New Blog Location!

On to WordPress we go! Please visit (and bookmark) the new blog location:
http://bobkillenphotographyblog.com

Thanks! I look forward to seeing you there.

Regards,

Bob

Near and Far

I am a believer in Community to support our fine art photography. So I’m excited to shout out the progress of others that I have seen grow in their art.

Thus I want to rave about Jim Smart’s induction into the National Park Service’s Artist in Residence program and his first show which will debut on 23 January at ‘The Desert Light Gallery’ in the Kelso Visitors Center of the Mojave National Preserve. Titled, Near and Far, this is an exceptional body of work that explores the relationships of large geologic mass in the Mojave to the small details.

Jim explores the desert with tight focus and pushes the edges of our understanding through quiet monochromes, which strip the desert of its color and leave us massive forms in a wide range of muted tones. In some images, we see familiar shapes that conjure up images embedded in our memories such as his Eels in Stone and Elephant Rock. These scenes and others while fully descriptive of memory images, place and landscape also present an abstract and hallucinatory edge. Near and Far hangs on Saturday January 23, in the morning and Jim will be around all day. His reception is on the 24th at 1 PM. I encourage everyone to attend.

And it is with great pride that I note that Jim has been a student in our Calumet/Bob Killen Fine Art Workshops. I am delighted to see one of our own grow and achieve gallery recognition. We wish Jim Smart continued success and a broad audience.

And finally Bob's Rant's and Craves will be leaveing Google Blooger for Word Press soon as they are more image friendly. Watch for a notice within the next few days.

Bob

That Cheating Feeling

“What about filters, plug-ins, and stuff like Nik or Topaz?” one of my Vision beyond Documentation workshop members asked. “How do they fit into the fine art workflow or should we not use them?’

“Why wouldn’t you use them?” I queried.

“I dunno,” he said. “Somehow it feels like I’m cheating or not using my own skills.”

It’s a good question, and that ‘cheating’ feeling can be real. There is a sense that if we employ off the shelf plug-ins such as Nik Creative Suite, Topaz, or any of the dozen others that are available that we have somehow cheated the creative process. It seems we are no longer creating a fine art image; it is now the handiwork of a cold computer and complex algorithms. With a click of a mouse, a computer has created an image better than we sometimes achieve after hours of work in Photoshop.

This kind of thinking is goofier then a wooden watch. I mean would you mix cement in a bucket if you had a power mixer available. Would you build a fire to cook your meals each day when there is an electric range at your fingertips? Of course not.

Look, Photoshop with its powerful filters, defaults, sliders, and actions automates all kinds of corrections and outputs. Nik, Topaz, Pixel Genius and other plug in programs are tools too with their own sets of adjustment controls. Out of the box and off the shelf, Photoshop defaults and commercial plug-ins can sometimes turn the good photo into a great image, so can the auto defaults in Lightroom and Camera Raw, but none of them can create a body of work. None of these tools chooses subjects, angles, time of day, light, and emotional range. That is the job of the artist and these choices are more critical now that we have instant image conversion and instant feedback at the camera.

That ‘cheating feeling’ that artists sometimes feel is the temptation to use automation in place of creative application. The later approach demands mastery and rigor of pre-visualization, image capture, Photoshop tools and workflow, and then the command of the commercial plug-ins you choose.

Photoshop and the world of plug-ins are tools that give you more choices, more possible ways of reaching the artistic goals that you set for your project and can often provide you with a means to reach those goals faster. But if you come to rely on these tools, which I call stylizing tools, as your ‘go to’ default process for your images, you will not cheat the process, you will cheat yourself by eliminating opportunities to develop your own visual voice. We need to recognize that all users of these programs have access to the same sets of algorithms, the same default actions, and as a result, we often see the same ‘paint by the numbers’ results across a broad range of images by various photographers.

I call this the commoditization of art and one only needs to look at wedding and retail portraiture photography to see that image style is often the same across a wide line of photographers. Does this mean that these photographers are not creative? No, what it means is that in the wedding/portraiture industry customers often demand certain ‘looks’ that are in-style, and plug-in tools and actions can speed up the process with a positive effect on the bottom line. Automation tools are critical to the cost/creative curve in this industry and free the photographer to shoot more weddings, to concentrate on expression capture, design in the field, and to solve many thorny problems such as low light in a church or zit removal from a teenage portrait.

It is also important to recognize that while each of the plug-ins has its own sets of sliders, control point technology and other proprietary doo dads all of them rely on the same fundamentals of hue, saturation, and luminosity. However, the better suites of stylizing tools such as Nik’s Silver EFEX Pro for black and white conversions, Tiffen’s wide array of photo and light filters, and Pixel Genius’s software for creative sharpening all have unique HSL interpretive approaches. Each of these stylizing tools can provide an artist with new visual paths.

Automation is useful for it can relive the artist of many production tasks and repetitive corrections. But if you are pursing images that expand your audiences emotional range then as a Fine Art Photographer use of all of these tools demand conscious choices from capture to print. Failure to do so will produce that paint by numbers, commoditized ‘look,’ and yes, you will have cheated yourself and us, the audience, of an opportunity to experience your visual voice.

"Speaking In" for a Happy New Year

Sometime in early November, I swore to myself that I would not write a New Year’s blog. At the time, I thought I had good reasons to exempt myself from this task.

First, I’m not inclined to make opinions about recent history without a time for consideration, reflection, and refinement, traits I've developed as I've grown older. Second, my work life has many demands in an economy that requires many demanding adjustments. Thus, it just seemed too challenging to think that far ahead and commit myself to such a blog. Third, it scares me to share ideas that demand some sense of forecasting which is what all commentators’ seem to do when discussing the New Year. Fourth, I tend to shy from sharing incomplete ideas for fear that they may go badly and thus destroy any good ideas that are germinating.

But here I am, the headlights of a New Year bearing down on, a Blue Moon rising, and I am writing a New Year’s blog post. Why?

Initially I saw this communication platform as a form of reportage about my own rants and raves, perspectives on emerging fine art photographers, product reviews, and odds and ends. Reportage is an outward, factual voice, but now as Wendy Richmond notes in her recent Communication Arts article, one can use the blog to ‘speak in’ as well as to speak out.

In the past, I’ve relied on my daily journal for those ‘speak in’ moments. It is a place where I keep undeveloped ideas, sketches, notes and try out various iterations. It is also the place where self-criticism takes place, and fears reveal themselves. But I see now that the blog is a good place to share work in progress, to share the thought processes (or lack of thought) with kindred souls who create fine art, because my own failings are often the seeds of someone else’s success as well as my own.

So as I am about to be overrun with a New Year and a Blue Moon on the near horizon I’ve decided to change perspective and use my blog to accomplish some new things.

First like all artists, I need deadlines and destinations for my work. So I’m committing to a new blog every fourteen days. This means the blog will function as something of a personal trainer one that forces me to come up with something new on a rigorous schedule.

Second, I’ll share the agony and ecstasy of developing new works, the first of which is the Past Gas project. Most of my Calumet workshop crew is already aware of the drivers in this project and I’ll share the creative statement with the rest of you on the next blog. This kind of self-revelation will serve to support the development of a new body of work.

Third, I’ll keep the blog’s reportage elements but I want to expand the reports on other artists projects. This is a small step to help create community and exposure for those who are making art that matters, because making art that matters is an act that makes a life that matter.

Happy New Year everyone!!

-32-

A Rave for Vincene

Today marks the 5th anniversary of Vincene Killen’s fall to cancer.

Some, but not all of you know that Vincene, my late wife, was my inspiration to pursue fine art photography from the Mojave Desert, and the Mojave National Preserve in particular. While driving back from the California Desert Protection Act Celebration at the Kelso Depot this Saturday, I found myself laughing aloud at these memories, because Vincene was more at home in a fine hotel then in a desert campsite, more at home in a well equipped kitchen then gnawing on oat bars while trail hiking or exploring four wheel drive trails.

However, Vincene, who thought drinking from a canteen was a learned skill, came to love the Mojave Desert and the Preserve quite naturally.

We explored old mine roads by four-wheel drive and found tiny water springs while hiking on faint trails. We celebrated the stillness, and noted how the magical quality of light united the starkly different geographic forms into an uneasy syncopation. Through these trips, we began to know that in this Gobi dry land, thunderclaps are rare, lightning strikes even less, and hard rain is an episodic event that creates gully-washing floods. To explain to others what we felt as we began to know the desert Vincene coined the phrase ‘Back to Loneliness.’ This then became my photographic theme for my work in the Mojave National Preserve and our commitment to photographically capture and interpret the solitude of yesterday and eons of yesterdays.

Sadly Vincene passed before many of my project images came alive in print, and of course how could either of us know ten how prophetic the title ‘Back to Loneliness’ would become.

As with any loved one, there is always a sense of loss, but there are also many fond memories to celebrate and recall. Thank you for sharing some of my past and Vincene’s love of the desert with you on this day of remembrance.

Bob Killen
http://www.bobkillen.com
http://twitter.com/BobKillen

The Rock-a-Hoola Water Park quit business in 2004

Quitting a business is fundamentally different than stopping or closing. The later happens frequently as one owner gives up, and then another comes along to renew the dream of success. But Quitting happens once. Quitting means not starting again; it means the dream has been irrevocably abandoned.

Business abandonment is not unique to America but we seem to do more of it then most countries: car plants close, shoe and textile factories go still and their work sent to some jungle shop, downtown merchants abandon character rich locations for a suburban box, and talented people quit their talent thinking there is no destination for their work. There may be some kind of cowboy wisdom that drives our penchant for abandonment, something that says if your horse is dead, well then− you might as well get off and ride another. But I think abandonment occurs when we fail to balance our imagination with realistic calculation. Turn too far in one direction and your head fills with wooly fantasies. Lean off on another course and you spend your life color coding your day planner. In either case the dream fails because expectations never arrived and it is then that the owner quits. What is left behind is the industrial undercarriage of what was and perhaps what might have been.

This proclivity to abandon dreams and leave things behind has long fascinated me as a visual thematic.

I’ve observed that a quit business undergoes a human like death process. There is rigor mortis, a time when the closed business is still and stiff, appearing as if it could return to life momentarily. But this ‘born again’ moment does not happen, decay happens, and the facility steadily rots out to archeological ruin. In between rigor and ruin, and before the vandals advance decay through post mortem breakage, I try to find the visually significant, the art within.

I got to Rock-a-Hoola just in time. The water slides have already been stripped from the park and sold less some intenerate trespasser decides to ride a skate board to injury or worse. What remains is the true undercarriage, the visual elements bare of activity and commercial purpose. Pagoda like slide cradles march over a man made hill, windblown desert brush fills the wading pools, boarded up art-deco buildings invite the artist to decide on color or monochrome approaches. In this detritus of a business quit I found patterns of fabric, tiles, pipes, lattice skirted billboards, cloud decks, towers, and tanks. My goal here was not to document each of the remaining elements or to provide a visual tour or time line. It was to find the visual story within the decaying industrial undercarriage. By way of background, Rock-a-Hoola is about 135 miles north of downtown Los Angeles on I-15. In the late 1950s John Robert Byers and his wife Dolores decided to add a man-made lake to their humble campground property in Newberry Springs, a small desert community near Barstow, CA. The campground soon became a popular destination when the Byers added slides, swings, ziplines and a trapeze, attractions that some considered as Water Park thrill rides. Word of mouth and late night TV commercial advertising in LA resulted in the park's most successful years— the late '60s to the mid '80s. Eventually, the popularity of the park waned and it closed for the first time in the late '80s.

In 1990 Terry Christensen and two financial partners bought Lake Delores. A frequent visitor to Lake Delores, Christensen had a vision for upscale 1950’s-themed water park and his LLC invested 3 million dollars into the concept. With help from local businessman and civic leader Spike Lynch, who was instrumental in the design, construction, and ongoing day-to-day management and oversight of the park—Terry Christensen's vision came to fruition. Boasting a catchy new name, an attractive new theme, new water rides, and the world's longest "Lazy River" -- "Rock-A-Hoola" waterpark (the park's name is based upon the song from the 1961 Elvis Presley/Angela Lansbury film Blue Hawaii) officially opened on July 4, 1998 to the constant sound of 50's/ 60's-era Rock and Roll music.

I spoke with Spike Lynch, and it seems that Christiansen was the neo-cortex of Rock-a-Hoola. Unfortunately, the extensive financial commitments from Christensen’s partners were fantasy. Without full funding, the critical elements for a destination oasis resort with an on-premise RV Park and hotel for year round operation failed, and public interest in standalone water parks waned. After only three seasons of operation, the park filed for Chapter 11 and later Chapter 7 in 2000. Christiansen died in 2009.

The Park stopped, closed, and then with a new owner opened again. New owners pumped in $400,000 of renovations and on Memorial Day in 2002 a new "Discovery Waterpark" opened. For the next two years the facility operated Thursday through Sunday with marginal results and during 2004, the last season of operation, the water park operated on an intermittent basis before finally closing for good. After 50 years of open and close, stop and start, Rock-a-Hoola quit— the dream, the business irrevocably abandoned.

A Rave for Jim Smart

I want to encourage my blog visitors to visit Calumet Photo’s Santa Ana Store (1430 S. Village Way, Santa Ana, CA 92705) and view the Jim Smart exhibit in the store’s gallery.

Jim’s landscape and two portrait images demonstrate strong photographic artisanship, patience for the light, with compositions that are simple and direct. What is great about this work is that you will not see the umpteenth ‘post card’-like landscape with cunning lighting and drama angles, techniques that are OK for a commercial presence but at the same time often seem awkward and over reaching. Instead, you will view a series of images that are quiet, reflective, and in a number of the images, there is a strong meditative quality. It’s this meditative quality that I find intriguing as he couples this to direct compositions that provoke questions that once cannot accurately form with words.

Smart is an accomplished English Professor, but as his exhibit demonstrates he is also an emerging fine art photographer who has come to terms with the fact that photography is seldom entirely within the control of the artist and is often a collaboration with chance. It is obvious that his visual voice is forging a process between the mediation of the camera and the dimension of his subjects and three of his images, (thumbnails included here) are illustrative of where his work is now and where it seems destined in the future.

In Barn on Bear Lake Utah, we have a flat plane, little ground, a tightly cropped memoir to times past. The bricks on the roof are a standalone sonata from the main composition, at once out of place and at the same time in harmony with barn’s past. In Dilapidated Barn, Montana, we have a foreground of new growth flowers juxtaposed against a barn roof sinking into the past. In his untitled ‘picket fenced house’, we view an abandoned homestead that has a sense of ghostly occupancy. The lightening rod, dead elm, and a lawn that seems to get an occasional mowing, delivers a quiet monument to vacancy and perhaps abandonment, a subject that I find intriguing.

I see these images as indicators of Jim’s emerging voice as he transients from solid image-maker to long-term art producer, because these images are indicative of vision, depth, and authentic sensitivity. And what of the other images on display— that are worthy of the wall space they occupy and allow us to appreciate Jim’s skills, and his intuitive ability to sympathize with the landscape as environment.

Go. See. And Enjoy Jim Smart.

Regards,
Bob Killen
http://www.bobkillen.com
http://bobkillen.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/BobKillen