A blog about photography & transformative art
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Daily Blog
Yesterday I just finished designing and developing my new web site. It was an exhausting process that consumed me towards the end. Late in the afternoon, unshaven and bleary-eyed, I uploaded the files to my server and, like wizardry, the site went live.
Most of the work I do in photomontage is a mystery. I find photos of enigmatic and interesting characters, live with them, file them, bring them out again, digitize them and restore them. Then one day, one (or more) of the characters speak to me. Then I move them into a new world of my imagination. Years ago they'd probably have medicated me (or maybe worse). Today I'm just an eccentric artist.
Yesterday's inauguration was a day I shall forever remember. I'm not much of a TV-watcher these days but I was riveted to the tube until 9:00 PM, unable to take my eyes off of the history being made. By the end of the night I was fatigued and stiff, my neck aching and my mind spent. The sensory fatigue of watching television is undeniable. There are too many sounds, too much movement, too many opinions by too many people. It is impossible to contemplate or absorb anything.
I have boxes of old snapshots. These days I find myself rescuing every old snapshot that comes my way. Once prized—people always say that the first possession they’d save in a fire is their photos—so many photos eventually find their way to flea markets, antique shops, and sadly, landfill. We try in vain, with our camera, to forever capture these moments, only to find each and every image is also of this mortal world. And so it ages and fades just as we and our memories do.
I’m honored to be part of a new show with my dear colleagues, Rosa Valdez and Philip Ringler. The show, opening on January 29th at the Eddie Rhodes Gallery, Contra Costa College, is called *Reinventing Memory*. Each of us brings a different perspective to memory and past. If you are in the area please visit the show and give me your feedback.
I get glued to this computer sometimes. My eyes stuck wide-open, frozen in a blinkless state, I feel like Alex from A Clockwork Orange in the scene where the reprogram him. Only, in my case, I don't have some creepy attendant putting tear solution in my eyes. "Blink!" I tell myself—always too late to do any good. By the time I actually do remember to blink, my eyelids feel like sandpaper.
I’ve been busy photographing the batteries and bunkers in the Marin Headlands, just north of San Francisco. Given that San Francisco Bay has been deemed strategic ever since the Spanish moved in, there are layers of military installations around the Golden Gate in order to protect it. The artillery bunkers were mostly established before World War II. By the end of that war it was deemed that the artillery would be useless in the event of an attack by missiles or advanced aircraft. So, the old bunkers were left to ruin.
Sometimes I got so involved with a project, theme, or process, I forget to enjoy making simple images that delight me. Every day, in preparation for this blog, I browse through my image library to see what resonates with me. More times than not, the work I did the previous day or over the course of the previous week will influence my choice. Often, projects or exhibits are born this way. Photography is a medium that benefits from serial exploration.
In the bunker country of the Marin Headlands one comes across these concrete and metal protrusions. Not being an expert on bunkers and fortifications, I don’t know the proper name for these things. I do know that they frighten me. They suggest some kind of subterranean activity. A portal leading straight to hell
So much has changed and, too, so little. Fear and terror can rise from the ashes in a heartbeat. The fear of the Civil War, World War I and World War II live on in coastal hills of Northern California. Today’s War on Terror invented nothing. It simply stirred the darkness, illuminated the shadow, raised the dead. Close by where the big guns of WW II were bolted down to shoot at the Japanese, a Nike missile site was later built to aim itself at the Soviet Union. The Cold War—nothing cold about it. Now the missile silo is an historical site. A curiosity. Seems odd that nuclear weapons were nestled into our neighborhood.
