Reality the Raw Material

    I am reminded how musicians or dancers might hear a certain rhythm--rain off a roof, a horse carriage passing, a machine in a factory--and then will pick up on that rhythm and from that beginning develop music or a dance.
    So a photographer might pick up on something from the phenomenal world, but then just run with it.

    These are the ramblings of a person who has read no literature on the history of aestehtics for photography.

The Detective of Beauty

  By putting a frame around something, you are setting that thing off and calling special attention to it. Poems are framed by white space.

  By lifting something out of the noise of its daily context, you may be able to say to someone else, hey, this is kinda cool, kinda  beautiful.

    There's a lot of beauty out there that hasn't been noticed, that hasn't even been found yet. The photographer is the detective of beauty.

    The more we learn to see, to recognize the beauty that is out there, the stronger we get, the better we can deal with the ugliness.  Maybe by an act of mental magic we can transform that ugliness into the beautiful.  We learn that what we thought was ugly was never ugly at all. That beauty had a certain edge to it, a sharpness. Perhaps that beauty touched something inside us we were afraid of, so we called it ugly.

    I could be more specific and less general, but I don't wish to chase you away.

    It's not cleanliness that is next to Godliness.  It is beauty that is next to Godliness.

    So indulge your own sense of beauty. Show it to us. Perhaps we too will learn to see the beauty there.

Spilling the Paint

     I always remember the scene in the bio-pic on Jackson Pollock where the artist spills some paint accidentally and that leads him to his rhythmic swirling of paint on canvass.
     In my own small way, I dream of the accident that can lead to new approaches in my own photographic work.
     One comes up with new ideas one can't afford, that require a studio for instance, plus a good bank of lights and models. Maybe in the future.
     Right now, I am off to make the flatness of the image an advantage, to push the colors, and to see beyond composition to total design. How can I make a photograph look like wallpaper, or a beautiful tablecloth, in miniature?

Last Class and Everybody's a Star

At the final exam they turn in a chapbook of their work. Making public is publishing, and now my students are both published and have a book.  A class of 25 has read their work in workshop. That makes it public and makes them published.

At the last class before the final, we have a literary reading. Everybody gets up and reads for 2-3 minutes.  That's short, I know, but this is a class of 25 students and we have only 50 minutes. 

Everyone, for a moment, finds themselves in a nonjudgmental, totally supportive atmosphere, to perform a short work--finally here, at the end of the semester. They've had all semester listening to me, and to their fellow classmates, tell them how to write.

Now they're happily on their own.