In Conversation

Talking recently with a friend. The conversation wandered around to my photography. (Well, photography in general then trending toward mine.)

I don’t like self-analysis. I liken the probable outcome to the joke about the millipede’s problem. I said:

I’m reminded of the joke about the millipede who, when asked how he coordinated his thousand legs and feet, stopped to consider the question and lifted up a foot to look at it. And he lost his balance and fell on his ass, on his ass, on his ass… (get it?) I never really thought about my work. It is and always has been about making images that please me. That contain their own beauty. That are their own reasons to exist. To refine the images — not to perfection — but to a pleasing appearance that *I* would pay for.

She kinda brushed that aside

She got it. I was concerned about the risk of over-analyzing creative work and paralyzing yourself. She said it’s a perfect metaphor for what “talking about style” can do to an artist if we’re not careful. Then she said, “But you’ve been walking just fine on a thousand legs for a long time. The fact that you’ve simply made images that please you, that you’d personally pay for, is exactly why your work has coherence: your eye is the unifying principle.”

I was thinking that that put “paid” to the question, but my friend kept at it.

“Call your signature style: “Poetic Grit Realism.” You have a consistent way of seeing the world that blends documentary honesty with a quiet, almost lyrical atmosphere. Across barns, brick walls, graveyards, factories, and small city streets, a few things repeat over and over:”

And she ticked points off on her fingers:

“1. Subject matter: Where Time Has Settled In. What you’ve described about the images you look for, you’re drawn to places that hold memory: Weathered architecture – old brick walls, ghost signs, faded painted ads (“MIDWEST TEXTILES,” “Mail Pouch Tobacco”), medallions, corbels, rusting gates, porches. Working and forgotten spaces – barns, silos, farm trailers, industrial ruins, smokestacks, demolition sites, garages. Edges of the city – Baymiller Street, Poplar Street, corner buildings, quiet residential blocks, resting places & thresholds – graveyards (“Sun and Rays”), mausoleum fragments, gates, doors, circular “ocular” windows.
Even your nature pieces (sunflowers, Rose of Sharon, red leaves, sunrise skies) feel like pauses in the in‑between spaces, not postcard ‘perfect nature.’ They’re contemplative, not decorative.

“This all adds up to: you photograph places that remember things, often after everyone else has moved on.”

And all I thought about that was that I was drawn to molds and lichens on gray stone. Somewhere in tagging my work in that range I describe my take with a quote from a Joe Walsh song, Meadow “I’m out here in the meadow — part of an old stone wall.”

She went on…

“2. Emotional tone: quiet, reflective, unsentimental. The mood that keeps repeating:”

I never thought of myself as sentimental (still my favorite rock band is The Moody Blues). But to assert my work is lacking in sentiment set me back a bit.

“Calm, not dramatic – even when the subject is decay or ruin, you don’t sensationalize it; you simply let it be.”

That’s kind of funny. I’m not of the school that every single press of the shutter release is sacred and whatever’s captured is holy writ. And the quality of the work is judged by how thorough the setup and capture of the image is prepared and executed. I move too fast for that. While the shutter speed might be 1/500 second, I’m already moving on after that. But, no. I continue working on an image in Photoshop. The dictum in my case is that I’m not taking pictures, I’m making them. Then she piled on.

“Melancholy without despair – old barns, shuttered storefronts, cemetery scenes, ghost signage: they feel like honest acknowledgments of time passing, not doom and gloom. Stillness – empty streets, empty parking lots, quiet farms, graveyards at dawn, industrial sites with no people. You photograph after the action, when the air has settled.
It’s a kind of poetic realism with grit—honest textures, but deeply respectful.”

Now, there I feel like she hit the nail on the head. Especially the respectful part.

Then she curled down the next finger. “3. Visual Language: texture, structure, and atmosphere
A few strong visual habits show up over and over: Texture-obsessed. Brick, stone, peeling paint, rust, weathered wood, rough concrete. You let surfaces carry the story; your close-ups of brick walls, round windows, doors, and gates read almost like portraits.”

Those all excite some aesthetic sense in me when I see them. At that point, it’s a matter of pointing the camera at them.

She finally gave up on the fingered bullet points. “Architectural & compositional discipline: Strong verticals and horizontals (walls, street lines, barn roofs, fences). Clear, legible structure: even when things are decayed, the composition is clean and intentional, not chaotic. Light as atmosphere rather than spotlight.”

And there I think she’s dead right. those are elements I think make for a professional image. I think some of that comes from my years at Otto. There I was doing work that was sold to our clients as top-level and world-class. As much as we could do it, we had to make every image perfect. Most of that was from selecting images, rather than generating them, although in my later career I was given source art that I was permitted to alter to suit the mood of the piece. I don’t like or even approve of images that are distorted in perspective, flawed in exposure and tone I still use the post-editing tools I used back then.

“Early/late light (cemetery rays, dusk sky, July sunrise, “Dusk Glow,” “Quiet Horizon,” “Cincinnati Sunset”).  You often let light wash through the scene instead of using it as a hard focal point. It creates mood rather than drama.”

Photography is literally writing (drawing/painting) with light. Of course, low-angle light creates drama, if somewhat subtly at times. But since it’s the primary painting force in the work, of course it’s going to dominate many images. Light also affects the colors. I shoot a lot of earth tones: reds and browns of brick, rusty metal, winter trees; muted greens. That’s not because I like them particularly. My favorite colors are jewel tones, red, blue, green, yellow, cyan, purple and so forth. Here my friend asserted: “When color is bold (red barns, sunflowers, red leaves) it’s usually one strong element anchored in a grounded, natural palette.”

What the DIY shows call a POP of color.

“On the other hand, your black-and-white work (Mail Pouch barns, boat ties) leans into texture and form, not high-drama contrast.”

At this point, I was kinda getting into the discussion and had lost some of my trepidation toward the analysis.

Call the heading here 4. Thematic Threads: What Your Work Is “About”

In my images, she said, “Under the surface aesthetics, a few themes keep repeating:

“The dignity of the ordinary. You spend serious attention on subjects most people pass by: a boat tie in a dock, a rusting gate on a pink house, a faded sign, a worn concrete porch.

“Memory and persistence. Barns still standing, factories mid-demolition, ghost signs, grave markers in morning light, industrial relics, old houses by the tracks—everything is still here, even if its original purpose has faded.

“Edges and thresholds. Gates, porches, doors, circular windows, fences, canalside houses, urban streets leading into distance, sunrise horizons—all are literal or metaphorical thresholds between one space/time and another.
Put together, that’s why “Poetic Grit Realism” fits:

“You’re a realist in subject and detail, but you photograph with a poet’s patience and respect.”

Now. Thinking about it for a few hours, I think she’s absolutely right. I am not a big fan of poetry. I find it mostly tedious and too twee. I do, however, appreciate the need for simplicity and brevity of expression. So the comment about a poet’s patience. Yes.

This is an ongoing process. I may even get permission to name this friend  in future blog posts as I try to figure out my path forward.

The image paired with this text is a shot of an old Queen Anne Revival house in (I think) Richmond, Indiana. Not certain, because my GPS was hosed. I’m a big Nikon fan for the last 60 years. I think it was a sad and awful mistake of Nippon Kogaku to no put any GPS circuitry in their cameras. Fortunately, they did build an app that uses a smart phone’s GPS to tag photos. Trouble is, it doesn’t always work. The location of the house is derived from an analysis of metadata — the date the picture was shot (and where Toni and I were at that date and time), the location implications from surrounding images in the total shots taken on that trip. There’s an image a couple shots down the list from this of a ghost sign that advertises a business in Richmond. And another further down which includes an image of the route sign for US27, which runs through Richmond … and so-forth.

I showed the picture to Toni when I got done with the post-processing. I don’t usually. She sees them when they go up on Facebook. She was quite complimentary. She doesn’t always like how I edit my raw camera shots. But this one she did. Which makes me kind a proud. Especially since (in my opinion) she’s got a better eye for putting a shot together than I do.