Sunshine and Noir

I ran into Thomas Michael Alleman's work Sunshine and Noir a year or two ago.  At first it struck me as an interesting way to view Los Angeles, of course this was while I was in London where any free beautiful day is spent outside in a park or soaking up the necessary Vitamin D in some way in order to make it through winter.

Now here it is another beautiful morning in Los Angeles, in early-February mind you, and I will take a walk in the park next to my house.  Maybe I will grab a coffee down on Sunset in between scanning negatives and making preparations for another shoot and all I will need is a T-shirt.

© Thomas Michael Alleman

I'm saying this because you get stuck into place sometimes.  Familiarity works against us most of the time, at least as photographers.  Thankfully I ran into Mr. Alleman's work again this morning during my usual waste-of-time mode.

Now that LA is familiar again, the work struck me in a totally different way.  It was absolutely gorgeous.  To look at the the harsh sun in LA with a Holga and grainy black in white is liberating.  It allows for that familiarity to be set aside for a moment and view the world with completely different eyes.

© Michael Thomas Alleman

It is similar to what music can do to us as well.  I know that is a tangent but hear me out...

For years I listened to Pink Floyd and I liked them-a lot.  But it wasn't until I listened to them when I first moved to London that I got it.  I understood instantly where the music was coming from.  In this respect I feel that I needed the proximity of LA to fully realize and digest Sunshine and Noir just as I needed a cold, wet, dripping bus stop to fully get what Roger Water, David Gilmour and the gang were trying to do.  What Alleman has done is almost the reverse of what Pink Floyd did for London, or should I say, what London did to Pink Floyd.  Sunshine and Noir flipped the sunshine of LA on it's head.  This along with the proximity of living here allows us to see the place with new eyes.

Anyway, thanks Thomas for allowing me to see LA in a different light.

Gohlke: Thoughts on Landscape

I'm always looking for a good read, especially on landscape.  I found this on a website today that has a collection of artist statements, essays and readings.  Gohlke was one of the artists associated with the New Topographics show in 1975 and the photograph below was taken after that show but I distinctly remember the tornando that caused the damage in the photographs below.  What he writes below is a great take on landscape and I'm buying his Thoughts on Landscape: Collected Writings and Interviews right now...

Aftermath: The Wichita Falls, Texas, Tornado No. 10A and 10B - Maplewood Avenue, near Sikes Senter Mall, looking east, 1979/1980.

Affection for the land runs deep in us, and its manifestations—from the garden plot to the national parks—encompass a vast range of human actions and choices. At what point in the history of our species, I wonder, did the watchful, anxious regard for our surroundings, on which survival depended, begin to modulate toward love of a particular place? There must be an Other before there can be love; Eden becomes the object of our desire only after we are cast out. The best landscape images, whatever their medium and whatever other emotions they may evoke, are predicated on that loss. They propose the possibility of an intimate connection with a world to which we have access only through our eyes, a promise containing its own denial. In the case of landscape photographs, the paradox is sharpened because the world represented must have existed for the picture to be made, and yet the existence of the photograph attests undeniably to that world’s disappearance.

Culture creates a gulf between people and the world they inhabit. Some human groups experience this rupture as a problem and expend enormous amounts of energy in their attempts to heal it. Americans have been noticeably divided on the necessity, even the desirability, of a harmonious relationship with the natural world; but when we do attempt to establish a connection with larger realities, photographs of unspoiled Nature frequently play a central, almost devotional role. It is an odd choice of tools: the making of a photograph presupposes distance, which accounts, I think, for the elegiac tone, the note of longing that suffuses so many of the finest landscape photographs. I admire those pictures most that acknowledge our predicament without causing us to lose heart, just as I am most touched by those places where damage and grace are inextricably entangled. Photographs bear witness to the facts, be they visible or existential, and it is a fact that our relationship with the natural world is a troubled one that can never be otherwise under the present cultural dispensation.

The photographs in this selection witness to many different sorts of facts, but first of all to the fact that I was moved in very particular ways by what I was seeing at the time. As different as these places are from one another, they have at least one thing in common: being there made my pulse speed up, and the making of a picture seemed the only appropriate response. I don’t always love the places I photograph, in the sense that I love places that we associate with outdoor pleasures. But the particularities of things never fail to draw me in. For a moment all my vagrant impulses are gathered together, and whatever sense I can make of the experience is crystallized in the photograph.

Approached attentively, any place may persuade us to linger in an attempt to locate the source of its attraction. What we discover often comes to us in the form of a story. Landscapes are collections of stories, only fragments of which are visible at any one time. In linking the fragments, unearthing the connections among them, we create the landscape anew. A landscape whose story is known is harder to dismiss, harder to treat like a neutral matrix of interchangeable parts. For all the obvious, vast differences between ourselves and the aboriginal walker, singing the world into existence at every moment, there is still some sense of kinship. At its best, telling the landscape’s story can still feel like a sacred task.

Traffic

No, I'm not talking about the traffic you think of when it comes to Los Angeles.  I'm talking about web traffic to my website which saw a considerable jump thanks to several blogs that posted some of my work the past couple weeks.

Just after Thanksgiving I popped into to reconfigure this blog and begin new entries here as opposed to my wordpress site.  In doing so I noticed a bit of traffic coming from some German blogs.

This one, http://www.crackajack.de, posted info first I believe.  You can read the article here, but don't forget to translate if you need to.

Although, it is possible that BldgBlog was the first to carry the work.  Most of the other traffic actually attributes BldgBlog as their source.  You can find the article here.

Of all the articles, I really appreciated the way that Chris Tackett at TreeHugger.com framed the work with his writing. 

"As an American and a fan of hiking and camping, the idea of being fearful to walk into nature because of landmines is foreign and depressing. Camping here in the Ozarks, Colorado or Northern California, I've grown used to being playfully cautious about snakes, cougars or bears, but with a wild animal, one at least has the chance to fight back. Landmines offer no such warning. It is this designed ability to kill indiscriminately that has led most of the world to agree to a ban."  --Chris Tackett

I felt the exact same way when I first began researching the idea and the project.  I came at the project, first and foremost as an avid hiker and backpacker, and this idea of nature being forbidden by way of man's intervention is what intrigued me so much.  

Chris, I'm really happy you got it and read it on the same level as I did originially.  I'm happy that the project continues to make the rounds and show up on various blogs around the world to remind ourselves of how much work we have to do to rid the world of this problem.

Here is a sampling of a few more blogs the work has since showed up on in the past couple weeks.

http://www.vice.com/read/brett-van-ort-s-landmine-scapes

http://www.disinfo.com/2011/11/the-beauty-of-minefield-landscapes/

http://majorkoenig.blogspot.com/2011/11/minescape.html

http://pijamasurf.com/2011/11/los-bosques-de-minas-terrestres-en-bosnia-la-peligrosa-estetica-feral-de-la-posguerra/

http://motherboard.tv/2011/11/29/landscapes-to-take-your-breath-away-and-your-legs

http://www.vice.com/de/read/landschaften-die-beine-zerfetzen

http://blogdoturismo.folha.blog.uol.com.br/arch2011-11-27_2011-12-03.html

Occupy L.A. Sky

So the police have assembled at Dodger Stadium and the suspected crackdown on Occupy L.A. seems imminent.  As I live nearby to the stadium and downtown the helicopter traffic has been intense the last few hours.  Time to go out and do some shooting I felt.

I've been waiting for this to happen sadly enough.  I knew it would and I knew what I wanted to do when it did happen.  

There is no denying that this city is an incredible place and the vantage points only heighten its beauty, especially on a clear night like tonight.

However. underneath the tranquil scene, the end of the Occupy movement, at least in its first incarnation seems to be ending.

Been a while...

Lots has changed since my last entry.  New place, well, an old place...I'm back in Los Angeles for a while and I've picked up where I left off here.

I went out to Santa Clarita last week and did some more work for Sprawl.

I was away for three years and I thought the Santa Clarita subdivision I was documenting would have been completed.  I have to be honest and say that I visited last Christmas but it was only for a day and I really couldn't see if anything had changed.

Building has dwindeled to only three or four houses at a time now.  And the cul-de-sac where I did most of my work still has yet to see a structure erected.  The grass you see in the foreground had taken hold again and the only thing seperating the fields were the roads and street lights that were layed out more than 5 years ago.  

Strange that the economic crisis has been a boon for the field mice in the neighborhood, huh?