Bosque del Apache is national wildlife refuge just one and half hours south on I-25 from Albuquerque in New Mexico. Here, in lakes and marshes along Rio Grande River is a place where tens of thousands of migratory birds including sandhill cranes, Arctic geese, and many kinds of ducks gather each fall and stay through the winter.

The most spectacular thing to watch in Bosque del Apache is the morning flyout. It occurs at sunrise when the first rays of ascending sun hit the Rio Grande valley. Exactly at this moment every morning thousands of geese wake up and take off simultaneously in one thunderous explosion of thousands of wings. It sounds like a jet fighter taking off. It is an awesome sight: the pond empties in only a few seconds, and multiple layers of geese fly low overhead at different altitudes and slightly different headings, frantically calling and honking to keep family groups together.

Bosque del Apache is prime spot for congregation of bird photographers as well. They flock here in dozens and line up every morning along the pond waiting for the flyout. With expensive cameras and huge telephoto lenses. It is a photographic subculture. Everybody seems to know everybody. They come to Bosque del Apache year after year. Oh, and if you have lens less than 400mm you are, well, not really cool.

I was there too. Following the crowd I mounted the biggest telephoto lens I have on my camera and set it up on a tripod. Made several frames waiting for the flyout. And then it came to me – the main subject is not the birds, it is the photographers. Their grotesque silhouettes and silhouettes of their tripods against the bright hues of sunrise sky created a perfect picture. I quickly changed telephoto to wide angle lens on my camera and literally started to crawl on the ground looking for the right composition. I found it with one of the photographers using his handheld medium format camera surrounded with his other two cameras on tripods. And at this moment the flyout happened. It lasted only few seconds but I’ve got my picture: a silhouette of photographer against the mass of ascending birds in the morning sky.

BK: You once mentioned to me, and I think it’s a great term, that you try to make your prints “sing”.

JS: I think a print should invite the viewer to look at it, engage the viewer, and sustain the viewer’s attention. I have seen prints by others – and perhaps a few that I’ve done myself – that have etched themselves into my mind’s eye, and find it difficult to stop looking at the print. Occasionally I have seen black-and-white photographic prints that appear to be illuminated from within, that seem to have a life of their own beyond that of the subject matter, a radiant energy and luminosity. I like to think of the process of photography being as much about “listening” as it is about looking. Not necessarily listening with one’s ears, but being receptive with one’s being.

BK: Not looking, but seeing.

JS: Exactly. Experiencing what is in the image itself, in the light, in the dark, in the shades of gray. Just as music is not only the notes – but the silence and the resonance between the notes – the same applies to a photograph. If you’re lucky and everything comes together there’s an ambience, a radiance, of not just luminosity, but of inspiration.

BK: So do you think a great photograph is about the feeling it evokes?

JS: Absolutely. You can have a piece of writing that tells a story in a concise and compelling way and is quite informational. You can also have a piece of writing that tells the same story, but it’s inspirational. The latter will be the story that will be remembered. It’s not just about information, it’s about the ability to inspire – to expand one’s knowledge, awareness, and understanding. I think that great writing, great music, great photographs, great paintings, have a universal quality. I don’t know that you can consciously interject that into an image – the only way you might be fortunate enough to occasionally accomplish that is to make a lot of photographs.

BK: How important do you think it is in life to be inspired?

JS: I think that inspiration is a positive force in the world and is something that human beings can bring to the planet. Inspiration stimulates hope – it’s hope for a better future, it’s hope that tomorrow I’ll feel like I’ve done something better than today. I think that photography can, in an uplifting way, show us a promise of a better tomorrow. It can also, in a terrifying way, show us the importance of things that didn’t go right – it can inspire us to prevent those things from happening again. In the best circumstances I think we can inspire one another, and when you’re inspired you have the opportunity to do something worthwhile.

An Interview with John Sexton
Interviewed by Brian Klligrew
LensWork No. 46

One gloomy October afternoon I found myself on a Staten Island ferry going back to Manhattan. It was about to rain, low heavy clouds cloaked New York leaving no hope for sun, oozing sense of despair into a humid cold air. And then I saw a torch glowing with warm orange light. It was Statue of Liberty. I found a clear spot in scratched ferry window and made several frames. Unconsciously I selected a composition which wasn’t aimed to show Statue of Liberty but rather its glowing torch tiny from the distance. It boldly but helplessly tried to illuminate approaching darkness of night. There is always a hope.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, rather must recognize that is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

Viktor Frankl

What is it that you want? That is a simple question. What do you want in your life? Everyone has an angel behind his or her back waiting for you to spell out the answer to this question. He would be glad to listen to you and make you wish true, but what is it? Can you put it into words, in one simple sentence – what is it that you want?

You may start thinking about world peace or bringing back health to your loved ones. No. That is the God’s job, angels do miracles but little ones and they do it only for you. In fact they are not that powerful, they cannot do miracles in a finger snap, they need your help. They can guide you along the path, they can save you from falling into abyss, but you are the one who has to walk this path.

I guess that where the word happiness comes in. We all want to be happy. And we are not that original in that desire. Twenty-three hundred years ago Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else, men and women want happiness. But what is happiness? We all want health, beauty, money, power and million other things because we expect that it will make us happy. But even those who beautiful, rich and powerful are often end up feeling that their lives have been wasted, that instead of being filled with happiness their years were spent in anxiety and boredom. The thing is that they have not walked the path, they received all these gifts without even wanting them. We don’t value things that are easy to get or given to us as a by fortune or random chance.

You cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. The truth is that walking the path makes us happy. The path to the goal we set to ourselves answering a simple question – what is it that you want? You have to have a goal before you find the path. You have to have a desire to reach this goal and follow the path. But here is the secret of all secrets – there is no a direct route to your goal. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, summarized it beautifully in the preface to his book “Man’s Search for Meaning“:

Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, for happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.

… to be continued, hopefully

There is nothing new under the sun, not really. Technologies are new, yes, but the basic human condition has not changed for thousands of years. The same passions rule us that ruled early man. The same questions plague us that have plagued our ancestors from time immemorial. This is, and always has been, the source of great art. Who am I? Where is it? Why? (Or as the philosopher Alan Watts has proposed, there are only four great questions that have plagued man forever: 1) Who started it? 2) Where’s it going? 3) How will it end? 4) Who’s going to clean it up?)

It seems that photography presents us a unique choice in the field of art. We can work to find something new that has never been photographed before and claim it as our unique photographic turf. Or, we can accept the challenge to use our tools as merely tools and come to the realization that the real task of being a photographer is to develop ourselves as conduits for inspiration that creates artwork. One path leads to tomorrow’s cliche. The other path leads to artwork that seems to last. One eventually looks easy; the other looks forever profound.

Photography is unique when compared to so many of traditional art media because it is so wrapped up with this question. Photography is the most technological of all media. The technology of photography is seductive. It’s fun! But if we hope to make art without our tools, the issues that should command our attention most ardently are not the technological ones but rather the issues of wonderment, mystery and depth. We are not making suits of armor. Our tools will never dazzle with technical brilliance, at least not for long. The future generation will look back at our prints, our books, our techniques and our tools with the same quaint smile that we use when considering albumen prints and wet plates. They will never wonder how we did it. They will wonder how we could suffer such primitive techniques.

And this is where the life of the photographic artist begins. Our work will entertain them in its technological coarseness or cultural historicity, or it will engage them in the deeper questions of life. Our work will either show them our world, or ask them about theirs.

This is precisely why I love photography. It is a tool, but it is also a challenge that constantly forces me to think about what I am doing, what I am making and why.

Brooks Jensen
The Magic of It
LensWork No. 38

Once I had a chance to participate in online conversation with well-known Russian photographer Sergey Maximishin. The subject was on photographic composition. In short, Sergey’s point was that a good composition should have several visual attractors connected together in a closed loop forming some sort of polygon. Viewer’s attention moves from one visual attractor to another, but he is never forced away, outside the frame of the photograph. Moving in a closed loop visual perception works like a corkscrew following the spiral in deeper understanding and appreciation of the photograph.

In my photograph from Oia in Santorini I believe I constructed such a loop, a polygon: windmill, blue arch with a cross, following a rope from a bell you get to a blue vase, then cloth line with colorful red spreads swaying in a wind leads you to lower left corner from where your visual attention jumps back to the windmill. I think an integral part of this polygon is the rope from the bell to the blue vase. Otherwise horizontal lines formed by a structure of the building would have overpowered the composition.

On a personal note I don’t think that closed loop composition in a photograph works for me. I believe that we perceive pictures on a subconscious level in a split of second; the rest is just “an elaborate post-hoc rationalization” which we call consciousness. We think that we need time to understand the picture, go around it in a loop or a spiral when in fact we need time to rationalize our subconscious first impression of the picture. So, in my view my task as a photographer is produce photographs with “killer” compositions which are simple, powerful and bold. That kind of composition gives a “knockdown” to visual perception of a viewer. Later he may go in loops and spirals around my photograph but that is later, that is the next layer of visual perception. Ultimately a perfect photograph should be like a Newton’s apple which hits you in a head and which later could be slowly eaten satisfying your eyes with its round form and red and yellow color and your taste buds with its sweet zest. And hopefully that apple can open door for you to new ideas or powerful emotions.

I’ve learned over the years that usually the first thing that The Photo Gods show you is the cliche – that is, the most obvious photograph. I’ve learned that I usually have to take that picture in order to move on.

I think something that has not been widely talked about is that here is a great deal of self-doubt, and it is a part of the creative process. If you’re comfortable with what you are doing, you’ve been there before. We all fall back on things that are comfortable. It’s human tradition.

Jerry Uelsmann
A Conversation with Jerry Uelsmann
Interviewed by Brooks Jensen
LensWork No.17

Beauty conveys truth, but not the way we thought. Aesthetic significance does not deliver truth about human condition in general: it delivers truth about the condition of a particular human, the artist. The aesthetic features of art make sense mainly as displays of the artist’s skill and creativity, not as vehicles of transcendental enlightenment, religious inspiration, social commentary, psycho-analytic revelation, or political revolution. Plato and Hegel derogated art for failing to deliver the same sort of truth that they thought philosophy could produce. They misunderstood the point of art. It is unfair to expect a medium that evolved to display biological fitness to be well adapted for communicating abstract philosophical truths.

This fitness indicator theory helps us to understand why “art” is an honorific term that connotes superiority, exclusiveness, and high achievement. When mathematicians talk about the “art” of theorem-proving, they are recognizing that good theorems are often beautiful theorems, and beautiful theorems are often products of minds with high fitness. It is a claim for the social and sexual status of their favorite display medium. Likewise for the “arts” of warfare, chess, football, cooking, gardening, teaching, and sex itself. In each case, art implies that application of skill beyond the pragmatically necessary. Anyone who wishes to imply superiority in their particular line of work is apt to style themselves an artist. The imperatives of fitness display allow us to understand the passion with which people debate whether something is or is not art. A claim that one’s work is art is a claim for sexual and social status.

Geoffrey Miller
The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

The following quote needs an explanation, a preface. Ex-Soviet emigrees Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid are know in art world as visual provocateurs who keep teasing audiences with unsettling artwork at its most satirical, statistical, and commercial extremes. One of their projects was a statistical poll to find out what kind of painting is preferred by average people intending to discover what a true “people’s art” should look like. The result of a professional market research survey was stunning: people from all over the world, from United States to Ukraine, from Iceland to Kenya – they all like a blue landscape. It is a “realistic-looking” dishwasher-size painting depicting an outdoor scene with water (lakes, rivers or seas), clear blue or stormy skies, vibrant blended colors, preferably a fall scene with wild animals (Finland prefers moose and Kenya prefers hippopotamus) and famous or ordinary people at leisure. It is hilarious. It is quintessential kitsch. But people have spoken. That’s what they want.

Excerpt from “Blue Landscapes, Bewitching Numbers, and the Double Life of Jokes: An Interview with Komar and Mealmid”

QUESTION: So what you make of the fact that the people have spoken for the blue landscape?

VITALY KOMAR: I believe it reflects people’s nostalgia about freedom. It’s very simple metaphor, and very deep at the same time: closed space and open space. The connection of idea of closed space, I believe, it’s prison. And concentration of idea of open space is a landscape – air, no barriers, in other words, vacation, freedom.

You know, we are not free. We do not choose to be born. We do not choose to inhabit this world, this space, this giant room, or, in language of contemporary art, this installation. But if, initially, life was not act of free will, then freedom does not exist in principle, much less in day-to-day life. In search of freedom, of blue landscape, we can at any time open the big door that leads out of this room, out of this time and space, out of this world and this life. But most of us are not capable of suicide; we are afraid to find out maybe behind this door there is another installation, another, different colored landscape. So most of us do not choose to leave this room. Most of us wait for door to open by itself – another, maybe final, violation of our will. Meanwhile, we look for smaller freedoms, open smaller doors, which are so numerous in this installation they resemble some labyrinth of modern offices.

You know, life reminds me of office. Employees scribble abstract patterns in legal pads during meetings and leave office during lunch. Within greater enslavement we discover small freedom – so we think. But if we examine close, this freedom turns out to be a new slavery, with its own freedom/slavery, and so on: our choice of lunch, for example, its price, taste, nutrients, etc.

A concentric structure like Russian matryoshka doll emerges, and we can track this structure down to its smallest particles, to indivisible moments of orgasm and pain, pleasure and suffering. Next installation “People’s Choice” will be like labyrinth of computerized offices. Only question is how to design the “big door” without going to extremes of Freudian interpretation.

QUESTION: All that in a blue landscape.

ALEXANDER MELAMID: It might seem like something funny, but you know, I’m thinking that this blue landscape is more serious than we first believed. Talking to people in the focus groups before we did the poll and the town hall meetings around the country after, I think people want to talk about art, for better or for worse, and they talk for hours and hours. It’s hard to stop them; nobody ever asks them about art. But almost everyone you talk directly – and we’ve already talked to hundreds of people – they have this blue landscape in their head. It sits there, and it’s not a joke. They can see it, down to smallest detail. So I’m wondering, maybe the blue landscape is genetically imprinted in us, that it’s the paradise within, that we came from blue landscape and we want it. Maybe paradise is not something which is awaiting us; it is already inside of us, and the point is how to figure it out, how to discover it, how to get it out.

We now completed polls in many countries – China, Kenya, Iceland, and so on and the results are strikingly similar. Can you believe it? Kenya and Iceland – what can be more different in the whole fucking world? – and they both want blue landscape. So we think that we hit on something here. A dream of modernism, you know, is to find a universal art. People believe that the square was what could unite people, that it is really, truly universal. But they were wrong. The blue landscape is what is really universal, maybe to all mankind.

QUESTION: Paradise: pro or con? Let’s go back to what you said earlier about paradise and the blue landscape. Going up the Hudson River the other day I thought perhaps the blue landscape is the last pure idealization, because with nature, in the instant of contemplation, you can forget that the water is polluted, the air is polluted, that on each side of the river is a strip mall or a faded town or whatever. In the moment of observation, all of that is forgotten, which is something you can’t say when you look at cities and factories, or when you think of communism or of the old idea of progress through electricity all motifs of modernism in one way or another. So maybe when people say they want a blue landscape it’s as a kind of icon of purer reality, the last remnant of faith.

VITALY KOMAR: But you are mixing beauty in reality and beauty in art. They are two different kinds of beauty, two different kinds of aesthetics in art and in life. For example, socialist realism asked artists to represent reality, but it was false reality. Because the basic idea of socialist realism was to depict people as they might be, not as they are. Because we are building ideal society, so we need ideal people. Of course, it was not realism at all, because real people were polluted, real life was polluted. And when people are speaking of blue landscape, I’m afraid they mean real landscape, not painting. They just like to have a reflection of reality in their everyday life; in their apartments they imagine this picture as a window of their freedom. It captures experience of hermits, who go out into desert and so forth. The blue landscape can make people hermits for a second, to meditate. Making people hermits for a second maybe that is the basic idea of art.

Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art