![]() ![]() I will breathe and share this rare space for an hour. I should be accepting of everyone’s journey. I shouldn’t be critical of all the other cell phone photographers. Maybe the camera should be a witness or testimony of one’s own presence? My own history, Vermeer, my environment and the life around me, cell phone camera and all. Dial it back 400 years and the material actually came from the Amazon or mines in Asia or somehow the brutal labor of enslaved people in the new worlds that the Dutch were conquering.īut here I stand. We might think of ordering something from Amazon. The physical oil palette of the 17th century was not easily obtained. Perhaps the craft of painting, his act of creation, his legacy–was a side-hustle. Vermeer painted the elegant contemplative instants that have resonated through the centuries but what is excluded is his 14 children and his wife shouting “When will you ever come to dinner and can you do something to help with these kids rather than simply engage in their creation?” He had to spend a great deal of his time as an art dealer to put food on the table of this brood. Of the 37 surviving paintings (of a possible 60 that are speculated to have been actually created) 28 are now in Amsterdam. The world is so chaotic today, but perhaps it was as intimidating in 1640 with the promise, but violence of colonial expansion of everyday life? I can capture an instant of symmetry and solitude and the illusion that this world can be retained. The photograph is not only what is in the frame, equally it is what is omitted. What are you missing when you don’t look behind you? Challenge the norm, the historic, perhaps the photographer is the star of their own movie and art history is set decoration …. Working as an artist, the world is always viewed through a normal lens, but there is also the impetus to look at 180 degrees. By trying to not miss anything, you would miss everything. It was always about “being” rather than “doing.” Having a coffee or a wine at four was more important than making sure I saw it all. The more I traveled–decades as a photographer, the more I learned about myself as well as the world. The painting a woman gazes out the window…out of the frame of the painting while the cell phone captures (and color corrects) the photographer in the foreground 400 years later. Those decades past-images were printed, not posted, not shared.Īn earlier photographer Cartier Bresson described this instant as the “decisive moment.” The contemporary museum goer uses the time to capture the image on a cell phone and then turns and takes a selfie– capturing themselves with the woman with a water jug…perfection of atmospheric Dutch Renaissance–window light streaming in from the left. It still is the only image of my own hanging on my wall at home. Pressing the shutter release was an act of pure faith.įorty years ago I stood in a dark, abandoned museum of natural history in Paris and opened a shutter for 16 minutes with a Hasselblad (camera) on a tripod and waited, and prayed. The image was something curated and precious. I grew up with a camera and existed in a world where the camera was a window into something special. ![]() But he still hoped to capture something unique, something memorable in his constant ballet movement of picture taking. The rolls represented 90,000 separate moments, frames, ideas. When he died, in 1984, he left 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film.įilm was the photosensitized support where images were “captured” and chemically processed. He shot two rolls of film walking from the Art Department to the UCEN for a cup of coffee. ![]()
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