Catching the light

This theme was inspired by the Charles Marville photography exhibition we saw at the Met Museum on our recent trip to New York. It's hard to take a bad photo of Old Paris, but I really like Marville's work because it's not just shots of everyday life, but of everyday objects. One of his main commissions, which earned him the title "Photographer of Paris," was to document the public works projects throughout the city in the mid-nineteenth century implemented by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the chief urban planner. According to the exhibition description, that included twenty thousand new gas lamps, making Paris the City of Light.

After seeing that exhibition, and the array of beautiful photos of basic things we walk past every day, I had the idea to make streetlights one of my themes. It certainly made me pay much more attention to the lampposts around Boston, which surprisingly are fairly uniform throughout the city. The main challenge was keeping every photo from being shot from below and also trying to make each one a different style of streetlight. But at least the subject matter was everywhere, and it gave me a good excuse to head to some new neighborhoods.

There was a great quote on one of the Met gallery labels about Eugène Atget, a contemporary of Marville. Atget had an "unwavering belief in the power of the medium [of photography] to describe meaning through careful attention to things as they are." He rarely photographed people and instead focused on the streets and parks that served as "the cultural stage." It is a perfect reminder that the subjects I often prefer - streets, buildings, architectural features - can still have life and interest in them.

Source: http://www.metmuseum.org

Sneak peak!

I put the final touches on my piece for the April UForge show today. The pegboard arrived in perfect condition and looks great. I printed my photos this week thanks to the lab at Aviary Gallery in JP. It took a lot of searching, but I finally found super strong magnets too. I'll be dropping this off tomorrow - save the date for the opening on Thursday, April 3!

Read more about the idea behind this piece here.

A moment for reflection

This week’s theme was to search out interesting reflections. This seemed fairly easy, and was further encouraged by the first photo I ended up taking and posting for it, but it turned out to be the most difficult one by far. There seemed to be three reasons behind this:

1. There are really only two kinds of reflections: those off of water and those from windows and glass. That narrows down the options for subject matter and composition, especially when I’m trying to put together a nice series of nine images. It became a struggle to find things that were visually interesting, both on their own and when viewed next to the others.

2. These photos mostly fall under the category of pictorials, which are not really something I gravitate toward in my work. I like pictorial photos and some of my photos could be called "pretty," but I usually like more industrial sites, old buildings and geometric architecture (I still managed to squeeze some in). Photos of rivers and swans are unusual for me.

3. With that in mind, I visualized a few ideas in advance that would have potentially been great, but needed things like raindrops and puffy clouds in a blue sky. These didn’t pan out in the last two weeks, so I was back to square one. I got lucky with a few blue sky days and some unexpected gifts (again, swans), but am curious what the other ideas would have looked like.

After all that, some of these photos got the most likes and comments of all of the ones I’ve posted so far on Instagram, so who knows. See the whole set below, as well as one of my all time favorite photos that first gave me the idea for this theme when I was building the new website.

Work in progress

I’m simultaneously working on three different gallery submissions, so it’s been a busy few weeks! But the main focus has been the April show at UForge Gallery called “Decon/Recon.” The gallery’s website about the show describes it this way:

“It is an old adage that the only constant is change itself, a fact perhaps seen most clearly in shifts in urban spaces as buildings are torn down and replaced or renovated. The plot of land remains the same but its appearance is changed, just as old materials may be repurposed for new uses.”

With that in mind, I headed over to one of my favorite areas in my neighborhood, the SoWa district. It is full of old warehouses and brick factories that have been repurposed for mostly artistic spaces (lofts, galleries, restaurants, open markets). I decided to focus on roughly one block, and try to take photos that fulfilled a different adage: “something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.” I looked for an old building in its original form; new or more modern architecture; something that has been re-used for an entirely new purpose; and something rundown, or looking a little “blue” in comparison to its neighbors. The final piece in the show will contain these four photos.

I also decided to forgo the frame this time and flesh out an idea I’ve been mulling for a while. I’ve thought that a lot of my photos of industrial and urban spaces would be better presented with a display format that is itself more industrial. I’ve also had the idea of creating a modular system, where different size photos can be interchanged and displayed together. So I ordered some metal pegboard to use as a background and mount for these photos. We’ll see how it goes when it arrives…

Keep a look out for more updates, but here’s one of the photos going into the show:

Pattern play

This theme was to focus on patterns, which I thought would be fairly easy. While there are lots of patterns in everyday things, a lot of them start to look the same and are mostly geometric. They also didn't always lend themselves to especially interesting photos, in terms of composition. You can only take so many photos with the camera aimed straight at a pattern.

But after reviewing the bunch, I think they're a good variety of patterns, color and compositions. It took almost the whole two weeks to find all nine, and most ended up being from my own neighborhood in the South End. Its bricks, old grates and industrial buildings were the best subjects for natural patterns, especially since Boston isn't bursting with striking modern architecture. Enjoy!