phonography album of questions

Fall fireworks in a small town

WiscoSouthern engine slicing light

Rear of the Central House Hotel, home of the Gideon Bible & purportedly haunted. Priceless hotel bar.

Big Bayou Blue Heron, St Petersburg Florida

Cracker range, old Florida, Marion County

Entrance to Bald Bluff trail, Boscobel

Spring storm across the cornfields, Hgwy 18 W. of Cobb, Wisconsin

Cleaning up my phonography files. Square format Instagram edits- filter paintings would be a good description for these digitally mediated images. Thinking about creating a squarebook to see what language suggests itself as a narrative. Slicing light and putting it to paper now has an entirely different measure of process than in did carried out in darkrooms. And using a phone for capture…facility and facile have the same root. I find myself constantly measuring the weight of my intentions and quality of my focus (not just the lens’) as the fluidity & diversity of digital photographic media makes the significance of all images slippery. And the quantity immense. Thousands of instant images. Transitory. Unrooted, non local, a-historical, protean. Meaning runs off the surface, deliquescent, Daliesque.

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Wauzeka, 8 am

Wauzeka Wisconsin, February. Looking south 8am. Silence. #driftlessworld #landscape #rural #winter #phonography #smalltowns #quiet

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Blacksmith’s house

As if dropped from Deadwood S.D. into our Wisconsin River bottoms, I never tire of reimagining this building’s stories.

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Twine story project: testing trajectories

So Twine’s a game building hypertext tool that freed people from mass quantities of coding. Games but also interactive stories and other species of e-narrative, which includes potential image narratives. And possibly dreaming the semantic web into place, since its based in part on RDF resource description framework tools.
Irresistible and accessible, although it would be great if WordPress would give us a plug-in option to host Twine builds instead of having to cross link to another site.
Anywho, I used Twine to contain some raw ideas for a project I’m building. Here’s the roughout: http://www.philome.la/DriftlessWorld/301-roadtrip
Thoughts and reactions invited, it’s one of those: “this is an interesting tool, now what?” moments.

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All Revved Up

All Revved Up, Know Where to Go

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Three Visions of St Francis

Summertime growing up in Villas, NJ lots of my friends’ families were Catholic, Irish or Italian, some German or Polish. Almost all were blue collar, factory & shipyard workers. Or they got by otherwise. Some stayed with grandparents. The blessed Virgin was ubiquitous: on dashboards, front lawns, jewelry, framed next to her Son in every dining room where the mother fed the neighbor kids as well as her own. Some kids went to St Raymond’s school on Bayshore Road, but most went back to Philly, where their real homes were; the Villas was for summer vacation, fresh air for the kids, breathing room for mom and the Villas Fishing Club on the bay for men- only. The boardwalk over in Wildwood for everybody with a car or bus fare.

Labor Day Weekend marked the end of summer firmly as a door closing. The following Monday morning the streets were silent, window blinds pulled down, driveways- twelve hours earlier festooned with wading pools, kids, grills, beer bottles & fishing gear, empty. A vacuous quiet descended. Left behind we were all watchers in this new found emptiness, watchful for artifacts of the prior occupants, for signs that summer had existed at all. Mary would stare dolefully back at us from within her blue robes at various locations throughout the neighborhood, daring our trespass.

And then there was St Francis, keeper of beasts & of nature, benevolent & compassionate. Guardian of the wildness inside us all and protector of the earth, he would keep watch along the bay all winter long, and ever after.

Three Visions of St Francis Guarding the Delaware Bay

Three Visions of St Francis Guarding the Delaware

Three Visions of St Francis Guarding the Delaware Bay

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It All Just Happens Right In Front of You

Quick lab video as i work out using Vine. Wrapped around some raw ideas from recent exposures in Madison to PhotoMidwest, LBM, FrakPhoto & PaulVanderbilt. Orthophonic Joy  the 1927 Bristol Sessions Revisted soundtrack sampled in the background.

I used YouTube for the full upload & embedded (since WP doesn’t support unpaid video hosting), and will sample that on Vine. Supporting social media as part of the workflow can seem like a time suck, almost equal or even exceeding the creation/ producing the original material. BUT, the mix-in, cross-inked end results that SM can generate reframe, re-state, & adhere the original work’s ideas in a mashup of free associations.  Which, stripped of intentions reveal alternate narrative, subtext or archetypal surprise. As if the artists’ work turns on its creator to introduce itself as a product not so much of that one person, but of all the raw materials & circumstances exploited to produce the work.

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Chasing Iconography Down the Road

Paul Vanderbilt & Alec Soth’s current Madison exhibits and accompanying text/audio and Frank Gohlke’s Thoughts On Landscape have me thinking about visual rhythms, algorithms and typologies.

Photos individual, paired, in series syncopate with what- anticipations, expectations, apprehensions?– in the viewer. And the resulting resonance renders them meaningful. Or.

The thing in itself, the subject without the photo, the photo without the viewer, retains meaning in situ independent of the intervening  eyes. Is it when the human attention drawn to the object of the len’s affection focusses deeply in that moment,  that the recognition of coincident, adjacent, harmonic- or dissonant– significance in the image(s) occurs? & Association liberates vision from its expectations.

And thinking too much impedes seeing:) A series of random views that made me stop and shoot during recent travels:

Umbrellas at Willow Vineyard, Cape May

Levitation. Seaport promenade, Manhattan (thanks to Liz S. for the tipoff!)

Wisconsin River Autumn, early morning

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Madison PhotoMidwest, WI Book Festival, Alec Soth & Paul Vanderbilt

Head’s exploding with stars after yesterdays trek to Madison for Paul Vanderbilt’s Wisconsin Academy Watrous Gallery exhibit Archive as a River, & WI Historic Society panel discussion of his work, which coincided with WI Book Festival, PhotoMidwest, Filter PhotoFestival, FlakPhoto, MMOCA’s Alec Soth exhibit, “From Here to There” and an arts reception at the Madison Public Library featuring FlakPhoto’s curated exhibit of new Midwest works & photo booklist based on MPL’s collection. And Filter PhotoFestival’s new artists’ photobooks display. Great smart visionary creative talk, people & works. This #mindmap of my notes tells some of the story this morning. Here are related links that tell the rest of the story: WI Book Festival , Photo Midwest , FlakPhoto ,  Filter PhotoFestival , MMOCA , Paul Vanderbilt Exhibit , Alec Soth , Madison Public Library Bubbler Additional random images from the day along State Street follow below. These are as shot, manual,  no post editing, Canon T2i DSLR w/ 18-135 EFS

Downtown State Street in Madison

Passing By I

Passing By II

MMOCA Intersection

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In Everyone’s Backyard

Evening walk down Airport Road, a residential, light industrial, verge of Wisconsin River wetlands mixed use landscape. Wilderness, industry and family homes collide in a kind of rural, blue collar pastoral. Which vista is sublime, which ridiculous? My beautiful cement factory, illuminated like a Byzantine icon. Where do we even begin to draw the distinction, when everywhere is altered and nowhere pristine, not even Yosemite Valley.

Because I see it everyday even the factory parking lot has gained meaning; for me and also for all who have worked/ work there- does our constant regard lend it an aesthetic also?I’m becoming obsessive about these kind of visual questions. Maybe it’s not healthy 😉

Antique Fairgrounds’ Clouds

These flat shots are all preliminary study done with a Samsung G4 phone, of subjects I’ll revisit to build out with the DSLR. Under the influence: Reframing the New Topographics

Packaging factory shiftworkers’ parking lot

Along the Wisconsin River floodplain

Sunset and cement, Highway 133 W, Boscobel

Define Beauty. Sunset, Hgwy 133 W. Boscobel

Notice the Red Truck

Near the Antique Fairground, Airport Rd

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