"Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so."

(Possibly fake internet quote by) Galileo Galilei. Reminds me of this essay by Jörg M. Colberg. Could you say, "photograph what is visible, and make visible what is not so"?

South Netherlandish rosary bead, 2" in diameter, 1500-1510.

This week I learned about a species of ant whose entire colony is contained in a single hickory nut!

Image from here, at the Cloisters.

"Down stretches of modest road from Phoenix to Düsseldorf, the approach of the New Topographics photographers has come to define a rigorous, serious, removed strain of photographic practice. And as with many mass movements, its place in the public imagination has only a little to do with the intentions of its founders. I found some comments in the guestbook at the Eastman House that come close to defining a commonly held New Topographicsism. 'BORING :),' one complicated visitor wrote. 'I understand why this show is ‘important’ but why do I feel so depressed and uninspired?' asked another. 'Intentionally boring,' 'engaging the mundane,' 'dry,' 'restrained,' 'cool,' and 'critical' are the standard lexical palette describing NT. And in the hands of its many followers, these taglines ring true. But walking through these sets of intimate, hand-printed photographs, it is easy to hear strains of whimsy, irony, and great affection set against the Sousa march of conceptual remove."

From Tim Davis's essay, The New New Topographics.

Bill from Pro Camera fixed my Pentax and left this behind. Looks like everything's finally working! I've been shooting on Tuesdays and have a bunch of film developed, just waiting for it to flatten out.

"There are a great many other practices that are observed concerning bees. Among those that know them well, bees are understood to be quiet and sober beings that disapprove of lying, cheating and menstruous women. Bees do not thrive in a quarrelsome family, dislike bad language and should never be bought or sold for money. Bees should be given without compensation but if such compensation is essential, barter or trade is greatly preferable so that no money changes hands.

"The practices and observations, illuminated in this exhibition do not even begin to scratch the surface of the wondrous body of information known as 'vulgar knowledge'. This extraordinary field of information is the product of the observation, intuition and understanding of the minds of our species, millions of individuals, over many thousands of years. Much of this knowledge has fallen into disrepute in the recent past, a mere few hundred years, a blink of the eye in our collective history.

"We would suggest that there is at work in this body of vulgar knowledge a form of collective intelligence about this existence in which we find ourselves, a kind of road map of life compiled by those who have gone before.

"Like the bees from which this exhibition has drawn its name, we are individuals, yet we are, most surely, like the bees, a group, and as a group we have, over the millennia, built ourselves a hive, our home. We would be foolish, to say the least, to turn our backs on this carefully and beautifully constructed home especially now, in these uncertain and unsettling times."

From Tell the Bees... Belief, Knowledge, and Hypersymbolic Cognition, an exhibition at The Museum of Jurassic Technology. Today we saw a cedar with a thin crevasse in the bark and honeybees swarming in and out. Imagine the hollow heart of that tree, full of buzzing and honeycombs and the smell of cedar.

From my parents, who are in the Everglades and know what I like.

Bald cypress. I'm pretty sure.

"The ultimate question is to ask: how can I make my photographs do things that it seems they can’t do? How can they do that regardless? That’s where things get juicy. That’s where the fun is. That’s where aspirations enter, where you don’t go about fulfilling your expectations, but about pushing against your and your medium’s limitations.

"You have got to have aspirations to make photographs. Every time someone tells you that 'this has been done already,' you will have to be prepared to respond with 'fuck you, I’ll show you!' Every time someone talks about there being too many photographs, the same: 'fuck you, I’ll show you!'

"Make people want to look at your photographs because they’re so damn good. Not because they’re so ironic or witty or self-concerned or whatever other superficial crap is being peddled so much these days.

"... So ditch your anxiety. Don’t be afraid to fuck up, multiple times, until it’s not even funny any longer. As long as it’s somewhat funny, as long as it doesn’t really hurt, you’re not in the right spot. Who cares if there are thousands of negative holders or folders on your hard drive filled with bad pictures — as long as you have the few good ones in the end?

"Good enough, in other words, can’t be good enough. A good-enough picture, one that looks like it was made to look that way, can’t be enough. It has to become that picture that looks like you were incredibly lucky that you just stumbled across it, even though you spent so much time making it."

Good pep talk from Jörg M. Colberg. I'm not there, but I'm really trying again.

At the Atlanta Botanical Garden, which has the absolute coolest conservatory.

I've shared this before, but not in a video. The sheer length of this book does something all on its own.

Mom after some early blackberries.

Old snaps, new scans!

I can't stop thinking about this movie.

"One day, when I was nineteen, I was sitting on the bow of the ship anchored in a bay in the South Pacific. As I looked at the land, heard the roosters crowing, saw the thatched huts, etcetera, I thought down to the water level and then to the immediately changed and strange world below the waterline. But it was the line inscribed across the variable landmass, determining where people would or would not live, where palm trees would or could not grow, that hypnotized me. The whole world changed as a result of an interior illumination—the water level was not what it was because of a single command by a higher power but because of an average result of a host of actions—runoff, wind currents, melting glaciers. I began to apprehend things in the dynamics of themselves—motions and bodies—the full account of how we came to be a mystery with still plenty of room for religion, though, in my case, a religion of what we don’t yet know rather than what we are certain of. I was de-denominated."

"I never allude to persons or places or events in history. I really do want to begin with a bare space with streams and rocks and trees. I have a little, a tiny poem that says something about the only way you can do anything at all about all of Western culture is to fail to refer to it. And that’s what I do. This makes my poetry seem, and maybe it actually is, too extremely noncultural. And perhaps so. I grew up as a farmer and I had at one time a great love for the land because my life and my family and the people around me depended on weather and seasons and farming and seeds and things like that. So my love for this country was and is unlimited."

From this interview of A. R. Ammons.

From a William Eggleston book. (Which?)

Clockwise from upper left:
Tennessee, 1985
Atlanta, Georgia, mid 80's
Massachusetts, mid 80's
Near Minter City and Glendora, Mississippi, 1969-70

"I'm not exactly sure that anything means 'Southern' for me. I like to look, and look around, and the South is one place I am most of the time, which means that obviously what I see around me are Southern things, but I've always tried to take that out of my photographs and make them more...not based in a place. I don't see my works as 'Southern works'. ... I'm trying to – working either in the South or in a foreign environment – essentially take the same picture, which is the picture I believe in and is illustrative of my kind of working."

From this interview of Eggleston. But then John Szarkowski in his introduction to William Eggleston's Guide:

"Artists themselves tend to take absolutist and unhelpful positions when addressing themselves to questions of content, pretending with Degas that the work has nothing to do with ballet dancers, or pretending with James Agee that it has nothing to do with artifice. Both positions have the virtue of neatness, and allow the artist to answer unanswerable questions briefly and then get back to work. If an artist were to admit that he was uncertain as to what part of the content of his work answered to life and what part to art, and was perhaps even uncertain as to precisely where the boundary between them lay, we would probably consider him incompetent.

"I once heard William Eggleston say that the nominal subjects of his pictures were no more than a pretext for the making of color photographs - the Degas position. I did not believe him, although I can believe that it might be an advantage to him to think so, or to pretend to think so. To me it seems that the pictures reproduced here are about the photographer's home, about his place, in both important meanings of that word."

From Elisabeth Hogeman's book After the Garden, 2014.

I would have loved these photos regardless, but Ellie was in my photo classes at UVa. 

Tom Uttech, Nind Awatchige, 2003.

Tom Uttech's paintings slay me. They were in the American Art Museum's show about birds. He also takes photos!

Tom Uttech, Nin Nissingwam

I am embarrassed to say that I haven't taken any pictures in a year and a half, since I went back to school. Excuses include broken camera, broken light meter, too busy, etc. etc. But now I'm done with school! And my camera ought to be fixed! I need to pick one project to do over the next 7 months and print as I go this time. I have too many projects that failed because I didn't print along the way and think about the final product. Welcome to 2016, this blog is super chatty now. Here is something old.

“I like to look on plants as sentient beings, which live and enjoy their lives — which beautify the earth during life, and after death may adorn my herbarium… It is true that the Hepaticae have hardly as yet yielded any substance to man capable of stupefying him, or of forcing his stomach to empty its contents, nor are they good for food; but if man cannot torture them to his uses or abuse, they are infinitely useful where God has placed them, as I hope to live to show; and they are, at the least, useful to, and beautiful in, themselves — surely the primary motive for every individual existence." 

Richard Spruce, who loved the lowly liverwort in the 1800s. From here.

In 1990, Gabriel García Márquez interviewed Akira Kurosawa. Here's a little bit.

García Márquez: Can you remember any image from real life that you consider impossible to express on film?

Kurosawa: Yes. That of a mining town named Ilidachi, where I worked as an assistant director when I was very young. The director had declared at first glance that the atmosphere was magnificent and strange, and that’s the reason we filmed it. But the images showed only a run-of-the-mill town, for they were missing something that was known to us: that the working conditions in (the town) are very dangerous, and that the women and children of the miners live in eternal fear for their safety. When one looks at the village one confuses the landscape with that feeling, and one perceives it as stranger than it actually is. But the camera does not see it with the same eyes.

Thierry Girard, Accrochage, 1944. This picture and this picture:

Robert Adams, from The New West: Along the Colorado Front Range, 1974.

And that quote versus this one about Girard:

"He photographed the landscape as it stands, as we do in living there, unvarnished, without picturesque conventions. And paradoxically, thanks to his magical talent, France is such that we love the most. We have in our memories, our very unconscious, associated with these pictures, feelings of happiness. These cold images become very emotional and a real beauty appears."

Thierry Girard's Maquis, 15 novembre 1942 from Paysages Insoumis, 2007,

Point de vue 12, 1997. From his blog.

Facebook alerted me to the work of Thierry Girard, whose work is up at New Cabell Hall back at UVa. Thank you to Google translate for the quote below.

"...whenever possible, I try to take into account the thickness of the landscape, and consider it as a kind of palimpsest, the landscape is actually the result of successive writings and intertwined in history natural and human."

"...To be just, however, it is necessary to remember that there has been another tendency: the tendency to stay put, to say, 'No farther. This is the place.' So far, this has been the weaker tendency, less glamorous, certainly less successful. It is also the older of these tendencies, having been the dominant one among the Indians.

"The Indians did, of course, experience movements of population, but in general their relation to place was based upon old usage and association, upon inherited memory, tradition, veneration. The land was their homeland. The first and greatest American revolution, which has never been superseded, was the coming of people who did not look upon the land as a homeland. But there were always those among the newcomers who saw that they had come to a good place and who saw its domestic possibilities. Very early, for instance, there were men who wished to establish agricultural settlements rather than quest for gold or exploit the Indian trade. Later, we know that every advance of the frontier left behind families and communities who intended to remain and prosper where they were."

From The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry (page 4).

This blog has been on hiatus for school, but that's probably okay because there are about three people in the world who look at it. (Hi!) Maybe I can read a real book and take some pictures over break.