Anatomy of a photograph

 

Many people ask me:

"What is your process for coming up with your photography pastiches?"

Actually, no one has ever asked me that. 

And come to think of it no one ever asks me any questions about my process for anything. But nevertheless I am quite keen to talk about my process. I think I'm kind of even now drifting into talking about my process for talking about my process.

So let's make a deal. 

I won't talk about my process for talking about my process if you can be okay with me talking about my process. And, BONUS, I am not just going to be talking, there will be pictures, because this is about my process for coming up with my photography pastiches. Which people ask me about all the time.

Oh, right, they don't. We've quite circled all around, haven't we?

Sorry.

Now I am going to show you our finished picture for the day first. 

Is it our best picture? No, but I like it and it's a good case study, and I've only lost one of the source photos for it, which is pretty good in something with a complicated trail like this. 

So here's the finished picture in all its glory:

Okay, cool, so it's a picture of Snoopy, in kind of a ghost town, smiling down at a plate of green eggs and ham. That may seem to be a very natural, almost inevitable picture to you, especially now that you've seen it. But it didn't start out like this at all!

There was a process.

First I took a small ton of pictures of Snoopy, which I do almost any time I come across a likely Peanuts volume at the library I work at. I am very partial to this source and have hundreds of Peanuts pictures on my phone. Here is our starting point:

The sweetness of Snoopy's expression here is most appealing!

At the time I singled out this Snoopy picture I had recently taken a large group of photos from a book called something like "Abandoned America". These were a lot of very nice black and white photos of empty, desolate American street scenes. Here, as you will recognize, is one of these:

I was experimenting with putting figures  at a small scale in these photos to accentuate the loneliness of these scenes (you'll probably see more in the next few days, sans the process discussion, though you never know...). I placed a carefully cut out (digitally) Snoopy into a spot that seemed to work in the photo. Shadow and lighting and size and scale and luck all play a part in my figure looking like it is in the scene, rather than on the scene:

This worked out well, and the shadows were agreeable. But clearly Snoopy was looking down warmly at something. It seemed to be an opportunity. 

So I poked around in my files. I tried this:

This one seemed okay, but left me a little flat. The snail didn't sit well or resonate with the environment. 

I felt Snoopy's gaze was too good an opportunity to just pass on.

And then I remembered some green eggs and ham I had been messing around with a little while ago. Oddly I can't find my original shot from the Green Eggs and Ham book, but here is how I had used the image previously; an image in my library that I could not decide whether it was too subtle to work:

So I grabbed up my green eggs and ham, set them before Snoopy on his abandoned street, and there we are. Our photograph complete!

Great literature

I am surprisingly good at remaining neutral at the front desk of my library. People have a great many different interests and beliefs, and though I am sure many of them will cause the end of all life as we know it on the planet, I am also sure that keeping an open and unthreatening library environment will make that all less likely to happen. 

Slightly less likely, but less likely.

Nevertheless, I will carefully speak up for my beliefs in the right circumstance. A good example of this is when there is dissension between parents and their children, especially when I feel the children need support.

Yesterday I was helping a young lad track down two volumes of The Complete Peanuts that had been on hold for him, but that he just missed his pick-up time for. This search was a long process, and the mother was impatient with it. I don't think she was concerned that it was taking up too much of my time, or maybe even hers, she was just upset that her son was so interested in these Peanut books. She said he needed to read more chapter books, he needed to read text because his brain wouldn't develop if he read cartoons.

"I just have to step in here," I said. "The Peanuts are great literature. They are Shakespearean. I'm not saying anything against chapter books, but your son is reading one of the great sagas of our times."

I don't think the woman was really convinced.

But then, I wasn't speaking for her.

The same joke

 

Because my father would make the same bad jokes over and over and over I am cautious of it. Working at this library desk as the decades pass by with their weird combination of lumbering, interminable plodding and terrifying speed, I try to keep things fresh. I try to reinvent my jokes, retire them, and seek out new ones. But there are some groaning jokes I'm very fond of and I will, perhaps with an irresistible genetic pull, trot them out every few months or years to see how they're doing.

Maybe I'm just waiting for that one perfect delivery, or for one unreasonably good laugh as a response.

Today I took out one of these ol' chestnuts and it all happened very much according to this plan. Usually with these kinds of jokes I get looks of mild confusion or, at best, weak smiles. Who knows how uncountably many times I've tossed off this very slight joke to mild response, but it can't be often, if ever, that I've received, as I did today, a full, surprised, belly laugh.

Yes, I will tell you the joke.

Don't expect much.

This laugh today was my joke punching way above its weight.

Here's how the joke works:

Sometimes when I'm registering a library card for someone there are a lot of things to hand back to the library patron at the end of the business. In today's case I was registering a new card for a man's daughter, and so was handing out the new library card, an "I got my library card" sticker, a guide to the library, and I was returning the man's driver's license.

It starts with a series of mildly explanatory comments and sort of tumbles along from there:

"Here is your new library card. You can check out anything you'd like with this today." I say handing over the new card. "This is a sticker celebrating your getting a new library card. You can stick it to things." I say handing over a sticker with a reading fox on it. They exclaim over this. "Here is a guide to our library system. It has all our hours and locations and policies." I hand over the guide. "And this," I say, handing over the driver's license, "You will need to operate a motor vehicle."

"That's it?" You ask.

"Yes." I reply. 

I know it's not much, but I know one guy who thought it was hilarious.

   

More of me not complaining

 

While I was not complaining about picture taking I took thousands of pictures that are now oozing out of my phone. I have trouble sometimes deleting pictures because, well, one never knows when one might need a picture of a... tree for instance.

Yes, I have other pictures of trees. But this one might be more what I'm looking for.

So, as you know, instead of deleting pictures I combine them together. Then I keep the combined pictures and both the original pictures, and four or five variations on the combined picture.

No, it's not a perfect system. But all that's just math really. 

The important thing is that every part of the hog gets used, so to speak.

Those pictures I was talking about

 

I have some pictures to show you!

No, I wasn't complaining about making pictures yesterday, I was just saying they're complicated. EVERYONE ALWAYS THINKS I'M COMPLAINING ABOUT THINGS BUT I'M JUST SAYING THEY'RE COMPLICATED!

Sorry for yelling.

No, I'm not complaining.

It's just...

Yes,

Complicated. Thank you. Good word.

So then I was saying how a lot of picture taking is like panning for gold- one filters and filters away all the river mud for the tiny grains of precious metal. Then one takes it into town after a hard day's work of panning and panning, and the goldmonger puts the gold on their scale and says:

"There's so little here my scale is having trouble registering it." 

Or something to that effect.

No, I'm not complaining about being an artist, I'm just saying...

Right right. We covered that.

Reflections on writing and photography

 

Having spent every spare moment of my day at work taking photographs of pages from The Smithsonian History of American Art, and painstakingly assembling them together with other images (and I say painstaking not because I am so exacting, but because my back still hurts a lot!), it occurred to me:

It is much easier to simply write a blog post.

Pictures always seem like they'll be really quick, and maybe one picture would be, but that's not the way pictures work. Picture taking is like gold panning. The gold is never there for the taking; one must filter carefully down, letting the heavy, shiny material settle slowly out of the prodigious mud.

Some people say that writing is the same way- that you have to winnow down, working your prose, bit by bit, until the gold shows through.

But I think this is good enough.

 

River photography

 

Due to my continuing back problems, I couldn't bring my big camera down to the river this morning. I had to make do with my phone, which takes pictures!

A phone that takes pictures! Can you imagine that!

No, I don't think I sound old. I think I sound full of childlike wonder.

And so I took these pictures of various things that exist, in one way or another, albeit not usually together.

Pain

 

What do I know of pain?

That there is always something worse, until there isn't?

My back is at a five on the ten scale of pain. So I am not asking for sympathy. 

At six or seven I would ask for sympathy, and this would maybe be a shorter blog post.

Is this going to be a long blog post?

No, no, it is about pain.

And all pain is like a hard poem.

The same reflections once again

 

We just watched at my house a really good movie called Palm Springs. Without going much into its particulars it is a time loop movie. A time loop movie is when a character (or sometimes characters- three in Palm Springs) resets the same day every night and awakes to a morning the same as the last, where all of the events of the past day reset, accumulating only in the protagonists' minds.

I have now seen four time loop movies that I can think of.

I have never met a time loop movie I didn't like.

In fact, I like time loop movies so much that I was thinking I would like to make a series of time loop stories.

Like, what if every day I wrote a blog post, over and over and over, starting brand new each day, as if nothing had happened and I had never written one before?

Oh.

Summer lawns

 

Though it is my first inclination, I don't have to say anything cruel about the great American lawn. I could. But I don't have to.

Out here in Saint Minneapolis, America's 19th largest city, the rain has been light, and the days warm. The lawns are burning out. To stop this, the well-heeled home owners, morning and night, water the sidewalks. My wonderful wife and I walk along many times each day, in the long holiday weekend and observe: What very wet sidewalks!

And then we are distracted by all the cute bunnies.

It is a great time of year for bunnies.

But anyway, as I look out on all the struggling lawns, turning to yellow, and sometimes straw, and even to deathly white, I think: Wow, I guess it is a far drier Summer than I thought.

But having spent a childhood in something that was technically a desert, it is hard to believe that "Gosh, it's been a few days since it rained!" is a proper drought.

I'm beginning to think that grass is unreasonable in its demands.

Go down by the creeks and woods, nay even walk along the city's abandoned alleyways and all is as lush and verdant as a rainforest!

And as to the sidewalks?

It is all death and ants.

Leftovers

Sometimes leftovers are better than the original meal!

No, I can't think of a time in particular as an example of this. And today's collection of leftover pictures isn't it probably. So why I am I pointing this out before I show a grab bag of pictures that didn't fit in anywhere else?

I was hoping to put everyone in a good mood!

Oh, you're in a good mood?

Excellent. We can now proceed!

Elephant at the falls!

 

Fiddler in the DVD section!

Interactive toy in the kids' room! (I don't know why it's all exclamation points here).

Seuss figure in the stacks!

Snake on the shelves!

Cats on my walk

 

Despite my aching back I went for a morning walk in the warm woods by the river. I saw too many dogs, but no cats.

So I fixed the walk in post production.