Thursday, May 13, 2004
Construct your image
This morning I went with my parents to a breakfast event at Harrah's Casino in Council Bluffs.
The occasion: a talk given by underwater photographer David Doubilet, sponsored by a Council Bluffs group that brings in leaders and scholars to speak to the business community. This link is for his site at the National Geographic, where he is the photographer in residence, or some such. Amazing photos, and it's really a shame that the National Geographic site only shows 11 images of his. We were...spoiled, I think is the best word, by over 40 minutes of his own slides and commentary. His perspective is such a healthy one for us to develop, we who spend our lives walking around on the few solid surfaces of this water planet.
It was not an environmental discussion--he was not there as an activist, but instead as an artist--but the environment is the topic, and so cannot be ignored. He talked a lot about coral, and why not; he shared that all the world's coral put together is large enough to comprise a whole other continent. He mentioned how the Orange Ruffy, a fish not uncommon to our supermarkets, is harvested when it is 100 years old, and that one large haul of the fish can wipe out an entire population. It seems to me that they are, in that respect, not unlike the old growth trees rain forest harvesters wantonly slice down to make my printer paper. It's nice we have sites like The Rainforest Site (part of that collective of sites where you can make donations by viewing sponsor ads), but we need a Save the Oceans Site, too--they surround us and separate us, yet we somehow make them easy to ignore.
And I was reminded of the matter-of-factness that separates his artistry--indeed, the artistry of any photographer--from the snaps most of us take. He fashions his pictures with movie lighting and careful timing, in addition to healthy luck. Only a part of it is being in the right place at the right time; the rest of it, honestly, is creating the right place at the right time. Sure, he's capturing wild and elusive subjects--for all his skill, David Doubilet cannot make a shark pose any more than I can command the stones to fly--but other factors of composition, like light and timing and framing, are all under his control. The same can be said, of course, for those spectacular portrait photographs of Roark Johnson's I've been on about lately, and indeed for all great photographers. The art of it is in taming both the controlled and uncontrollabe, in making the created moment seem stumbled upon, and the stumbled upon created.
The event itself, aside from the photographs, was just fine. The person who introduced Doubilet called him a "photo-grapher" rather than a "phoTOGrapher". My potatos were a little dry, and the orange juice and chocolate milk on the tables were lukewarm, having been placed out long enough to lose their chill. My parents and I sat alone at a table; most of the dozens of other tables were filled. It was nice to feel as though we were at the presentation as a unit, when so many other tables were shared among business associates.
Turns out Doubilet has been selected for the annual Council Bluffs celebration. Many smaller towns and cities have such community celebrations, though Council Bluffs's feels like an attempt to stir up loyalty to this town, which so often is cast as Omaha pathetic, weeny, hillbilly snotnosed little brother. I think that has a lot to do with why the community celebration is called "Pride Week." I'm new to the area, and perhaps I'm just sensitive to a different set of associations than the rest of Council Bluffs, but every time I hear someone go on excitedly about Pride Week I forget myself and wonder if the whole city's gone suddenly gay.
The occasion: a talk given by underwater photographer David Doubilet, sponsored by a Council Bluffs group that brings in leaders and scholars to speak to the business community. This link is for his site at the National Geographic, where he is the photographer in residence, or some such. Amazing photos, and it's really a shame that the National Geographic site only shows 11 images of his. We were...spoiled, I think is the best word, by over 40 minutes of his own slides and commentary. His perspective is such a healthy one for us to develop, we who spend our lives walking around on the few solid surfaces of this water planet.
It was not an environmental discussion--he was not there as an activist, but instead as an artist--but the environment is the topic, and so cannot be ignored. He talked a lot about coral, and why not; he shared that all the world's coral put together is large enough to comprise a whole other continent. He mentioned how the Orange Ruffy, a fish not uncommon to our supermarkets, is harvested when it is 100 years old, and that one large haul of the fish can wipe out an entire population. It seems to me that they are, in that respect, not unlike the old growth trees rain forest harvesters wantonly slice down to make my printer paper. It's nice we have sites like The Rainforest Site (part of that collective of sites where you can make donations by viewing sponsor ads), but we need a Save the Oceans Site, too--they surround us and separate us, yet we somehow make them easy to ignore.
And I was reminded of the matter-of-factness that separates his artistry--indeed, the artistry of any photographer--from the snaps most of us take. He fashions his pictures with movie lighting and careful timing, in addition to healthy luck. Only a part of it is being in the right place at the right time; the rest of it, honestly, is creating the right place at the right time. Sure, he's capturing wild and elusive subjects--for all his skill, David Doubilet cannot make a shark pose any more than I can command the stones to fly--but other factors of composition, like light and timing and framing, are all under his control. The same can be said, of course, for those spectacular portrait photographs of Roark Johnson's I've been on about lately, and indeed for all great photographers. The art of it is in taming both the controlled and uncontrollabe, in making the created moment seem stumbled upon, and the stumbled upon created.
The event itself, aside from the photographs, was just fine. The person who introduced Doubilet called him a "photo-grapher" rather than a "phoTOGrapher". My potatos were a little dry, and the orange juice and chocolate milk on the tables were lukewarm, having been placed out long enough to lose their chill. My parents and I sat alone at a table; most of the dozens of other tables were filled. It was nice to feel as though we were at the presentation as a unit, when so many other tables were shared among business associates.
Turns out Doubilet has been selected for the annual Council Bluffs celebration. Many smaller towns and cities have such community celebrations, though Council Bluffs's feels like an attempt to stir up loyalty to this town, which so often is cast as Omaha pathetic, weeny, hillbilly snotnosed little brother. I think that has a lot to do with why the community celebration is called "Pride Week." I'm new to the area, and perhaps I'm just sensitive to a different set of associations than the rest of Council Bluffs, but every time I hear someone go on excitedly about Pride Week I forget myself and wonder if the whole city's gone suddenly gay.
Comments:
Post a Comment
