The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

Chief Seattle’s Letter To All The People

Taos Pueblo, New Mexico

Palm Springs, California

I’m aiming more toward just the visual: not telling the story, not describing a place, but just making a great photograph, whatever it takes. Whatever works is whatever works. It might be that nobody even knows what image is, but the colors, shapes, forms and textures create a feeling in you, though you don’t know why. It’s like music without lyrics. There’s a melody there and it makes you feel certain way, but you don’t know why. It’s just sound waves. These are just light waves.

Carr Clifton - www.carrclifton.com

Carr Clifton says some viewers decry any digital retouching of an image, but he’s quick to point out it has been always done. And since it’s all in the service of a creative vision, there is no right-and-wrong rule book.

“Some people complain: ‘Oh, you’re digitizing and manipulating,’” he says. “Well, it’s just an artistic expression. Now we can be even more an artist. You have more tools and creativity at your hands. It’s phenomenal.”

Take cleaning image of an errant pinecone, for example. Clifton explains that he does the same thing in the computer that he’s always done with film. “We used to digitally remove them anyway with digits on our hands,: he explains. “Grab that pinecone and throw it out of the scene. People pretend ‘Oh, I didn’t touch a thing.’ But I don’t know. Moving the camera is manipulation. Move a little to the left or right… So taking garbage out of the picture? Absolutely. Taking a jet trail out of the sky? Absolutely. Taking the dirt off it? Absolutely. Moving a person into the image. I haven’t done that. I haven’t moved a sky into the image either. I’d love to do that with some photos, but I haven’t done it yet. Pretty soon, nobody will even care. It won’t even be an issue. It’s all part of the creative process.

“I think it’s like writing,” Clifton continues. “You have fiction and you have nonfiction. And you believe the person who writes a nonfiction novel – that it’s true. You know the fiction writer made it all up. It’s the same thing. We trust news to have total truth in that newspaper; they don’t make that story up. This is creative endeavor. People can do whatever they want. If they want to change the color or put a bird in a sky, they can do it. There’s nothing wrong with that as far as I’m concerned. It’s just who wants to do it. I don’t care to, but if they care to, that’s their own business. As long as they’re not saying it’s nonfiction. If they’re claiming that this is true nature in their image, well that’s one thing.

“It’s like writing a story,” he adds. “You could have 10 people see something happen and then they all write a story about what happened. Well, it’s all nonfiction, but people have accentuated certain things that happened – they each saw it from a different angle. It’s the same thing with photography – like when you make a print. You’re going to tell the story, and you’re going to put certain things in parentheses and you’re going to capitalize certain things. It still tells the truth!”

From interview with Carr Clifton by William Sawalich

There is a terrible truthfulness about photography. The ordinary academician gets hold of a pretty model, paints her as well as he can, calls her Juliet, and puts a nice verse Shakespeare underneath, and the picture is admired beyond measure. The photographer finds the same pretty girl, he dresses her up and photographs her, and calls her Juliet, but somehow it is no good - it is still Miss Wilkins, the model. It is too true to be Juliet.

George Bernard Shaw
Wilson’s Photographic Magazine, LVI, 1909

Once upon a time I followed a path of links from one website to another and I stumbled upon an article in Washington Post. And I read it. I am not a very sensitive person (well, I am a man) but this article stirred a flurry of emotions in my heart. I cannot say that I dropped a tear but I was really deeply touched.

The article was not about the latest news (which are always bad and to which we are already numb) but about art and beauty. And what it means for us, humans. You can read the full text on Washington Post website but here is the condensed version.

Gene Weingarten, cultishly popular Washington Post journalist, has convinced world famous violinist Joshua Bell to conduct an experiment. On Friday morning, January 12 Joshua Bell put on some casual clothes and a baseball cap and showed up at the L’Enfant Plaza metro station in the center of federal Washington. There he stood against the wall beside the trash basket, opened the case at his feet, shrewdly threw in some pocket change as a seed money, took his four million dollars Stradivarius violin and began to play. He started with Bach’s “Chaconne” which Joshua himself calls “not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history.” After “Chaconne” followed Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and more and more…

Joshua’s Stradivarius was making out-of-this-world sounds which make even gray-hair men in packed concert halls cry. “Delicate urgency.” “Masterful intimacy.” “Unfailingly exquisite.” “A musical summit.” “. . . will make your heart thump and weep at the same time.” That is just a few critical acclaims to Joshua Bell’s latest album, “The Voice of the Violin”. So, you get the picture. The Washington Post was anticipating crowd control, traffic jams, police and tear gas. Not so fast…

The whole experiment was videotaped with a hidden camera and these are the cold facts: the performance lasted 43 minutes, the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by, 37 of them gave money, most of them on the run for a total of $32.17, only 5 slowed down to listen to the music and only one recognized Joshua. You can see the whole misery of ignorance for yourself in this video:

It is a very gloomy and disturbing picture. It makes you angry and sad to you see all these people passing by totally oblivious to the beauty of the sound they hear. Federal employees on their way to the boredom of their government jobs.

The title of Weingarten’s article reads “Pearls Before Breakfast”. The hidden message reverberates with proverb adapted from a saying of Jesus from the Gospels, “Cast not pearls before swine.” The full text from Matthew 7:6 sounds even more callous: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.”

On the other hand, you keep asking yourself: would you have stopped in the same situation? Would you? Would I have stopped? Early morning, barely awake, late for work, making a mad dash to the gray warmth of your cubicle, feeling being utterly alone in a crowd, pounded with mechanical noise of the city… You close in and ignore your surroundings. Maybe…

But at the same time there were a lot of people there who did not rush anywhere. Just across Joshua and his violin there was “shoeshine stand and a busy kiosk that sells newspapers, lottery tickets and a wall full of magazines with titles such as Mammazons and Girls of Barely Legal.” There were people standing and waiting in a lottery line looking for a long shot to get a lucky break. Just in a few feet from a treasure which they ignored. What do you make of that?..

What Gene himself has to say about his experiment? “Context matters” - he says - “Kant in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment argued that one’s ability to appreciate beauty is related to one’s ability to make moral judgments. But there was a caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America’s most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.”

“Optimal,” Guyer said, “doesn’t mean heading to work, focusing on your report to the boss, maybe your shoes don’t fit right.”

And that applies not only to music, but all arts including visual art.

Mark Leithauser is a senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings. Leithauser thinks he has some idea of what happened at that metro station.

“Let’s say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It’s a $5 million painting. And it’s one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: ‘Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.’”

Optimal viewing conditions, art in a frame, in a gallery, in a museum… Art labeled as “art”. By artist himself or even better by critics and art establishment… Doesn’t it lead us to the conclusion that art is a pure social construct? Art without frame: is it art?

Landscape photography is pretty much a lonely affair. You travel and hike alone, you find and setup your shots alone. And that is good. I consider it as something very close to spiritual meditation. It is a road to your higher yourself. And if you are lucky enough you may get a companion on this road - a guru, a person who can show you the way, point the right turn on the road, keep you away from the waste of dead ends.

Rodney Lough. The first time I came across this name was last fall in San Francisco. I had been photographing Golden Gate Bridge at sunrise and decided to stop at Sausalito for a breakfast. Right on a corner of Bridgeway and Princess I stumbled across a gallery with magnificent photographic prints in the windows. It was early morning and the gallery was not yet opened. As I stood at awe admiring every detail of the photographs exhibited in the windows a lady came in, opened the door and greeted me in. We got into a two-hour long conversation and Vivian (that was her name) told me the whole story of Rodney Lough. He was the same age as mine, left his daytime job, was doing art shows for awhile and now has 4 (four) his own galleries. Wow, - I thought to myself, - he did it. And I can do it. It was like a light bulb switching on above my head – you can make your living with fine art landscape photography.

Later in November I was in Minneapolis for a couple days. And I spent the whole evening at Rodney’s newly opened gallery in The Mall of America looking at every detail: not only at the prints, but how they are matted and framed, how the light is set, how the gallery is organized. It was perfect. It was something to aspire to.

By that time the figure of Rodney Lough grew in my mind to mythical proportions and he took his rightful place in my little pantheon of fine art landscape photography gods.

Here goes the story…

Last week I was at Horseshoe Canyon in Canyonlands and it was the third time I came to photograph The Great Gallery - an ancient Anasazi pictograph panel. The first time several years ago I had a 35 mm film camera, the other time I came with my first digital camera and this time I had intention to make some multi-row panoramas.

I camped at the rim of the canyon and woke up before sunrise. I rushed onto the trail with the first rays of light in a hope to catch nice morning reflected light on the panel. Three miles hike down the canyon and I was late. The shadow line moved through the panel in a matter of a couple minutes in front of my eyes and the panel was washed out in full sunlight. It happened so fast that I didn’t even have time to setup my tripod. It is what it is, - I thought to myself and proceeded anyway trying to salvage contrast with polarizing filter. Three hours and several multi-row panoramas later I felt exhausted and headed back on the trail.

As soon as I left the panel I saw a funny looking figure walking towards me. White long sleeve shirt, shorts and some kind of high boots. Oh, and a tripod! A fellow photographer! Coming closer. Gitzo carbon fiber. Interesting… Sharp blue eyes, golden hair, short trimmed beard. We got into talking:

- I like your boots.
- Oh, that’s not boots, that’s gators.
- Shooting medium? - I nodded at the tripod.
- Eight by ten, - was the answer.

Suddenly I felt a little cold in my stomach. You can count landscape photographers shooting 8 by 10 with fingers on both of your hands. I leaned forward and asked without any ceremonies:

- What’s your name?
- Rodney Lough.

I almost jumped.

- Sir, I’m honored to meet ya! - I said shaking his hand and immediately poured on him the whole story of my admiration.

- Wow, I’m surprised that you know who I am, - he muffled in response.

To make the long story short I shamelessly stuck with Rodney in the canyon for the rest of the day. I asked questions. He talked, I listened. It was great. It was a lucky chance that made my whole trip.

- Where is the panel? - Rodney asked me.
- Oh, it is right here. Unfortunately it is in full sunlight.
- I can wait. All I want now is to stay in the shade. I saw a beautiful tree against the canyon wall on my way here… Oh, here it is.

Frankly, to my eye the tree was nothing to look at. I just walked by this tree without even noticing it. But Rodney was excited. He started to setup his tripod and unpacked his 8 by 10 from the backpack.

- You see, it is perfect. The color of the leaves. That tree behind – the green is too dark. And it is too close to the wall. That tree on the right – still too dark. And the branches are all over the place. This one is perfect. No wind. Even on one second there won’t be any movement. Every twig, every leaf will be tack sharp. It will look awesome on 8 by 10. It will be on a gallery wall for sure. You’ll see, – and he disappeared under the dark cloth busy setting up his camera.

The light was pretty even in the shadow of the canyon wall. Rodney used his Sekonic to spot meter exposure in control points. He kept mumbling shutter speed numbers to himself, completely immersed in the process and oblivious to my paparazzi clicking.

Pulling out the dark slide. Notice vertical shift to elevate the lens tilting the monorail up and using front and back tilts.

And the final CLICK. The shot is done.

When he was done with his shot we sat in the shadow of the canyon wall for several hours. Rodney was patiently waiting for the shadow to come to the panel which eventually happened in the late afternoon. So I had plenty of time to torture him with my questions. I wish I had prepared the list beforehand because I still have many more.

He candidly told me what my biggest problem as a photographer is. Lack of patience. And it is true. On my photo expeditions I often feel restless chasing the light. I feel like a hunter pursing his prey. It is an exciting feeling but quantity of shots rarely produces quality.

He told me a story which happened to him in the beginning of his career as a photographer. It is a legend. He was at Grand Teton on one of the photographers’ hot spots with majestic overlook of the Tetons waiting for the sunrise with a crowded group of other photographers. To kill time everyone started to introduce himself to the others. The introduction made a full circle and came to the photographer next to Rodney.

- I’m Willard Clay, - he introduced himself.
- Wow! - said Rodney, - Willard Clay! It is honor to meet you. Do you have a business card or something?

While Willard went to his truck to get the card everybody else gathered around and asked:

- Who is this guy? Why are so excited?
- Don’t you know? - Rodney replied - His photographs are in every book and calendar about Grand Teton.

The sunrise was over as well as photographers’ shootout. Everybody left except Rodney and Willard. They had a conversation and Willard said at the end:

- There is one thing I have to tell you, young man. One thing only: wind is your friend.
- What does it mean? - Rodney asked. - Wind is photographer’s enemy. It moves grass and tress, it makes photographs blurry. How can it be your friend?
- By the time the wind calms down every other photographer will leave and now you free to make your shot nobody except you will be able to make. Wind is your friend.

Patience.

That is what Rodney has in abundance. Patience. We sat in the canyon waiting for the shadow to come to the pictograph panel for hours. But when the time came he acted charmingly and quickly.

Those who have been to The Great Galley know that access to the ledge where you can view and photograph the panel up-close is protected by chain rails. All you can do is photograph the panel from far below, from the canyon floor. Rodney was able to charm Bonnie, the park ranger, a graceful lady in her seventies. She unlocked the chain and let us on the ledge. Rodney quickly setup his camera.

There was no time to spare.

- Isn’t it a treat! - he kept repeating.

Notice raised monorail and back tilt used to align ground glass with the pictographs panel. Front tilt is used to increase depth of the field (Scheimpflug rule) for the stones which are almost in front of the camera.

I like the look of a heavy machine gunner looking through the turret of his firearm. The concentration and intensity is the same. The result is quite different though. I wish all machine guns in the world could be replaced with photographic cameras with a simple swing of a magic wand.

It looks like the front frame is too high.

Let’s move it down.

And back to mystery under the dark cloth.

The shot was done and we pushed back on the trail to climb up to the canyon rim to our cars. Rodney invited me to his camper. I showed him some of the ancient Anasazi ruins locations within Cedar Mesa. In exchange I was treated with a real sandwich made by Rodney himself. It tasted like nothing else. Especially after living a week on crackers and cold canned tuna. We shook hands and he took off. I left after him on my way to Factory Butte slowly digesting a great chunk of information I was given.

Life road has turning points. Change. New course towards bright light leaving the dark tunnel behind. Thank you, Rodney, for guiding the way…

Rodney Lough - www.theloughroad.com

Willard Clay - www.willardclay.com

Photography is not a pure art. It was born a bastard and it changes all the time through its relationships with chemical, optical and electronic industry.

Catherine Coleman
Curator of Photography at Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia

- Remember what John and Paul said.

- The Apostles?

- No, The Beatles: “All you need is love.”

Michael, The Movie

Love is patient, love is kind, and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own (will), is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Apostle Paul

We’ve got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.

John Lennon

April issue of Art Calendar magazine arrived to my mailbox. Usually I spent 2 minutes browsing it but today I found a gem: an article “Choices” by Jack White. I could not help but to make some quotes for myself:

Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to circumstances. You choose how people affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line: it’s your choice how you live your life.

We are who we are because of our choices.

Today is the tomorrow you fretted about yesterday.

People can only hurt us if we give them permission.

There us no sin in failing. The sin is in staying down.