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photography Uncategorized

edges

Because I usually prefer a square print and work with rectangular negatives, I have to pay particular attention to cropping. I hardly ever see the edge of my image through the lens. When I shoot I am drawn to an element of light and I place it within the lens frame where I think it might eventually be in the print, but I’m not fanatical about it. Cropping in the dark room adds another stage to the creative process. It can be done with a degree of deliberation not possible when shooting in the field in ambient light that is always changing.

In determining the edge of an image I consider three options: closed frame, open frame, and broken frame. Which option I choose isn’t just a matter of where I place the edge of the image. It’s really a matter of how the edge interacts with the overall composition of the photo.

Closed Frame Rocky River 111
A closed frame implies nothing outside the frame has any particular relevance to the image. The image is complete unto itself. In general, such images are carefully composed with the attention of the viewer directed toward specific elements. In complex images if the eye is tempted to explore, there are elements to direct it away from the edge and back into the center of the image. Such framing is the most conventional type and is the mainstay of studio work and commercial photography. Closed frame pictures are the closest to pure artifice, creating a reality sufficient unto itself that may or may not have anything to do with the real world the viewer occupies.

Open Frame Rocky River 94
An open frame creates the impression that the subject of the image is only part of a larger reality beyond the edge of the picture, as though one is watching life unfold through the arbitrary constriction of a window. It allows for the possibility that the focus of the viewer’s attention may be anywhere within the image, even–in the extreme–outside the image itself. Open frame compositions may appear more chaotic than closed frame compositions and have the effect of making the viewer consider the relationship of the image to the real world of which it is only a limited reflection.

Broken Frame
An image with a broken frame both has and doesn’t have an edge. This is accomplished by printing an image with some white space at the edge so there is nothing to mark the boundary between that part of the image and the paper it is printed on. Such images are rare. When I first began printing in this way, I met with resistance from viewers disconcerted by their inability to tell where the image ended or began. To requests that I reprint such photographs, burning the white sections until a clear edge appeared, I politely declined. It is important to me, in such photographs, that the paper isn’t just a surface on which the image rested but is itself an integral part of the image.

Over time I have become more interested in broken frame, particularly in the photo abstractions of the series Obsessive Emulsion Disorder. Without a clear and complete edge, an image seems not entirely artifice but actually fuses with the world of which it is an assumed reflection. When looking at such an image, we are not only looking at the world through art, we are looking at the world itself. Such images also serve to remind the viewer that when we look at the world itself, we are looking at art of which our consciousness is an essential part.eyelids

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cleveland photography spirituality Uncategorized

toward the light

Toward the Light is my experience exploring the distinctive qualities of light in Cleveland, Ohio, where I live.
I know very little about the physics of light, and I am a self-trained photographer, so I can’t speak technically about it. But in my experience Cleveland light has its own character perhaps shared somewhat with other parts of the Great Lakes region.
It may have something to do with the latitude, though I doubt it, because the light in San Francisco, where I spend part of my year, is also of the same latitude but seems sharper.
I suspect it has to do with the humidity caused by lake Erie. The evaporation over the lake and drifting condensation over the land produce what locals know as a Cleveland sky, dense and lowering in the winter, high and soft and sculptural in the summer—a sky unseen anywhere else I have traveled. The resulting environment is a narrow rain forest along the lakeshore that fades away into the drier climate of central Ohio. Near the lake, the lambency of a humid August morning bathes the air with a light that rises from the ground, and Spring fog swaddles new foliage with a pale florescent glow as it floats in the air. Throughout the seasons, Cleveland light is always soft and forgiving.
Apart from the lake, there is so much water in the Cleveland environment—puddles, ponds, streams, rivers, marshes–that light is always rising from reflective sources to surprise the eye as it moves through the landscape. Even in deep woods, trees can be momentarily foot-lighted by pools of stagnant water as beams of passing light shoot through gaps in the foliage overhead.Rocky River 113
What light falls on or passes through has much to do with how the quality of light expresses itself. Forest City was Cleveland’s original name and remains its nickname today, a testament to the density and extent of woods that cover the sinuous moraines deposited by the glaciers that formed the Great Lakes. It is possible, of course, thanks to architecture and agriculture, to escapes the woods and gaze directly at the sky, but the characteristic Cleveland experience—urban, suburban, exurban and rural—is still the walk under foliage or, in winter, its vast skeletal framework.
One thing I’ve learned photographing Cleveland is that leaves are always translucent. They can be almost opaque when plump with moisture and green with chlorophyll, but by Fall they have become thin, veiny, even lacy with only their ribs impeding the passage of light. The vast majority of Cleveland’s trees are deciduous, and the variety is unrivaled, meaning the shapes and colors of leaves seem infinitely varied. And the colors are in constant change, from the first lime-green buds of April to the last tan oak leaves clinging to bare limbs in January. Every variety has its distinctive palette throughout the seasons, so Cleveland autumn displays are distinct, if not for their brightness at least for their range of color. Light is constantly being filtered and colored by foliage through most of the year. And if that isn’t enough variety, the foliage, for the most part, is in steady, delicate motion. To the black and white photographer, this means the tonal range in a landscape can be so subtle that edges often blur.
Whatever the reasons, the light in Cleveland is alive, and the eye must be fully present to witness it.