Picture Notes

Consideration: Does anyone know where I took this photograph?

Where are you? Don’t you wonder about this and ask yourself “Where am I?” I do this every so often because I seem to get lost easily; either in my head, in another person’s dreams or caught up in emotion. So when I walk though the National Mall in Washington and I see little signs that tell me where I am, I usually ask myself, “who designed this sign and how did they know that I was coming this way and would need this sign?”

The two rivets holding the sign to the map are nice, they give me a sense of security and the impression that “you are here” will be around for a long time and no one is going to move that little marker and try to trick me.

I owned my first camera at 12 or 13, it was a birthday present from my mother and it was a Polaroid. At that time I had no money of my own and film was so expensive I wasn’t able to use it very much. There are no photographs left that I shot with that camera and can’t really remember what I was photographing as I carried it around all day. Fast forward to today and I think about all the 10-12 years olds who have digital cameras and no film costs of any kind. They just need access to a computer and a little time. I wonder what photography will look like in a few years as those who fall in love with photography decide to enter the profession, then get older and buy better and better cameras.

The average $200 digital camera is much better than the average $200 film camera from 40 years ago. The technology has advanced so far it’s left many old film photographers behind. We are going to see photographers and digital artists emerge and make interesting images that no one expected.

This photograph was made last March at Kew Gardens in Richmond, just outside of London on a nice spring day. These girls were feeding this goose and were having a great time photographing. I would like to see their photographs as they were having such a good time. The photographer part of me says, “The goose is back lit and the background is going to be enough in focus to be ugly. To get the bird in focus she’s got to be shooting with a wide to medium lens and I’m really not sure what she is shooting right now. My photograph doesn’t have any of these answers because I grabbed this shot without looking through the viewfinder, I didn’t realize I’d find all these questions.

I drove out into America yesterday. I live inside the Washington, DC beltway and hadn’t been out in about 8 weeks, since I went to Fallingwater. I’d like to report that America is just fine, despite what we hear on television about the goings on at the Capitol. This is one of the main streets in Staunton, Virginia - “the Queen City of the Shenandoah Valley,” it escaped the damage of the Civil War and there are still 18th and 19th century buildings in town.

Small towns have interesting people who talk about things that you’d forgotten about and help you forget your current crisis as they present ones of their own. It seems like these people would get lost in a large city and would no longer have a voice.

Notes from Staunton residents, I have no idea if any of this is true.

“1. Photographic film will no longer be made in the United States by as early as next year.
2. If you take the limiter off a 74** series BMW you can get it to 165 mph.
3. Fall color will be weak this year because there hasn’t been much rain.
4. There is no difference in the corruption of Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches of government.”

The Shenandoah Valley was brown and warm, I think global warming has come there first. I remember it as being green and fertile. This is the only photograph I made as I was walking to the coffee shop with the green awning. I’d like to report that the coffee is hot and delicious in Staunton.

I was at the Air and Space Museum waiting in line for an exhibit and saw this photograph, well sort of. The shadows of Americans were there and I added the flag. It reminds me of our innocence as Americans, we believe in high ideals; Democracy, the Republic, balance of power, the Geneva Convention and not torturing prisoners of war, nor do we use mercenaries to fight our wars or spy on our citizens and we actually believe our court system is fair and makes the accuser produce evidence of guilt, and we don’t overthrow foreign countries for our “ideals” nor do our politicians lie - ha ha, just had to throw in that one. See, we are so innocent, none of what I just wrote is true of America, or anywhere, we do all those things and more. We will not know the real horror of the war in Iraq for many years and when the total truth is known it will be interesting to see who is still standing to the right of this issue. This may be the time when Americans lost their innocence.

This silver is at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and is a vignette on the silver makers over the past several hundred years. This display is a discussion of the maker’s mark and how it’s changed over the years and what different numbers and marks mean. Before the industrial age everything was made by craftsmen in their own shops, one at a time, and the maker’s mark identified the piece and was probably a little bit of advertising as well. I’m sure there are a few silver smiths who didn’t really need a mark, that their work was so beautiful it was recognized by people who loved the craft.

The industrial revolution brought on thousands of mass produced goods made in factories by anonymous people using molds and Henry Ford’s ideas of the assembly line and today we have plastics being pulled out of molds in countries we’ve never seen by people we know nothing about and it turns out that these people are polluting their world the way we polluted ours.

Mass production is a cheap fix and a way to produce goods at a lower cost and sometimes they can be of better quality, and some things like silver serving spoons, should continue to be made in shops by craftsmen and women. There is no reason to flood the market with expensive items that last forever, it’s best to leave the most beautiful items as the rarest.

Is it too late to argue for a craft based industrial movement?