Desire

Siddhartha, who became the Buddha, made his final breakthrough to enlightenment after many days and nights sitting under the Bodhi tree, rooted there in determination to reach the end of his quest.

His final obstacle was a confrontation with Mara, the demon of desire. After he faced down Mara, invoking the earth as his witness, he achieved enlightenment and became the Buddha.

What is most interesting about this story is not the wrong objects of desire that were paraded before Siddhartha in this final "temptation" but the fact that the story casts desire itself in the central role of tempter.

The notion that desire, the very "act" of wanting something or somebody, is at the heart of the problem is a new one to me, until I think about what has been happening on the frontiers of biological research into the brain. Then it makes sense.

Neurobiological research is doing a lot to make clear the psychobiology of desire. This work suggests that desire is a universally addictive response. The same circuitry seems to be involved with cocaine, sex, chocolate, flowers........anything that gives us pleasure. The brain circuits involved do a very effective job of creating an anticipation of pleasure which itself becomes a drive that is hard to resist.

This seems to be a neurobiological definition of desire.

If it is the desire itself that we have to manage then we have some clue about what might be the answer. I mean, how do we manage this desire? I think the answer is patience.

Whatever the desire is, whether it be money, or sex, or chocolate, or paper clips, it is the uncontrolled compulsion to satisfy that desire that will destroy us.

If this is true we do not need to make an analysis of whether sex is more important than paper clips. If the need to have paper clips NOW causes us to act heedless of our other commitments and obligations and needs, we will destroy ourselves and others.

What we need is time to understand how the need for those paper clips fits in with everything else and how we might stay alive, keep others alive, and get some paper clips too.

Surely patience is needed.

Returning to Siddhartha, he emerged from his stay under the Bodhi Tree with great insight into the nature of the universe and everything in it. He developed a set of moral precepts to guide anyone else seeking this path. I understand them to be a simple way of turning something not good into something good.

where there is greed, let me be generous.

where there is ignorance, let me be wise.

where there is anger, let me have compassion.

....to these, I would add.

where there is desire, let me be patient.

(credits: the story of Siddhartha is drawn from a WGBH production on the life of the Buddha; the summary of neurobiological research comes from a recent Charley Rose production on the brain; the answer came from across the ocean.)

My Bodhi Tree

Sometimes we all have to pull back and look inside of ourselves in order to be true to anyone and to everyone. We all know this, and we all know how hard it is to do. So when someone takes that decisive step, it is clear that we must support them and it is also clear that we must thank them. Only when someone is not there does it become more clear how wonderful it is when they are.

This is an image and a message of thanks but it is not in fact dedicated to anyone, it is dedicated to everyone. It is dedicated to everyone because this need to withdraw and seek ourselves is a universal need, and it is dedicated to everyone because everyone and everything is connected.

This is my cedar tree on Patuisset. Of course it is not my tree, it is everyone's tree. it is the tree of all those wonderful people in this little paradise and it is connected to trees everywhere. It is connected to my grandfather's cedar a few miles north; it is connected to a cypress tree in Crespellano; it is connected to a Bodhi tree in India. it is connected to countless trees that I do not know.

I personally discovered that here, at this tree, I could touch the ground and ask it to bear witness to my own quest, and with Sile's help I found the technique to both touch the ground and reach for the sky in one image.

I put this tree here as a sign of thanks and as a return to the universe that bore it and me. The file is there. Anyone anywhere is welcome to do anything with it.

I, personally, will be here, touching the ground and asking it to bear witness to what is good, and searching the sky for dreams to dream.

Thank you.

Suffering

Girl with Mangoes, 1971

It is not a fun theme to explore, but it seems to me that suffering can produce great art. Without making any larger claims for this image, I know that I like it, and I know that on the day I took this picture, I was suffering greatly.

Here are a few more images that are connected to times of great pain, uncertainty or disorientation, where it seems clear to me that the act of making the image was part of a process of seeking a solution, of expression, or even of healing.

Bicycle at Rest, Florence, 1978

Knotting a Persian Rug, Khorasan, 1978

The Caregiver, Quissett, 2010

Documentation is an Illusion

In earlier posts I have discussed the burden of expectations that photography operates under because of its role as "documentation". Then my argument was that although the vast majority of photographs operate as documents, e.g. in newspapers, that there are many other roles for photographs, e.g. as an expression of creative imagination, and that there is no reason to believe that the rules for documentation applied to all photographs.

Now I think that the argument needs to go beyond this. I think the word document/documentary is suspect at its core, and is so much at risk for misuse or misunderstanding that it needs to be abandoned completely.

There are no "documents", no true records of "how it really was". Every photograph is a personal intervention, first by selection of space (framing), then by selection of time (release shutter). These choices, if made by people, have a message, a reaction that is expected from the viewer.

I grant that the intent may be to inform rather than to incite. I would prefer to use the word "report" when this is the aim rather than "document". If my aim is to inform you then I should follow methods and standards fit for that purpose. If my aim is to share a fantasy with you then there are no bounds.

I see on the New York Times web page an invitation to "Help us Document the decade". This is perverse. Why not just "Help us Remember the decade". Using the word "document" invites us to participate in an attempt at objectivity that is unnecessary and doomed.

Why not just acknowledge that this effort, worthy as it most likely is, is going to be a subjective personal effort of intersections between people and what happened mediated by a camera.

Because they will appear in a newspaper, it would be perfectly reasonable to request, or stipulate, and make a further request that the style of the photographs be "realistic" as in no further creative intervention beyond the "taking" of the photograph.

I think this would be better statement of what is the undertaking here, and a pretty worthy one at that.

Cranberry Harvest

For more than a month I was able to follow the cranberry harvest in Bourne, Falmouth and Wareham. For the most part I was following the harvest team of Handy Cranberry Trust.

There was the dry harvest in Cataumet and the wet harvest in Cataumet, Falmouth and North Falmouth.

The wet harvest is probably familiar. The bogs are flooded, the berries dislodged and a sea of red surfaces. The harvesters move deliberately and gracefully through the water. Are they walking ON water? No but they are walking IN water, and there is a total and special grace to their movements.

Part of that grace comes from the riot of red they move in. The red of the floating berries is so intense that one becomes addicted. More red, more red. But the work is going in the opposite direction. Slowly the red vanishes, sucked up the tubes and spilled into the truck. The blue pools remain, but they too will disappear when the bogs are drained.

How does one move through this watery terrain? The threshing machines plod, but they appear to float. The illusion would be rudely undone should they stumble on a drainage ditch, so a Moses marks the way with his staff, showing the way through the red sea with his staff, and guiding the submarine threshers to safety.

There is a less romantic but equally interesting dry harvest. But here there is no watery solution to the problem of gravity.....how to get the berries without crushing them. The only solution is to tread carefully and from the outside in.

There is one other cool move for getting the berries from lowland to highland, and that is to airlift them.

The Art of Photography: Principles and Observations

On Starting another course at the Falmouth Artists Guild I thought it might be useful to set down some principles and observations.

1. This is about photography as an art form.

2. Art is a shared fantasy.

3. Realism is only one of the aesthetics available to the photographer.

4. The first rule of composition is "find great light". All other rules of composition are there to be broken; I don't think this one can be.

5. It's not that important what kind of camera you have, but it is important to know what it is doing.

6. Pixels are precious; know the count !

Photography as an Art Form

Last week I talked at Highfield Hall about Photography as an Art Form.  I may be able to write more but there are a number of simple propositions that are the core of what I want to say.

1.  Photorealism is as much an aesthetic in photography as it is in painting.

2. Although photography is a useful tool if one's objective is documentation, there is no reason that a photograph has to be a document.

3.  If you are in an art gallery, you should be expecting a work of creative imagination, not a document.

4.  The f64 group made a big mistake for photography by defining themselves by technique rather than by aesthetic objective.  Since then photography has been trapped by expectations of fstops and megapixels.

5.  An acquired image is a plastic form, not a fixed form.

6.  My relation with the forest is more important than the fine detail of its trees, leaves, and twigs.

7.  Art is a shared fantasy.

8.  The usage "artists and photographers" needs to be retired; so does the classification in bookstores, "art" in one section "photography" in another.

Parallel Universes: Photography Show at Falmouth Art Center has many dimensions

(this review submitted to Falmouth Enterprise and Cape Cod Times June 8, 2009)

It is a privilege to review the Photography Show at the Falmouth Arts Center.  There is a lot going on here with this first juried show in the wonderful new home of the Falmouth Artists Guild and there is much to see in this extraordinary new building, culmination of so many efforts over the last few years.

In the show there is a set of prize-winning photographs exhibiting some great photographic technique.  A full list of this work is below.  Congratulations to the winners.

What I found as I looked at all the show's images, assembled by juror Marion Roth, was that there was a set of pictures that drew me in, that got me excited and made me think....or dream.....or feel.  I want to write a few words about these, because this is what art is all about, a sharing of feelings and fantasies and notions through a medium.  That medium might be oil on board, dots of ink on paper, or marble on a pedestal.  Not much by themselves but improbably alive and transmissive after a human hand, and heart and mind have worked on them.

First is Jean Adelman's "Sunday Squall", a view from the shore of a looming storm.  Everything in this small work makes us feel the impending threat -- a darkly silhouetted house, brilliant eelgrass in the foreground set against the steel gray depths of the looming cloud, and under it, tiny and threatened, the wake of a boat making for the safety of the shore with all haste.  Beachgoers sit calmly in their chairs seemingly oblivious to the threat, although one curious pair seems to be aware of its approach.

Deborah Casso's "Lone Lily Pad" stopped me in my tracks.  After you get done asking yourself..."now how did she do that?", you continue to marvel at the two realms of fluidity, the ghostly tuber ascending in a sinuous curve from the depths and the forthright platform floating on liquid you know is there but cannot see....definite, crisp and precarious.  Is this risk? Or reassurance?  For me, this is the riveting work of the show.

Howard Dunn in "Avila, Spain" gives us a classic set of three Spanish ladies chatting in a village that seems far, far away.  Douglas Greetham and David Kelly give us bright spring flowers in "A Celebration" and "Breezy Day".  You can feel that Spring is bursting outside the building.

Barbara Groom's "Power" plays with shapes and gives us a bright and clear visual pun constructed of a cross and crosspieces.  Darlene Heard's "Crystal Sea" reminds us that there are other places besides the Cape to escape on a boat in beautiful water.  Andrew Howard's "New Silver Beach, Winter" is both chilling and breathtaking. 

Joel Leavitt makes a moody fogbound scene on Nantucket and Lillian Holmes shows "Maurie" a simple but poignant family portrait.

 Ruth Leech makes us feel the emptiness of a deserted house and Alicia Petitti's moody mysterious moonrise over a cotton candy sea in "Lucy Vincent Beacon" intrigues and makes one feel safe on land.

Finally Milt Williamson's "Help with the Flag" is a classic flag picture which excels in the depth of its colors, the play of light and the fluidity of its composition.  You feel that the group of children that is folding up the flag is one with it.

I have one suggestion for my fellow photographers, which is to say more about the materials, the medium, we are using.  The labels for the show make for a monotonous repetition of "photograph" as the medium.  Only one label says anything more.  I urge everyone to take the trouble to list more specifics, such as "C-print", "Silver gelatin print", "Archival inkjet print",  "ink on paper", "ink on canvas".  A show of paintings would have more specifics on the label such as "oil on canvas", "acrylic" and so forth.  I think this is particularly called for these days, as there has been an explosion in the last ten years of materials with which photographers can present their work.  "Oil on Canvas" made a revolution in Leonardo's time, and digital print techniques are making a revolution in ours.  Let's say more about what's going on.

Prize-Winners:  Juror's Choice: Kathleen Hall, "Reflections of Motif #1"; Best Color: Doreen Sykes, "Tree at Ruins"; Best Black and White: Mark Chester, "Chauffers"; Best Creative Study: Jeannine Lavoie, "Reflections"; Best Special Technique: Robert Manz, "I Cipressini"; Honorable Mentions: Ben Allsup, "Nutcracker"; James Lynch, "Canal Sinking"; Joan Pearlman: "Double Focus #3".

Robert Manz is a fine art photographer working in natural light.  He is a member of the Falmouth Artists Guild.  His work can be seen at Jan Collins Selman Fine Art in Falmouth, at the Cataumet Arts Center, and at his studio in Pocasset.

New Studio

In January I decided to buy a studio space in the town of Bourne on Cape Cod.  It is off MacArthur Boulevard (Route 28) near the village of Pocasset.

This is a pretty big step, as my studio has been our condo.  But the condo has sort of filled up with frames and mat board and foam core and pictures.  The computer and printers are in our bedroom, and my stepdaughter's bedroom fills up with prints just varnished.

The real reason I bought the space is that when I saw it, it spoke to me.  I just knew this would make a good studio.  It has big picture windows with a north view, a good front space for an office/reception and a huge back space for work tables.  One corner in the back space, near the pair of windows, should make a good corner for doing portraits.   Around both rooms there is plenty of wall space to put up pictures for a gallery.

The location on Route 28 pretty much means that anyone from Bourne to Woods Hole to Martha's Vineyard drives past.  And, for the time being, that is the community I hope to serve.

Buzzards Bay, the Canal, Gray Gables, Mashpee, Back River, Monument Beach, Tobey Island, Monk's Cove, Pocasset, Hen Cove, Patuisset, Cataumet, Squeteague, Megansett, Old Silver, Chapoquoit, Black Beach, Sippewissett, Wood Neck, Quissett, Woods Hole, Naushon, Robinson's Hole, Pasque, Quicks' Hole, Nashawena, Cuttyhunk, Menemsha.  I have been up and down the Buzzards Bay east shore since before I can remember and gone a bit beyond to the Vineyard -- I hope to do more.  

And I hope that my sign on the road will reach out to anyone with some part of their life in these places along the Bay shore, and you will stop in and see what I have to share.

Here are some pictures of the studio space before I move in.

Beach Day at Chapoquoit

"Beach Scene"

My Cape pictures go largely in a one-year cycle.  During the summer I am doing lots of shooting of seascapes and beach scenes and during the winter I am working on the files and making prints.  So the pictures I will be introducing in 2008 were largely taken in 2007.

Last summer I introduced a picture from Chapoquoit beach, slightly abstracted, with people, and with a broad view of, over and past Bowerman's beach club.  It is taken from the angle of the rock bulwarks that support the parking lot overlooking the beach.  I made a large varnished ink on paper print - 20x30 - mounted on canvas and framed and it sold to a man who lived just a few hundred yards away.

"Two Red Chairs"

This had been taken early in 2006, so in the summer of 2007 I set out to take more from this perch, and other points along the beach.  My goal was to work on something between a landscape and a street scene.....people on and along the beach and in the water.  Sunning, playing, talking, running, reading.  The visual elements included form and gesture, the sand, the sky, the sea, the vast distance you can see down Black Beach to Sippewissett, beyond to Woods Hole and out to the Elizabeth Islands.

I was conscious of the danger of prying, intruding, exposing.  I don't feel too concerned as I feel that my vantage is a respectful and celebratory one.  The beach teems with people in their summer rituals, and I only want to celebrate them.

"High Tide"

Here are a few of the images from this work.  I would like to do some kind of community show of these.  I am thinking also of making a calendar or some other print publication of the images.

There are many more and they can be seen at www.robertmanz.net under "latest work" in the "images" section.

"Father and Daughter"

Lifeguard at Chapoquoit

and a while

We are living in Ireland this year and there have been many steps to get here. It is strange to feel culture shock in a country where everyone speaks English; of course it is not just about language. And balancing the sense of things that ought to be familiar but are strange, are threads of memories from an Irish American childhood now connecting to their source.

My approach to pictures is the same, wander in the neighborhood, in our case Counties Galway and Mayo, around Castlebar.

Below, and on the home page of my web site for the time being, is one from northern County Galway that I like, from a volcanic crater lake called Lough Nafooey. A respected critic back in the U.S. thinks the skiff engaged head on in the picture is "too small". Is it? A positive way to put it is "minimalist". I like this description. The skiff is there; you know it. You know it is resting. The skiff to the right is only barely there, but you feel its presence too.



But I think this picture is about the lake, which stretches from the strangely sandy shore in such a gliding way that you feel you could just walk out on the water. To go more for that feeling, I think I will try some more with the skiffs even smaller. It is a magical place and I am making more trips there.

Since I last posted I have settled more comfortably into a mode of slightly abstracting using Photoshop tools. My aim at the moment is to achieve the effect at a level where it is not very noticeable. Is it here?

A set of images from Counties Mayo and Galway is available here.

Been a while

Yes it's been a while. I have been through March on the Cape and back to Budapest for April and May. Went to County Mayo, Ireland in April, and down to Tuscany in May for my annual pilgrimage to Florence. Only this time I decided to see what was the wonderful landscape of Val d'Orcia south of Siena all about. I have seen many beautiful images from here, and beautiful landscapes in "The English Patient" and "Gladiator" (Maximus' home) were set here.

I went, and extended my stay, so that this year's annual trip to Florence was really a trip to the Val d'Orcia. Did get to Florence though, and the highlight there was spending a day standing in the Uffizi arcade with the water color painters and the morocchini selling art prints and knockoff handbags, trying to sell some of my prints. Many compliments, no sales, lots of fun.

The Val d'Orcia was beautiful but gave me a strange feeling of taking pictures of what I have seen pictures of....not a very creative feeling. One day I saw a photo tour bus of photographers working on the famous stand of cypresses at Torrenieri. Their van had pulled off the highway that runs right past the spot, and I hope they did well, but it sort of reinforced the feeling of wondering where was my personal experience of this beautiful landscape.

I think it is emerging as I work through the images. Here are two from the day the sun really came out, the clouds blustered in spectacular fashion and I wandered wonderfully through the lands of San Giovanni d'Asso, as I moved from Montalcino to Pienza, by a very roundabout route.



I call the first one, "To Camprena" because just up the road and to the left is the turn to the monastery of Santa Anna in Camprena, which was the setting of "The English Patient" and some opening scenes of the movie were along this road I am sure.




The second one, "I Cipressini" is a revisit of the abstract look I started working on last winter. I like it, and am applying it to many of the Val d'Orcia pictures.

More images from the Val d'Orcia can be seen here

Culture Shock

Crossing the Atlantic went smoothly and jet lag has not been so bad. Culture shock at a fairly low level too.

It's a strange thing changing spots every two months. There are a lot of old habits to resume. For example I haven"t driven a car for two months, not a big deal, but the timing is off. I am not used to a swirl of vehicles going at 60 miles per hour. Have to think about it. And everyone is speaking English. Strange that that should be strange.

I have resumed work with color spaces. I have a lot to learn. And am worried each step of the way that I might lose my bearings. In Budapest I calibrated the monitor and put up all the images on this blog using recommended practice of embedding sRGB color space. Then I came back to the Cape, calibrated my monitor here, and found that all the newly done images with sRGB space embedded looked hypersaturated and contrasty. On the other hand, images put up in the past with no calibrated monitor and no embedded color space, look just fine. But I am getting used to the recalibrated monitor, am getting some idea of what the files do and where they go, and feel comfortable with all of my past files. They seem to be in the right color world.

Made my first print of the abstract winter bog image -- below.





An 8x12 inch on William Turner paper from Hahnemuehle. It has some texture, which goes well with the abstraction. Am looking forward to varnishing it.

From Budapest to Cape Cod

I will be heading back to Cape Cod tomorrow, after almost two months in Budapest. It has been a quiet midwinter time, doing some scans, thinking about what images to print, experimenting with this blog, and enjoying family.

Have been doing some looking into Val d'Orcia, which seems to be the site of iconic Tuscan landscapes, at least the gently rolling kind, and wondering whether to include it on my Spring trip to Florence. Might be easy to fly to Rome, rent a car there and drive up to Florence. Only problem is, I might never make it to Florence, this countryside is so beautiful.

The "season" will be starting on Cape Cod, and back in my studio, will be working on lots of prints for stores and galleries. I am excited to begin an affiliation with the Jan Collins Selman Fine Art Gallery. Jan is someone whose work and person I have a lot of respect and enthusiasm for, so I hope this will be a good relationship.

May have found a stock agency or two to work with. A different world from fine art prints, but the question is how different, or how much chance for an interesection of the two sets. When I work with an image I am thinking of how it would look on a wall, but what is to say that would not look good in print as well. We will see.



An image from Budapest last Fall.....there are no cafe tables on the streets right now.

What is art ?

A couple of painter friends and I meet for coffee every week on the Cape to talk about our work and big questions like what is art. My contribution comes from the period when I was first entering shows and confronting exclusions that suggested that photographs might not be considered art. I wanted to know what terms could be used to enter a rebuttal discussion.

Also, as I was making inkjet prints on watercolor paper from digital files created from scanned negatives, I got myself into the question of just what is a photograph and how to call what I did....what to put on that little line of the entry card that said "medium".

This is what I came up with and have been working by.

First, I would hesitate to call this a definition of art...maybe elements.

Elements

1. the artist or subject.

2. the object...something the artist/subject engages with or reacts to. might be the artist him/herself. The easy example to imagine is a painter looking at an inspiring scene. We have subject and object.

3. the medium. what stuff is the subject going to use to convey something about the engagement with the object? Oil on canvas? Clay? Ink on paper? Sounds on a flute? Body motions?

4. the method. highly related to medium, but not the same. paper is a medium. painting on it is a method. printing on it using an engraved plate is another method. drawing on it is another method.

5. the art. this is the hardest part. something intangible that results from the artists engagement with the object and takes form in their application of method to the medium and elicits a reaction in the viewer/audience.

6. the audience. art is not complete without an audience. maybe art does not exist without an audience. if a tree falls in the forest and there is noone to see the painting I made of it, is the painting art? But this is a little sterile. It is not just the existence of the audience, but what happens in the soul of the audience when confronted with the art. Is it shocked? Stimulated? Pleased? Inspired? Amused? Turned on? Made thoughtful?

What is more important....what Leonardo did to make the Mona Lisa, or what the Mona Lisa does to us? Not sure, but if there were no "us" there might be a Mona Lisa, but it wouldn't be art.

Boat Club in a Time of War

Cape Cod seems such a marvelous escape. Anyone who can be there in "the offseason" is able to wander wide spaces of beach under big skies, or poke into quiet coves undisturbed. Anyone who can be there in the summer is on vacation, away from job or rest of life, with family in an intense and happy way, constructing memories to last a life, or indulging a life of memories.

It is peace, it is beauty, it is good.

But of course the world has some other dimensions, and they intrude on this idyll. Jets thunder out of Otis into the skies over Buzzards Bay, and even on the most pleasant beach day it is easy to remember that we are at war, even if we are here to forget things like that.

This picture I have been working on is about the intrusion of some of those other realities on this idyll.

It shows the West Falmouth Boat Club, scene of many happy outings, center of a fleet of vacation craft, and iconic setting of many pictures about the pleasant summer memories.



This image has all the elements of boat club icon -- the bright sunny day, the gentle breeze, the dinghies at the dock -- but I think it has a more sober mood. The water is still, the dinghy is empty, the flag is ambivalent in its curl, the bare rocks emerge from the tide like a half-hidden graveyard, and the sun is harsh. You might not want to be out in it.

Pictorialism

Knotting a Persian Rug

For a few years I have resisted using any of the effects filters in Photoshop - actually I have just been using Photoshop Elements so far - but I have been working on ground where it might make sense at some point. I like to work with abstracting in my images. Hard to say what that means in any specific or differentiating way as it's hard to think of a great image that does not abstract. I do know that I am not looking to max out the resolving capabilities of lens or image receptive medium; this is just not important to me. I am also interested in the common ground between paintings and photographs.

One of my favorite images - "Knotting a Persian Rug" - often gets the compliment that it reminds people of a Flemish primitive painting, specifically of a Vermeer. This is an incredible compliment to get, and I realized this more after I really dove into Vermeer courtesy of a great website that seems to have everything anyone one could ever want to know about him, including superb high resolution reproductions of his paintings. Here is a link to the "The Essential Vermeer".

Tired Maid

Getting wrapped up in Vermeer led me to make a picture which consciously appreciated his setting and lighting and subject. This image - "Tired Maid" - was captured in my room in the Pensione Sorelle Bandini, where I have stayed on my visits to Florence each of the last three years. I really like this setup and I hope to do a series of portraits in this spot when, and if, I get back to Florence and the Bandini this Spring.

I made a 12x18 inch varnished print of "Tired Maid" for my show at the Vagabond Gallery last summer (August, 2005), mounted in a black floater. In December, I made a smaller, 8x12 inch varnished print, and put this one in a subdued gold frame with a Florentine profile. I just found out on Friday that it was accepted in the Falmouth Artists Guild annual juried photography show.

I am glad of that, and eager to see the show when I get back to Cape Cod (am in Budapest now), but I am also waiting and hoping for the Falmouth Artists Guild to open their main, summer juried show to photography. I have been urging this idea for a number of years as I think it would be very exciting for me creatively and hopefully for the larger community to have photographs hung side by side with paintings. I have seen interactions between photographers and painters grow at the Guild in the last few years, and the number of shows excluding photography has happily shrunk.

The Cape Cod Art Association just took this step in 2005, opening up all of their juried shows to photographers, and photography to their juried membership categories. The Association has created a very active photography program, with courses, workshops, and a photography club.


I taught courses at both the Guild and the Art Association last summer, as well as at the Cataumet Arts Center. I enjoyed everybody, and the work, and became persuaded of the excitement of class photo shoots, securing my favorite image of the summer on an outing to Nobska Light. Its title is "Beach Chat in the Late Afternoon".

I used Photoshop (i.e. Elements) on this image to remove one of the photo shoot participants from the middle ground of the beach. I don't think anyone can object to this, especially if they understand that my purpose with this image is to convey something of the excitement and romance and beauty of this spot on a late summer day, something other artists, such as painters do as well, routinely adding and removing elements to support the composition and their desired impact.

I think the key is that my purpose, clearly conveyed, is to do art, not to document or report. If this image were appearing in a newspaper, as news, or as documentation of what the scene was like at Nobska on a certain day in August, 2005, then I and the newspaper would be under an obligation to communicate that this photographic image had been changed, and a person removed. But, in an art gallery, or on a web site of "fine art", I don't feel that I am under any obligation to state that, although I am aware that people may have a lingering expectation for a photograph to be of something that was "really there". Actually everything you see here was "really there" but some more was there that you don't see. And that is in fact true of any photograph, isn't it??

I worked through this question of modifying images a few years ago when I first encountered the tools that made this possible. The result of that "thinking through" was the essay What is a Photograph ?

Beginning

This is the start of another writing effort. My idea is to record a trail of my thoughts as I work on my photographs. You can see my images at www.robertmanz.net, and when I understand more about the blog process, I will move this blog over to my website.

Here is an image I have been working on recently. It is interesting to me because it is the first time I have used the abstraction tools in Photoshop to give a result that I might actually print and show.