processing look compared to hers? But I think that is just something we can acknowledge, look at, and move on from. I want to pick up on your phrase “beginner’s disease.” It immediately calls to mind the famous zen phrase, “beginner’s mind.”
U: Oh, I remember having read the phrase in David Ulrich’s book on Zen Photography. It sounded a bit friendlier than I used it above.
L: 🙂 A bit!!
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*Here are our thoughts after posting:
L: : I just approved your pingback (do they call it the same thing in German?) I love your photos! Thank you!!
U: Yes, it is the same word. And I love yours! They are so completely “Lynn’s”! I must view and think a minute …
L: The captions you used help to carry me into the photo, because they show what you were thinking. I want to just say “I like…” but I’m searching for better words, because that really doesn’t say anything. Still, my initial reaction was a delighted: “I like what she did with my photos!” I appreciate that you tell the viewer which filters or effects you used. I confess I don’t remember what I did – it was more a matter of “try this, try that.” But there’s value in knowing how you get to a place! The systematic way you worked is satisfying to follow, and I can learn something from it.
U: Your captions are not so technical as mine, but they show an important part of your motivation, your intention what to do with the images. For many readers, your information may be more “speaking” than the techniques. But I’m really surprised how unfamiliar your alterations made my photos to me: you have added some of your character to them, your subtlety and refined taste. There are groups in your choice I see: one are the three roof cuts which pleases me very much, it gives something abstract to the skyline which I didn’t see before. And then the cloudy, ocean like bricks, marvelous! Isn’t it funny we both finish with kind of a joke?
L: The big “L” at the end of your post made me laugh, and I think that image and the first one are very powerful. I also chuckled at “green glow” – that is almost radioactive! It truly does glow, that little piece of metal. Combining all three photos was a serious challenge (Bildausschnitt, Schlösser einmontiert in PS). If you asked me to do it, I would not have known where to start. The result may be my favorite one – it sings. There is a fairytale quality to it, it seems that a narrative or a mystery lurks just beneath the surface. I also want to comment on your organization – the flow is easy to follow. Something else I can learn from. 😉 One more thing – your Photoshop skills! Kudos! I fully “believed” the last two photos. They don’t have the artificial look one sometimes sees when different images are combined, they’re very natural.
U: Thank you for the flowers (can I say so in English? – it is a plainly translated German proverb). I willingly admit that I have been working hard on my use of PS, and it gives me a bit of contentment that you perceive the compositions as natural. What seems quite “typically Lynn” are the tender colour and reduced “clearness” in ns. 2,3,4 and 6. All the more, I laughed about your very colourful finale, it must have hurt you to do it :-))!
L: On the contrary, I really loved making that one. It’s unfortunate that I couldn’t remember what I did, because I wanted to do more in that vein but when I tried to work that way again, I couldn’t figure out how I got there. My fault for not making notes! I’m glad that this collaboration gave you a chance to move ahead in the direction you’re going, and I’m curious to see what else is going to appear down the road on your blog.
U: Me too :-)) I have no answer to the question behind your “curiosity”, we will see. And if you didn’t make notes on the making of …, trying again will lead you to new, other or similar results, and give you new fun. I hope this project didn’t lead you too much astray or off your path. And as you ask where this experiment will be leading us, I ask myself which were our intentions to give this kind of collaboration a try.
L: As for being led astray, that’s a good thing, it keeps us fresh to veer off our path once in a while. And as for intentions, I was wondering about intention, i.e. what was our intention in processing the photos? We talked about that before without calling it “intention” and maybe thinking specifically in terms of intent is helpful. There is an element of fun there, certainly, but it’s more than that. We are each letting go of our work, relinquishing it to the other person’s aesthetic, and – correct me if I’m wrong – I think we both find that idea more intriguing than scary. Some people would find the idea of another person working on their photo frightening. Another part of the intent, for me anyway, is to take the opportunity to push past some boundaries that I might normally stay within. My guess is that also is true for you. And then there is always the “payoff” of stretching yourself and learning or growing in the process.
U: The thought of risk is interesting for readers, I’m sure, for me it would be anyway, but in this case, I didn’t feel a trace of it. As you say, it was almost completely and exclusively intriguing. Besides, more and more I come to think of my raw captures as material to become what I want to show by further actions, so it is not so dangerous for my inner self, if someone else is touching them. Your question of intention is a bit more compelling for me: above all, it was a thing of fun and adventure and just doing anything together that is possible over the wide distance. But more seriously thinking, there is the hope of stepping out of self set boundaries when you have the opportunity to watch what somebody else (somebody you appreciate) does with your material – and what is even more valuable: someone I can talk to about what she is doing and what I am doing. There are so many people not unable, but unwilling to use language to reflect the great things they do.
But, to sum it up, I am very happy with the process and the outcome of our experiment – even this risky spontaneous chat felt completely comfortable all the way. Thank you so much for being the sagacious and lovable being you are.
L: I’m pleased with it too. You have struck a perfect balance (for me anyway) of open flexibility and calm organization during the course of the project. And the bottom line is (Americans love to talk about the bottom line!) that frankly, I really like your work!! Thank you very much.
The original photos:
Technical note: Ule sent me PSD’s of the photos I requested, and vice versa. Then we each worked on the photos in Lightroom. I also used Color Efex Pro. We scheduled meeting times across the nine hour time difference and chatted using google docs, which we then copied and pasted into our posts.
photographed and written by two bloggers in two languages / fotografiert und geschrieben von zwei Bloggerinnen in zwei Sprachen
1. Pigsty Door, Klein Reken
While traveling in Germany this past April, I spent a day with my friend Ule in the little village of Klein Reken, in the rural province of Munsterland. Being born and raised in America where the built environment is not very old, I was captivated by Klein Reken’s traditional half-timbered architecture – especially one well-worn, deserted building I saw when we strolled through the village. As we walked around the structure, I took picture after picture, honing in on peeling paint, patched brick and rusty locks, wondering about the curtains in an upstairs window. Ule said she was drawn to the place too and had noticed it even before she moved to the town. She too had photographed the venerable building, delighting in the structure, the textures and the muted colors.
After I got home Ule and I talked about collaborating on a post about the old building. As we worked together more ideas surfaced and the post grew, so we decided to split it into two: this post includes old photos from the town archives, two of Ule’s photos, twelve of mine and a bit of local history. Next time we’ll show you the results of a photo exchange, where we each chose photos from the other person’s archive to process in our own way.
Während meiner Deutschlandreise im vergangenen April verbrachte ich einen Tag mit meiner Freundin Ule in dem kleinen Dorf Klein Reken im ländlichen Münsterland. Ich bin in Amerika geboren und aufgewachsen, wo die Bebauung nicht sehr alt ist, und war fasziniert von traditioneller Fachwerkarchitektur in Klein Reken – besonders von einem baufälligen, verlassenen Gebäude, das ich beim Bummeln durch das Dorf gesehen habe. Als wir um das Gebäude herumgingen, machte ich ein Bild nach dem anderen, wobei ich mich in abblätternde Farbe, geflickte Ziegel und rostige Schlösser vertiefte und mich über die Vorhänge in einem Fenster im Obergeschoss wunderte. Ule sagte, sie sei ebenfalls von dem Ort fasziniert und habe es schon bemerkt, bevor sie in den Ort umgezogen sei. Auch sie hatte das Gebäude fotografiert und war begeistert von der Struktur, den Texturen und den verblichenen Farben.
Nachdem ich zu Hause angekommen war, sprachen wir über die Zusammenarbeit an einem Beitrag über das alte Gebäude. Während wir zusammenarbeiteten, tauchten weitere Ideen auf und der Beitrag wuchs, so beschlossen wir, ihn in zwei Teile aufzuteilen: Dieser Beitrag enthält alte Fotos aus dem Archiv des örtlichen Heimatvereins, zwei von Ules Fotos, zwölf von mir und ein bisschen Ortsgeschichte. Das nächste Mal zeigen wir euch die Ergebnisse eines Fotoaustauschs, bei dem wir jeweils Fotos der anderen Person ausgewählt haben, um sie auf unsere eigene Weise zu verarbeiten.
3. The pigsty and a neighboring house; photo by Ule
The worn brick and wood were mute reminders of the village’s farming past; indeed, Ule said villagers called the building “Funke’s pigsty” – for that’s what it had been. No one keeps pigs in the middle of the village anymore, but clearly someone was still providing minimal upkeep to the building. Doors were shuttered, a brick wall was roughly patched with concrete, and many coats of paint were evident. I wondered why the old half-timbered structure continued to settle into place essentially unchanged, while the village around it grew more prosperous. In my country a structure like this would have been torn down decades ago, or perhaps converted into a chic restaurant.
Der abgenutzte Ziegel und das Holz erinnerten stumm an die bäuerliche Vergangenheit des Dorfes. Tatsächlich, so Ule, nannten die Dorfbewohner das Gebäude “Funkes Schweinestall” – denn so war es gewesen. Niemand hält mehr Schweine in der Mitte des Dorfes, aber offensichtlich sorgte immer noch jemand für den minimalen Unterhalt des Gebäudes. Die Türen waren mit Fensterläden verschlossen, eine Mauer war grob mit Beton geflickt, und viele Anstriche waren zu erkennen. Ich fragte mich, warum sich das alte Fachwerkgebäude im Wesentlichen unverändert weiter festsetzte, während das Dorf um es herum florierte. In meinem Land wäre ein solches Gebäude vor Jahrzehnten abgerissen oder in ein schickes Restaurant umgewandelt worden.
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My friend Ule said she would find out more about the history of the place. She did, and the resulting glimpse into rural life is a real treasure! Here’s her friend Kurt, reminiscing about the building:
Meine Freundin Ule sagte, sie würde mehr über die Geschichte des Ortes erfahren. Sie tat es und der daraus resultierende Einblick in das ländliche Leben ist ein wahrer Schatz! Hier ist ihr Freund Kurt, der sich an das Gebäude erinnert:
“Even in my childhood this was an old house of poor construction, but it always looked well maintained. At that time a family lived there, whose children I often played with, in the yard behind the house when I was allowed to accompany my grandmother there for a visit. In the yard there were chickens, also cats, which were never allowed in the house, at the most, just outside on the windowsill.” At that time there was no toilet, no water in the house, and they had no stable, because the father of the family did not work as a farmer, but earned his livelihood in mining in the Ruhr area, like many men after the completion of the railroad in 1877. In fact, the poor village came to a little modest prosperity through these jobs for the first time. Kurt remembers well the year 1955, when the Mühlenweg (Mill Road) got its own water supply. He was able to watch the home owners at work digging the trenches for the pipes themselves, since he was home with the measles at that time. This event was just right for him as a remedy for boredom. Thereafter, his family did not need to pump the water out of the well, which was especially a relief on the weekly bathing days when the zinc tub was filled, into which all the family members – one after the other in the same water – climbed for thorough cleaning. Only later did Kurt’s family get the first proper bathroom on the Mühlenweg, tiled and with a bath stove – luxury! Such luxury had never been seen in the miner family’s house next door.
“Schon in meiner Kindheit war das ein altes Haus von ärmlichem Zuschnitt, das aber immer gepflegt wirkte. Damals wohnte dort eine Familie, mit deren Kindern ich im Hof hinter dem Haus oft gespielt habe, wenn ich meine Großmutter zu einem Besuch dorthin begleiten durfte. Im Hof gab es Hühner, auch Katzen, die niemals ins Haus durften, allenfalls draußen auf der Fensterbank liegen.”Im Haus gab es damals keine Toilette, kein Wasser, keinen Stall, da der Familienvater nicht als Bauer arbeitete, sondern im Bergbau im Ruhrgebiet seinen Lebensunterhalt verdiente, wie viele Männer nach der Fertigstellung der Eisenbahn 1877. Tatsächlich kam in das arme Dorf durch diese Arbeitsplätze zum ersten Mal ein wenig bescheidener Wohlstand.Kurt erinnert sich gut an das Jahr 1955, als der Mühlenweg eine eigene Wasserversorgung bekam, er konnte den Hauseigentümern, die selbst die Gräben für die Leitungen aushuben, bei den Arbeiten zuschauen, weil er zu der Zeit mit Masern zuhause bleiben musste. Da kam dieses Ereignis als Mittel gegen die Langeweile gerade recht.Danach musste seine Familie das Wasser nicht mehr aus dem Brunnen pumpen, das war besonders an den Waschtagen und den wöchentlichen Badetagen eine Erleichterung, wenn die Zinkwanne gefüllt wurde, in die alle Familienmitglieder – einer nach dem anderen in dasselbe Wasser – zur gründlichen Reinigung stiegen. Erst später bekam Kurts Familie das erste richtige Badezimmer am Mühlenweg, gefliest und mit Badeofen – Luxus! Solchen Luxus hat das Häuschen der Bergarbeiterfamilie nie gesehen.
Ule tells me that in the late 1950s, the miner’s family moved to a house in the new Antoniussiedlung on the outskirts of the village. The half-timbered house was sold and converted into a pigsty, henceforth it was called “Funke’s pigsty.”
Ule erzählt mir, dass die Bergmannsfamilie Ende der 1950er Jahre in ein Haus in der neuen Antoniussiedlung am Rande des Dorfes gezogen ist. Das Fachwerkhaus wurde verkauft und in einen Schweinestall umgewandelt, von nun an hieß es “Funkes Schweinestall”.
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Ule dug up more village lore, learning that in years past there were a number of farms in the village, some run as a sideline business, with only one cow. The cows were driven in the morning over the mill path to the pastures behind a railway embankment. Since they left “traces” on the way, the mill path came to be known as the Kudrizkistraße (Cowshit Path). Kurt said that During World War II, a village resident addressed a field postcard to his family with “Kudrizkistraße” with no further location information – and it reached its destination.Once two children, Martin and Heinz, made a joke of throwing swine manure on the cows. And forty years later, Martin recalls being punished by the farm servant Alwis with a slap on the neck he handed them while he rode past on his bicycle. Martin added that otherwise, Alwis was very fond of children and never averse to a joke.
Ule grub weitere Überlieferungen aus dem Dorf aus und erfuhr, dass es in den vergangenen Jahren eine Reihe von Bauernhöfen im Dorf gab, von denen einige als Nebendienst betrieben wurden und nur eine Kuh hatte. Die Kühe wurden morgens über den Mühlenweg zu den Weiden hinter einem Bahndamm gefahren. Da sie unterwegs “Spuren” hinterließen, wurde der Mühlenweg als Kudrizkistraße bekannt. Kurt sagte, dass ein Dorfbewohner während des Zweiten Weltkriegs seiner Familie eine Feldpostkarte mit der Aufschrift “Kudrizkistraße” ohne weitere Ortsangaben zugesandt habe – und dass sie ihr Ziel erreicht habe. Einmal machten die beiden Kinder Martin und Heinz einen Scherz, indem sie Schweinegülle auf die Kühe warfen. Und vierzig Jahre später erinnert sich Martin, wie er von dem Hofdiener Alwis mit einem Schlag auf den Hals bestraft wurde, den er ihnen reichte, als er mit seinem Fahrrad vorbeifuhr. Martin fügte hinzu, dass Alwis ansonsten sehr kinderlieb und keinem Witz abgeneigt sei.
Ule hoped to find an old photo of the building in the Reken archives but there weren’t any because in those days, photography was reserved for more imposing buildings, like churches, inns and schools. As Ule says, “no house of poor people or pigsty was worthy of such attention and expense.” However, a set of evocative old photos was procured from the town archive. You can see some below.
Ule hoffte, ein altes Foto des Gebäudes in den Archiven von Reken finden zu können, aber es gab kein Foto, denn damals war die Fotografie für imposantere Gebäude wie Kirchen, Gasthäuser und Schulen reserviert. Wie Ule sagt, “war kein Haus von Armen oder Schweinestall einer solchen Aufmerksamkeit und Kosten würdig.” Aus dem Stadtarchiv wurde jedoch eine Reihe anregender alter Fotos beschafft. Sie können einige unten sehen.
The lack of photographic records of the pigsty was remedied once Ule moved to the village. She noticed the building right away, and watched it grow a little more crooked every year. It’s not surprising that she found it to be a compelling photography subject. I’m glad she made sure we wandered past it on our walk that day. I had to apologize for leaving everyone else waiting while I kept taking pictures – it was hard to stop.
Nein, es gab keine Fotos von unserem Schweinestall … bis Ule ins Dorf zog. Sie bemerkte das Gebäude sofort und sah zu, wie es jedes Jahr ein bisschen schief wurde. Es ist nicht verwunderlich, dass sie im alten Gebäude ein überzeugendes Fotomotiv gefunden hat. Ich bin froh, dass sie dafür gesorgt hat, dass wir an diesem Tag auf unserem Spaziergang daran vorbeigegangen sind. Ich musste mich entschuldigen, dass ich alle warten ließ, während ich weiter fotografierte – es war schwer aufzuhören.
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We are planning another post, this time with a few photos of each other’s that we will process our own way. Stay tuned!
Wir planen einen weiteren Beitrag, diesmal mit ein paar Fotos aus dem Archiv der jeweils anderen, die wir auf unsere eigene Weise bearbeiten werden. Bleib dran!
bluebrightly 
