I’ve been thinking about this for a while now—the question of what it is about the kind of photography that I do with old cameras and do I really need to shoot on expensive and difficult to handle instant film. Certainly, it will change the way I work, for one, it doesn’t create the same kind of instant gratification that Polaroid-type film does.

I’m currently in negotiation with Yelp to do a free photo-booth set-up at The Jazz Age Lawn Party, but it had to be digital (they have to be uploaded fast), so I did some designing and tinkering along with Christopher Smith, a fantastic sculptor who lives and work in South Philly (http://christophersmithsculpture.com/) and we were off and running. The shot above, I did in my studio, but I hope to field test the camera sometime this week, perhaps in Rittenhouse Park. The unit will likely get a coat of flat black paint and some light-stopping weather stripping in the front, but it’s otherwise done. It absolutely has to go on a Majestic gear head. It weights nearly twenty pounds!

The camera combines a digital and an old Crown Graphic. Currently using a 135 Schneider but it will also take a 210 Xenar from 1910 that’s in a Compound air shutter.

Crusher in his finished state.

I think one of the fundamental axioms of art is that all creation is done under than less than optimal circumstances. Jean Cocteau during the filming of the famous armless statue scene in Blood of a Poet used a rented Paris flat lined with second hand mattresses as a sound stage. The mattresses had bedbugs. Lee Miller (the statue) should have been nominated for a cinematic award simply for finishing that memorable scene. 

With photography, it seems rare that the great image doesn’t have some technical glitch. The captured image is a window in time that cannot be repeated. With the photography I do with Tsirkus, most of the time, I get one whack and the subject is gone, leaving me with the physical and chemical remains of the image, the cognate with which to struggle.

I guess I derive a certain delectation out of creating the silk purse from the proverbial female pig’s ear, this applies to image matrices and printmaking, not my subjects! Today, I really pushed the limits. Evelyn Kriete, G.D. Falksen, and an as yet unnamed dapper young gent posed for this portrait at the last Dorian’s Parlor. Ev and G.D. have been wonderful supporters of my work and it’s always a pleasure to meet up with them and shoot their portraits. I wasn’t quite happy with this one when I saw the Fujiroid positive, but I had a suspicion that it still might be a good shot, so I set to work, perhaps to reclaim myself. Besides it was 95F in the upstairs studio, so the best thing I could do was work at the computer in the cool, lower belly of the beast I call my home/work place.

Well, hours and forty-three layers in Photoshop later, I pulled what I think is pretty tasty print.  Worth it? Hopefully, and I suspect it will make me dream and find new directions.

I’ve been knee-deep in printmaking these last three days and this amazing little print emerged this morning. So often this happens, that I’ll be working on something and it just comes out of left field. I try to stay really flexible doing these, in fact with all my printmaking. You really never know what may work or lead to something new. I was watching a documentary on Jean Cocteau and he mentioned that Picasso was always trying to break with his own conventions. What a great idea!

I’m a huge Miller fan. I’ve gobbled up the better part of his work, have re-read a number of his tomes and have more in the cross-hairs. I have heard from a number of people that they can’t stomach him because of his attitude toward women. So Miller is a male chauvinist, does it really matter? Such is akin to shunning every Degas painting because like many Frenchmen of his time, he was an anti-Semite. He was also was a misogynist and generally misanthropic. Whether this can be read in the work itself is an issue I’ll leave for the professional art historians.

Does genius forgive moral lapses? No, but to demand transcendence and largesse in all things from the creative personality is a tall order, especially given that great work never seems to arrive without its share of psychological battle scars; evidence of being badly pressed to the wall. Artists somehow wriggle free of the clutch through the creative act, but its this same creative will that makes them lopsided, monstrous, giants in one realm, but imperious infants in others. 

We have little to fear from fiction presented as such. Miller is long dead and it’s only words on a page— to be appreciated as words both critically and as food for spirit.  It’s not like we have to buy it all. We’re not moving in with him. It’s not religion. That’s the beauty of viewing art and reading with an adult’s critical eye— being able to skim what we like, especially from a vintage that has been allowed to settle into the punt. With any faith, we know the next generation of creative people will do better. This is also a strong argument as to why nothing should ever be censored; only restricted to eyes and ears mature enough to understand and make an informed analysis.

I trust that Miller is not lying when he says it was always the whole woman in which he was interested. He just somehow can’t get to what I’d call the “female secret.” He can only recount the picaresque comedy one’s life becomes when one goes searching for that center willy-nilly under the battle flag of unrestrained sex.  Much as pornography is often maniacally consumed to become numb, I believe his fixations on graphic depictions of sex are neither to ennoble nor degrade, but rather function as a kind of smokescreen behind which he can hide and set the reader off-guard.

For Miller, the banked fires of memory and the flames of imagination power the miraculous, cockeyed machine-loom that weaves childhood streets, slag-piles, and the offal of early 20^th century NYC into an enchanted rag rug, but somehow this magic carpet, this creative center, arises out of the carbonized leavings of old Williamsburg with the fixations of a six year old in tow. The headspace that spins the tale is too immature to include the question of the other, that being women. In his creative brain, his will is the center-of-all. Though humans are for Miller sources of fascination, himself included, the great love in Miller’s work is creation, what I’d call “life-spirit,” not individuals. Miller is a genius at bringing the reader back to the pre-verbal motivations of childhood when the world appeared to course with energy from which one was inseparable. The Zen philosopher might call this “oneness.” A modern might call it a feeling of exultation, of being in love. Miller, as he himself might have said, was “intoxicated with life.”

Though women were central motivating forces in his life, he can’t get inside the essence of his relationship to them in the direct language for which he is celebrated. It’s telling, that although he carried off a long and deeply involved affair with Anais Nin, to the best of my knowledge, she never surfaces as a fictionalized persona in his works, though Miller’s many wives and lovers do. Miller, however, appears in Nin’s diary quite vividly. For Miller, writing about Anais would have caused his work to implode; he would not have known how to craft a story around the arrival of an equal, or perhaps superior artistic force, Unlike Miller, Nin was extremely adept at manipulating language to exquisitely limb the essential vagaries of her loves.

Being at a loss to delineate the essential truths about the women in his life, he eviscerates them. They are portrayed as conniving liars, unloved saps, viragos, and borderlines that seem to physically shape shift and invent new personas when convenient. (This does not stop Miller from depicting them as always aching for sex in which the protagonist consequently partakes.) Ironically, it was often via the agency of women, including June and Anais, that he was gifted the needed time to write. It should also be mentioned that the flayings are not only meted out on just on females, but men as well, and Miller himself comes off as no saint in the bargain.

Miller’s art and creative philosophy are rooted in the times and the prevailing roles of the sexes. He describes vividly, plainly, often eloquently and poetically as his executor Kenneth Rexroth says, what is, including his less-than-lovely self. Even though he stands outside of his time in terms of attitude, he is very much writing within it. Miller is still an early 20^th century man even if his creative musings are his escape hatch, allowing him to soar into surreal and timeless heavens. 

As Charles Eldred, my college drawing teacher once said: “Beginning and ending are the hard parts.” Sounds like a love affair, well I guess it is, of sorts. I’ve set my sites on a short series for these pieces—five and this is number three. What a bear to print this turned out to be! My work space is piled with test prints. I will see if I can pull a few more rabbits out of my hat and shoot some more in the next few days. Right now the studio is near ninety plus degrees, so I’m hoping for somewhat cooler weather.

The tulle and the soft light create all kinds of problems and the subtlety of the play of tonalities are very important if the print is not going to look like it’s made of soot and chalk. I’m at an equal disadvantage since I’m using a very inexpensive printer that is not known for it’s fine gradations of tone. This is no way intended to be an excuse. I derive a distinct pleasure from being able to get, what I believe, are some pretty decent prints from it. When I do upgrade to something better, I won’t need to use as many tricks, but I’m glad I know them.

In terms of learning, I think the argument for pushing the limits of cheaper, simpler equipment is a good one. I spent years working with film and wet printing, often taking a whole day to make a single eight by ten. The amount of time to make a really decent print hasn’t really changed; I still have to go through a ton of iterations. It’s really a shame and a loss that a lot of photo departments in colleges are decommissioning their wet darkrooms and no longer having students learn on 4x5 cameras. I have no desire to sound like an old codger who constantly repeats: “Back in the day…” I certainly have no yen to make it harder for tyros to get a leg up by saddling them with difficult equipment and techniques, but in art, there is something positive to be said for obstacles and things that press you to the proverbial wall, creating tension and forcing you to come up with something. The lessons and work discipline I gained from using film are unique, valuable and continue to inform my vision and working technique.

I had the pleasure of bringing the portable photo booth to Dorian’s Parlor in Philadelphia this last Saturday with the outfit I run, Tsirkus Fotografika (http://Tsirkus.org ). The goop negatives, as they often called, needed to ripen for about four days in a sealed bag. This morning they were at their peak of perfection to be digitally photographed so they can be worked in Photoshop. If not allowed to sit long enough, they are runny and shiny; left too long they become filled with tiny dots (deal-able, and often not noticed) to splotchy (problematic to unusable).

I’m a bit of a freak about putting myself in harm’s way when it comes to any kind of chemical. The goop negatives are not only very caustic when wet, they contain unknown reagents. When I shoot, I deftly affix the wet negatives to stiff paper kept on a clipboard (on which I keep a watchful eye!) using strong packaging tape. After I have two on a sheet, I roll the whole business into a tube, then tape it shut. This way, I never touch anything chemically contaminated and the wet negative does not contact anything, including itself. They can then be unrolled, pulled over a table edge to be flattened, and then be digitally photographed.

Because these recent shots were taken under artificial light they have much more solarization than instant film negatives done outside and it will take a number of days to get them done—reworking and proofing them out. Outodoor shots sometimes require no retouching whatsoever. To do the digitization, I made use of the early morning light, which is very even and soft. The negs will hang on my studio wall until completely dry, wherein I then stack them and file them away. Occasionally, if a shot is really a “wowser,” Ill make a direct scan of it. 

I’ve been playing with tulle and I simply put the piece of material over my head, grabbed it with my mouth, and pulled it tight and it became this animal-like mask. How could I resist?

I try very hard not to censor myself in the studio. Not to confuse the art with the maker, I am willing to go extremes in my own work if that is where my inclinations run, even if they may be anti-social, go against the usual norms, be seen as aggressive, or not acceptable in polite society; although frankly, I wonder if it’s really possible to shock anyone anymore. With no need to defend myself, let me say too, my visual constructions often start out raw and then flow toward the poetic. I believe the fusing of the daemonic with the poetic to be one of the strongest motifs in art; maybe it is really the undercurrent of life itself, for isn’t nature both awe-inspiring and at the same time brutal? Are we not children of nature?

I have gotten into the routine of printing each image before posting it online. So many photos in this digital age never become hard copies, but it’s really only by really making a print, spending time, and considering what’s really there does one get any insight into what’s the picture really is.   I need to look at the physical print from across the room. Does it read?  Do the tones ascend/descend harmoniously punctuated by counterpoints of incident and detail? Are the intervals of light and dark working…. and onward.

When I started doing this, one of the first things I realized was the photos I had been posting were very flat and lacking tonal range. Of course, proofing each image leads to a lot of wasted paper and ink. I made fifteen small trials this morning to get the print close to where I want it. Luckily I’m using very inexpensive paper (Staples Matte) and bulk ink.  The thing is, the image is never really, “done.” I only reach a tentative stasis.

I’m writing from a cafe in my neighborhood and it feels like a time warp. It’s been eons since I sat in any public place and worked, but I’m off-line these days for the most part over the long weekend (I don’t work Mondays). Consequently, I’ve been creating and experimenting like a house-a-fire. It’s amazing what starts to bubble up when you find yourself twiddling around with images while you cook and eat, rather than looking at what people posted on Facebook and when you find yourself dipping into books by great authors or find yourself watching foreign/silent films when you are just too wiped to do much else. Lest anyone fear that I’m on my way to being a full-stop hermit, I also did a public portrait shoot at Dorian’s Parlor in Philadelphia this weekend. The house is starting to be a helluva lot cleaner and I even fixed the broken sump pump. Its sporadic “slurp, slurp, slurp” now that the water table in South Philly has risen for the summer makes a nice reminder of my industriousness. 

I’ve been shooting a whole bunch of self-portraits in my studio. Like many things, it started out as a lark to give me something to do between projects and then quickly became a serious series. The early morning light in my space is perfect for shooting the human form. The loft, a cleared second story of a row house was designed to be a painter’s studio and has three large skylights. The images I’m doing are digital, but oddly, or perhaps not so, they very closely resemble the 4x5 field camera shots I’ve done. Guess you can’t escape your roots.