Taking Stock

It's obviously been a while since I've written here, but I thought the new year was a good time to stop and take stock of where I am photographically—and where I'm going.

2013 was an interesting year, to say the least. I have a great new job with a lot of opportunities to make a difference in people's lives and help bring a university fully into user-focused technology solutions for students, faculty, and staff. I'm very excited about it, but the amount of time it takes—while worth it—will take away from the time I have to make pictures, and think about photography in general.

Photographically speaking, 2013 was also an interesting year for me. I attended two versions of the Artist's Round Table (ART); once as a participant and once as part of the staff. As usual, both experiences left me with more questions than answers, but thanks to many of those same people, I'm pretty comfortable with that :-)

Without a doubt, meeting and talking with Bill Allard was a highlight of those trips. His work as a photographic storyteller is truly inspirational, and the guy is a damn good writer, too. It was an honor to share a meal with him and to listen to him speak about his work, and I hope I get to do it again sometime.

As for my own work, you will notice that I've changed the site a bit and added several new projects/galleries to it—Flyover Country, Mooreland Fair, and Night Lights.

Night Lights is a project I've been working on for the better part of two years. It is a series of photographs that shows the spaces we illuminate when darkness comes. Originally begun as an exploration of security, the project has grown to include the personality of the lights—color, brightness, pattern, etc.—as well as revealing new questions to explore: Why shine light in these places? What are we revealing (or hiding)? The photographs here represent a slice of an ongoing project, designed to look at the reasons why we shine lights in the dark and what those lights have to say about us.

The Mooreland Fair series comes from three years of exploration of the meaning of community in the small town Midwest US. The fair itself is a bit of anomaly in the general structure of county fairs that feed into the Indiana State Fair. The Mooreland Fair occurs outside of that system; in fact, it takes place at the same time as the State Fair. There are no livestock shows or awards. It's more like a festival that appears every year for a week in August  and then disappears just as quickly‚ almost like the carnival in Ray Bradbury's novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes—without Mr. Cooger and Mr. Dark.

Mostly, though, the Fair is a place where people of all ages come together for fun and friendship, some as far away as Cincinnati and Chicago. I've spent three years documenting the Fair and the folks that come to it, trying to better understand how this isolated event has endured for over 75 years.

Finally, I've also added some photographs of a more recent project, Flyover Country. This work is the beginning of a larger exploration of the American Midwest—sometimes referred to as "flyover country." As a born and bred Hoosier, my hackles raise whenever I hear that phrase and the subsequent dismissal of this area as without worth. My work here is designed to educate and inform, as well as to show the redeeming qualities of a lifestyle that is often described as ignorant or backward.

Each of these projects is ongoing and I'll probably add photographs to each collection over the coming months and years, but it seems appropriate at this point to begin to show them to you, if only to let you see where I am in my work and my thinking.

I've had many influences over the last couple of years that I would have never thought to consider before, and those photographs, paintings, and writings continue to inform the work I do. And I've travelled to many different places and made photographs there. Though my focus has changed since I wrote Close to Home, the essence of that book is what still drives me to explore more closely the world around me.

I hope you'll continue to come along for the ride.

Remember Who You Are

"Could it be that the great photographers make their great images because they spring from their life, whereas the majority of 'amateurs' fail to make great photographs because they are too busy trying to photograph someone else's life, someone else's landscape, someone else's experience? Perhaps instead of going out looking for subject matter, we should simply try to see clearly our life as it is and find the images of significance that surround us." — Brooks Jensen

A couple of weeks ago, Ray Ketcham suggested I take a look at the work of Andrew Wyeth. He said he felt Wyeth's work would be helpful to me, since many of his paintings dealt with rural areas and subjects. Why? Because previous to this, I had been studying Edward Hopper. I had seen Hopper's work in person at the Indianapolis Art Museum and the Chicago Museum of Art and I connected with his use of light and space—and light as space—especially in many night scenes, including, of course, Nighthawks. These paintings especially made me feel comfortable and secure, even though Hopper's work has been described many times as feeling lonely and sad. I am a "night owl" in general, so I could easily imagine myself in a few of those scenes, sitting alone or with one or two other people, just enjoying the silence of the night. I live in a place where many times at night, especially in winter, it is nearly completely silent. I love that and Hopper reminded me that I do. (To me, that is what art does.)

But Hopper's work is mostly urban, or at least not really rural, so his work didn't always resonate with me fully. I've been in Chicago, New York, and other large cities for long enough periods of time where I could match my experience to Hopper's vision, but my home is in the country and it's there I'm most comfortable. I grew up in a small town and many of my friends came from farm families. I spent many of my early days playing with my friends in their families' fields and barns. Later, when I started working summer jobs, I worked on a farm, de-tasseling corn and baling hay. I lived in a small town, but part of me grew up on a farm.

For that reason, at least to begin with, Andrew Wyeth's paintings were a revelation. His work deeply resonated with me and brought back many memories of my life in rural America, especially his paintings of Chadds Ford and the people who lived there. After seeing these paintings, I wanted to know more about Wyeth and his influences, so I bought a biography to find out more. What I discovered was not only the stories behind his paintings, but something even better.

I found the magical connection between an artist's head and his heart.

I know people very much like the people that Wyeth knew and painted. I know places very much like the places Wyeth knew and painted. When I read about his love and appreciation for these people and these places, I knew where my work really needed to come from. Home. Not just where I live, but what home is to me. Not just close to home, but right there… at home.

It's been said many times that artists draw from personal experience for the work they create. (Write what you know!) If you look closely at great works of art, it's pretty much impossible to separate the work from the artist, simply because their work comes from their voice, and their voice comes from their experience, and their experience comes from the fruit of their lives. What Wyeth did for me is to make that connection clear. Your best work comes from your voice, your experiences, your life.

If someone asked me to describe to me the essential message of my book Close to Home, it's this: Look deeper. See more clearly. Find the material you need to make good photographs. I believe strongly that my (and your) familiarity with a place and its people gives us an advantage over others who don't know or, more importantly, don't understand them. As Wyeth describes it:

"You can be in a place for years and years and not see something, and then when it dawns, all sorts of nuggets of richness start popping all over the place. You've gotten below the obvious."

But what I also learned from Wyeth helped me understand another part of making art. For me, it's the location of the well from which we can draw the raw material we need to produce meaningful work, and it's something I remind myself of now every time I make photograph.

Remember who you are.

Overcoming Familiarity: Space vs. Place

I've spent and continue to spend a lot of time finding pictures around my home here in East Central Indiana, which, as anyone who's been here can tell you, is not always an easy task. One result of this is, of course, my book, Close to Home: Finding Great Photographs in Your Own Back Yard. In it, I attempt to help others see what I see: that great photography exists everywhere if you only look for them. One of the things I discuss in the book is the difficulty we all have overcoming the familiarity of a place. This familiarity can cause us to gloss over many photographic opportunities which, to us, seem mundane and boring. However, I recently came across something that I think can help you to make that shift in your mind and allow you to see beyond the familiar.

In her book, Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity, author Liz Wells talks about space vs. place. She writes:

"The act of naming is the act of taming. In Western culture, describing space as desert, or wilderness, or planet, represents potential comprehensibility and cues scientific and philosophical inquiry. By naming, I mean both the terming of the space and, for example, wilderness, and the naming of such a space as, for example, Antarctica. Naming turns space into place. Once named we no longer view somewhere as unknowable—although as yet relatively little may be known. Likewise, of course, familiar places are those that have come to seem 'known'. " (Emphasis mine.)

What this means, of course, is that we perceive the places around us as familiar because we think of them as named. The park, the street, the city—as well as Davis Park, 57th Street, and Paris. I would go a step further and say that we name places even on a smaller scale, again because we crave familiarity. Davis Park becomes "the kids' park" and Joe's Sports Bar becomes "the guys' hangout", all because we feel more comfortable in places we've named and personalized and it makes it easier to recognize them.

This works against us as photographers. We lose the ability to look beyond these labels to what a place or a thing actually is in order to truly see it. Many of the best photographs show us universal truths in specific moments or places, and in order to see them, I think we need to let go of our familiarity. We need to return to thinking of a place as simply a space—a pub that represents many other bars around the world, a city street that looks like a lot of streets in a large city, a man walking along a river that can represent any man or any river. Using your subjects as symbols for a commonality we share can raise your work above simply pretty pictures.

The history of photography abounds with such symbols. A photograph of a woman and her children, down on their luck, becomes an iconic representation of hardship during the Great Depression in the US. A portrait of a girl with bright green eyes and a burning stare shows the determination of the refugees from Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. These are photographs of specific people in specific places, but we recognize them as representations of the universal human condition. The photographers who made them spent a lot of time in the places where they took these photographs, but they did not forget how to see the familiar as universal.

The flip side to this—and this is the paradox—is that you need your familiarity with these places as well, in order to capture what other photographers will miss. Your familiarity will not only gain you access to scenes others may not, it's also a gateway to the feelings you have about a subject or place. In the end, you have to balance your closeness to your subject with your photographer's eye that sees things as they really are… or could be.

It's a difficult balance to achieve and one I think we will constantly work at over the course of our lives. Our perceptions will change. Our ideas of what is universal may change, but consistently questioning what it is you're actually photographing and why will help you to make better photographs in the long run.