Occurrence at Otter Cliffs

Otter Cliffs, Acadia Nationa Park, Maine 2007


This is a view from the southern end of the Ocean Path Trail in Acadia National Park, a trail that is quite easy walking. Walking along it is more like strolling down a sidewalk than taking a hike, though it is mostly paved with fine gravel, not concrete. But the ease of the path is the only similarity to a city sidewalk; few cities are sited in such spectacular places. Thankfully no city will ever spoil this shore.


When we went for a walk on the day I made this diptych, my husband was not feeling well, but he knew I really wanted to visit Acadia and go for a hike before going back to Boston. Lansing's back was causing him pain, a result of a ruptured disc two years before. We had been vacationing at the Wagner's  new summer house in Brooklin, Maine, and we had been sanding and varnishing the floors, which exacerbated his problems. I suggested a slow walk down the length of the Ocean Path might be something we could both do. As we went along I kept shooting pictures, composing my diptychs in camera. It was a beautiful day, so I knew at least one of them would work out well.


One of the themes I try to include in my work is the impact of humans on the environment, or at least how we interact with it. I see this everywhere in Maine. Sometimes the impact is subtle, a grassy hay field or blueberry crop is there because someone is cultivating that acreage. The buoys of lobster traps dot almost every bay, ringing the islands and peninsulas. Though a lot of my landscapes and seascapes don't have people in them, I do like it when I can include humans. 


When we got to Otter Cliffs, at the end of our walk, we saw several people rappelling and rock climbing. I first tried my 135mm lens, a short telephoto on the Bronica RF 645. Then I switched to the 45mm, a wide angle lens, which when used to make a diptych like this takes in 100 degrees. So this scene captures basically all of what I saw with both eyes including my peripheral vision. But it's more than just a snapshot of one moment, because as I had been making earlier pictures I had also been tracking the progress of a lobsterman's boat. They were slowly making their way northward, checking traps that were surprisingly close to the perilous cliffs, and they were about to come into the scene I was capturing. 


Before the boat arrived, I shot a picture of the cliffs and hikers, the left frame you see above. Here is a detail of that image. In some ways it doesn't really illustrate what they were doing there. The people actually climbing the cliffs were on the far side, out of the sightline of my camera, so only the people on tip show up.

After having made the photo that would be the left half of the composition, I had to wait patiently for the boat. When it got to where I wanted it I released the shutter. I didn't know how lucky I was to have pressed the button when I did. As you can see in the detail, one of the men on the boat, the guy who had been pulling up the traps and taking out the lobsters, had just thrown a trap back into the sea, with a nice splash recorded onto film. I could not have been much happier with these two negatives, and so far this is the best selling diptych I have made. While it looks good even printed small on an 8x10" sheet of paper, it's truly impressive when the print is enlarged more, and I have a few prints on 20x30" and 20x24" that show how medium format film captures details that 35mm pictures just can't deliver.

Kiyochika: Samurai to Artist

Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847-1915) was one of the most interesting artists in Japan in the 19th century. Though he became famous as an ukiyo-e woodblock print designer, Kiyochika was born into a Samurai family, and his father oversaw one of the Tokugawa Shogunate's rice warehouses in Edo (now Tokyo). But from a young age he was always interested in drawing and painting with a brush more than the way of the sword. Though he did take up a  musket for the last shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, against the forces of the Emperor Meiji, he was apparently not a great soldier. After the victory of the Imperial forces Kiyochika became unemployed: in the new order the samurai lost their status. Japan changed rapidly under the new Emperor, who was intent on modernizing the country, so that it could defend itself against the more technologically advanced Americans and Europeans.

Kiyochika tried to eek out a living with a traveling group of former samurai demonstrating the discipline of kendo  (swordsmanship) for entertainment, but failed in this too. Then he turned to face the new and became a professional artist. His early prints were strikingly in tune with the changes in society, showing the modernization of the new capitol city of Tokyo. Many of these explored artificial lighting at night, as well as new and old buildings around the city. His prints employed large areas of darkly inked night sky and dark ground with reflections and shadows portrayed in a way no Japanese artist ever had done before. A great example is the print Kudan Hill on an Early Summer Night, 1880. In this work Kiyochika tries to show light and shadow in a scientific way, and this results in something that was quite a bit more realistic than most printmakers of the ukiyo-e tradition had done, with the exception of Hokusai's phase of designing accurate shaded perspective cityscapes.

Much later in the 19th century Japan went to war with China for control over the Korean Peninsula, and Kiyochika went into a second prolific period that included some very novel work. He began designing large senso-e print triptychs that were something of a combination of news illustration, propaganda for Japan and an affordable, collectable art. Lansing and I first saw some war triptychs by Kiyochika and other artists at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston a few years ago. And though I find war a great obscenity, there was no denying that I really found them visually compelling. Later on I went on to buy an 1894 Kiyochika triptych of the Naval Battle Near Phungdo, which he set at night, going back to his successful early style in a larger way.

But for the photographer, one of Kiyochika's most interesting print designs is his triptych of a photographer and his assistant photographing a battle in 1895, called, 18 Illustration of Photographing Our Troops Fighting the Fortress-Town Nuizhuang. It is ironic to see a news image made in the old medium of woodblock printing showing the modern medium of photography, which would soon come to replace that old form as the dominant form of printed news illustration.  

If you want to see more of Kiyochika's works, or find out more about the artist, here are some links:

Mini Biography on Artelino:
 http://www.artelino.com/articles/kiyochika_kobayashi.asp

Kiyochika War Prints on Artelino:
 http://www.artelino.com/articles/kiyochika-kobayashi-war-prints.asp

MIT - Kiyochika's War:
 http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/throwing_off_asia_02/toa_essay02.html

And there's a very well illustrated biographical book By Henry Dewitt Smith, Kiyochika, Artist of Meiji Japan,  Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California , 1988. It's out of print but available used or in a good art library.

Life at the Beach

This is one of my favorite diptychs of those that I recently printed. Actually, I took it last year in August or September 2008, but I did not think much of it when i first saw the contact sheet. It's sloppy compared to my usual ones, having been shot handheld. At the time I was trying to be more careful. For most of my 2008 shots I was using a nice wood tripod with geared head, keeping the horizon flat and swinging the camera a precise number of degrees to avoid overlap between frames.

But I left the tripod behind when my husband Lansing and I went to the beach in East Blue Hill with his sisters Heather and Nugget, and Heather's daughters. I took my Bronica RF645 and 65mm lens just in case. It turned out to be a bit too cool for me for swimming that day, so I took some pictures while the family hung out on the beach. I think Nugget did take a plunge, as she doesn't mind cool water.

This shot has a lot of elements I like in it. There's my husband and sisters in law at the far right, the dog in the left frame, the other beach-goers, the colorful beach gear and clothes speckled about here and there, the rocks, the sea the islands fuzzed out by light fog. The crazy horizon doesn't bother me as much now, it makes me think of how Andre Kertesz didn't seem to care about tilting the camera and yet his photos are all the more interesting because of the diagonals he created. I'm sure he was more deliberate, less haphazard than my shooting that day, but the same energy seems to liven up my image.

Lansing and I got to really enjoy Curtis Cove Beach this August. Now that we have a house in East Blue Hill village, the beach is less than a ten minute walk. We spent a lot of time painting the inside of the house, on some of the hottest days of the year, and the beach was a great relief. The water there is quite comfortable on a hot sunny day, as the tide comes in over the shallow sand, but cool enough to be like instant air conditioning if you are overheated. Hermit crabs and Green crabs skiddle around underwater on the sand, and schools of minnows come streaming by. If you walk or swim out a bit from the water's edge, you can still touch down on the bottom and watch osprey and gulls fly overhead,and if you look to the East you see the mountains of Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island.

So perhaps my greater love of this beach makes me see more in the diptych above than is really there. Perhaps I am being sentimental in presenting it, when it deserves less attention than other land and seascapes I've done recently. But I still like it. I'm going to hang a 20x24" print of it in my new office in the B1 basement of Harvard's Northwest Sciences labs. It will help keep me sane, knowing I'll go back there soon.

The Rinpa School and Photography

In 2007, I took a class with Tanya Ferretto Steel at Harvard University in the Extension School, which covered the History of Japanese Art from 1600 to the Present. A bit into the class I had a little epiphany about my photography that led me to the work I am doing now. I realized I could use my Bronica 645 camera, which makes vertical negatives on film to make diptychs, two adjacent negatives I could print onto one piece of paper, using a 4x5" carrier. This is good old fashioned optical printing from film onto Type C Paper, a process I have loved since college. So I began shooting often combining shots that were taken side by side, mostly landscapes, cityscapes and seaside photos.

I continue to be inspired by Japanese Art, and love looking at images of paintings and prints. One of my favorite works shown In Dr. Steel's class was Sakai Hōitsu's pair of painted screens, Grasses and Flowers in Spring and Fall, made some time in the Edo Period (1600-1868) and now in the Tōkyō National Museum. Some day I would like to go see the original paintings. This is an amazing work, as Hoitsu painted the picture over silver leaf, using sumi ink and colors he probably miked for himself using precious materials like lapis lazuli for the blue of the water in the upper right. Hoitsu worked in what is now known as the Rinpa Style, which emphasized bold color instead of the heavy black lines of other Japanese Art at the time. Besides being a lovely study of native plants, this painting is also allegorical. It was painted to hang on the back of another earlier famous painting by Ogata Korin of the Buddhist Wind and Thunder gods Fujin and Raijin, which was a copy of a previous work By Tawaraya Sotatsu. The wind in the plants and the rivulet of water allude to a passing thunderstorm. Also fascinating is that these artists knew each other only through seeing the works of each previous master, usually after death. So the Rinpa Style was not formally handed down directly from master to student, like the official government sponsored Kano School.

It might be cheeky to say so, but I guess my current work is a continuation of the Rinpa tradition, translated to a new country and the new(ish) medium of color photography. And like the other Rinpa artists, I learn not by studying with teacher and adopting his school, but by seeing the works of those old masters, long dead.