Issue 115 | October 7 - 21, 2022

Picturing Place

“What we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place. In this sense we would choose in most respects for thirty minutes with Edward Hopper’s painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street that was his subject; with Hopper’s vision we see more.” 

-Robert Adams

I just got back from my first real trip in a long time. It was an exciting adventure from start to finish. From the butterflies I felt packing my camera gear before I left, to getting on a plane for the first time since the pandemic started, to touching down in a new place, to having multiple peak experiences during my travels around Colorado and Utah, and finally to being welcomed back to NYC by a genuinely insane taxi ride home from JFK with a driver who was utterly unable to see in the rain and dark and almost got us both killed or injured multiple times. It was an incredible trip, but it’s also so good to be back in NYC, and I’m grateful to have made it home alive.

I’ve been to Colorado and Utah before - My father was a geologist who worked in these areas, and as a family we’d travel out to his old stomping grounds for summer vacations in my childhood. I don’t know if it got too expensive, but those Western trips stopped when I became a teenager. I’ve made a couple trips back in the years since to visit a close friend who made a life out there, but It had been a long while since I returned, more than a decade. I took photos the last time I was there, but only as an enthusiastic amateur - I hadn’t yet become the photographer I am now, with my more demanding ambitions and aspirations about picture making.

Although some places were familiar, most of this trip was to new places and new hikes - The Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs, Colorado National Monument outside Grand Junction, the high peaks surrounding Crested Butte, Colorado, camping on Cedar Mesa in Utah, and a hike through the hoodoos of Fisher Towers in Moab, Utah.

It’s an astonishingly beautiful landscape, and I wanted to make pictures that celebrated the beauty of the place, but I also wanted to try and make something new - pictures or sequences of photos I hadn’t seen before of these places. 

I also wanted to explore a nascent idea I had about making pictures of the geology of this landscape - something that might connect me to my father and the geology work he did in the area. 

This part of the world is almost all rocks and all kinds of rocks. You see and feel fragmented rocks, giant boulders, pebbles, slick rocks, sandy rocks, rocks that bounce your heavy car up and down like a plaything, billion-year-old rocks, million-year-old rocks, gentle rocks that support small desert plants, rock pools, worn down rocks, water-chiseled canyon rocks, massive rock walls and rock faces, mountains of solid rock, craggy fraggy draggy rocks, rocks splashed with colorful lichens, layer cake sedimentary rocks, dripped sand castle rocks, rocks that sparkle like the galaxies above, and so many more rocks.

And amidst all these rocks, you’re constantly confronted with scenes of staggering and monumental beauty. One of the primary challenges in photographing this place was just trying to convey these tremendous geological forms’ scale and living presence. 

It’s an ancient landscape, and it’s a landscape that is very directly connected to the indigenous people who lived on the land far before Europeans set out to explore this land in the 1500s, people that still live there today. The spirits of the Ancestral Puebloans in Utah felt particularly present as we camped out on their mesa and hiked through canyons they once built cliff-dwelling homes in - homes that are startingly well-preserved a thousand years later. Of course, the descendants of these people are very much alive and well now too, a vital and vibrant part of the contemporary landscape of the West.

Alongside this profound land, and underneath the vivid stars and luminous clouds of the Milky Way, which sparkled as I never saw before, there’s also the slowly unfolding ecological and environmental disaster of contemporary American life spreading inexorably throughout the landscape. Ugly houses and developments blighting otherwise pristine views, ‘Trump won’ MAGA billboards, endless strip malls, enormous homes built in ski towns like Crested Butte that will only be occupied by their very wealthy owners a few months each year, and the ubiquitous ‘Don’s Johns’ that sit on recently purchased plots of land, a sign of the construction to come, and foundations soon to be poured. 

Photographer Robert Adams documented this strip-mallification and housing development construction across Denver’s front range starting in 1968, and it was interesting to see on this trip how that process never stopped. Adams could work on a similar project today, showing just how far the juggernaut of capitalism and population growth had infringed onto the landscape since his early images. “Show affection for the world, but don’t lie about it.” Robert Adams said. It’s hard to show affection for some manmade intrusions that blight this beautiful land.

The friend I was visiting lives in a gentrifying ski town whose wealth and density increased sharply during the pandemic as rich people fled cities for mountain retreats like his. It’s a town entirely surrounded by supreme beauty, and yet I found it fascinating how my friend’s opinions of the place were so divided - half the time, he would enjoy the beauty with me. Yet, an almost equal amount of time was spent pointing out and decrying the changes and wealthy gentrification of the mountain town he’d lived in since the early 2000s (a place his partner had lived since the late 1980s). My friend’s job is running a conservation land trust. Throughout a lengthy career in this work, he’s preserved thousands of acres of land across Colorado, an accomplishment that hopefully tempers some of the angst and sadness he feels at all the places he and his organization weren’t able to preserve, all the areas still being despoiled by man’s encroachments.

I left Colorado with hundreds of photos, some on film, so I won’t see them for a while, and a lot of questions about how to make photos of places like this. Although my visit was for two weeks, it was also hectic, with hundreds of miles on the road and new places to explore almost every day. 

I think my best photos from what I’ve seen in a quick review are probably just scenes of Western natural beauty - towering storm clouds illuminated by a setting sun one evening in Utah, the shimmering and intense yellow autumn Aspen forests in the high peaks of Colorado, and the sublime enormous rock forms of Utah. 

I got some new ideas photographing this landscape, and I feel like some progress was made, but it all feels so developing and also very contingent on the immense support and help I got from my friends along the way. 

I wouldn’t have gotten any photos without the expert guidance and advice of my local friend, who took my other pal and me on all the most adventurous and exciting parts of our journey. I’m unsure if I’ll ever have the skills or experience to explore the most interesting parts of these difficult and sometimes dangerous landscapes on my own, the way I’m able to explore NYC neighborhoods on my own.

He and the other friend I traveled with were also soooo gracious and patient with my frequent picture-making stops on the trail (and my many pauses to catch my breath - 11,500 feet really tests your lungs!) I’m so blessed and lucky that I had them as companions on this Western adventure.

I really want to investigate this land further. I’m eager to review my photos in more detail, and I think I did alright for one trip. But I suspect if your goal is describing a place, you must immerse yourself in many more than one visit. I have to go back soon. It can’t be another several years until my next trip. That’s the only way. 

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Class Announcement:

Starting Saturday, October 29, I'll be teaching a five-session online class called 'Questionable Pictures' that will explore the written and unwritten rules shaping the photography we create. Inspired by the book Photo No-Nos: Meditations on What Not to Photograph (Jason Fulford, Aperture, 2021), we'll explore different ideas around aesthetic and style conventions and subject matter (what can we make pictures of and what shouldn't we make pictures of? Who comes up with all these rules anyway, and how can we subvert them?) By the end, we'll be a class full of rebels, celebrating all the rules we broke along the way.

Learn More / Signup: [here]

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Photo at top of post - Fisher Towers, Utah 2022 by James Prochnik

Issue 104 | February 18 - 25, 2022

"I once was lost, but now I'm found."

Before I shifted my career into web design and photography, I spent many years managing a busy commercial art studio that made custom art installations - things like large-scale hand-painted murals and lobby-filling sculpture installations. Working on these art projects taught me a lot about creative work under the commercial pressures of tight budgets and fast deadlines, and it also just taught me a lot about making artworks that connect with people.

An idea I still think about from those days came from one of our best clients, architect David Rockwell, who designed many highly theatrical restaurants and hospitality spaces around the world.  He would often ask us to return to the idea of the ‘lost and found’ in the art installations, we made for him. If we were hand-painting a decorative pattern on the wall, he wanted parts of it, in almost random ways, to be distressed or fade away entirely. If we were making a sculpture for a large interior space like a hotel lobby, he wanted it to emerge and swoop in and out of the interior depending on where you stood in the space. If we were making a mural for a restaurant, he wanted parts of it to appear as if the mural continued behind the banquets where no one could see it, or have us make the mural out of glass beads that would shimmer and break the surface when disturbed by air currents or different lighting. What was this idea about?  Why did it appeal so much to David Rockwell, and why has it stuck with me after so many years?

Lost and found is a concept that does seem to reflect an eternal and deep aspect of existence. When we walk through a forest, light from a sunny day will appear and disappear in dappled patterns as breezes blow through the forest canopy. Greenery and color appear in the spring, fade away by autumn, largely disappear in the winter and return the following spring. Clouds in the sky form, grow, dissipate, and form again. Emotions, like clouds, form and take over our minds for minutes or hours or milliseconds before submerging into our subconsciousness like bubbles appearing and disappearing on the surface of a boiling pot. Relationships we have with family and friends take dramatically different forms and appearances over the years.

So lost and found can be a way of understanding existence as one of continuous change.  Everything we are and know is transient, evanescent, and subject to observable change given a long enough time frame. 

I think the idea has really stuck with me as a photographer making pictures in the world because I am continually seeking to spot and hold moments that emerge and disappear in fractions of a second. Every day I walk the streets with my camera I see the truth of our lost and found world where mystery and beauty and humor and ugliness reveal themselves in flashes and just as quickly hide again. If my photograph is successful, I hold some proof, some evidence that the world, which can feel so commonplace so much of the time, is as alive and magical a place as I believe it to be. 

From an aesthetic and formal standpoint, the idea of the lost and found also holds power. A photograph that describes a scene where the subject is smack in the center and in perfect focus does half the job a photograph ought to do (a photographic challenge I wrestle with all the time). A photo like that answers some questions about the world. It tells us that such and such looked like this at a certain time on a certain day and that we think this subject is important for whatever reason.  It tells us what the photographer found. It is good to get those answers right. But the other half of the job a photograph ought to do is to raise some questions. Some of the questions you might want to raise are about the world beyond the frame, the world inside the frame, what we are seeing, and on and on.

A photograph that is somehow able to conjure what is lost, as well as what was found, invites viewers to stay longer and to engage longer with what you have made. Those are the photos that I think hold the most power. So much more to say about this idea, but it’s late and I’m feeling pretty lost in the labyrinth for now.

Hopefully, I’ll find ya next week.

❤️

James Prochnik The NYC Photo Community | Issue 104 | February 18 - February 25, 2022

Issue 100 | January 21 - 28, 2022

Welcome to the 100th issue of the NYC Photo Community Newsletter! I'm happy I've made it this far with a project I started on a whim in September of 2019, and I'm very grateful for all of you who have chosen to come along for the ride. Thank you.  I'm especially grateful to the scores of fantastic photographers who took the time to share their work and thoughts with the community. 

Any time you start a long-term endeavor, you reach a point where you know that to keep going, you need to shake things up, adjust your direction, and stretch a little higher or further than you have so far.  It's taken me a while to get there, but I'm pleased to announce I've finally taken some steps to make the newsletter better, more useful, more user-friendly, and more readable. My goal is to create a more interesting place to connect with and be inspired by other photographers who share our enthusiasm for the medium. In short, it's infrastructure week here at the newsletter. Here's what I did and why:

—I made a brand new website for the NYC Photo Community. Much of the basic structure I envision for the website is up and live, but be warned, as of now, it's a website in early days, like a spring chick pecking its way out of an eggshell, but not quite hopping around yet. There's a ways to go still, and a lot more content I want to add. I know with time and feedback we'll get there soon.  Having a unique website is going allow for a lot of positive changes, both immediately, and long-term.  Right away it's going to be a much better platform to showcase photography and organize the kind of material this newsletter has presented in the past into a more durable and useful way. Longer-term, I plan to launch a print/zine/book/poster store on the site to help support both the NYC Photo Community and the artists who've been a part of it since its inception. I also hope to start some kind of forum where we can more easily connect online but haven't settled on the means to accomplish that yet.

—I've re-designed the typography and colors of the newsletter to be simpler, cleaner, and hopefully more readable. The design was overdue for an update, especially the old logo which always reminded me a little too closely of a coronavirus particle. That definitely had to go!  

—Like this editor's note, the newsletter had gotten far too long. To address this, most of the newsletter will now consist of brief summaries of content, and readers can click through to see or read further as they wish. Since this is the inaugural edition of the new format, I'm keeping the full editor's note this week, but future issues will just have a short excerpt and a link to the full note.  The same will go for all sections of the newsletter. This change is the biggest, and for some, it will not be welcome, so this was a change that did not come lightly for me. After a lot of thought, I believe it's the right choice and will help people find material they're most interested in more easily. I'm particularly happy that it will give a much better format to present the work and ideas of the featured photographer each week.  (I love this week's feature on Patrice Helmar!)

All for now, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the changes and plans for the future.  Just hit reply to this email to drop me a line, or use the contact form on our website.  Thanks again for being part of this, and I'm looking forward to the next 100 issues!

❤️James Prochnik The NYC Photo Community | Issue 100 | January 21 - 28