What the Lily Saw
Flowers are easy to photograph (they usually don’t run away and don’t complain afterward that you got their “bad side”), and in the spring and summer months, they are everywhere. So pretty images of flowers clog our digital photo albums and social media news feeds. As consumers of all this petaled pictography, we can easily turn blind and jaded. You’ve seen one daffodil/rose/lily/iris/peony, you’ve seen them all. The most special and beautiful things become banal when our eyes and other senses glut on them.
If you’re a photographer, the problem is this: here’s a beautiful flower–how do you take a photo of this beautiful flower that doesn’t bore the viewer, that stands out among all the other photos of all the other beautiful flowers, that conveys something new and unique about flowers in general and this flower in particular?
The photo pros will tell you that one way of solving this problem is to look at the flower from a different perspective. In other words, shoot that flower from a different position, an unexpected one. We’re used to looking down at an angle on flowers or looking at them straight on, at eye-level, in a vase. Try shooting the flower from directly above, or get down on the ground and photograph the flower at its own level or shoot up at it from below. Think about the scene in which the flower is located. Perhaps you’ve found a beautiful lilac bush thriving in an urban setting. Would a wide-angle shot that includes some of the scenery around the bush add interest to the shot? Or do you instead want to get close up, maybe with a macro lens, to study small structures of the flowers that people often miss on their routine perusal of these fragrant blossoms? Making these decisions requires engaging with the subject. Instead of just standing there with the camera and snapping away, think about your relationship with what you are photographing. Think about how close you are and how close you want to be. Think about getting in front of, on top of, behind, underneath, and inside it, in as many ways as possible.
When I took the above photograph of a lily, I literally sneaked up behind it with my cell phone camera. I thought it would be interesting to peak over the lily’s shoulder, to get a little sense of what it sees.So I crouched down behind it and took the photo looking up, following the trajectory of the lily’s eyes–if we allow the lily to have eyes. The lily had a beautiful face, of course, but, in this photo, I focused on the back of the blossom, on the graceful curls of the petals as they peeled back and opened the flower’s face to the sunlight. The lily was growing in a courtyard, and, in this photo, it looks up at its building, and at the buds on the stalks surrounding it, with what I hope is optimism and joy. As the photographer, I can say, everything–the building, the flowers, the sun and sky–looked new and beautiful through the lily’s eyes.
One of the gifts photography–or any art–offers the practitioner is the ability to experience the world, both inner and outer, with new eyes–or ears or hands or hearts. This is one of the reasons why I photograph–not only to find out how I see the world, which is an important, ongoing process of self-discovery–but to see the world as the lily sees it. In other words, to see the world through as many different eyes as I can. How much would I miss if I did not stop, every now and then, to see the world made new and strange through the lily’s eyes?
The Door Opens
“Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?”
–Jalal al-din Muhammad Rumi, poet and Sufi mystic (1207-1273)
Sleeping Beauty, Upon Awakening
. . . discovers that people found her a whole lot sexier when they thought she was dead.
The Bones Did Not Know
Two and a half years ago, I was assaulted. As a result, I sustained a broken eye socket. I was relatively lucky. Such injuries often lead to nasty complications. Fortunately, I did not require surgery. I got away with some temporary discomfort, and some double vision on extreme upward and downward gaze, which has mostly resolved. The internal bone structure around my left eye has changed ever so slightly. My left eyeball now sits a millimeter–about the thickness of a dime–lower than my right eye. Traces of the fractures are still visible on CAT scan images. However, I’ve been told it is highly unlikely I will suffer any further ill-effects from the injury in the future. In fact, if you looked at me from the outside, you would never know anything happened. As a result of the blows that fractured my eye socket, my upper left cheek was cut, and I needed stitches. The cut mended well, and, though there is a scar, it is a very small one. You can only see it if you get very close. No one gets that close.
Right after the assault, I, of course, had a magnificent black eye. It faded gradually over a period of three to four weeks. During that period, I had a regimen of medical appointments and visits to the police station to keep me busy. And the concern and curiosity of friends and co-workers to keep me engaged. But when the outward signs of injury faded, when my face “looked normal” again, I sensed it was time for everything else to go back to normal, too. But I was not normal. And the expectations and assumptions that I would be ready to plunge back into the current of life and swim the right way pulled me down. Because it was only after the wounds healed and the police stopped calling and the medical appointments grew less frequent and the questions about “what happened” faded in intensity that I actually had time to think about how I’d been hurt.
The thoughts, like the expectations and assumptions, felt heavy in my head. So heavy, they dragged on me physically. I seemed to move more slowly than the rest of the world, almost as if I were inhabiting an alternate universe, identical to the one everyone else inhabited, but with a viscous atmosphere through which I could push forward only with extreme effort. It took me a while to reset my internal chronometer to the one that measures time for the rest of the human race.
Looking back now, I realize time didn’t just slow down; it stopped. Or at least I expected it to stop. There’s something so final and unanswerable about a fist to the face, and, without realizing I was doing so, I interpreted the assault as signaling an end to something. The fact that the injury coincided with other events in my life that rang of finality–including the loss of my job–added to my firm, unconscious conviction that I had come to the end . . . . the end was coming.
Having done some research, I now know such feelings are not uncommon among trauma victims. A sense of a foreshortened future is actually one of the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Some people who undergo severely traumatic incidents when very young grow up convinced they will die at an early age. They have a hard time planning for the future because they don’t believe they have one. Even when the trauma comes later in life or is less severe, the person who suffers it may nonetheless experience feelings of doom. These are natural feelings, but difficult to talk about and difficult for others to understand.
In the months after my injury, I never caught myself thinking I was about to die. I never told myself my death was imminent. But when I look back objectively, I realize, in some ways, my behavior, my actions and reactions, were those of a person who believes that things are essentially over. Or at least of a person who is not quite fully engaged with the world of the living.
I don’t know what I expected to happen or what kind of end I was waiting for. But part of me, an unconscious part, was, indeed, waiting. It was as though the end, my death, had already occurred, and the consequences of that event, like sound waves, had not yet caught up with me. So I sat, in between life and death, waiting for my sonic boom.
I was something like the character played by Bruce Willis in the film The Sixth Sense, the psychiatrist who is murdered in the opening scenes and then shuffles through the rest of the movie not realizing he is dead. Like Bruce Willis, I meandered through certain familiar routines. But it seemed as though I talked into empty space to ears that didn’t hear me, past eyes that didn’t see me. All the familiar doors were locked. I even wore variations of the same wardrobe day after day just like Willis’ character.
The scene in The Sixth Sense in which the little boy, Cole, finally tells Willis his secret is truly chilling because it perfectly captures the terror of a small child finally letting go of the one thing he has tried so long and so desperately not to reveal:
“I see dead people . . . walking around like regular people. They don’t see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re dead . . . .they’re everywhere.”
When I saw the film in the movie theater–and for several days afterward, I expected to see dead people, too. Many years later, right after I was assaulted, I expected, somewhere deep inside, that I would soon be one of them.
But I never did see dead people, and no preternaturally insightful little boy arrived to help me find a peaceful passage to the other side. I had no epiphany of death. The clues did not come together in a frightening gestalt to persuade me, finally, that I had already met my demise. In fact, they indicated something altogether different. I kept on living.
I know now there are things scarier than seeing dead people. States of being more horrifying than walking around dead and fooling yourself into believing you’re still alive. What happens when a person has begun to bury herself only to discover she didn’t die after all?
The dead people don’t scare me as much as they used to. This is what scares me now:
I see living people. They’re everywhere, walking around like regular people. I see them all the time. A lot of the time, they don’t see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don’t know they’re alive.
Mannequin in Waiting
I love mannequins. When I see mannequins, I immediately feel the urge to pull my camera out.
Why? What is it that attracts me so strongly to mannequins? I’m not sure. Sometimes, I think it is because they are so strange, so inhuman, stripped of all the cultural and social clothing that turns us living, breathing bipeds into “people.” Other times, I think it is because they are more human than humans, that their generic nature simply reveals what is essentially human in all of us. Without faces and names, without the quirks that mark us as individuals, they are painfully and dangerously vulnerable.
Yet, they sometimes express personality. I found this mannequin in the window of a Lower East Side boutique. To the right–off-screen, cut out of the photograph–is another male mannequin, dressed very fashionably in a light-colored suit, sitting on a chair in a very entitled pose. When I took this shot, it seemed to me that this mannequin, the one in the photograph, had just entered the store window to wait upon the seated mannequin. This mannequin is a well-dressed servant of some sort. I felt sorry for him. The seated, off-screen mannequin looked like he would be a pain in the rear end to wait on.
It wasn’t until I edited the photos I took that day and really examined this frame that I noticed something odd about the way in which the servant mannequin’s hand is posed. Unless I am mistaken, he is giving the seated mannequin the finger.
Life in a Dumpster
I like to take photos in which what is absent exerts the strongest presence in the scene. Photos of chairs that speak insistently of the people who should be sitting in them, or photos of tables or beds that retain the imprints of the people who have just left them behind. Photos of ghosts. Or of the wisps of events just ended as they begin to knit themselves into memories.
Photos like this one, in which the subject is a person whose form is strongly suggested but who is nonetheless not there in any real sense. I took this photo back in May 2005 in Philadelphia. I was in the city to see the Dali exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and I took some time to wander its streets, which I had not really explored since I was a college student on the Main Line.
I came across this scene and immediately spotted this secretive personage, hiding beneath jacket and cap, reading the newspaper in solitude in the shelter of the dumpster’s shadow. Meanwhile, regular folk pass by on the sunny side of the street, oblivious to the presence of the newspaper reader. That’s all right, I thought as I took the photograph. Our hero liked being left alone. Indeed, our hero wasn’t, strictly speaking, even there.
A few years later, I showed the photograph to my therapist. She asked me what I liked about the photo or what struck me about the scene. I gave her my very deep and pretentious explanation about finding presence in absence. Or was it absence in presence? I felt unintentionally postmodern in a purposeful way. I felt very profound.
“Do you know what I see when I look at the photo?” my therapist said. “I see you.”
“Me?” I asked, disappointed by my failure to impress her with the absence and the presence.
“Yes, you,” she said. “That’s how I think of you. It reminds me of how you talk about yourself, by yourself in your corner, hiding with your newspaper. And the dumpster is like your house where you do your private things.”
I looked at the photograph again. I was very familiar with it, but it had never occurred to me that it might be a self-portrait. As soon as she said it, though, I knew she was right. I had taken a photograph of me.
I thought about my notion of finding the presence in the absence, and I felt keenly how much I had wanted my little artistic endeavor to transcend the personal, to ultimately make a cultural critique and connect to a Grand Idea. But the more I try to wrench philosophical and intellectual meaning from the things I create, the more personal they become. Sadly, and inevitably, it ends up being all about me.
The Soul has a Hearth
“One may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul and yet no one ever come to sit by it. Passersby see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on the way.”
– Vincent van Gogh, Dutch Post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)
Winter’s Hand
After the big snowstorm that struck the northeast in late January 2011.
Trees in Redscale
I am a recent convert to the cult of cell phone photography. In fact, not so long ago, I loathed cell phone cameras and everything related to cell phone cameras, including how the mere act of deploying one seemed to instantly transform the user into a sub-moronic boor. Not only did I find cell phone images irredeemably crappy, but cell phone cameras were ubiquitous–annoyingly so. An amateur photographer lurked on every corner, cellular instrument in hand, waiting to reduce me or my rear end or my bad hair to a pixelated blob in the background of his or her latest crappy cell phone street photo. And, for the record, cell phone shooters, blocking foot traffic on the sidewalk while you spend five minutes taking a photo of your two best friends holding hands in front of a fire hydrant is, morally if not legally, a high misdemeanor. A new circle in hell is being prepared for you.
So I spent few years looking down my nose at cell phone cameras. Sure, I snapped a few photos of my cats–an image of my tiger cat sitting in my lap became my cell phone “wallpaper”– and the nice decorative painting job I did in my bedroom. But really, to me, these pictures were like the toilet tissue of photographic documents. For “real” photos, one needed an SLR. Period.
Then I upgraded from my cheap-y basic mobile phone to the best smartphone I could get for free when I re-upped my contract with Verizon Wireless–a Palm Pre Plus. Suddenly, I had a phone with a camera that could take images that didn’t look like they’d been taken at night during a dust storm. Real photos, more or less. The photos were not SLR or DSLR quality–they weren’t even nearly as good as iPhone camera photos. But I could work with them. In a year and a half, I’ve taken almost 5000 cell phone photos. That’s a lot of cell phone photos for someone who’s generally loathed cell phone photography. A former cell phone camera hater, I have come to love–and rely on–the ease with which my phone enables me to document and express what I see and experience in my daily life.
I have not made total peace with cell phone photography, however. Cell phones have made it so easy to photograph the world around us that I sometimes fear we are recording our lives at the expense of fully experiencing them. Living a moment, being in it deeply without distraction, is so much better than having a photo of that moment stored in a phone.
And I wasn’t sure what to think when I learned colleges were beginning to introduce courses on cell phone photography to their undergraduate curricula. A course in cell phone photography at Immaculata University near Philadelphia covers “both the quality of the images and the ethical responsibilities that come with taking and publishing them.” At Kent State University, students learn to use cell phone photography to experiment with “composition and light, . . . [to] anticipate action and emotion and to tell stories with pictures.”
Huh. For real? Getting at the guts of photography with such a limited device, one designed, built, and marketed to serve convenience rather than artistic expression? I am skeptical.
At the same time, I cannot deny that one can learn a lot about photographic technique, and perhaps about one’s self, by practicing cell phone photography. The lessons derive less from what the cell phone camera can than from what it can’t. Cell phone cameras are still quite limited technically. For instance, my cell phone camera has no zoom function–a lack that has frustrated me to no end. That means I’m stuck with the same angle of view–unless I can get closer to my subject, which is not always possible. Sometimes, a photographer is faced with limited options when it comes to a finding a shooting position with respect to the scene or subject being photographed. When neither switching to a lens of a different focal length nor using zoom is possible, those options become even more limited.
But once you accept these limitations, something amazing happens. You begin to invent ways of working with those limitations and around them. When I take photos with my cell phone camera, I am stuck with that same angle of view within that same rectangular box. I am forced to adjust–to move myself, to move the camera, to tilt it up or down, to take other elements of the scene into consideration–when composing the photo. When I take cell phone photographs, I now automatically experiment in ways I did not before when I could always count on the superior technology of my SLR, and my instinctive understanding of photographic composition has grown geometrically as a result. All because I’m saddled with that crappy cell phone screen and have to make due with that same old visual box.
Life is a lot like that, too. Sometimes, we get stuck in a box. Sometimes, we want to zoom, but we just can’t. But when we stop focusing on our limitations and start exploring what we can do, we release ourselves to the opportunity for creative discovery. With a little luck, if we leave our eyes and minds open, we’ll begin to perceive a plethora of ways of making that crappy box work. If we really want the photograph, we figure out a way to take it.
(I took the above photograph of trees in Isham Park [located in Inwood, a neighborhood in Northern Manhattan] with a Palm Pre Plus cell phone camera. To create the special effects in the image, I used a photography app for WebOS, the Palm operating system, called “MOLO.” MOLO offers a number of photographic filters which, in many cases, dramatically alter the appearance and mood of the image. In this instance, I used the redscale filter, whose effects mimic those of the film photography technique of shooting with the film loaded backwards in the camera, so that the back of the film or the bottom layer–the emulsion side–is exposed first. In color film, the top layer of the film is sensitive to blue light; the bottom layer is sensitive to red light. Reversing the order in which these layers are exposed results in an image with little to no blue rendered in various shades and tones of red.)
Eyes Inside
What in the world is in this photograph? I am not sure I really have any idea. Of course, it’s a digital manipulation of a photo and looks nothing at all like the original. That much is obvious; you won’t see a lot of . . . whatever that thing is . . . during your typical stroll through the neighborhood. This image emerged largely through serendipity. I was playing around with the original, and I was thinking about outer space and planets and alien worlds. Then I happened upon something that started to look a lot like the image above, and I knew I had stumbled on what I wanted. So here’s one possible way of thinking about this photograph:
Imagine an alien world with a living landscape, a planet where hills and caves are made not of inanimate soil and rock but of vibrant flesh. The creatures who inhabit this world emerge from the terrain yet remain part of it. Like trees, they grow roots, and their roots extend deep beneath and beyond the ground, entangling with structures that precede knowledge. Geology defines and confines them. They move as mountains move, very slowly, over vast oceans of time, compelled by remote and fiery forces whose purpose they only dimly understand. Their lives pass in soft, fungal silence, in interior darkness.
Imagine one of these creatures manages somehow to open its eyes. Perhaps an inner sun begins to burn within one of its underground chambers, or perhaps the glow of an acid sky slips through it translucent skin. Whatever the cause, its many eyes are now wide open, hungry and sore, and the creature examines the caverns of itself with a brave and brutal fascination. What does it see? What does it think? What does it discover, this living cave exploring itself?
