I started to build a new darkroom to process silver and platinum prints. Thank goodness Midwest houses have the basements. This is the blank slate and I will continue to post pictures with the progress. But even to get to this point I had to move water heater from the middle of the room to side wall. Plus electric wiring is almost done by now.

Chlorophyll and blood (hemoglobin) are nearly identical substances. They differ by only single atom out of 137 atoms in each of their molecular structures: the hub of every hemoglobin molecule is one atom of iron, while in chlorophyll it is one atom of magnesium. Just as chlorophyll is green because magnesium absorbs all but the green light spectrum, blood is red because iron absorbs all but the red. Chlorophyll is green blood. It is designed to capture light; blood is designed to capture oxygen.

Wilderness to the people of America is a spiritual necessity, an antidote to the high pressure of modern life, a means of regaining serenity and equilibrium.

Sigurd F. Olson

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 is a melody there and it makes you feel certain way, but you don’t know why. It’ 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?