Hipsta Is As Hipsta Does: Adventures in iPhone Art Photography
“Kodachrome… it gives us those nice bright colors
Gives us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah!
I got a Nikon camera, I love to take a photograph
So Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away”
–Paul Simon
Roanoke, July 18th
Once upon a time, my cameras were just toys. Then I got serious and they became tools, also known as expensive toys.
I remember my Kodak Instamatic camera and the plastic body and lens, the film cartridges in the back and the 4 square flash bulbs on top. I remember the sweet crayon smell of the film emulsion and the yellow Kodak box and the foil package inside that held the cartridge.
Florence, Italy
Color film was reserved for the adults. Kids playing with cameras had to stick to black and white. I got two or three rolls to use during my time at summer camp.
Too many pictures and Dad would complain or simply refuse to take it to the drugstore for processing. In the pictures I’d cut people’s heads off or there wouldn’t be enough light. Sometimes I would open the back of the camera before the roll was done and ruin the film.
When I was a little older I got a rangefinder Yashica and shot higher speed Tri-X Pan and sometimes the indoor shots without flash would still turn out. I wouldn’t know until I finished the roll and could use my allowance to get the pictures developed.
With the money from my first summer job I bought a Canon single lens reflex, at the time an affordable amateur SLR. Then came hours and hours of pouring over photo magazines, reading about great photographers, setting up a darkroom in my basement. I burned lots of time and ruined a lot of pictures. I then bought a Nikon, a professional camera!!!!, and had a series of them. The tech was even more fun than the photos. As a Serious Photographer I was absorbed in f-stops and shutter speeds and film grain and could quote the price and features of every Nikon camera and Nikkor lens. By the way, I’m still not sure what f-stop really means. I know it is a measure of aperture or the amount of the lens opening, but why there is an f and why it has to be stopped is beyond me.
Ultimately, I was the school yearbook photographer and the photographer for the school newspaper. I wasn’t big enough to play football or tall enough to shoot hoops, but I could take pictures. I even won a contest.
Florence, Italy
Then one day I stopped taking many pictures. My aesthetics had outrun my skills and I had become more interested in writing.
With respect to Paul Simon’s song: Kodachrome’s gone and I don’t like Nikon cameras now that they’ve gone digital. Kodak stopped manufacturing Kodachrome on June 22, 2009 because of the dwindling demand for color slide film in a digital world. My uncle, who used to work for Kodak, told me that Kodachrome was difficult to process because the color was added in the processing, not in the film. It gave the pictures a special color, sharpness and quality that may never be duplicated (except of course with the right Photoshop plug-in, but for the Luddites it still isn’t 100%.)
So many people my age got into photography because it was (along with hi-fi stereo) the cool technology of the time. Now there are a lot of substitute obsessions for geeks. Computers, Gaming, Digital Imaging, and Smart Phones appeal to dweebs like me.
Venice (Burano), Italy
Venice (Burano), Italy
Venice (Burano), Italy
I go to a lot of photography workshops and meet lots of other photographers, some pros and a lot of amateurs. At some point, the discussion turns to gear and the boys have to compare the size of their lenses. Full frame is better than half frame is better than point and shoot. RAW is better than JPEG. The wide open lens gives great bokeh, and other stuff that only a few people care about.
At one workshop, several people were using their iPhone for photography. I couldn’t understand it. I had used the camera on my iPhone and found it quite lacking. One of my fellow participants, Harry Sandler, was using an iPhone on top of his wildly expensive medium format camera and producing images that were quite spectacular. (For a preview of Harry’s newly published Blurb book iPhone Antics click here.) My friend John Paul Caponigro has started blogging for the Huffington Post about the iPhone.
But the iPhone only has 3 megapixels. It doesn’t shoot RAW. It looks like a toy when you use it. How can it be any good?
Venice, Italy
Courtyard, Venice
I found out the difference is in the apps. Harry and John Paul were adept at using apps such as Perfect Photo, Real HDR, Photoforge, Old Booth, iRetouch, Comic Twist, Old Photo, Joiner, Panorama and Brushes. These apps not only gave special features to the camera, they served as an in camera post-processing wonder taking many of the processes of Lightroom, Photoshop and the traditional darkroom and allowing the user to take the picture, post-process it, upload it to Flickr or Facebook or e-mail it within a matter of minutes.
Venice, Italy
Well, gee whiz, you might say, ain’t that great for you photo geeks? Lots of new toys.
You have a point.
However, recreating the feeling of playing with toys has significantly impacted my creative life. I rediscovered it when using the application Hipstamatic with my iPhone and it has changed the way I see the world.
First and foremost, taking pictures has become fun. Again.
Secondly, no one particularly cares if you take their picture, as they do when you take pictures with a pro-quality DSLR.
Thirdly, the limitations of the frame (it’s square), and the post-processing time (very slow) force you to think about what types of images to shoot. Sometimes, having fewer choices makes you more creative.
Most importantly for serious photographers, it ends the most inane observation ever and that is when someone sees a good image by you and says “You must have a really good camera.” Now they say: “You took this on a phone?“
Venice, Italy
Venice, Italy
Mt. Pilatus, Switzerland
Venice, Italy
With Hipstamatic I find it best to shoot images that have simple compositions and will have a classic look to them. In my post entitled “Remembering the Present” I write about how I like to take the present and find classic elements.
The iPhone and Hipstamatic has freed me to look more closely and to sometimes take pictures for their sheer ironic snapshot authenticity. I’m not consciously chasing fine art and all that implies. This makes me giddy sometimes with delight when I see the results.
These photos appeal to me because they make a consistent and visually interesting aesthetic out of snapshots, bringing a look to the images of moments in time in a past that never existed. As is the case with photography in general, these pictures are both memory and creation, a moment captured that is a subjective choice of what the imagist’s eye sees and yet doesn’t. The iPhone captures it in the blink of a digital eye and the Hipstamatic post-process is the coda, a final flourish that elevates the simple snapshot into a mood and moment that expresses an exquisite sensibility.
iPhone4 Wide Shut
I shot these Venetian masks this morning by available light with my iPhone 4. Again, as in Hipstamatic, I get successful iPhone images by using simple compositions and distinct graphic elements.
Here’s one with the iPhone 3G that uses the same elements.
Widener Library, Harvard Yard
While I haven’t tried the HD video on the iPhone4, I had a lot of fun with having an available an unobtrusive video camera in Lucerne and took this video of some street musicians. While it is not even close to professional quality, it allows the viewer to experience some of the fun of the afternoon.
Remembering the Present
Venice, June 2010 by way of Venice, 1600
“It seems the longer you live in New York,the more you love a city that has vanished, For those of us well versed in the art of loving what is lost, it is an easy leap to missing something that was never really there.”
– Jeremiah Moss, “Nighthawks State of Mind,” NEW YORK TIMES, July 3, 2010
Venice, June 2010
I have seen the future and it is the past.
The more I explore my creative life, the more I realize that I consciously and unconsciously try to connect my work with a wistful and sometimes dark recreation of the past. Old films, old photographs, the work of the Dutch painters, dreams and nightmares all inspire my images and my writing.
The trips to Buenos Aires explored a dance and a culture that seemed old world and yet contemporaneous at the same time. While marking my fiftieth birthday, I both celebrated the future while recreating a past.
The very nature of what I am doing is a recreation of the past. Photography’s nature is to freeze a moment in time. For many decades we have looked at photography as a record of the present, an objective “snapshot” in time. The shutter clicks and we freeze a fraction of second in a tableau. It is accurate as far as what is captured, but completely influenced by what the photographer has seen.
Whether it is the Kodak Instamatic pictures of our childhood or Neil Armstrong standing next to the flag on the moon, the very presence of the camera gives the occasion authenticity. I might argue that the only thing authentic is the image itself in its own context, not as a complete document of its subject.
The aesthetics and the reality of the shot are greatly influenced by photographer’s eye, the angle and lens choice, the aperture and shutter speed, the quality of light, the rearrangement or posing of subjects, and often sheer happy luck.
These all have been with us practically from the beginning of photography. Many of the processes in Photoshop such as masking, burning, dodging, alteration of exposure, contrast, cropping are a direct reflection of the processes used in the wet darkroom.
Now that digital imaging has entered the world, we have the ability to alter images at will: combine, composite, recolor, create a pastiche or a distortion. As with the artist’s palette and canvas, the limits of digital imaging capabilities are only limited by the digital artist’s imagination and skill.
This creates ethical dilemmas for photojournalists. How much can the image be altered until it is not a record but fiction?
For those of us who are not tremendously skilled in Photoshop but who are either good or lucky at capturing the image (or “taking the picture” in the old nomenclature) become frustrated because viewers now assume the image is put together in post-process. This takes some of the joy out of showing unique moments. Part of the joy that film photographers felt when they were able to capture what Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment” was anticipating their audience’s wonder of their timing, skill and vision.
These images are from a workshop I have just attended that was run by VSP Workshops. During the workshop we recreated some of the scenes and feel of the Carnival in Venice during the summer away from the crowds and at times to catch the models in the most beneficial light.
Venice itself is a magnificent anachronism and the images we produced revel in their anachronism. In some of the images, I enhance the effect by adding sepia in post-processing. They portray an imagined past that never existed and a reflection of my mood during the period: contemplative, wistful interpretive and respectful of the past while firmly rooted in the moment.They are at once the expression of the present and of the past.
To paraphrase George Santayana, those who do not rememember the present are condemned to omit it.
Learning to See
Monhegan Island, Maine
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
–Elizabeth Bishop “One Art”
MONHEGAN ISLAND, MAINE (June 2009)
Sometimes falling down a cliff is the best thing that can happen to you.
I am at a photography workshop in Maine for four days. We’ve just traveled to Monhegan Island by ferry. It is a bright and humid day, a bit buggy and windy, fairly typical for Maine in mid-June. I have finished showing my Buenos Aires pictures to John Paul Caponigro the digital artist who is leading the workshop, and then I venture out to get some pictures.
I think I am walking south towards town. Instead I am walking north through the woods. There is no sight that interests me. The woods are too much like the woods in Virginia to be of much interest.
The map shows that the coast is near and I look forward to getting down to the shoreline and taking some pictures of the gulls and the surf. I emerge from the woods and overlook a part of the shore that is named “Pebble Beach.”
The “Pebbles” are rocks the size of hippopotami, probably named by a Mainer with a Down East sense of ironic humor. My shoes are not built for this kind of aggravation and as I attempt to make it to the coast to take some photos of seagulls I continue to slip and fall. Moss and mist have made these rocks into oil slicks. I hiccup from anxiety as I slither back to the path. A little shaken and a little stirred, I continue to inch my way along the path, expecting to circle the island and head to the town side. Instead the path ends. I keep trying other directions only to have the new paths end as well. The only way back is to retrace my walk like Hansel and Gretel.
I am aware of the allegorical irony of the false paths and retracing my steps. I continue to look for pictures, still finding nothing of interest.
I have come to Maine to participate in John Paul Caponigro’s workshop entitled “Along The Waterline.” (Now I understand it is called “Islands“) Before the seminar started, I was a nervous wreck. I had a fight with a friend on the drive up. I had a seriously bad experience at a Photoshop seminar in New York. I had upgraded cameras and this was my first week with the new purchase. I was feeling inadequate and intimidated because Photoshop skills were required and I had no Photoshop skills. My editing was done in iPhoto, a laughable program for serious photographers.
To me, Photoshop is an onion. Lots of layers and it forces tears.
During the introductions I learn that two of the workshop participants are photography and digital imaging professors at a major university. Another is the camera and computer editor for a national publication. Another has written a book on Adobe Lightroom, the application for photographers. In this company, I feel like a novice. In the past months, I was beginning to realize through my blog reader comments that photography was probably a direction I should explore. Many people said they liked the pictures on my blog and stayed silent on the writing. It hurt my feelings a bit but I can take a hint.
The first morning it is pouring and rather than venture out immediately, we sit in John Paul’s comfortable living room and show our favorite images. Before now I thought they were just called photos or pictures. I have never encountered the slightly reverent word “image.” I receive warm comments on mine and I feel better. As the days go forward, I feel supported and more and more a part of the group, even surviving the 1:30 am wake-up call to go up to the top of Cadillac Mountain for the 4:30 am sunrise.
As I retrace my steps on the path that ends (metaphor included at no extra charge) I am having a bit of trouble with my footing. The path itself is rocky and the grass that has grown between the rocks is wet. I was angry that I hadn’t thought to bring hiking boots.
The path ends again, but this time because I slip on the rocks and fall 10 feet or so down a steep incline. I have fallen into a briar bush. I had bent my glasses and broken one of my cameras. I am scratched up but the bush and my backpack have broken my fall, probably saving my neck (this time no metaphor.)
I am at a competition diver’s angle, similar to what it looks like right before the diver enters the water at the end of a backward pike.
There is no one around. There is no cell signal.
The only way to get myself back to the hiking path is to find something to grab to pull myself up. There is only one thing and that is the briar bush. I wince as the thorns pierce my skin and I start to pull myself up. Both the angle and the thorns make this quite painful. I make a bit of progress toward the trail but the rocks are slick and I slide back down. This time I fall even farther into the bush. Gravity wins again.
This means I am going to have to grab the branches again. I start to sweat profusely. I can feel my heart race.
I grab hold of the branch and start to lift myself.
Once again I fall, deep, deep into the bush, scratching myself all over.
Finally I come up with the solution. I pull myself up a little at a time and rather than use my feet I use my glutes to grip and almost walk my way up the slope until I can put my knees over the edge and pull up the rest of my body with my attractive muscular quads.
That’s right, folks, I pulled it out of my ass.
I emerge on the trail and have to lie there for a minute to catch my breath and regain a modicum of composure.
I never fully regain that composure. I stumble back to town to meet my group for lunch. People I don’t know offer commiseration and ask if I need medical assistance with my wounds. There is general amusement and shock at the way I look.
The anxiety from the trip, my intimidation with the other participants’ credentials, the gray mist in Maine all lead to an excess of neurotic energy. My sense of humor becomes darker, my reputation as a nut grows. Well read John Paul (“J.P.”) calls me “Kafka.” Those who prefer films call me “Hitchcock.”
I assure them this is not method acting. I really am a nervous wreck. I crack up J. P. when I say “I’m afraid that you’ll think I’m paranoid.”
The difference this time is that I use the anxiety and the neurosis to climb a rung up in the creative path. My images from the week are strong enough to earn me some respect.
John Paul Caponigro leads a workshop that gets me to look at myself in a completely different way. I used to think of myself as a writer with a photography hobby and I start to think of myself as a photographer with a writing hobby. In four days I start to consider that word artist. It seems a jacket too precious for me to try on but I look at it in the store window hoping one day to acquire it.
Tango in Tuscany
SAN QUIRICO D’ORCIA, Tuscany
It is the second afternoon of a very challenging workshop in Tuscany. I am having trouble communicating with the models and think it would suit me well to find out more about them.
One of the models has said that she had been dancing Tango for a couple of years. I play “El Choclo” thinking that maybe I can make the atmosphere lighten up a bit. She begins dancing a Tango on her own.
It has been six months since the last time I had danced, but I join her for a bit. I am nervous as I hold her. I can’t lead her to a cross. Is she really a Tango dancer or am I that bad?
She critiques my style in Spanish, telling me to be “mas fuerte con tu brazo.” That old demon shyness again.
It is still a couple of days before we start communicating well during the workshop and we don’t click until the last two shoots.
We don’t dance again which is probably best for both of us.
Clearing My Throat
Widener Library, Harvard Yard (Taken with my iPhone)
“Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” — Gene Fowler
SAN QUIRICO D’ORCIA, TUSCANY
I’m back. Months of clearing my throat. Trying to clear my mind. Frustrated and guilty over my lack of progress. Absorbed to the point of obsession with trying to develop my talents in photography and understand digital imaging.
I’m wondering what happened. Maybe it was winter and the inactivity and sadness. There has been memory and loss and regret. Too much for me to write about now.
Certainly it was being at home too much. For a wandering Jew like me, home is where not only the heart is, it’s where the writer’s block is. What the meaning of “is” is the the key to it.
I am writing from a small town in Tuscany. I know… I am lucky. I’ve come here for one of my serial photography and creativity workshops. “Serial” means a continuing habit, a series. It does not mean I studying to be a serial killer.
Now there is so much to write about the block becomes one of procrastination, not of the lack of ideas. Not enough focus and a bit of dread over where to start. I think the focus of this blog will start to shift. Personal growth and challenge, yes, less about Buenos Aires and Tango. The visual arts and photography. Travel.
Hipstamatic iPhone photo taken in Florence, Italy
However, Tango has been everywhere. While at Harvard a couple of weeks ago I walked the bridge across the Charles River. I wanted to shoot the clouds at dusk. There was a circle of people dancing and a small dark and attractive woman handing out flyers: a Boston Tango festival. I told her that I had tried to learn Tango in Buenos Aires for a year but found I didn’t have a natural talent. I did not tell her about my public milonga debut. I haven’t written about that yet, either.
She said that she took beginners. I could feel the blood rush to my face, but I gave her a tight smile and walked away saying I didn’t live in Boston.
There isn’t a Tango club within a two-hour drive so during the winter I let it slip.
Saturday I had lunch at a communal table at a wonderful restaurant in Florence where the locals go. The couple sitting with me lived in Florence and met through dancing Tango. The man has a Facebook group and organizes events in Florence. Monday there will be an outdoor milonga. I’ll miss being there. He says they dance Tango better in Italy than in Buenos Aires. I’m not going to get in the middle of that argument.
This weekend two of my Tango photographs were published in a Brazlian magazine: DEFESA LATINA. The editor had seen the images on this blog and wanted to use them.
These little Tango tweaks that happen when I travel keep reminding me that I have to work on my next step and keep this blog updated.
I’ve continued my Spanish classes via Skype with Gisela Giunti, my tutor in Buenos Aires. She has been very patient with my eccentric patterns of learning and my need to sometimes work by chat and sometimes by voice. My style of learning is visual and there are days I simply do not process the conversation aurally. She’s been good. I recommend her highly if you are in Buenos Aires or if you want to start your learning from elsewhere in the world.
In the coming days I’ll be talking about my various journeys to photography workshops, about learning to see, about the turning of the page on Tango, a break but I hope not the last chapter. Sometimes there will just be an image. We will see. I hope I will say things worth reading as well.
Venice, Italy (also taken with iPhone)
A Loss For Words
I wrote this piece for my first photography exhibit which opened last night, October 17, at 202 Market in Roanoke, Virginia…
"Wave" Taken at Sand Beach, Acadia National Park, Maine
On October 16, 2008 I stepped off of a plane in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a city that I had never visited and in which I knew no one, to try to learn two things for which I have no talent: Tango and Spanish. I was attempting a life experiment to see what would happen if I took myself completely out of my comfort zone at mid-age and lived the adventure while others watched. I wrote a blog about my mishaps and adventures: JUST TANGO ON: A Midlife Solution Not A Midlife Crisis. I began to develop an audience and I started to live a crazy and wistful life in a city I didn’t quite understand .
I have been taking photographs since the age of 14. I was a camera geek, developing my own prints and studying photography magazines and books. When I got to college, I never thought about pursuing photography as a profession. Instead, I wanted to be a screenwriter. For more than twenty years I studied screenwriting and films and wrote (or started to write) loads of movie ideas and scripts, only to be frustrated by the very difficult task of writing and marketing a successful screenplay. However, all those years of thinking visually and writing “word pictures” developed my sense of the visual world.
I named my first post from Buenos Aires “The Astonishing Quality of Light.” I wandered around the streets with my little digital camera and I saw a spectrum and intensity in the city’s light I had never before encountered. I was entranced by the visual dramas that unfolded in front of me. I only understood the body language between people, not the words. Everything was upside down. Spring started in October, time moved forward for Daylight Savings Time and Mother’s Day was observed that month. The only way I could participate was by observing and I felt that I was in the middle of a constantly unfolding movie in which as I walked through the streets, an invisible director yelled “ACTION.” I was simultaneously a part of the scene and apart from the scene.
My Spanish was abysmal and I was scared to speak. I stuttered in English because of my anxiety surrounding language. I watched, I pointed, I grunted and I got by. I had become bi-inarticulate.
I received feedback about my blog from home. Many people liked the writing and they loved the pictures. I didn’t understand. I was spending all this time writing and all people wanted to talk about were the pictures? One commenter tried to reassure me about my language difficulties. She wrote: “You speak Spanish fluently with your eyes.”
When I came home in late December I took the files and had them printed. I started to realize that the photos had a certain style and in the new larger format I started to look at them differently. I went back to Buenos Aires twice more. I had a group of pictures of Tango, another group of pictures of cityscapes, and a group of pictures of people that captured in single frames a sense of story, a feeling of mood and motion, and that extraordinary Argentinian light.
This past summer I spent time in Maine attending a workshop that placed me in a group of accomplished peers led by the digital image artist and instructor, John Paul Caponigro. In Maine, I discovered that I could capture a sense of nature’s mystery and mood in my images. I became more open to other subjects and dug deeper into my creativity. I began to use anxiety and worry to enhance my work. In the past these emotions had blocked me creatively. Recently I traveled to Barcelona and Mallorca. There I took many of the cinematic and colorful elements from my Buenos Aires work and mixed them with the darkness and perspective shifting that I had explored in Maine.
In tonight’s exhibition I am showing representative images from my emerging body of work. This year I have made the transition from working as a writer illustrating his work with photographs to working as a photographer augmenting his images with words.
Tonight marks not only an inaugural exhibition, it also marks the first anniversary of this quixotic project, one that shows that sometimes the sanest thing you can do is to try something a little crazy. The adventure continues in Buenos Aires next week. Tango on!
Here are the pictures from the exhibit. To view a picture in a larger format, click on the thumbnail.
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- Monhegan Island, Maine
Casting Long Shadows
Dancers in Recoleta, April 18
“I could dance with you until the cows come home. On second thought I’d rather dance with the cows until you come home.”
–Groucho Marx
BUENOS AIRES, April 19
The glorious light of Buenos Aires that taught me to really see is fading. The sun sets earlier each day and the hours are beginning to have a valedictory feel. The gloriously touristy San Telmo fería (market) that pops up each Sunday afternoon is different today. There is a blue shadow across Defensa and the street is torn up, a repair job that has a good part of San Telmo’s main street fenced in and strewn with rubble. A brisk wind whips down the street and the tourists, formerly loose and sleeveless, are now huddled beneath fleece jackets. Many of the locals have scarfs around their necks. After a much delayed start, it is autumn.
Walking down Independencia to the Subte (subway), I notice a cart with paint splattered equipment. It interests me, then its owner walks out of an apartment building. It is the dancing painter whose photo is in my post “Happy Accidents.” Seeing him away from his performance spot and in front of his apartment makes him more real and also makes him an anachronism.
I am woozy with nostalgia. I eat my French meal at the Brasserie Petanque and pretend to speak French to the owner. Smiles and knowing chuckles work in whatever language you don’t speak. Several times I have taken the elevator with a well-dressed woman of about eighty. She smells of light powder and wool and she speaks Spanish to me from the moment she gets on the elevator until the moment she gets off. I smile and chuckle and pretend to know what she means and she leaves happier than before. I guess I’m a good listener.
I am sad today because I am missing my home, but I am also sad because I am leaving Buenos Aires in a couple of days. Taking the Subte home, I see a singer in the car and a man handing out booklets to everyone hoping for a sale. I have never seen anyone buy one. The stations go by… Callao… Facultad de Medicina… Pueyrredón… Agüero… Bulnes… Scalabrini Ortiz. I have memorized the stops, know which ones board on the opposite side, know the short cut to cross the street by tunnel, know how much a Coca Light costs at the kiosko. I think of the walks from the Subte to the studio for the Tango lessons, the buskers on Florida in front of my school, the feel of the street in Palermo Soho at 2 A. M. on a Saturday night, the bars overflowing and groups of young people laughing and drinking and smoking their way down the street. I think of the beautiful parks and the famous Cemetery I finally toured yesterday. I think of chocolate con almendros helado, my favorite ice cream. I think of how I still haven’t quite cracked the code of living here. I know the map but not the way, the streets but not the people that walk up and down the sidewalks.
I am going back to Virginia for some family events, my son’s college graduation, to take care of some medical matters, and of course to plan my return. I have a return ticket the end of May.
I’ve made a couple of good friends–Osmany and Joaquin–and developed happy working relationships with my Tango instructor and my Spanish profesores. I have no love interests, no group to hang with, and most of the time no one with whom to share a meal. Still, I have learned to enjoy my own company and I have discovered that my talent for photography never really went away, it simply laid dormant for thirty years.
I have danced a bit of Tango and tonight, after so many lessons, I will attend my first milonga. I’m a bit nervous.
My Spanish remains the biggest mystery. A combination of anxiety, poor discipline, and probably a low aptitude has kept me from making progress with the language. I freeze when I try to speak it outside the classroom and this is something I am not sure how to solve. My profesora tells me that it isn’t a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of confidence and I believe she is right. I can’t change my personality overnight and I am having a lot of trouble getting out of my own way so that I can learn to speak. I have a deep fear of humiliation and my ego isn’t allowing me to fail enough to achieve some competence.
I think back to those first days of South American spring last October when everything was so new and intimidating. I was scared to take the Subte and so I walked everywhere and marveled at the cityscapes. The light painted the city and I walked through an ever-changing movie set. Scenes would unfold and I would capture them with my camera. Later, on my computer, images and stories I never saw at first would emerge and I would be astonished at the light and the people and the activity I had captured. Now with the light fading, I feel those first days of growth begin to pass and with them the knowledge that I have to find new ways to grow and to see things for the first time again.
I’m homesick. Homesick for the city of my birth: Roanoke. Homesick for the city of my rebirth: Buenos Aires. Homesick, as we all are, for past experiences that were so vivid that they shook you awake, rubbed the sleep from your eyes, and made you see the youthful light of a new day.
Happy Accidents
“There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.”
–Jackson Pollock
Buenos Aires, March 21
When I was 16 years old, I wrote a short story. It was about a popular sitcom in which every character in the show was spun off into his or her own series. Ultimately, no actors were left on the set. The cameras continued to film the empty set and people watched faithfully each week. The narrator of the story, a television producer, ends the story by saying “I don’t know what they are watching, but it’s a hit.”
Hollywood, do NOT steal this idea. It is MINE.
The last month I have been back in the States and my story has been an empty set and yet people continue to read this blog. This surprises and delights me.
I am so less productive when I am home. My ADD kicks in and I can’t write at all. I don’t read very much. I am left working with my photographs, working out, playing Scrabble, watching silly comedy shows and pacing my apartment, putting papers and bills in piles and spending all day on line reading the news, looking for jokes, monitoring my two e-mail accounts and checking Facebook.
I am living in context, comfortable and nothing creative comes of it.
Now that I am back in Buenos Aires, I seem to have the ability to write again. I can once again mix the alien energies into a new synergy.
I am interested in how all creatives take disparate elements and whip them into an artistic souffle. It is a mysterious process in writing, but it happens all the time, and when the souffle comes out of the oven and doesn’t fall flat it just seems as if it was meant to be.
Something similar happens in photography. I take a photo and people and objects that I was not aware of come out when I crop and edit the photo.
I have a belief that creativity springs from happy accidents.
I am interested in the numerous dog walkers that dominate the daytime streets in Palermo. Here’s a picture I took in January of a dog walker near my apartment:
It has many elements that I like in photography: morning light, shadows, composition that includes several people in their candid moment. However, it is unsatisfying because the dogs are caught from behind.
Here is a photograph that I took yesterday:
I was interested in the pack of dogs and the unselfconscious concentration of the walker/texter. Since I took the picture from across the street and since I could not see the small screen on the camera, I had no idea that the three dogs nearest the walker were looking at me and that the underdog was smiling. They are arranged as a canine totem pole. A happy accident.
Here is a photo I took in San Telmo of one of the many feather duster salesman you see on the street:
I was following him and trying to snap photos. I had no conscious idea that he would have an arrangement of feather dusters that would remind people of a tribal dance and I certainly had no conscious idea that his dusters would so beautifully frame three women. This created three additional moments in the story.
The photo caught the notice of two artists friends, both named Susan. One is a painter and the other is a photographer. They pointed out elements in this photograph that I had never thought of before. For example, the pattern in the street pavers. The touch of turquoise. The cookies.
This is the joy of street photography. You see an interesting tableau and it becomes more interesting later.
When I go out, I feel that I am walking into a film and the scene unfolds around me. I often feel as if I am on a movie set. I walk around a market, marveling at the light and start taking pictures when I hear The Director calling “action.“
My photographer friend Susan has a very different style. Often she takes photographs and combines disparate elements into a new and very successful image. I asked her about how she creates her work and she responded:
My own creative process seems to be a contained found one. Like Burroughs who would cut out words and shake them up in a paper sack and shake them out and then make something of them, I take a lot of pictures then identify a theme I’m currently interested in, start with a file of pictures and then randomly access my data base of picture files and then deliberately make use of the random picture that I found. That is how the train and the dancers ended up incorporated into the moody night pics file. I shot that brick window wall…the other night. And a customer from the gallery said he was looking for jazz pictures so the theme emerged…Very little planning, creative use of what is.
For a creative, the random isn’t random at all. It is allowing the happy accident to stimulate creativity and create directions that have, on some level, been intended all along. Whether you shake words out of a sack, or you throw yourself onto an alien continent and try to learn things for which you have no special talent, taking yourself out of context is often the best way to have a fresh look.
An old joke:
An accountant was blindfolded and taken into a field.
When his blindfold was removed, the accountant saw a cow.
When asked what color the cow was, he answered:
“Brown…on one side.”
When I take the blindfold off, I see the color on the other side, too. How now, brown cow?
Peek-a-boo
“One should always keep a diary in order to have something scandalous to read in the train.”
–Oscar Wilde
BUENOS AIRES, January 18
I am walking through the Sunday street fair in San Telmo and enjoying the feel of being back in Buenos Aires. Despite yesterday’s summer swelter, today is cool and there are people out in the street wearing jackets. I have just finished my usual Sunday brunch at Brasserie Petanque, a very good French restaurant, and I had a little Lomo (tenderloin) a la Bearnaise. I try to speak Spanish when ordering, but no one is interested in playing along. The owner says “thank you” and “merci” when I leave. This slightly humiliates me.
I snap pictures and I feel a bit rusty. My hands are shaking. I know I need people in my pictures, but I also don’t wish to invade people’s privacy. It becomes a moot point when my hands shake too much to keep the camera steady. I walk on and try to recompose the compositions and to regain my composure.
One part of Defensa is completely torn up and there are narrow sidewalk passages. To pass you have to turn shoulders when people approach you. An attractive and tall blonde woman is making her way toward me behind her friend, a small dark-haired man wearing glasses. “It was SO good,” she proclaims loudly in Scandanavian-accented English, “that I would think about getting a second boyfriend.”
She pumps her fist in the air and I do not stare directly, but I hustle through the construction so that I can write down her comment. It is the perfect overheard comment, at once scandalous and a non sequitur. Many options race through my head as to what it means, and all are deliciously filthy. Probably all are wrong, but the episode sums up the voyeuristic activity in which I engage.
Street photography is my genre and, according to the entry in Wikipedia:
“Shyness and street photography seem to be mutually exclusive. However, most successful street photographers have started as shy photographers.”
My shyness certainly presents itself in the shake and in the reticence to put myself directly in the middle of the scene. Yet I realize that I have to overcome the shyness in order to take the photographs I see. Occasionally, I am very successful; often, I end up with a poorly composed or blurry picture of interesting people.
What a job I’ve made for myself, a shy man. I have assigned myself a project that requires me to be a street photographer, Tango dancer, and Spanish speaker. They are all a struggle. The photography is the easiest because I am able to use the camera as a shield and composing the photograph creates something of a distance from my subject. Tango and Spanish do not offer any shield. Passively listening to a sexually suggestive comment by a tall Scandanavian is the best job of all, just like listening to the amorous couple in the next apartment as I did in “Again at 3 A.M..”
Before you judge my task of listening and watching, remember I am reporting all this back to you. You read this for the same reason I listen and watch. Some of my friends have asked me to publish salacious details from my life and I have no intent to become that transparent. Men of Mystery must keep a bit of obscurity about them, otherwise their notoriety prevents them from achieving the proper anonymity to photograph and report street scenes. Also, we may prohibit ourselves from executing dangerous clandestine international missions.
In the Subte train on the way back to my apartment, a woman of about 60 is seated across from me. She stares at me in a way that makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, as if I am being judged. Her dozing husband is not interested.
She takes her cellphone out of her purse, opens it, studies it and pushes a button. She does it several times and stares into the phone.
A sudden insight brings a smile to my face. I turn my back to her and pretend to look out of the window at the dark walls rocketing past.
She has been taking my picture.
Colonia, Uruguay
Sycamores, Colonia
You are going to Uruquay and I am going my way
–Groucho Marx, ANIMAL CRACKERS
Colonia, Uruguay, November 15
It has been a hot, muggy and smoggy week in Buenos Aires and I thought I would take an hour ferry ride to Colonia, an historic town on the Uruguayan side of the Rio de la Plata.
The lighthouse, Colonia
The hour ferry ride has proved to be quite complicated because of customs, immigration and crowds. The trip has taken three hours. No matter, it is part of my plan to try to cure my ferry-phobia and other than a mild anxiety attack it is not as bad as the freak-out in Washington state I wrote about in “An Uneasy Crossing.”
The windy Rio de la Plata
The street is empty, the weather has broken, and there is a 20-25 MPH wind stinging my eyes, it is cloudy and the temperature is about 60°F.
I go into a small and lively restaurant called the Merco Sur. It is warm and friendly. Large groups of women talk rapidly in cigarette-tinged voices and there are a few other tables with couples, solo men tapping on laptops, and a small family. On a wall-mounted flat-screen television, ESPN broadcasts a NBA game between Boston and Denver.
As I sit eating my bife milanese, the restaurant’s version of chicken-fried steak, I observe that many places maintain local culture solely to attract tourists. The music system plays a familiar tune and I hum along. I realize that the woman’s smooth alto is purring a smooth jazz cover of Radiohead’s song “Creep.“ She sings:
But I’m a creep.
I’m a weirdo.
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here.
I also think about this interesting relationship that you and I have. I write knowing you are reading in almost real time. That in some ways changes the writing and the experience. You read, in part because you enjoy the vicarious travel, or you get a voyeuristic thrill as you did during my experience of aural sex in“Again at 3 A.M.” This would not have been possible until fairly recently and it gives the rather solitary job of writing an immediacy and sociability that would not have been previously possible. This makes sitting alone in a restaurant in a distant country, where you can neither understand or be understood, a pleasure. I’m having a ball.
After lunch, I walk up the street and see a small crowd gathered in a plaza. Drums are beating and bagpipes are playing. The Union Jack is waving. Dozens of children are dressed in white shirts and plaid skirts and kilts. The Scots-Uruguayan school parades down the main street to the center of the historic part of town and the students give a stirring performance of Scottish reeling.
The headmistress introduces the dances in accented English. The parents applaud and take pictures. The sun has come out for a brief period and I smile as I realize that so many seem to be training to be somewhere else.
Also see: Found Illusions
Regardless of how far we try to wander off the tourist trail (and no matter how long we try and stay off it) we are still outsiders and dillettantes, itinerant consumers in distant lands.
–Rolf Peters, MARCO POLO DIDN’T GO THERE
Watching the Tango
“I like to watch.”
–Chance (Peter Sellers) in BEING THERE
Buenos Aires–October 18
When you are a writer or a photographer, you tend to remove yourself from the actual scene, even as you are in it. That is the way you gain enough perspective to record what is happening and the ability to see and relate details and impressions.
At least, that is what is true for me. I think I was drawn to these disciplines by my innate shyness and introversion. My introspection is useful at times, but sometimes also makes me feel alienated and not fully in the moment. I often have a sense of dèjá vu even as I am seeing something in real time.
My friend Ray, gregarious and extraverted, camps out in a cafe or bar wherever he goes in the world and finds it easy to make friends. I am shyer and more aloof and have never been good at this. I sit in the back and observe and I am intimidated. Since I am talkative with close friends, some may think this is hogwash, but I have always felt like a bit of an outsider. I can be in a gathering and step out of myself and observe in the third person.
One of the reasons this project is such a departure is that I am making myself work through my inhibitions. I will have to fully participate in Tango and try to get along in a foreign country with a foreign language. Mistakes will happen, but I must Tango On. It is the charm and anxiety of the naif, the greenhorn, the amateur that creates a bit of comedy, and I hope interest.
Since I often second-guess myself (another personality feature of the introvert), I wonder if the anticipation of what will be and the observation of the event itself will make it different, similar to the observer effect in physics, where the observation of a phenomenon subtly changes the phenomenon itself.
Piazzolla Tango
Teatro Astor Piazzolla
A Group Dance in Red, Piazzolla Tango
Last evening, I went to a show at a tango dinner club called “Piazzolla Tango.” It was my first live exposure to Tango and I had decided to go because it is within easy walking distance of my apartment and my guidebook highly recommended it.
I dressed in a suit and a black shirt and ventured out into the evening. Florida Street, generally jammed with tourists, was dark and deserted. A few vendors had mats with unsalable items spread out on the street and there were people huddled in doorways. The shops were closed and the security gates had been rolled down and locked.
I entered a well-lit and pleasant arcade and went to the theatre’s entrance. I had elected only to attend the show, not to have dinner, which made my ticket saleswoman frown. I may have been the only one in the hall of several hundred people who had not dined there, but I get tired of the looks one gets when one dines alone in a fancy place, and I just wanted to see the show.
Descending two flights of stairs and having given my name twice, the lobby was so quiet and empty that I was worried that I had come at the wrong time. I was escorted through a double door into a music hall, festooned with gold accents and covered throughout with late nineteenth-century dark red whorehouse velvet. Laughter and warm conversation bounced around the hall and was absorbed by the fabric, the well-dressed people, the plush carpet.
The lights dimmed, the curtain rose, and dancers twirled on stage, the men costumed in fedoras and suits, the women in tight dresses with frilled skirts and slits to show the legs as they moved. While the men led, the women seemed to show the most expression, kicking their legs high as they turned and snapping their heads back and forth in rhythm with the piano and accordians.
The couples stomped their feet as an accent, the men would twirl the women or catch them in a mock fall, the dance would end with the signature pose of the woman in a low backward crouch and with the man in a pose as if he were a sprinter preparing to start a race. The dancers teased and flirted over a rose, the man offering, the woman pretending not to show interest, and then accepting the rose and circling the stage with her partner in a tug of romance and seduction, rejection and acceptance.
A beautiful brunette singer, sparkling with costume jewelry and luminescent in a white dress, delivered an impassioned song. Between choruses, she gave the audience coquettish looks and swayed her hips, confident in her voice, her beauty, and her sexuality. The performance alternated between the female singer, single couple and multiple couple performances, and a talented and emotional dark-suited male singer. I was moved to give the performance a standing ovation, yet there were not many of us who were standing. Could this be an American habit, giving standing ovations for every performance and expecting the ovation to spread across the entire room like a fungus?
After the performance, I walked back to the apartment, passing a famous milonga (Tango hall), Confiteria Ideal. The hall has been featured in the films EVITA and THE TANGO LESSON. To watch a dance filmed last year at Confiteria Ideal clink on this link. I stopped in and looked at the board. The dances and classes were listed and I blanched a bit. There are dances tonight, which I will probably sit in the back and observe. Tomorrow afternoon, though, there is a class with instruction in both Italian and English. Will I throw myself into the moment, or will I continue to hold back, an observer but not a participant?
The Astonishing Quality of Light
What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
–Alain de Botton, THE ART OF TRAVEL
BUENOS AIRES, OCTOBER 16:
I arrived this morning–at last!–and agreed with my brother-in-law that the trip to Argentina is relatively easy. Since there is almost no time change, and since there is enough time to sleep on the plane, in Buenos Aires you can function well the first day.
Plus, the seat next to mine was empty, so no fat guy and no elbows jockeying for control on the community armrest.
I arrived about an hour early and took a cab to the apartment building. I had been told I could store my bag until the apartment was ready. When I arrived, no one knew anything, no one spoke English, and I couldn’t get my cell phone to connect. I ended up rolling my bag through the streets for the next couple of hours and ended up back at the building where the security guard cheerfully sent me to the apartment, which of course was locked. I remembered enough Spanish from my Rosetta Stone course that I said: “Donde estan los llaves?” He shrugged his shoulders and made a call. I asked if I should “¿Espero aquí?” again astonished that the words had come.
After getting settled in the small apartment, I heard drum beats and chants outside. I left and took my camera and saw a massive demonstration and I have no idea what the crowd was demonstrating for or against. There were banners with pictures of Che Guevara. Young women had their faces painted as skeletons. It felt chaotic and indiscipherable and somehow more alive that way.
Demostrating not only their beliefs, but also my ignorance
The demostration continued down Avenida Corrientes and I walked next to it, interested in taking a longer walk. In front of me an elegantly dressed older gentleman tripped on a curb and fell backwards taking a long slow-motion roll onto his back. Two men helped him up by grabbing him by the arms, but he kept his legs straight and it took extra effort to right him. He assured them “bien, bien” and started walking again.
I was focused on the parade and had slowed a bit. In front of me was a newsstand and the same man who had fallen was shaking another man by the shoulders and yelling in his face. Deep rage rose from the older man’s core and the dark, heavy bags under his eyes looked as if they were about to explode. The other man, finely dressed, middle-aged, and accompanied by a woman, was bemused and saddened and tried to calm him down by entreating “Señor, Señor…” Although, I couldn’t hear or understand him, I am sure that the man was trying to ask what had aggrieved the older man so much, but the older man would not calm down and his entire body shook visibly and violently.
I turned onto a main shopping arcade, Florida Street and the demonstration had rounded the corner and now met me head on, and jammed against the flow of people out shopping.
It stopped in front an official looking building where police had erected barricades and stood in a line, wearing helmets and riot gear. I was thrilled to be in the middle of it.
When I travel, I try not to be an obvious tourist. Often, when in other countries, people will stop and ask me directions. It happened to me a number of times in Germany and it happened today in Buenos Aires. I observe gentlemen’s shoes to make sure that mine do not make me look like a rube. I check to see how people dress. In this city, men wear darker colors and many wear jackets or suits. My shoes should be okay. I always dress in dark colors.
Each city has its own rules about pedestrian crossing. Some cities are strictly against jaywalking and cars have the right-of-way, as in Las Vegas and London. Some, like Boston, seem to have no rule about jaywalking or traffic lights. Everyone justs drifts along and expects the other guy to stop. It is a hybrid here. In general, people obey the crossing signs unless common sense tells them it is okay and then they cross. Unlike London, cars do not seem to speed up when they see a pedestrian.
Gold and blue, fire and ice on Av Santa Fe
Several years ago, I read an article in THE NEW YORK TIMES in which the writer gave his impressions of the famous O. J. Simpson White Bronco freeway chase. Unlike many viewers, he wasn’t emotional because he hadn’t known that O. J. wasn’t as good a man as his persona, but because the writer was from Southern California and missed the warm golden glow of the L. A. sunshine, a light he hadn’t been able to duplicate elsewhere.
A well-lit Florida Street buidling--not my apartment
The Argentine sunshine has that quality. Today’s sky was a cool blue, the light was golden. The warmth and the ice combine to create an effect that I had only seen before in L. A. Perhaps it is only that both cities are famous for smog, but the day seemed uniquely perfect and the city’s name “Good Airs” seemed to be correctly advertised, even if it is occasionally lampooned because of the often-polluted air.
Oh, and that thing about the Southern Hemisphere toilets flushing counter-clockwise?
At least in this apartment, it’s a myth.
“Who Takes Your Photographs? They Are REAL Professional.”
Florida Street, Buenos Aires
People have been asking me about the pictures on my blog.
Photography has been an interest of mine since I was a teenager, but I have stopped practicing the craft in the last decade. Part of the reason I stopped taking photos is that I felt so conspicuous carrying around my Nikon SLR and additional lenses. I am currently using a Panasonic Lumix DMC-T23, a small camera which has a crisp Leica lens, and I am editing the pictures using a simple program, iPhoto. I have been quite pleased with the pictures and the other benefit is that the camera makes me look like a normal turista so no one cares if I get a casual shot. This gives me the opportunity to give the blog a better look and has also made me observe the city a little differently which I think helps my writing.
The photography has been the true surprise of the trip. I purposely brought only a point and shoot–albeit a sophistical one–because I wanted to test a theory that it is the photographer’s eye and not the equipment that matters. Cartier-Bresson, Bourke-White. Eisenstadt, Elliott Erwitt, etc. took some of the finest photos ever with a manual exposure rangefinder Leica and one or two lenses.
A few pictures come from Google Images. I have given credit for any photos that I haven’t taken.
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Writer Photographer Man of Mystery
Sam Krisch
