Art is Life is Art: Susan Reep Photo Art

Once in a while I like to head up Highway 65 to Exeter.  It’s a fantastic little town with 26 outdoor murals.  The town was going the way of many small towns, especially after the citrus freeze of 1990, but they found a way to reinvent themselves: become a tourist attraction with cool restaurants and shops and outdoor art.  And the art is good.

My sister came with me and we ate lunch at the Hometown Emporium – we like it there because their homemade bread is the  best.  And Cris adores their fried bologna sandwiches.  Someone has to like bologna – Oscar Meyer sells a lot of it.

This is the view from Hometown Emporium.  The Yokohl label is one of my favorites.  We stopped at a lovely little park.  Can you tell the mural from the sky?

Very pleasant.  And there are nice little shops and restaurants right by the park.

Another view from this grassy area.

This mural depicts a packing house from when?  50s?  Earlier?  Notice the male supervisor making sure the women are doing their work correctly.

I’m going back as soon as the weather cools off to walk the whole town and see all 26 murals (it’s a small town).  But we had a very pleasant excursion.

I just found out today that the two works I submitted for the Art’s Council of Kern’s show Food Glorious Food were not only accepted, but are on the poster and postcards for the show!  That’s so cool!  Excuse me while I’m excited for myself.

Ok, I’m not so excited that my name is nowhere on the poster, but one step at a time.  The show benefits the Golden Empire Gleaners and attendees should bring food with them to donate.

The works are small, paint on canvas with images from vintage fruit crate labels.  I’m particularly fond of these two little guys – I love the labels with goofy fruit guys – Mr. Apricot and Mr. Pear.  In fact, I’m heading up to my top-secret location tomorrow to buy a new supply to work with.

Come to the opening reception next Friday.  Luckily, I will be there.  We go on Saturday to Santa Monica for my 45th high school reunion.  Yes, I’m that old.

So anyhow, I put a link on my links box, upper left, to a very cool website, Digital Photography School.  So many places to learn so much, but I like this one lots.

Check out this link to see not only some of my photos in the gallery, but to read about Saving Grace, the Bakersfield event to be held next Tuesday to benefit Ricky’s Retreat, a local AIDS home and hospice.  They are raising funds to purchase the house on Grace Street that they have been renting for so many years.

This page was in the Bakersfield Californian last week.  It’s a little hard to follow because they neglected to upload one of the images that is most talked about, and the other images are not in the order in which they are discussed.  It is what it is.

Finally, the next six photos were posted on the Urban Photography website out of London. You’ve probably seem at least some of them before in my photo galleries.

Shopping for birds – or just finding an excuse to be together.

My favorite traffic photo of looming disaster.

Too many people!

A sidewalk market that would never pass inspection here.

Here’s that girl at the bus stop again.  Slightly different look.

You’ve seen this one before but I love love love this photo.  Look at the reflections of the peeps.

So have a great weekend everyone!  Football tonight – Frontier High School’s very first home game, and our friend and Frontier coach Rich Cornford is gonna win!  Tomorrow the top-secret location trip, and Sunday our very own personal Harvest Festival.  My daughter is having families over who participate in our carpool for Abundant Harvest Organics.  We’re all contributing a dish from our food in this week’s box.  It’s fantastic food.

I posed a question the other day:  why is it that although the world is in color, black and white photos look more realistic?  I’ve actually thought about this for quite some time.  I have to say that I am a fan of color in my life.  For example, when my husband and I went to Costa Rica, we loved all the vibrant colors so much that we returned home and painted our entire downstairs with lime green, orange, vibrant blues, yellow-gold.  They are happy colors – we feel happy looking at them.

But in photography, black and white perversely seems more real.  I say perversely because besides the implied contradiction,  I always think of Calvin and Hobbes:

Calvin:     Dad, how come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then?
Dad:        Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It’s just the world was black and white then.
Calvin:     Really?
Dad:        Yep. The world didn’t turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
Calvin:     That’s really weird.
Dad:        Well, truth is stranger than fiction.
Calvin:     But then why are old paintings in color?! If their world was black and white, wouldn’t artists have painted it that way?
Dad:        Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane.
Calvin:     But… but how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn’t their paints have been shades of gray back then?
Dad:        Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did in the ’30s.
Calvin:     So why didn’t old black and white photos turn color too?
Dad:        Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?

Calvin:     The world is a complicated place, Hobbes.
Hobbes:   Whenever it seems that way, I take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner.

So here’s the Costa Rica picture in black and white:

We miss the vibrant colors but the picture is still interesting.  The shadows are there and the texture in the plant leaves is even more pronounced.  So maybe black and white gets rid of all the extraneous “noise” and leaves you with the bare bones of the image, although you lose the translucence of the leaves.

Maybe there is no real answer and the question is spurious, because why should one be better than another?  I do think there’s a point, however, to cutting out the “noise.”  In a complicated image, there is so much competing for your attention.  The following picture is from an exhibit of Dale Chihuly glass.  Chihuly is a master and color is essential to his art.  However -

without the distraction of the color, beautiful as it is…

We can better appreciate the shape, form, the arc of the glass leaf over the boy’s head without the distraction of the colored glass in front of his body, plus, the way the photo trails off the page is more subtle but at the same time more dramatic.

What do you think?  Perhaps a question that needs no answer, but it’s still fun and instructive to look and analyze.

This is a Roman bath in Pompeii.  I was so excited to see the light coming in from the ceiling portal, focusing on the frigidarium, but I think this photo, with the dramatic lighting, looks much better and more realistic in black and white. I notice the beam from the light source in the center more quickly and the almost-parallel alignment of the beams.

So far, I think black and white is coming out pretty well.  I’ll put in one more set and do some more tomorrow.

Times Square at night.  The taxi speeding by – the essence of New York.  I love this picture (Remember in one of the posts we mentioned that if a photo is blurry it does not immediately discount the picture as a bad one?).

It’s still a nice photo in black and white, but for me, this is one place where color really does count.  Razzle-dazzle is important to Times Square, and since it’s already nighttime, without color we loose the effectiveness of the neon.

So this is just a little food for thought in case you’ve ever considered the conundrum of black and white seeming more realistic when representing a world that’s in color.

Part two to follow.

I’m getting ready to exhibit a few works in Burn the Witch, an all-woman art show held in Bakersfield. I’ve had fun with these.  First is Carry Me Home.

I had been wanting to use this carriage image from a vintage fruit crate label, so that was the motivation to begin with.  I also wanted to use embellishments – pearls, jewel-type butterflies and stars.  I’m not sure what made me use the background photo of the aspens near Crested Butte, Colorado.  The artistic process is not entirely explicable, but as I worked I began to think of the televangelist shows, especially the one that used to have the pinkish-haired lady who wore prom dresses and lots of glitz.  At least that’s the way I thought of her.  I envisioned her in this frilly pink carriage being transported to heaven with pink pearl reins and butterflies that transformed into stars.  It was difficult to get this one right but over a period of several days I got it to where I not only was satisfied, but actually like it quite a bit!  I had fun making the feathery images with my new paintbrush also.

All the King’s Horses

The photo of this piece is not good – I’ll give the disclaimer right away.  This is one of the replicas of the Triumphal Quadriga – the four horses – at St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice.  The four original horses are in the Basilica with no photos allowed, but these replicas are on the balcony overlooking Piazza San Marco.  It was hard to get this photo – getting an image from the angle I wanted with no people around.  But I had time and I waited until I had my opportunity.  Is there a better place to wait around than the balcony of the Basilica overlooking Piazza San Marco?  Can’t think of one offhand.

Blue seemed like a good color for the canvas.  In between the nine squares is a deeper blue – can’t see it here.  The horse is fragmented to represent the many journeys it made in real life.  The origin of the horses is unclear – may be Greek or Roman.  Probably Greek from about 175 B.C.  They journeyed to Rome involuntarily, probably to adorn Trajan’s Arch (Trajan had a lot of arches build in different cities), and from Rome ended up in Constantinople.  When the Venetians sacked Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, they helped themselves to the four horses.  In about 1797 Napoleon removed the horses to Paris, but in 1815 they were returned to Venice.  Supposedly, he was just “borrowing” them. That’s six moves for four bronze horses (with a high copper content).  When it was discovered that the statues were suffering from the acidic sea air and were oxidizing, they were moved into the basilica and these replicas put on the balcony.  What an exhausting story!

So I put my photo on this nine-part canvas as a metaphor for the horses’ fractured history.  In Greek mythology, there are nine muses, so the number seemed apt – the statues started in Greece and certainly served as muses for a number of cultures, judging from their travels around the globe.

Here’s a picture of the original horses – not taken by me since photography is forbidden.

Here are a few of my images.  You’ll recognize the last one and see from the others some of the challenges of getting a photo up there.

You’ll see this one in Burn the Witch als0 – a very small mounted photo.

And finally

You can see more photos of Italy and also read my travel journal for more information.

We’ve been talking about how to photograph people – again, not portraiture, but street photography – people doing what they do.  Primarily, I’ve been talking about travel photography – documenting not just that you were there, but the day-to-day life of the people. Let’s finish up, starting with a look at Streetcar, a photo by Robert Frank, a Swiss photographer who published The Americans in 1958.  Of his photos, Robert Frank said, “When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”

This image certainly demands a second look.  How many of us, had we snapped this photo on a trip somewhere, would have said, “Oh, that’s no good. The lighting isn’t perfect, it’s sort of grimy, it’s ugly.”  All of that may be true, but the photograph is excellent.  It is ugly because the black people are at the back of the streetcar.  Had we taken this photo in another country, we might think, “Wow, is that coincidence?  Or did people have to sit separately?” The people are looking straight at us which in a sense makes it more real.  You’re getting real unvarnished looks, not poses, for the camera.

I took this photo outside the zoo in Chongqing, China.  The cotton candy vendor looked straight at me as I took the picture, and oddly enough, it gives us a better idea of who he is.  The same is true for the next photo of a woman in Xitang.

I was in a boat, she looked straight at me, but I took the photo anyway.  The hidden story is that she’s washing her hands in filthy water that the residents know they should not use for anything.  But she’s washing up.

The next photo also is more expressive even though only one of the people is looking straight at me.  I felt intrusive taking this picture, but I took it anyway.  What I was mostly interested in was the little table and chairs used at this “waterfront cafe.”

Here’s another photo with the subject looking straight at me.

This is a cool image in a way, with the person in the background sleeping, and this gentleman certainly looks just like we’d expect an elderly, scholarly Chinese man to look.  For me, though, it’s ruined because I was there, and it was clear from the way he was wandering around that he wanted to be photographed (and hoped to make a little money from it).

Now I’d like to bring up an interesting conundrum.  My photos are in color.  Robert Frank’s photo is black and white.  Which looks the most real?  The black and white does, but why?  The world is in color.  I’ll do a post on that soon.

Here’s another woman in Xitang.  She isn’t looking right at us, but the photo sure tells a story. It’s real life going on.  Here’s some more real life going on.

I like both of these very much.  Notice in the photos, the full figures of the  monks aren’t visible, but it doesn’t detract from the picture; in fact, I think it improves the picture.  Remember, the entire person doesn’t need to be in the frame to make it a good photo.

This is one of my favorites – it’s not quite in focus but I took if out of the bus window and had but one chance.  This woman was riding on top of a pile of dirt in this little truck.  On the left, you can see the lineup of cars behind the very big truck!  This is a true slice of life.  A good street photo does not have to always be perfectly focused.

Ok, a couple more and we’ll wrap up.

Back to the rice paddies, a man is breaking up clods of dirt with his pitchfork and his wife is holding the water buffalo.  Which photo is more interesting?  I think the top one is because of the action.  You can see how hard he is working and what is probably their house in the background.  The second photo is interesting because water buffalo are exotic to us, but that’s about all it tells me.

I hope you all have more to think about now as you document your travels or just life around you.  “We were there” photos are nice, but ultimately, how many photos can one look at of oneself?  I mean, it’s nice to see my husband and me at this cocktail party in Shanghai, but it’s pretty hard to tell it’s either a cocktail party or Shanghai!  But – we were there!

You can see more people pictures on my website, and I promise, no “we were there” photos!  There may also be photos of interest as street photography in the travel section.