Spring is coming. I am sure of that. The robins have been flying around town and my son’s birthday is tomorrow. My father’s birthday is the day after that. In my family we mark the coming of springs with birthdays and snow storms. The last snow storm of the year traditionally happens during the first week of March.
Yesterday we woke up to a full on storm of snow. It was a huge disappointment because it meant that our kitchen cabinets that we have been waiting on for over three months would not be delivered. The freight company cancelled all deliveries and now we are stuck waiting for the next available delivery date. Even at home it can feel like you are stuck in an airport with a cancelled flight.
School wasn’t cancelled but I had already decided to teach class remotely so I could demonstrate some techniques from my studio computer that I cannot demonstrate on a campus computer. I was continuing to explore color grading and playing pipe organs.
I don’t really play a pipe organ but they have become my metaphor for all the creative options that presets and plugins give a photographer in Photoshop and Lightroom.
In light of the snow I decided to work on this image from my ghost sign portfolio. I made this image during the winter of 2005. One of the things I love about photographing in winter is that there are new things to see after the leaves have fallen. I had photographed this Drink Squirt sign earlier in the year but you couldn’t see the whole sign. WIth the leaves gone I not only got to see the bottle graphic but also the Albers Flapjack Flour sign.
The acuity of 4×5 film combined with the color grading of digital editing allowed me to revisit this image and bring it to life in a way I had not been able to before. One item of consideration is whether or not the composition is effective for the medium.
What I mean by that is the question of whether or not I was close enough to the signs or not. Is this an image about the signs or is it about the relationship of the signs to the place. The format of presentation impacts the composition.
When I first made these photographs I had the intention of presenting them as mural prints which I did. There is a 30×20 framed print out in the world somewhere that was sold at auction many years ago.
The challenge is that today most images are viewed on a small screen. Robert Capa famously said, “If your photos aren’t good enough you aren’t close enough!” He’s right of course.
But the distance one remains from an image is directly impacted by the size of the image. A billboard size image reads clearly from a car passing below. A mural sized print in a gallery or museum reads really well from a distance of 10′ or more with the opportunity to move closer to pick out the details.
An image on a smart phone has certain limitations. Yes you can zoom in with your fingers on the touch screen but there is a practical limit to how many pixels you can upload to a web server. A high resolution file that would allow close inspection of every detail takes too long to download into a viewer. If an image doesn’t load in a blink of an eye most web surfers move on.
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I like presenting images in galleries and books because they encourage a person to sit with an image. You can look closely at the photographs and see more and more detail. On a photographic print you can even get out a magnifying glass! I enjoy prints but cannot justify the expense of making a print of every single image I edit. Sometimes a contact sheet is the only print made.
Thus the appreciation for web based presentations of my work. I just have to live with the unease of knowing that the intent of my original composition may not be apparent to the viewer. I have recently been making online flipbooks of portfolios of work. Yesterday assembled the first set of the Ghost Signs portfolio into a flipbook that you can see here.
As I edit these images I am thinking about their cinematic qualities. I am reminded of the director Wem Wender’s photography. His work points out how important a character place really is to telling a story. Place impacts our own life story.
In some of these images you might note that there are people blurred out. Most of these images were made at an exposure of F/32 at one second. I was trying to create deep focus to make the buildings near and far in sharp focus.
One of my favorite images is from this project is a banal image of a parked car with a bulldozer in the background. It is an important image because it reminds me of the fact that as I attempted to document the ghost signs in downtown Spokane, I had several occasions where the sign I went to photograph had been destroyed just before I got there. I had gone to this location to photograph a building I had scouted a couple of weeks before and found it had already been torn down. I still made a photograph because there was still the remnants of Blair Business College left standing.
Photography reminds us that life is in constant flux. An image is a moment in time plucked out of a snowfall of life experiences and preserved for safe keeping.
Happy March 1st!
Ira
