Color Blind

The people who work with me have pointed out that I’m color blind. Fortunately I can tell my greens from reds, so I’m allowed to drive, but apparently I can’t really see the color blue particularly well. This became particularly obvious after that long, angry weekend I previously described. I invited everyone back into the studio and with great pride showed my team The Grey Room, a new set that I had destroyed and then re-sanctified with buckets of grey paint.

Or, as my team pointed out to me… BLUE paint.  I’ll take their word, I guess…

I just found this wonderful two-part article called the The Crayolafication of the World that explores the naming of colors, how we got there, and how it has affected our perception. The author explores how different cultures have come about naming colors. It is not as analogous as you’d expect it to be. A lot of cultures don’t make a distinction between blue and green, for instance.

How many colors can you name? I can probably get to fifteen, but that begins reaching into purely descriptive terms. (Rust? Eggplant? Egg yolk? Those might describe East German hair colors for older ladies…)

Part Two of the article gets into the slightly more scientific aspects of color recognition. Children take comparatively long to acquire a nomenclature for the various colors. I can’t recall whether that was the case… It seemed my three sons figured out colors very early, but one thing that I will remember forever was a particular bonding experience with my first son. I’m not sure whether it was simply because I had more time for him than others that weekend, or whether we’re wired to communicate a certain way – we’re both highly communicative… to a fault!  But at that time he was walking around pointing at things and saying “Elmo”, possibly one of his first words. Well, I sussed out that he was only pointing at red objects, and Elmo is a red furry Sesame Street monster… and we just spent the rest of the time walking around the house pointing out Elmo-colored things and saying the word “red.”

The point is that language has a lot to do with perception, because language becomes definition. I am completely bilingual (German and English) and can bullshit my way through a number of other languages. To anyone who speaks more than one language, you realize that straight translation is impossible, that all words are loaded with historic and cultural values, and that they have a distinct etymology. This means that people have different experiences because they don’t just get filtered through a personal matrix of reference points, but that there are distinct cultural aspects that define our experiences.

And maybe that’s why I see the set as grey, and my Berlin teams sees it as blue. People here seem to have more words for grey than eskimos have for snow… which is less than I thought.

Whaddaya call that?

I’m stumped. I’m not sure how to describe my own photography. My assistant Thomas Schäfer has begun a new project, and I seem to have inspired the guy… he built a set, rented a lot of furniture, and worked with actors to create some highly narrative images. We were talking about this style today, and even though I can think of plenty of photographers who inspire me, who have gone before me, or who I consider contemporaries… I wish I could find a quick phrase to sum up this style.

The great masters of this are Gregory Crewdson and David LeChapelle, but there are guys like Erwin Olaf and Eugenio Recuenco who are doing technically inspiring work.

Maybe it’s a good thing that there isn’t a phrase yet. On some level, it’s a very deliberate process, much more like painting than it is photography. Every item gets carefully placed, and is vested with some meaning… why put a pomegranate there? Why aren’t they looking at each other? Should the light be coming from slightly below the main character? What I do isn’t simply taking a picture, it’s making an image. And that is very distinct and specific way to stage a shot.

…here’s another teaser from my new series, tentatively entitled the Dark Project. Obviously a lot of Caravaggio, but also some Füssli in the mix.

EDIT:  I’m just going with “Narrative Photography” for now. It’s kinda what I do …

Another Comeback

climbing back up out of the ooze, out of
the thick black tar.
rising up again, a modern
Lazarus.
you’re amazed at your good
fortune.
somehow you’ve had more
than your share of second
chances.
hell, accept it.
what you have, you have.
you walk and look in the bathroom
mirror
an idiot’s smile.
some go down and never climb back up.
something is being kind to you.
you turn from the mirror and walk into the world.
you find a chair, sit down, light a cigar.
back from a thousand wars
you look out from an open door into the silent
night.
Sibelius plays on the radio.
nothing has been lost or destroyed.
you blow smoke into the night,
tug at your right
ear.
baby, right now, you’ve got it
all.

Charles Bukowski

Anti.Mono.Stereo

I don’t like sharing a studio. I’ve tried that, but to be an artist you need to be an alpha-type person. And two alphas don’t share well, and it’s even worse when one artist is serious about work and the other just wants to smoke pot all day and make a lot of declarations and promises. I know there is that clichée of the lone artist toiling away in a studio somewhere. That may actually be true in the creative phase, but the rest of the time being an artist means being a cultural entrepreneur. As an artist I need to work even harder than a businessman. If I build a business, I can identify a need for my product or service in the marketplace and try to meet that need. But no one needs art. So I have to hustle twice as hard.

Not surprisingly, the artist-as-slacker vision is most convenient to slacker-artists. Berlin is filled with photographers, painters, writers and musicians who spend all night drinking and all afternoon in cafés complaining about the lack of paid work, publishers who don’t “get it” or amateur gallerists. Many believe that working hard is somehow anathema to the arts, and a form of selling out… or at least find themselves overwhelmed by the fun to be had. Read James Coleman’s article “In Berlin, you never have to sleep” to see what I mean.

So I no longer share my studio space, but I am also very busy,  and I need my space for my own work. I have assembled a very talented team, and some of the members will occasionally utilize the space for their own creative efforts. I frequently get asked whether my studio is available for rent, and the answer is an unequivocal NO! But every once in a rare while I will lend my space to a photographic artist who is working hard, has a creative vision for a specific project, and is also a friend.

All of that was just a long preamble. Here’s a video that Tomaso Baldessarini put together to show a portrait project that he has begun. It’s called Anti.Mono.Stereo. I believe he works very hard, and I think his portrait project is interesting. The few images he’s shown look very different than this video, but I believe he is after a certain mood, and is capturing faces devoid of emotions. The face is a person’s most powerful tool in the expression of feeling, in the communication of self, but what does that tool look like when it is not being used?

Tomaso shot this at my studio, and is shooting again in a few weeks. And I’m in the video because I am one of the faces in the project, and that’s why I’m sharing it on my blog. I’ll link to his work again when he’s ready to show the work in a proper gallery.

https://vimeo.com/58187185

 

 

Book Porn

There’s a Tumblr called Book Porn that I follow. It’s usually really wonderful images of attractive people reading, or cool pictures of libraries.

Today they posted a picture of Malala Yousafzai, the 15 year old girl who got shot in the face by Religious Fundamentalists for wanting to learn.

I just thought I’d show this picture here. If you claim you have no time to read, you are taking your rights for granted. And if you think there is only one religion that wants to control the reading list, you’re deluding yourself.

“A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t.” – Mark Twain

Go read a book.

Fast Food

The title of the video is hyper-dramatic, but the content is real. I am not naïve about how food gets produced. I even feel bad about the animals, but not to a point where it gives me cause to change my diet. Out of sight is out of mind, after all.

No, what really bothers me is the consumption of resources we put into meat production. We cut down whole forests and farm them with a single crop, year after year. We chemically fertilize and spray those crops with insecticides. We mix hormones and antibiotics into this food so the animals grow faster. Then we plastic wrap and ship this unnatural meat all over the world where it’s turned into products that were physically inconceivable 30 years ago.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xwpjr5_holocaust-on-a-conveyor-belt-assembly-line-of-death_news

I eat less meat and milk every year. And if I had a better selection and more ready-made options I’d be a Vegetarian. But I am lazy, and I love meat. I try to only eat the best-farmed meat and dairy products, but I should be a lot more vigilant and concerned.

I am the best example of why we need certain regulations. I am human. I know it’s bad for me, and bad for my environment, yet I keep on doing it. We need to declare leaders that will save us from ourselves. It’s not pretty, but it will have to happen.

The ideal democracy is not one in which chosen representatives speak for us or grant us majority wishes. It is one in which we elect leaders that make the hard choices for us.

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, who you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

 

Let Go

It’s frustrating how life-affirming and life-enabling advice seems to flow so freely from poets and writers, but the courage to make the changes required are actually so incredibly hard. Their proscribed liberations seem incredibly selfish in the glaring light of reality…

… that is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. People need to understand that no one is playing with marked cards; sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Don’t expect to get anything back, don’t expect recognition for your efforts, don’t expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Complete the circle. Not out of pride, inability or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were, and become who you are.

~ with help from Paulo Coehlo

A whole Life

You can see a person’s whole life in the cancer they get.

Haruki Murakami “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”

Lines for Winter

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know, which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.”

– Mark Strand