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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All Revved Up

All Revved Up, Know Where to Go

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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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After a Busy Summer

Taking the time to sit down and edit again after a long and busy summer away from blogging. Rainy days like the one we’re having at the moment don’t induce the kind of “carpe diem” guilt that parking in front of a laptop, editing does on a brilliant blue sky summer afternoon.

Here’s a tumble-down tin roof roadhouse sagging toward earth near Muscoda, WI. Old wood and tin, irresistible!

Wooden roadhouse near railroad siding and highway 133 crossing

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Memorial Day

One of the shots made in Muscoda yesterday,filtered through all that this day of remembering the ultimate cost of conflict represents in America.
My “photomod” post-processing actualizes the implicit tangle of emotion, layering visual moods directly over the image, rather than make any attempt at an objective presentation. The image becomes as freighted with interpretation as is our culture of ideals bruised by the realities of our actions and history. And our determination to get back up and move forward, unbroken.

Land of the Free

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New Topographics, Revisted

After reading Rebecca Solnit’s Unfathomable City and Wanderlust these past few weeks my attention’s been re-focused on the history of landscape as cultural narrative and on human modified landscapes a reflection of our cultural values. Or the dis/integration thereof. The 1975 photography exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” came to my attention this morning and I’ve since been web diving for information about the individual photographers who participated in this re-en/visioning of the traditional narratives of vast, wild, sublime American landscape. Their post-industrial, post-suburban, interstate sliced still lives of the land made subservient to human whim resonate deeply within my own assessment of what has changed everywhere we live in the past 50 years.

Frank Gohlke’s work should be known by anyone interested in contemporary interpretations of landscape. The following interview and retrospective slide show of the images he considers most significant nicely summarized his vision and intentions:

http://www.terrain.org/interview/28/

here today I’m editing & printing cityscapes and trying to design a promo postcard for the April show. Never was I much good at making choices and there are a lot of them to wade through, which photo, what dimensions, what to say, how much. learning as I go!  Thanks for stopping by the Driftless World.

Hall Street, Brooklyn New York October, 2013

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Charcoal Hut, Duval Street 1960-ish Mod Project

When I see these old island photos shared by the Key West (Monroe Co. Public Library) on Flickr, they tear the deep roots of memory wide open, for a world, a personal history, a way of life of which only vivid embers remain- to illuminate the choices I make to phoMod the original.

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Old Key West Bottling Plant

I recently found an amazing archive of old Key West Photos at the Monroe Co. Library’s Flickr page. These shots of KWest from the 40’s – 70’s to me represent the “real” KW, before tourism took off and redevelopment took over and transmogrified the island into a simulacrum of itself; a place dusty, mellow, local and genuinely alive, populated by Bahamanian and Cuban Conchs, sailors, hippies, artists, refugees and scalawags of all stripe, who lived and let live. There was peace and more freedom there than any time or place I’ve lived since. And so I can’t resist taking these old photos and modding them to reflect the feelings they incite, deep within memory, dragged up from the depths of my heart.
Old Coke bottling factory on lower Simonton(?) Street, alley view, @ 1960. Credit for the original
to Florida Key’s Public Libraries http://www.flickr.com/photos/keyslibraries/

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