When you come to my fights and I’m under the lights
and you see that my footwork is false
don’t count me out, at the start of the bout
I’m just doing the secondary waltz
doing the secondary waltz

- Mark Knopfler (from the Kill to get Crimson album)

I blame Mark Knopfler. It is all his fault.

Sometimes I am as influenced (read: informed) by music as I am by what I see, and sometimes music affects my perception of the landscape. Heaven knows what I will produce if I start listening to Metallica or ACDC while I am on the road!

Lately I have been giving myself permission to move beyond the representational, to move further into post-visualisation and expressionism. Let me explain.

All Art begins with a problem. Look at the work of the greats (Monet, Picasso, Warhol, Minor White, Weston) and you see artists whose oeuvre was the result of an exploration of a picture-making issue or issues. For Monet, it was the depiction of light, for Minor White it was the exploration of his innerscape. What you see in their work are roadmarks; mile markers; postcards from their journey. Thus the works can be read for their own story on one level, enjoyed for their artistic virtuosity on another, but also viewed for the story they have to tell us about the road the artist travelled.

The problem each artist faces is sometimes resolved, often not. Often it is an ongoing study, reflected in notebooks, in journals, sometimes in letters and writing. But it is there. Then there are the Aha moments, moments where the artist has suddenly broken into a new way of thinking, found a new source for exploration and/or analysis turned on a dime as it were. The path is rarely linear; rather it seems to me it is series of meanderings, journeys taken up side roads for a short or long period before he/she gets back on the path. Edward Weston’s explorations of the photographic qualities of vegetables is an example, a meandering on his photographic journey, before he got back to whatever path he felt himself to be on. Did he set out to make the images in the way he did? I would venture to suggest he had an ‘aha’ moment one day, while looking in the fridge. He tried it, became fascinated and continued for a period. Then, for whatever reason, he moved on. As he made each image he no doubt reflected on what had emerged from the developer, studied it and used to to inform further practice. He post-visualised.

It seems to me the various stages of visual manifestation fall into the following categories:

1.       Conceptualisation

2.       Previsualisation

3.       Capture

4.       Post-visualisation

5.        I will gradually introduce these concepts in future posts.

Back to the road. And Mark Knopfler.

There is something serenely wonderful about travelling down a road on a sunny day, with the car stereo wound up (and no one to tell me to turn it down or to change the track). My truck had found her own rhythm and did her own thing. At times like that I am happy to let her have her head and feed her just enough diesel to make her comfortable. I can turn my eyes to the road and what I am seeing/hearing/being.

It was on the road down from Tarras to Cromwell, that lovely series of sweepers that follows the shores of Lake Dunstan that I happened to glance across the lake and saw this image. At first I was unimpressed; it was midday and I have a prejudice towards making work in such flat lighting. I need to get over it.

But there was something irritatingly compelling about it. In the end I gave up on my prejudices and pulled over. The structure of the hill, the lines of the lake edge, the solitary pine trees and the erosion scarring made it seem somehow surreal. The perspective flattening form the long focal length I used only served to increase this effect. I made around 24 exposures, altering the cropping slightly and moving the position of the trees in the frame to achieve balance, then put the camera back in the truck, and headed on to Queenstown.

And forgot about it.

The yesterday, while I was out on the hill, using my camera for the first time in 3 months, I loaded a memory card and there it was. (I always check my cards these days before I reformat them, a practice that helps me to avoid losing files). As I looked at it on the LCD, it held an attraction for me that fascinated. I sensed a new turning in the road.

Back home, I looked at it for a while, and the first impression was that it should be black-and-white. Somehow the colour had only marginal impact (well, none at all, actually). So I opened it in PhotoShop and applied a Silver Efex conversion (Normal Infrared). While that gave it some drama, it still wasn’t quite there.

I thought back to the space I had been in, driving, and listening to MK singing about the terror of learning ballroom dancing at school, and how that experience would serve him well in later life. I had been floating on a cloud of nostalgia at the time I made the photograph and perhaps that was what had prompted me. There was something film-related in the scene, a sense of a moment in a road movie that might have starred Bogie, or Katherine Hepburn or which might have been made by Wim Wenders. The finished image needed to reference film (cinema), film (photography) and music. That realisation gave me the direction.

Nik Color Efex has a wonderful preset called Polaroid Transfer. Some of you may have tried it. You make the Polaroid image, soak it in warm water until the emulsion softens, and then you transfer it to a surface such as watercolor paper. The effect can be quite exquisite, and the colors are usually muted, just like an old movie, a family portrait from the 1950’s, or an early colour movie.

There was the solution to the problem.

All that remained was to apply a simple high pass sharpening action to accentuate edges and texture, then lower the opacity to 29% ensure it didn’t dominate.

I suppose I should really thank Mark Knopfler….

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 11:06 am and is filed under Making images, Thinking about Photography and Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.