The last three on the list (color version)

When I began making a list of ten photographers I admire,  I knew who my top handful of photographers were–and I knew that I had more than ten–but the process has led me to an interesting point–none of the photographers so far have been color photographers–and I do have a few more black and white photographers I want to add to my list–but there is a trio of color photographers I admire greatly–Stephen Shore, William Eggleston, and Richard Misrach.

Stephen Shore , Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975

Stephen Shore is best known for work done in the first half of the 1970’s, when I was in high school, during the first Arab Oil shock, and his photographs from Uncommon Places and American Surfaces are full of gas stations, cars, motels and highways–all in lush color, full of memories.  I remember looking at Uncommon Places shortly after it was first published in the 1980’s,  when I was living in Philadelphia, with two plates from Spruce Street, at 20th and 21st streets, a place I passed frequently,  not that much different than other street corners in the city, what was so uncommon about this place?

William Eggleston

I first saw William Eggleston’s work while an undergraduate in the late 1970’s, viewing a copy of William Eggleston’s Guide with a bold essay by John Szarkowski, and I have to admit that I agreed with the many vocal critics who thought the work was baffling and that Szarkowski’s judgment was  simply wrong.  Now looking at the Guide again, with the perspective of having seen hundreds more photographs by him over the past 30 years, Eggleston’s vision obviously deserves the attention brought to it.  Watching William Eggleston in the Real World made me wonder, though–how much of his success is due to his excessive drinking, and how much is due to his unlimited budget for commercial photo processing? And now that every photographer with a digital camera no longer is constrained by economics,  will his work still interest us decades from now?

Richard Misrach, Bomb, Destroyed Vehicle and Lone Rock, Bravo 20 Bombing Range, Nevada, 1986

Richard Misrach makes my list (the bottom of the list) mostly for his wonderful Bravo 20 work, which proposes turning an unauthorized bombing range into a national park.

Weston’s influence on my work (or maybe not…)

In keeping up the spirit of the posts here, I usually try to find some reflection of the artist I admire in my own work.  Weston’s work is sculptural, his prints are full of volumes, shades rendered in order to create sensuous forms (though some have suggested that his peppers are sexier than his nudes…).   What I discover when I look at my own work is precisely the inverse problem–deliberately using a flat surface as a subject, to be rendered as a photographic print–with sometimes surprising results…

Bottle Pack, Tanana River, 1999

Tire, Tanana River, 2007

I can’t even say for sure why I think these pictures reference Weston, except I admire his acceptance of subjects and his commitment to finding form, which he described as the strongest way of seeing something…

Edward Weston–on my list at #6

Edward Weston is one of the classic west coast photographers, but one I still find myself looking at.  Over the past decade, I’ve made several brief visits to the California coast, and the place felt familiar because of Weston’s photographs–the shape of the hills, the coast, the light, and the trees were as Weston described them.  A friend recently gave me a copy of California and the West, with text by Chairs Weston and photographs by Edward Weston describing the travels they did while on the Guggenheim Foundationbetween 1937 and 1939.  The 96 plates in this book are evenly divided between natural scenes and human influenced landscapes, including a dead man and a stunning fully clothed seductive portrait of Charis.

Edward Weston, Vinyard, Clear Lake

While Weston appreciated the natural landscape, his images of farms, orchards, roads, and towns also reveal a respect for the designs that man places on the land.  His images offer hope that the earth might be beautiful even in places where there are people.

Weston also managed to make photographs that resonate on multiple levels.  One of my favorite images is “Tide Pool, Point Lobos, 1945″, an image that includes a dead floating pelican.

Edward Weston, Tide Pool, Point Lobos, 1945

When Weston made this image, he was approaching 60, and perhaps already beginning to feel the effects of Parkinson’s that would eventually force him to stop photographing and then kill him.  But this photograph is made with a calmness and clarity, an acceptance of death and beauty as both integral parts of the picture.

From Sunny Florida

Noted in passing—Clyde Butcher

I recently traveled to Florida with my family, a short stint in the sun, running from the darkness of Fairbanks in winter.  We flew into Miami, then traveled across the Everglades to visit Sanibel Island near Fort Myers.  One stop we made was at the Clyde Butcher Gallery, to look at the photographs there.  I had been familiar with Butcher’s work through a photo magazine article several years ago, but had never seen any of his original prints.  His gallery was filled with images of the Everglades—my favorites were of the Cyprus swamps—and noted that he is selling both silver prints and “gilcee” prints (aka ink jet images).

Clyde Butcher Loxahatchee River 14

I don’t think that Clyde Butcher is a great photographer—he borrows much too heavily from the past–he seems to encourage constant comparisons to Ansel Adams—but he also has taken influences from Atget and Edward Weston.  But there is no denying that his work resonates with a knowledge and love of the landscape of south Florida, and that his work has found an audience that appreciates his work.

The O’Sullivan Influence in my work

Before Timothy O’Sullivan, most easterners had no idea what the west looked like, and the overblown romantic paintings of Bierstadt and Catlin did little to help.  Part of what may have kept O’Sullivan honest was the fact that his employer, Clarence King, was a scientist, though the core of King’s theories based on cataclysmic events shaping geography have been largely discredited.   But the scientific nature of the work led to documentation of the ordinary as well as the beauty of the landscape, and his pictures, as a whole, feel more honest than many of those who came after him.

FingerMountain, Dalton Highway, June 1994

And while the expeditions that O’Sullivan worked on were difficult compared to my modern trips in my battered RV, I often find myself staring at mountains or rock formations that are strikingly beautiful, but not over photographed.   This land has not yet been adequately described, either by scientists or artists–and part of my job is to try to see this place as clearly as possible, and to make photographs that carry what I see.  Part of what makes O’Sullivan’s photographs so wonderful is the space that remains in the west–a space that remains in Alaska.

Pipeline, Near the Yukon River, 2005

Under the Influence #5–Timothy O’Sullivan

Timothy O’Sullivan was the first great photographer of the western landscape, but began his career as a cameraman for Mathew Brady, photographing the American Civil War.

Timothy O'Sullivan Tertiary Conglomerates, Weber Valley, Ut, 1869

Which is a dramatic photograph, well seen, but only a few years before, O’Sullivan made a similar composition

Ruins of Richmond

And his use of figures in the landscape

Timothy O'Sullivan, Hot Sulphur Springs, Nevada, 1869

which uses a figure of the same scale as a photo from a few years before

When Robert Adams wrote that early explorers considered the western space to be sublime, a redemptive landscape, he must have been referring to the experience of O’Sullivan, who saw (and smelled) the horror of the American Civil War.

For those of us born after Ansel, the western landscape conjures images of majestic pristine wilderness–but O’Sullivan is nearly a century older, with pictures full of silver mines and farms–he began photographing twenty years after gold was discovered in California, before Little Big Horn, but concurrent with the building of the transcontinental railroad.  Part of the success of O’Sullivan is due to his ability to travel into a bleak landscape and photograph, but then to get on the railroad back to civilization, to look at his photographs, in safety.  Another part was his use of the colloidal plate, that required exposure and development of the negative while wet, requiring the need for a portable darkroom, but providing the instant feedback of an image in the field.

Friedlander’s influence

In keeping with the spirit of the list of photographer’s that have influenced me, I’ve been thinking about Friedlander’s influence on my work.   It’s a bit of a tough call to point to any single photograph and call it an imitation Friedlander–his work is too diverse for simple copying.  It’s more in an attitude, a way of filling a frame, a way of telling the truth and a joke at the same time…

Thirty Below, College and Old Steese, February 2008

And here’s another image that I did and I know Friedlander would probably never do,  but if if I saw it with his name under it I wouldn’t be surprised, just trading licks, man, smashed, busted, and maybe beautiful…

Busted Birches, Fairbanks, 1992

Lee Friedlander–on the list at #4

Lee Friedlander makes my list of photographers worth paying attention to, even though his photographs are completely different than the others on the list.

Lee Friedlander, Lee Avenue, Butte, Montana, 1970

Many of Friedlander’s photographs are of scenes so banal that it seems impossible that anyone could make a photograph that could possibly hold our interest, but somehow he succeeds.  Many of the pictures are visual jokes, like the picture above, a self-deprecating play on his own name, can one imagine a worse street to live on?  He has published something on the order of 50 books, many of them self published, but a key to his work is in “American Musicians”, published in 1998, of work mostly done in the 1950s and 60s, photographs of musicians for album jackets, including many jazz greats, including some of my favorites,  Miles Davis and Stan Getz.  I think of a comment that a critic made about Stan Getz–”he blew smoke rings around god”–all those wonderful notes  in the smokey air–and it seems to me that Friedlander is doing the same thing in his photographs–they are jazz, full of phrases verging on chaos, but always somehow coming together, resolving perfectly, the band sharing a laugh at the end of the song.  I own many of Friedlander’s books (the ones I can afford), my favorites include “Letters from the People“, (amazingly still in print), the MOMA book (just out in paperback, cheap), and “Nudes” (astonishing mostly because the bodies actually look real…)

Lee Friedlander, Lake Louise, 2000

Friedlander has taken on a wide variety of subjects, and he has taken on the western landscape–Jeffery Fraenkel called the results “Ansel Adams on crack”.  And he did visit Alaska, with two images in his “Portraits“  book.

The List–Walker Evans

Continuing on with my list of influential photographers, Walker Evans is an obvious choice.  He has a style so simple and clean that it seems to claim to be no style at all, merely the simple truth.  I think of Robert Adam’s line that a sense of truth is the most sensuous of all the sensibilities–Walker Evans convinces us that he saw, and is showing us, the truth.

This image was made for the Farm Security Administration, and so is available through the Library of Congress–I managed to purchase an old contact print of this image, and it hangs in my home.

This image is published in a book called Walker Evans:  Photographs for the Farm Security Administration, 1935-1938, which shows all the Walker Evans images available from the Library of Congress.  There are a total of 488 images in this catalog, predominately done with an 8×10 view camera, although some of them were clearly done with a 35 mm camera.  There are variations in the quality of the images–not every picture succeeds as well as the one above–but the number of strong images is striking.  It is astonishing what can be accomplished in just a few images, when the camera is in the hands of someone like Walker Evans.

And, of course, Walker Evans never came to Fairbanks, but maybe he would have made an image like the one above, if he had.

Atget in Alaska

Eugene Atget never traveled to Alaska (and I’ve never been to Paris or France), so on one level it is impossible to directly imitate his work here.  But sometimes, when looking at an image I’ve made, I recognize how looking at his pictures has allowed me to see something in this landscape that I think I would have missed were it not for the gift of his pictures. Sometimes I’m even so inspired by him to digitally “tone” the images to something resembling the gold toned albumen prints he made…

Lake in Rain, Richardson Highway, 2004

Lake and Mountains, Tok Cut Off, 1994

The influence of Atget on my work include the selection of the 8×10 camera as the weapon of choice for my landscape work.  While this camera can be incredibly slow in the field, it allows (forces) contemplation during composition, and also rewards the effort with a robust, meaty image that carries the precision of the light.