"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"?

"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.

"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.

"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.

"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."

“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.

"...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.

Ha! Still learning how not to quit at step 4, or step 2.

Sometimes I question my life because of a comic book. These pages are from Daisuke Igarashi's Little Forest. (Read from right to left.)

"Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it – a vast pulsing harmony – its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries."

Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac.

"In traditional indigenous communities, learning takes a form very different from that in the American public education system. Children learn by watching, by listening, and by experience. They are expected to learn from all members of the community, human and non. To ask a direct question is often considered rude. Knowledge cannot be taken; it must instead be given. Knowledge is bestowed by a teacher only when the student is ready to receive it. Much learning takes place by patient observation, discerning pattern and its meaning by experience. It is understood that there are many versions of truth, and that each reality may be true for each teller. It's important to understand the perspective of each source of knowledge. The scientific method I was taught in school is like asking a direct question, disrespectfully demanding knowledge rather than waiting for it to be revealed. From Tetraphis, I began to understand how to learn differently, to let the mosses tell their story, rather than wring it from them."

"Mosses don't speak our language, they don't experience the world the way we do. So in order to learn from them I chose to adopt a different pace, an experiment that would take years, not months. To me, a good experiment is like a good conversation. Each listening creates an opening for the other's story to be told."

Pages 76-77

"In traditional ways of knowing, one way of learning a plant's particular gift is to be sensitive to its comings and goings. Consistent with the indigenous worldview that recognizes each plant as a being with its own will, it is understood that plants come when and where they are needed. They find their way to the place where they can fulfill their roles. One spring Jeannie told me about a new plant that had appeared along the old stone wall in her hedgerow. Among the buttercups and mallows was a big clump of blue vervain. She'd never seen it there before. I offered up some explanation about how the wet spring had changed the soil conditions and made way for it. I remember how she raised a skeptical eyebrow, but respectfully did not correct me. That summer, her daughter-in-law was diagnosed with liver disease. She came to Jeannie for help. Vervain is an excellent tonic for the liver and it was waiting in the hedgerow. Over and over again, plants come when they are needed."

Page 103

From Gathering Moss; A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which has a lot more scientific method than I just made it sound.

Segment on Robert Adams from PBS.

"...I came into the darkroom and printed them, and I was really surprised. I thought I was taking pictures of things that I hated. But there was something about these pictures.. they were unexpectedly, disconcertingly glorious."

Have I really never put his photos on here?

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

A little bit of poetry in my boss's book on grasses (by Lauren Brown):

Ticklegrass

The inflorescence is at first green-purple and shining, then tan. After flowering, the inflorescence often breaks off and floats around like a tumbleweed.

"In Jitka’s pictures there is no welcome. They have been taken from the inside. The deep inside of a forest, perceived like the inside of a glove by a hand within it.

"She speaks of the between-forest. This is because, in the same valley as her village, there are two forests which join. Yet the preposition between belongs to forests in general. It’s what they are about. A forest is what exists between trees, between its dense undergrowth and its clearings, between all its life cycles and their different time-scales, ranging from solar energy to insects that live for a day. A forest is also a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant, waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth. Something intangible and within touching distance. Neither silent nor audible. It is not only visitors who feel this attendant something; hunters and foresters who can read unwritten signs are even more keenly aware of it."

"It’s a commonplace to say that photographs interrupt or arrest the flow of time. They do it, however, in thousands of different ways. Cartier-Bresson’s 'decisive moment' is different from Atget’s slowing down to a standstill, or from Thomas Struth’s ceremonial stopping of time. What is strange about some of Jitka’s forest photos – not her photos of other subjects – is that they appear to have stopped nothing. In a space without gravity there is no weight, and these pictures of hers are, as it were, weightless in terms of time. It is as if they have been taken between times, where there is none… In the silence of the forest certain events are unaccommodated and cannot be placed in time. Being like this they both disconcert and entice the observer’s imagination: for they are like another creature’s experience of duration. We feel them occurring, we feel their presence, yet we cannot confront them, for they are occurring for us, somewhere between past, present and future…"

From John Berger's introduction to Jitka Hanzlová's book Forest. Taken from here.

"Abba Doulas, the disciple of Abba Bessarion, said: When we were walking along the sea one day, I was thirsty, so I said to Abba Bessarion, Abba, I am very thirsty. Then the old man prayed, and said to me, Drink from the sea. The water was sweet when I drank it. And I poured it into a flask, so that I would not be thirsty later. Seeing this, the old man asked me, Why are you doing that? I answered, Excuse me, but it's so that I won't be thirsty later on. Then the old man said, God is here, and God is everywhere."

From Desert Wisdom: Sayings From the Desert Fathers, translated by Yushi Nomura.

In early 2012 I got a little obsessed with the Novosibirsk Reservoir on the Ob River, aka "the sea". My city, Novosibirsk, emerged at the turn of the 20th century as the site of the Trans-Siberian Railroad bridge over the Ob. In the 1950s, a hydroelectric power plant was built on the river, creating a 100 mile long artificial lake. The grand undertaking flooded several villages and part of the city of Berdsk, as well as swaths of fertile land and forest. For all that flooding, the hydroelectric dam is actually pretty small and doesn't meet the city's full electrical needs. However, the construction of the dam was a bonus when physicist Mikhail Lavrentyev was looking for a place to build an academic center with "an attractive site, railroad connections, and plenty of electric power". So that was the origin of Akademgorodok, where I grew up. We spent the summers at the beach on the reservoir. The lake has its issues, including pollution and erosion, but that's not how I experienced it. Anyway, I took some photos. (I'll be adding more soon.) I'd like to be there for an algae bloom one year!

Thinking About Being Called Simple by a Critic

William Stafford

I wanted the plums, but I waited.

The sun went down. The fire

went out. With no lights on

I waited. From the night again–

those words: how stupid I was.

And I closed my eyes to listen.

The words all sank down, deep

and rich. I felt their truth

and began to live them. They were mine

to enjoy. Who but a friend

could give so sternly what the sky

feels for everyone but few learn to

cherish? In the dark with the truth

I began the sentence of my life

and found it so simple there was no way

back into qualifying my thoughts

with irony or anything like that.

I went to the fridge and opened it–

sure enough the light was on.

I reached in and got the plums.

"Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said: Abba, as much as I am able I practice a small rule, a little fasting, some prayer and meditation, and remain quiet, and as much as possible I keep my thoughts clean. What else should I do? Then the old man stood up and stretched out his hands toward heaven, and his fingers became like ten torches of flame. And he said: If you wish, you can become all flame."

From Desert Wisdom: Sayings From the Desert Fathers, translated by Yushi Nomura.