Archaeology, Siracusa - 5x5 Palladium Print

I had a productive weekend in the darkroom. Now that I’ve had a chance to do a whole bunch of prints, I am going to go back and do some fine tuning. I’m also excited to try some larger prints. I’ve been printing at 5×5 so far, which looks great, but I am very curious to see what some of these images would look like at 8×8 and larger.

I’ve also been going through my contact sheets from Sicily and found a few interesting photographs that I didn’t notice on my first pass through. I think I now have about 30 photographs in the Sicily series altogether. Isn’t it nice when that happens?

Side street, Siracusa - 5x5 Palladium Print

Cactus, Cefalù - 5x5 Palladium Print

I can’t spend enough time in the darkroom right now. I am printing at a feverish pace.

La Rocca, Cefalù - 5x5 Palladium Print

The photos from Sicily are coming along nicely. I have finished developing film and I am now scanning, processing, and beginning to think about editing. Editing is definitely going to be a big challenge for me… when I left for Sicily, I had no idea where the project was headed and my focus was a bit scattered. Now I have at least 30-40 photographs that I like, but I know that a lot of them will not make the final cut as I try to put together the story. At least when I am able to continue the project (hopefully next spring, although not in Sicily), I will have a better idea of what to look for.

I need to get a first cut ready soon, because Platinum/Palladium printing begins next week. I’ve ordered all of the necessary chemicals and equipment and am doing a run-through with my professor on Tuesday. I’m sure my first few attempts will be pretty miserable, but I’ll be posting them anyway!

One of my favorite side trips while in Sicily was to the necropolis of Pantalica. Sometime around 1000 BCE, thousands of tombs were carved into the walls of a deep gorge running through the hills of eastern Sicily. It is now a protected national park.

The guidebook was unclear on specifics, but it seemed like it would be about an hour on the bus to Sortino, plus another hour to walk to the park. I packed food and water accordingly, knowing that it would be a hot day.

Three hours after leaving Sortino on foot, I finally arrived at Pantalica. It had been a difficult hike, with lots of hills and valleys along the way. There had been nowhere to get water once I left town, so I was already running low. I stopped for a quick lunch when I got to the entrance of the park and then descended into the gorge. Steps had been carved directly into the rock, worn away from thousands of years of use. Thousands of tombs and larger caves dotted the sides of the cliffs. It was a truly awe-inspiring and humbling moment.

I didn’t get to explore as much as I wanted because of the water situation; I had to turn back and head into town after only about ninety minutes in the gorge. I ran out of water about half-way back to town and dragged myself the rest of the way. I arrived in Sortino exhausted, dehydrated, and covered in dust from head to toe, but extremely satisfied with the day’s adventure.

This trip reinforced two things I think I have always known, but never really solidified in my mind. The first is that I am a desert person. I love the climate of the desert, I love the landscape, I love the vast amount of space between one place and the next. I attribute this at least partially to the time I spent growing up in Joshua Tree, and I am going to continue this series of photographs in southern California and Baja Mexico next year.

The second thing that was reinforced for me on this trip is the fact that I am a wanderer, to an extreme degree. I was happiest when I was out climbing mountains, hiking long distances, getting out and away from the city. This, too, I attribute to growing up in Joshua Tree. I had to walk for miles to get to school, to visit friends, or even just to go to the store. My hours of wandering back then gave me the chance to explore the world, and I think that I got a chance to revisit that feeling of discovery in Sicily.

A few hours alone in the desert gave me the chance to concentrate and really engage the visual side of my brain. This is not something that is instantaneous or even easy for me; I am easily distracted and it usually takes me a little while to switch gears. This is especially obvious in my contact sheets from that day; the first roll is so-so, and the fourth is a bit weak again because I was getting tired. But the two contact sheets in the middle are full of visual ideas that feel fresh and new to me. Having that time to really focus and let the landscape sink in had a tremendous impact on the quality of my work that day.

My wife’s aunt and uncle live on a farm in a little town about an hour outside of Palermo. This is the view I saw out the window every morning when I woke up.

I’ve finally got enough film from the trip developed and scanned to choose a few photos for the website. I still haven’t gotten to the film from Pantalica, a giant necropolis outside of Siracusa where I think I took my best photos. These are from Monreale and Monte Pellegrino, just outside of Palermo.

I was a bit surprised when I showed this photograph to my wife this morning and she said that she had seen it already. After all, I just took it yesterday afternoon, and developed and scanned it last night after she had already gone to bed. But she is convinced that I have taken this picture before.

Now, I know that I haven’t taken this exact photograph before, but she brings up a good point. I spend an awful lot of time walking the streets of Brooklyn looking for interesting sidewalk scenes. This one caught my eye, like many of the scenes I photograph, because of some interesting geometric details: the vertical line of the window and the door on the left, the twin satellite dishes, the checkmark made by the sign and its shadow and the door that floats just above it. This is one of the reasons I love the view camera—it forces you to take your time and allows you to be very precise in arranging the scene. It’s not just about the lines and shapes and tones that make up the picture; there is something a bit melancholy here in the sagging roof and drooping wires and dirty stucco that says something about this neighborhood and its place in the world.

One of the things I often do in my pictures is empathize with inanimate objects. It has to do with how I see the landscape, and how I put together a picture. I won’t take a picture unless I can find some kind of connection, some kind of personality in the objects I am photographing. To me, this is a photograph full of possibilities, and I could take a hundred more like this and find something new in each one. To most people, though, it’s probably just a picture of the side of a building. One of many I have taken, which probably isn’t all that different than the work of a lot of other photographers.

I guess I am trying to bridge the gap between how I see my own work and what the rest of the world sees. When one of my professors tells me that I am printing too dark, I bristle. It’s one thing if that were a technical issue, but as an artistic decision I feel that it’s necessary to stand by my work, even if it isn’t a decision that makes everyone happy.

Which brings me to my final question: how much of your art is driven by personal, creative goals, and how much do you let the others influence what you do?

People insist that I will like dancing if I just give it a try. Or cilantro. “How could anyone hate cilantro?”, they ask. I say, at 31 years old, there are a few things I do know: I don’t like to dance, I don’t like cilantro, and I prefer to photograph landscapes. So this is what you get when a landscape photographer takes a self portrait.

This photograph is pretty decent from a technical perspective. It’s well exposed and everything is in focus. The composition is classically pleasing and there is a nice sense of light in the image. And I absolutely hate it.

“picturesque |ˌpik ch əˈresk|
adjective
visually attractive, esp. in a quaint or pretty style : the picturesque covered bridges of New England.”

At this point, I have a pretty good sense of how to use my camera. I know how to pull a composition together. But this photograph honestly belongs in a kiosk at the mall. I have no use for picturesque.

I guess it’s good to know what you don’t like, though, right? I feel like the more pictures I take, the closer I am to figuring out what I am actually looking for. I am trying to create a world, and within that world, a series of stories. I think it’s fine if that world is a bit romantic and exaggerated; that’s part of the point. But it’s dangerous to get too carried away with those elements and forget about the other things about my photographs that excite me. A landscape needs to be a little bit mysterious, maybe even scary. There need to be hints as to the reasons why the landscape is the way it is. And there need to be questions that remain unanswered.

In this case, I feel like I’ve wandered into a hidden valley in the English countryside and I’m about to be introduced to a bunch of magical faeries. Ugh.