unbillable hours

Untitled No. 12

The Wonder Bar, Asbury Park, New Jersey
Canon EOS Elan 7ne, Ilford Delta Professional 400. 

Picture Envy No. 24 - And Pilate asked "What is truth?"

A quiet Memorial Day heads into the homeward stretch for me. I can see from my window the many wreaths placed at the foot of the Red Bank VFW statue, and during my lunchtime walk, saw the black-shrouded visitors at the local 9-11 Memorial. The one that stares out the Manhattan skyline from the banks of the Navesink, the river that cuts through this town that lost more people on that day four years ago than any other place besides New York itself.

Sy S., Gas Station, on Altphoto (May 27, 2005).

I'm going to take a different tack with Picture Envy this week, if only because I happened upon something that intrigued me and merits discussion on its own. I came across Altphoto (some shots on this site, it should be noted, are not safe for work) via Conscientious, a weblog that discusses photography (and, apparently, puts forth some rather left-leaning views on politics; I can do without the politics, but I like the discussion on photography). Altphoto is one of the websites out there where people can post their photos for comments and rating. I suppose that there are good sites for that sort of thing, and that there is a value to it. One can get a lot of useful information about how one should change shooting, processing or post-processing (i.e., photoshopping). I still am uncomfortable about this sort of thing, though. I can tell when people host my photos from Unbillable Hours on other sites because I can see the bandwidth drain. I've had a few occasions when I've noticed people copying my photos onto other sites. Moleskinerie, for example, has done so on a few occasions, but only to point to me, and I've appreciated the kind words I've received from that site's operator. In the one instance where I've found my photos being "pulled" to another site, draining my bandwidth, I've been less charitable in my response, as I found it more akin to plagiarism in how that (intentionally unnamed) site used my photo. Nonetheless, there are probably many points of merit and denigration that can be made with respect to sites like Altphoto that I don't want to address here.

I want to talk about Gas Station, the discussion associated with it, and why there is something about both this photo and the attitude behind it that I dislike. I come to this discussion – and this is relevant, as you will see – as an amateur with respect to post-development manipulation of images with Photoshop. I've learned a few tricks here and there – as can be seen by The Gates # 4, Untitled # 3, and (my favorite) Philosophy is a Walk on a Slippery Rock – but I am not terribly adept at using the application.

I trawled through Altphoto, tabbing images I liked when I came across Gas Station. First, I noticed that it reminded me of the work of someone else. I almost felt like I've seen that work before, either in my collection of photos by Walker Evans or in my viewings of Gary Winograd's work. It feels a lot like the famous Life magazine photograph taken by Andreas Feinenger, Route 66, Arizona, 1953. I liked the image, but I was also put off by how similar it was to the works of others.

Looking at it again, I realized there was something else that bothered me: it was surreptitiously unreal. The texture seemed too perfect. I wondered if the soil really had that yellow tone. Was the sky really that dark when the photo was taken? I've been out west; I worked in New Mexico for one summer and drove across country twice. I knew that, during the day, if the sky is light, it is light clear up to the farthest reaches of the heavens. Thinking about it logically, I knew the image is manipulated, even before I read the comments to the image. The mountains, I could assume, are the foothills to the Rockies. If they were, they run on a north-south axis into Canada. That means that, if this shot was taken on the western side of them, the photographer is facing east. For that sky to be that dark, it must be sunrise or sunset. If it's sunrise, for the mountains to be that light, there would be a sun flare coming from behind the mountains. The morning stars, and likely Venus, would be visible. If the photo was taken at sunset, then the mountains would be completely dark or as dark as the darkest portions of the eastern sky, as they would be losing their western-descending source of illumination. In other words, the sky could not have the shading gradient seen in this image. (And if we wanted to get really astronomical, the shadows of the parked cars, angling toward the mountains, indicate that it's a eastern facing view taken after the meridian point of the day, i.e., noon, and likely in the early afternoon, as the shadows are not long enough to indicate the angle of a later illumination by the sun.)

When I scanned the comments to the image, I saw this one by Havanai:

"You've apparently dodged (lightened) around the CAFÉ sign. The halo you created around the sign makes the manipulation too obvious and diminishes the otherwise appealing image."

I scrawled back up the page and checked out the shot again; sure enough, there was the halo mentioned by Havanai. While Havanai thought that the photographer, Sy S., lightened the sign (which he may have), I believe that the photographer darkened the sky around the foreground of the image. I scrawled back down to the comments. There, Sy S., the photographer responded to Havanai's comment.

"[Y]es thats [sic] true – but in my opinion this is what makes it special. [T]he manipulation is only onvious [sic] to people who know how to [manipulate photos, I presume]. [F]or all the others[,] the effect is nice! [M]y opinion … thanx [sic] anyway!"

(Ellipsis in original.)

Upon reading that comment, I was angry. It was as though the photographer had said to me "I'm going to mess around with this photo and you won't know because you are dumb." I have to wonder if others, upon seeing that, felt the same way. Looking back at the photo, I believed that I would have eventually noticed the dodging just as I had noticed the manipulation of the color of the sky.

What bothers me about this is that I feel, in a sense, that the image is now a lie to me. I cannot go to the place where Gas Station was photographed and see the same thing that the photographer represents as the image that he saw. I think this is because I believe that color photography, much more than black and white photography, is representative of "the truth." When I look at an image that I've taken, like Being There # 5, I know it represents what I saw that day in 2004 on the streets of New York (well, sort of; the image was shot while the camera was on my chest so that it would not be obvious that I was photographing; therefore, the image's perspective is a few feet lower than it would be if shot at my eye level). I have to admit, though, that I've manipulated the colors of things in photos or cropped out things I didn't like. I'm as involved in this misrepresentation as others like Sy S.

So what is it? What bothers me so? I guess it's that I wanted to believe – like others to whom photo manipulation isn't "onvious" – that the image was true. Color photos appear true to people, more so than black and whites (and these are heavily manipulated also; Ansel Adams did a lot to make his images as majestic as they were). Even though both color and black and white photographs are used in journalism, color photos are especially journalistic because they mimic – to some extent – what the eye sees.

Perhaps the appropriate response, for photographers, is to make explicit that they manipulate photos. Perhaps they should do nothing of the sort and maintain the mirage of reality in all cases except those with surreal or flawed manipulations. Perhaps the viewer should assume that all images are doctored. This last solution is the most troubling, as it renders impotent the journalistic intent of so many photographers.

I don't know what the solution is with respect to photo manipulation. The question is not new; such manipulation was always possible (basically). Manipulation is only relevant to this discussion now because it is so relatively easy with photo editing software in comparison to chemical manipulation in a darkroom. Even the general question about truth with respect to what we see is nothing new, as we can look at Plato and read him asking these same questions. Still, I ask: what do we do about this question of truth in the days of easy photo manipulations? How do we protect the viewers from seeing something like this and responding, as I did, with frustration?

Untitled No. 11

Asbury Park, New Jersey
Canon EOS Elan 7ne, Ilford Delta Professional 400

First of all, I appreciate everyone coming over from John Shabe's blog over on NJ.com.  I promise to limit my negativity toward the good doctor Springsteen. 

I read somewhere that there are eight standing, original HoJo's left out there, including the abandoned one above.  The Asbury Park HoJo's is a great structure, a two-story cylinder that used to have a winding concrete ramp that spiraled up to the second floor (as seen here) before running alongside the pitch-n-putt and outdoor movie theatre that ran the length of the boardwalk in between the Paramount and the Casino (see this post for photos of both). 

I had the pleasure of attending a fundraiser for Assembly candidates Beck and O'Scanlon (R, 12th District; Ms. Beck is currently a councilwoman in Red Bank, and is a smart, funny, charming woman; I'm just getting to know Mr. O'Scanlon, but, so far, I'm impressed) last night.  They're up for quite a fight, I imagine, but I think they've got the gusto to win it.  Apparently, others do as well, as gubernatorial candidates Bret Schundler and John Murphy joined us for the event at Red. 

Right now, I'm feeling a little "fatigued" from last night's event, so don't mind me.  I'm just going to  crawl over to the coffee maker for worship before I head off to the shower and try to get this sandpaper out of my eyes.

In the meantime, contemplate the wonder that is Doctor Gigi*, dental surgeon. 

*Not affiliated with Doctor Nick Riviera.

4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)

Asbury Park, New Jersey
Canon EOS Elan 7ne, Ilford Delta Professional 400

Sandy, the angels have lost our desire for us
I spoke to 'em just last night and they said they won't set themselves on fire for us anymore
Every summer when the weather gets hot they ride that road down from heaven on their Harleys they come and they go
And you can see 'em dressed like stars in all the cheap little seashore bars parked making love with their babies out on the Kokomo
Well the cops finally busted Madame Marie for tellin' fortunes better than they do
This boardwalk life for me is through
You know you ought to quit this scene too

Bruce Springsteen, 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy), on The Wild, The Innocent, and The E Street Shuffle (1973). 

Springsteen was once one of those personal heroes that I had as a kid and probably should not have.  I was fascinated, though: you mean a local boy like me could write and be famous?  By the time college came around, and I had exhausted my share of "Yeah, I see Bruce around town," stories, he came out with The Ghost of Tom Joad, Springsteen's incredibly sparse quasi-tribute to Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck.  With this album, with its incredibly well written songs - Springsteen's Straight Time is, without a doubt, my favorite song he has ever written, and Dry Lightning is as emotionally complex as anything written by Raymond Carver or Tobias Wolff - I was in awe. 

I picked up the newest album trying to hide my nervous excitement.  I had heard enough about Devils & Dust to know it was supposed to be a return to the Tom Joad sound.  I had thought The Rising was a blandly over-produced album that, even with its connection to 9-11, had no emotional pull for me.  Unfortunately, Devils & Dust also seems to lack power.  Perhaps, like The Ghost of Tom Joad, it will take me a year to finally appreciate this album, but I feel a sort of resentment to how the album was presented.  It's in this annoying DVD format (and only that format, as far as I can tell), which means that it cannot be played on my PC (and this is apparently part of some sort of intentional anti-piracy measure).  This means that I can't use my "good" speakers (my PC has Dolby 5.1 speakers and outclasses every stereo I own).  The songs... nothing's hit me yet.  There's no song that makes me feel gut-punched, like on The Ghost of Tom Joad.  There's still that slick sound of over-production, that far-too-clean sound that says the album was recorded in a multi-million dollar studio instead of on some low-fi 16 track recorder in a barn (like Nebraska, The River, or The Ghost of Tom Joad). 

It sounds like the sort of album that a member of my parents' generation would make at this age, the brief, final moments of just being an adult before one slides into one's sixties and enters a different period of life.  I can't say this is really an "age" thing, because I can pop Johnny Cash's American IV: The Man Comes Around into the stereo and hear a 70-year-old's fresh take on the raw American roots sound (and more to the point, I can hear one do a version of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt that has me gasping for breath by the end). 

For some reason, this really bothers me.  It's like finding out that Mickey Mantle - or whoever one could claim is his modern equivalent - used 'roids or beat his wife (okay, I guess that some have had to deal with this one already, at least if they were fans of Joe Dimaggio, the biggest fool in American history just by virtue of his cruelty to Marilyn Monroe). 

I want that thrill again. 

Untitled No. 10

Asbury Park, New Jersey
Canon EOS Elan 7ne, ISO 3200

I know, I know; it's taken me a long time to post anything.  I've been giving myself a break during/after my recent move to the new apartment.  I needed it.  I've been insanely busy with litigation, which has been a great experience.  I feel like I'm learning more and developing more skills as a lawyer than I ever have before.  That's an incredibly fulfilling sensation.  I also feel like I am one of the many torture victims claimed by the diabolical Swedes of Ikea (I'm sure many could discuss why they don't like Ikea and so forth, but I'm a fan of birch finishes and modern design, which means I either shop Ikea or spend an extraordinary amount of money on furniture). 

Still, all work and no play.... 

So, this weekend, for the first time since just after St. Patrick's Day, I picked up my camera and headed out to take pictures (I went down to the lovely Island Beach State Park, just south of not-so-lovely Seaside Heights {back when Rolling Stone used to do journalism, it had a great piece on the young derelicts attracted to the boardwalk of Seaside Heights that had to have been one of the most depressing works of journalism I have ever read; still, it was also crisp writing}). 

I'm going to continue with my last project, which was a series focused on Asbury Park.  Asbury Park, along with Sandy Hook/Gateway Nat'l Recreation Area and Ocean Grove, seems to be one of my favorite photography subjects. 

Bullet In the Brain

Via Screenhead, which is an unlikely source for something this beautiful, here's a CBC adaptation of Tobias Wolff's brilliant, lyrical short story, Bullet in the Brain, from his collection The Night In Question. 

I used to have that book.  The "used to" part ties into memory, and the tangible experience of having that book and handing it over to an often-smirking brunette who slowly faded into ex-girlfriend status saying "here, let me give you this; this is some of the best stuff out there," not knowing that it was the sort of foolish, improper thing one should not do after an often-smirking brunette waxed rhapsodic about pulp thrillers by Robert Ludlum or Ken Follett.  She took the book, incredulously, and we stopped seeing each other by the middle of the summer.  No more to join me for dinner in over-priced restaurants as an indulgence to my love of good wine and cuisine, no more to allure me simply by showing off her tan legs during a golf game, but forever given to a slight squint of the eyes, a glance down at a trade paperback full of beautiful short stories, and then a smirk that measured our time like the hours spent waiting for a commuted sentence. 

Picture Envy #23

A slightly delayed Picture Envy this week, brought on by my need to sleep, oh, sixteen hours on Sunday after a week of two all-nighters on unrelated lawsuits.

Sixteen hours of sleep. 

There's nothing more blissful... except for the fact that I just scored four classic films on Amazon for less than $10 apiece: Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), with James "EVERY sentence is exclamatory" Mason, John Ford's version of The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Raising Arizona (1987) (which means I'll be repeating "I'll be taking these Huggies and whatever cash ya got" over, and over....) and Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid (1969), written by the brilliant Willam Goldman (who continues to surprise me with what he has written besides The Princess Bride, i.e., Heat {which explains why this is the one Michael Mann film I like} [scratch that; I was referring to the wrong version of Heat; thanks go out to my anonymous informant], A Bridge Too Far, Marathon Man, and the adaptation of All the President's Men) and starring the Bolivian Army (and some other people). 

Ah, I love the classics.  I would be surprised if someone did not look at the above list and say "Raising Arizona?  A classic?"

Absolutely.  As a comedy, Raising Arizona was the permission slip for American filmmakers to slip into the world of the absurd far more fully than ever before. 

Plus, it has Randall "Tex" Cobb in it, who may just be the scariest man alive.  (Cobb was the bounty hunter known for "killin' the littlest creatures of nature.")  Cobb went fifteen rounds with Larry Holmes without ever being knocked down.  On his own, Cobb could be a local chapter of the Hell's Angels. 

...

Okay, there's  no way I can segue from that into Picture Envy, so I'm just going to run with it. 

Deceptive Media, Moving Walkway II (Dec. 22, 2004). 

Moving Walkway II is the kind of image that would instantly trigger my recollection of countless Radiohead lyrics, as so many of their songs focus on the alienating experience of modern life.  Moving Walkway II captures that sort of surrealistic experience very well.  First, the coloration of the shot - the pale silvery blue-and-white monochromatic texture - is the sort of thing that ties the image to a sense of digital ghostliness.  The subway tunnel has the same sort of anemic light that is seen in classic dystopian films as Ghost in the Shell (1995) (which is also filled with vivid coloration, but does rely on intense, pale coloration when addressing florescent lighting) and THX-1138 (1971) (back when Lucas didn't ruin his films).  Second, the long perspective and blurred focus of the shot is unnerving.  I imagine a slightly-longer-than-normal exposure did the trick here (say, 1/60th of a second?).  It's great social commentary-oriented photography.

No Traces, Night Train (Dec. 21, 2004).

From Deceptive Media's image of an industrial landscape as clean and alien, No Traces gives  us Night Train, which is an image with industrial qualities mixed in with the fluidity of nature.  No Traces is extremely fond of long exposure shots of water, a theme that Bob, its operator, and I have discussed as being derived from his appreciation of the works of Michael Kenna, amongst other things (I presume).  For an example of Kenna using long exposures to take dramatic images of water, see Dark Waters, Tsuda, Shikoku, Japan (2001).  Night Train reminds me of the 19th Century bridge settings I often see around the Delaware River, where old industrial iron-focused towns of New Jersey and Pennsylvania now struggle to adapt to the modern, post-industrial economy.  The rusted bridge's decay, in parallel to the living, flowing water (yet constant; waterways, like light, are both a constant and an individual moment of energy) is peaceful.  I think there's also an element of chaos in the image, not merely because of nature's inherently chaotic tack, but also because of the non-level angle of the bridge and the dead trees that fill up the right third of the image.  It's great composition. 

DailySnap.com, Falling Star (Dec. 23, 2004). 

No Traces lucks out this week; there are two images by its operator, although this one is hosted at DailySnap.com.  This is the fortuitous nature of when things were collected in my compendium of del.icio.us links, as Falling Star happens to be a guest post on DailySnap.com.  Falling Star, could be wedged into the same sort of "industrial-as..." theme that has been discussed above, but I'm not really focused on that with this image.  Falling Star works for me primarily because of the emotional characteristics of the image.  First off, there are two points of wonder conveyed in the image: (1) the wonder of the modernist building and (2) the (more rare) wonder of capturing a meteor burning up in Earth's atmosphere in the shot.  Modernist structures convey wonder to me because of the incredible idealism (optimism isn't quite the right word, as there is so much dogma and austerity to modernism that doesn't sit well with the more generic sense of "optimism").  A case in point would be Mies Van Der Rohe's Farnsworth House.  In designing the Farnsworth House, Van Der Rohe approached the notion of a residence with a sense of simplicity more commonly seen in zen rock gardens.  This image conveys what I consider to be a mind-blowing purity of form, one that conveys light and warmth without resorting to ornamentation, that can be considered emblematic of "good" modernism. 

The building in Falling Star has a lot of modernist elements that I enjoy: the use of formed concrete, painted over, as a sort of updated version of adobe (that's hardened clay, for all of you that immediately thought of the software company), the sweeping curves along the roof's edge (along with the incongruous triangle point) and the perforated outer walls.  It's sad that, more recently, architecture seems to have stalled in its impetus toward using design on everyday buildings (such as restrooms).  Gateway National Recreation Area, on Sandy Hook, New Jersey, the nearby isthmus where I took the majority of my Sea and the Sand shots, has interesting arts & crafts/modernist restroom facilities that resemble, in a way, Japanese arches.  I just shuffled through my shots and noticed that I don't have any of those restrooms.  I'll have to fix that, now that the weather's finally nice (not the grey of mid-spring, which makes me want to drive a pry bar through the side of my head). 

I am curious about the location of this shot... I'm left with a sense that it is out in desolation's reach, perhaps in the southwest.  The desert southwest seems to preserve these pleasantly lonely spaces where there's just enough of civilization along the highways between, say, Santa Fe, New Mexico and Moab, Utah, to remind one that there is so little of civilization there upon which one can rely.  At night, looking up at the stars, the dome of the horizon wraps around a person like a too-big life preserver, and one begins to fear just ... drifting off... into the abyss of stars. 

Pictures should be returning to Unbillable Hours this week.  I should have my scanner in operating order tonight, and will begin to set up my second part of the Asbury Park shots I worked on two months ago. 

Picture Envy #22

No Traces, Ray of Sunshine (Dec. 23, 2004). 
I guess I would call this the first "normalized" week in the new apartment.  It's pleasant, albeit quietly so.  A place to sit and read (Philip Caputo's A Rumor of War currently).  A place to wax somnabulent as the History Channel talks about Fremont's conquest of California.  There are, of course, things I do miss of the home I grew up in.  Although I had intended my stay there to be brief - an intermission between moves - it stretched out longer than expected, and I grew fond of waking up to walk my dog.  Therefore, this first picture, from No Traces is a good example of just what I miss: the goofy, sweet pleasure of having a dog around.  There's a neat perspective on this shot, which is brought on by the use of a fisheye lens (unless the dog is, um.... special).  I need to get one of those lenses, someday. 

Cariboo Images and Thoughts, School Master (Dec. 2004). 
From the technology of the last shot - a Canon 20D digital camera with a precisely ground lens - to the barest beginnings of technology; this is the first benefit of School Master, from Cariboo.  Taken with a pinhole camera, one of the earlier-developed styles of cameras.  I appreciate School Master, both from the structural perspective of how the image came out and from the historical perspective of what was required to take pictures in the 19th Century. 

Shutter~Log, Femme au cinema (Sep. 27, 2004). 
This is one of those shots that, initially, I have a hard time explaining why it pleases me.  Taking pause, though, I suspect that my strong initial reaction to Shutter~Log's  Femme au cinema is based on the vibrancy of the colors.  The rich red of the theater seat contrasts perfectly with the black background.  The symmetry of the "femme" of the picture also serves the shot well.  The viewer only sees seven seats in the image, yet suspects that, given the symmetry, there is no one else in the theater.  It gives the image the hint of a story.