South Congress Avenue on Valentine's Day.

 

A couple sharing a moment, eating ice cream at Amy's.

Yesterday was Valentine's Day. It's a silly holiday for all kinds of reasons but it is redeemed by making us imagine, just for a little while, how good it feels to be in love. To have someone unflappably on your side. And in my mind those good relationships create concentric circles of happiness. Solid, grounded people attract others who are like them and the circle of good friends grows around you. And, of course, my partner would say that it all starts with kindness. 

I spent time yesterday figuring out some ideas for camera packing. I have to fly to Santa Fe on assignment and I'm always anxious about getting the delicate and expensive camera gear safely to my final destination. The last time I had an assignment in Santa Fe I drove there and I could take every last bit of gear I'd ever want with me. Not that I really needed a lot of gear but sometimes having redundant layers of gear is like having the ultimate security blanket. Warm and cozy and feeling prepared for anything that might crop up...

I'm sure most of you fly at least once or twice a year and I'm sure you've experienced the airlines all tightening up on how much luggage you can bring along. Both by size and by weight. The problems with transporting delicate and expensive camera gear are amplified by many of the new restrictions. Some airlines are imposing very strict rules on economy ticket holders including allowing only one personal item (computer bag? Purse? Small backpack?) and no other carry on luggage. This is a change, but an important one, from being able to bring both a rolling case that would fit in the luggage bins and a camera bag that one could manage to wedge under the seat in front of you. And it's disheartening for all photographers who would like to streamline travel and not have to check luggage. 

The elitists among you might immediately suggest that this is what you deserve unless you are willing to ante up for a business class or first class seat, but Whoa! there. Have you flown on a smaller, regional jet lately? In many cases the bins won't accommodate rolling cases that easily fit in the bins on something like an Airbus 320 or a 737. And the space underneath the seat in front of you continues to shrink... All the pricy ticket maneuvering isn't going to make the space allowed grow and you'll end up gate checking stuff more often than you might like...

If you are going to fly into Santa Fe from Austin you'll probably do so on an American Airlines flight. You'll start in Austin on a 737 variant and make a connection in Dallas. There you'll be shoehorned onto a much smaller plane with much less in-cabin storage space for your stuff. At that point you may have some tough choices to make.... And you can multiply this many times over if your journey is more complex and has more stops and plane changes. 

I'll be photographing a corporate event for a banking giant. I'd love to take everything including the darkroom sink. My first thought was to pull the Think Tank Roller case off the shelf and load it up with the gear I anticipate shooting with as well as back-up gear. The urge for redundancy being, no doubt, a hold over from the film days when mechanical cameras often stopped functioning and photographers routinely brought multiple back-ups. Even though I have yet to have a digital camera melt down the memories of going through multiple Hasselblad bodies on a shoot, or the sudden death of a poorly repaired Leica M3 on the first day of a vacation in Paris still haunt me. I should get over it and embrace the reliability of modern, digital cameras. 

To my mind, roller cases that are big enough to be useful to photographers are easy targets for gate agents. Might not be a problem if the overhead bins are ample enough and you are in one of the first boarding groups but things get dicier if you have a cheap ticket, purchased at the last minute and you are in one of the cursed last boarding groups who are quickly confronted with the fact that all, ALL, the overhead bins are totally full and there's no way you'll get a rolling case of the typical dimensions under the seat in front of you --- no matter how hard you try.

After lots of configuring and reconfiguring of physical gear I decided to reconfigure my expectations about what to bring. Instead of the super hefty Leica 24-90mm zoom lens, two SL-type bodies, the big Panasonic 70-200mm f2.8 zoom, the 14 inch MacBook Pro and a back-up Panasonic 24-105mm lens, along with batteries, phone, more batteries and chargers, I decided to harken back to earlier days and reconsider what I actually used to provide the same kind of photographs at the same event over the three previous years. Almost everything I shot in 2023 and 2024 was done with two focal lengths. Those would be 35mm and 85mm. The other focal length that saw about 25% of use was a standard, boring 50mm lens. So, three smaller and lighter lenses. 

I decided that, at this point in my career, to take a leap of faith and instead of bringing mountains of back up gear I would take just what I can fit into a Domke F1X camera bag. Why? Because I know that I can fit that bag under airplane seat. And I know it will be light enough to carry if I don't overpack. 

The Domke bag will get the main camera, a smaller, lighter back-up camera (Q2) three prime lenses, one hot shoe flash, extra batteries, and the computer. And at the moment I'm considering another photographer's advice that I switch from a bulky laptop to a smaller, lighter M4 iPad --- just to reduce the total size and weight of the package. I'm resistant but still considering. 

I'll pack a generic, rolling case with necessary clothes, extra shoes, a second battery charger, a well packed back-up shoe mount flash, and a very well packed 135mm lens ---- just in case I decide I need some more reach. If the roller needs to be checked I'll suck it up and gate check it. I can afford to lose the clothes, the lens and the flash if the luggage goes astray. But the rest of the gear will travel with me all the time. Mostly under the aforementioned seat.

Taking advice from Hanoi-based photographer, Justin Mott, I bought one of those wretched, unfashionable photographer's vests. It's muted black. It has lots of big pockets. If I feel the need to bring "one more thing" I'll pull out the vest from the roller case and put the wanted item into one of the pockets and then I'll suffer the indignity and wear the vest... The sacrifices we make for our photography... 

There is a part of me that wants to turn back the gear clock to a time when I did so much with one camera, one lens and one flash. And the lens back then was never a zoom. As a compromise I dream of working with just two camera bodies and two lenses. One flash. You could almost wear all of your critical gear on a flight. Unless the gate agents count each camera as one "personal item." But wouldn't it be great to travel and work so lightly? I think it might be plausible. And along those lines I think I'll ditch the business suit this year and lean on my work as a photographer to exclude the burden of a suit jacket. More room in the roller bag for swim gear....

And it's not like Santa Fe is at the end of the world, adrift from consumer civilization. There are a couple of camera stores there and if everything goes to hell on the journey in one swipe of a credit card could supply the bare essentials to get an event oriented job done. So I guess I should chill a bit.

Anyway, after I went through all the ideas and permutations of packing logistics I arrived at a couple solutions I'm good with and decided I'd worried enough for the day --- especially about a job that's a month in the future --- and headed out with a camera and a totally different lens to see what was afoot on S. Congress Ave. on Valentine's Day. It was a short shooting adventures. A chance to try out the Sigma 85mm f1.4 on the new SL2, just to see if my "two cameras, two lenses" idea might have value. 

I needed to be home at a reasonable time because I was the designated chef for our Valentine's Day dinner. I got lucky and cooked two filet mignons perfectly (not always the case). I made two sides. One was a cold potato salad of fingerling potatoes mixed with smoked salmon and a very subtle vinaigrette dressing; the other was a pickled beets, walnuts and kale mix. The cute looking, romantically heart-shaped, chocolate cake came from Whole Foods. Add wines and dinner was a success. 

Here's some of the stuff I shot yesterday. It was gloomy and overcast but it's always nice to get a walk in and immerse one's self in the sea (or puddle) of humanity... Hope you had fun yesterday as well.

Every day revolves around swimming. Or swimming pools. Or contrasting colors. Or coffee....

Ready for immediate application. At Jo's. In a paper cup. That's the way it comes.

 Coffee means different things in different cultures. 

Many EU cultures can't imagine coffee being portable. Or coming in 

disposable cups. We can't really imagine coffee that you acquire outside your home

any other way. And Americans, at least the younger ones, seem more comfortable 

with a warm or cold drink in one hand as they walk around. 

The French and Italian citizens become paralyzed by a cup of coffee, 

served in a ceramic cup, and can't move from the spot until every drop is 

drained. They'll never know the pleasure of being ambulatory with coffee.... Sad. 

I guess this means it's okay to bring your dog. As long as he or she is kind and 

unthreatening. Noted. 

The mannequins see the need for coffee as a very human weakness. 

They disregard people on the other side of the window who dare to bring their coffee with them.

The shop windows these days are filled with examples of very modern coats. Dress coats. Trench coats. Fashionable trench coats. Long, wool coats and so many other coat styles that look so very nice but which are only practical for about two weeks of wear, per year, in Austin, Texas. 

Sunglasses, on the other hand, are always in fashion. Always stylish. 

And then the walk was over and it was back into the kitchen.

Happy Valentine's Day!

 

Photographed in front of Brock's Books in San Antonio's downtown. On Houston St.? 

Ancient film camera and a 28mm f3.5 lens from the dark ages. I've posted this photo on Valentine's day somewhere, every year, for the last 30+ years. Either as a physical print or, of the last decade or so, on social media. It's one of my all time favorite time travel photographs about San Antonio. 

I hope you are experiencing true romance. Today and every other day...

Random photos with an M240 M-E and a Voigtlander 50mm f2.0 APO. A sweet combo. I think John Szarkowski would have approved...

 

photographer ventures out in the frigid Winter blasts.

A bone chilling 50°.  Is able to handle his camera

even without the protection of thick gloves! 

Testing out his brand new hoodie. When did medium sized hoodies 

get so baggy? Time to eat more cheeseburgers....

A discovery after walking past this hundreds of times over the last 50 years....

 

today was a day for me to make a new and different route for a photo walk. I've exhausted the routes I have pounded along since the start of Covid. The one through downtown. The one around the lake. And lately, the one down S. Congress Ave. But a photo walk has to be convenient for me or I'll figure out some way to procrastinate and eventually skip it altogether. I crossed the pedestrian bridge over Lady Bird Lake,  into south Austin and walked over to see something I'd never bothered to explore before. Right next to the Peter Pan Miniature  Golf Course is a "Pitch and Putt" course with five or six holes. 

While I have had lessons from Tom Kite and Ben Crenshaw I'm not a very good golfer. Mostly because I find it requires too much practice; and a full round takes too much time. I played a round once with Sugar Ray Leonard and while I can swim pretty well and he could box really well neither of us was even average on the day we played the Fazio Course out at Barton Creek Country Club. He did have some good stories to tell as we whipped around on a golf cart....

But I digress. I walked over onto this little course which is owned by the city of Austin. Everything was extremely casual. The course is just across the lake from the core of downtown and, on a sunny day I suspect the view would be pretty cool. I took a lot of shots but as you are no doubt aware, I am a mediocre landscape photographer. So there it is. 

But I will say that whoever it is that manages the course has a great sense of humor. At least if you can tell anything about someone's sense of humor by the signage they sprinkle around their course. 

Since the course is small and nearly every hole is a par two nobody uses or even brings woods or drivers. Everyone was playing with wedges and putters. And having a blast at 11 a.m. on a Monday morning.

Some random course signage. Just for fun...

If the game left you exhausted you could pull up and plant yourself at the observation deck in one of these comfortable lawn chairs. The "pro" shop serves coffee, biscuits, and various other traditional golfing beverages and snacks. There's also a burger truck that serves up $16 Waygu beef burgers....

But for me the chairs were the real draw.

the hell with those thousand dollar Adirondack chairs. Who needs them when you have folding, aluminum lawn chairs at your disposal?

An all purpose building housing rest rooms and a self-service ice machine. 

I remembered that I'm not all that interested in golf so I got on with my walk into South Austin. What used to be the blue collar guts of a much smaller city. One of the original neighborhoods. Now overtaken by yuppies and over the top construction re-dos of 1950s to 1970s era houses in a close in neighborhood with infinite live oak trees.

a sign in response to those like Elon Musk who would like to pave over our parks and put shopping malls on the publicly owned lake front properties. Fortunately Lady Bird Johnson put a hard stop to all that a while back. Holding the capitalist/fascist at bay. At least for now...

Toy dogs hanging out in front of a dog speciality shop. They look real at a glance. Especially when you are going by in your car and see them for the firs time. Fun.

Seven flavors of Doggy Ice Cream. Pup cups galore. 

I stepped into the Dougherty Cultural Arts Center.

It's in a 1950s building just a bit down the road from the pitch and putt. 

They do a lot of really first class art exhibitions. Classes for kids and 

some live theater performances. The art displays change about every six

weeks. Today I saw gorgeous paintings by Bibi Flores. 

She's one of the top fine art painters in Texas. 

The show was great and the restrooms just dandy and clean.

With a bit of curated fine art under my belt I headed back onto the trail and found a convenience store with some great murals and permanent signage. The store is called, "The Austinite Market." 

It's right next to a very good restaurant called, "El Alma." 

Convenience Store BTS....

Sandy's Hamburgers is a long time South Austin tradition. The burgers are Texas Authentic and 

a huge draw is their soft serve ice cream. They've been actively cooking happy stuff on this spot since 1947. that's a lot of tradition. Nice to get a hot burger and even hotter fries on a cool, winter afternoon. 

Near the end of my walk I came across this great and perfectly formed tree. 

In the background is the empty building that once was home to the world 

famous Threadgill's Restaurant. Live music every night. Gospel Jazz for 

Sunday brunches. And maybe the best chicken fried steaks since the Stallion 

on South Lamar closed. Now gone. The landlord raised the rent and chased out a bit 

of history. Then karma struck the landlord and his building has been sitting 

empty since just before Covid struck. Still sitting there un-rented. 

And the property was right next to the Armadillo Headquarters which suffered a 

similar fate. I remember watching Bevo open for the Talking Heads there one night.

the cover charge was $4.00. But the Shiner Bock beers were only fifty cents.

And Willie Nelson, Kinky Friedman and Jerry Jeff Walker were all week night regulars... 

A nice time to be alive in Austin...

And then, camera in hand and back home to the snooty suburbs....

An exercise with which I convince myself that any black and white image can be interesting if you plow in enough contrast and a certain kind of small detail sharpness.

I've been working on the nuts and bolts of becoming more savvy about not working for clients much. It's a science as much as it's an art. You want to keep the good clients, discard the bad clients and keep a certain cash flow humming along so you don't have to prematurely dip into savings as you put off taking Social Security till age 70. Which will be this year. Unless it's all cancelled.... 

But all accounting, work scheduling and gentle abandoning of difficult clients can be boring and exasperating. Sometimes you need to go out and play for a while until your head clears. Today, for a fun diversion, I switched back to rangefinder mode. 

I'm finding that I have two favorite cameras these days. I like them so much that I've become indifferent to new products from Canon, Nikon, Sony and Olympus. The only camera companies besides Leica that I have any interest in these days are Pentax and Sigma. And unless Sigma brings out another full frame fp camera I'm probably set. I loved my Pentax K1 for a lot of different reasons but none I find compelling enough to try it yet again. 

The two cameras I've come to trust and enjoy are the Leica SL2 and the Leica M240 M-E in its hammered, gray metal finish. Both are very transparent cameras in use. Both are a joy to hold and look at. Both make very successful files. 

But today? Eh. Any camera would have done well enough. Add a certain mix of grayscale, contrast, mid-tone snap, etc. to an image and you'll have a visual formula that makes some stuff look exciting even though it's not. My shots today came from the M camera with the VM 50mm APO. I had three or four people actually stop me in the street just to tell me how much they liked the look of the camera. I can assure you that this never happened with other brands. Now considering making a red dot/Leica logo tie tack to wear around as a fashion statement.... 

Air conditioners. The hardest working appliances in Texas!!!

 time for a little pitch n putt golf. Or not.

Photographer re-discovers, for the thousandth time, shallow depth of field. Firmly resists calling the effect "bokeh."

 

Easy enough to do. 50mm f2.0 lens on an M240 rangefinder camera. 

Shoot wide open and get close to the foreground subject. 

Pretend you have discovered a brand new style....

Works in black and white and color.

Taking another stab at understanding Lee Friedlander. Re-posted from the "other site." Pass on by if you already read it there...

 

June 07, 2024

"HOMAGE" TO A PHOTOGRAPHER THAT I DON'T UNDERSTAND AT ALL. 

Lee Friedlander. Unfathomable or just boring? Certainly unexplainable. Pass.

Here's something I think about, a lot. When someone makes art that's niche-popular, in a certain time period, does the process automatically confer elevated "artist" status for the artist and the work for all time? If we thought an approach to art was new and innovative in 1965 are we duty bound to maintain our appreciation for that piece or portfolio for as long as we may live? Or do some pieces not rise to the lofty heavenly tier of art which allows them to be declared timeless? 

Using everyday fashion as an analogy we have some sort of consensus that fashion is temporally contextual. What's "in" this year is not necessarily something that has continued art of fashion value as the months and years roll onward. Some pieces rise above the general marketplace of art and defy the academic idea that fashion is more transitory than the other arts. An example is the Chanel, little black dress. If there was not a general decay in aesthetic value assessment that clicked in after the shock value of the newness wears off most fashions we'd be flooded with a confusing and unfathomable infinity of daily choices before we even leave our houses. And we'd live in a nauseating kaleidoscope of endless trash fashion.

Do you remember elephant leg pants? How about bell bottom blue jeans? Puffy sleeved pirate shirts? Platform shoes? Mutton chops? Nehru shirts? How about culotte shorts for men? Don't ever want to admit that, right? How about droopy, bright bow ties? Ascots? Or the blue collar version = Dickies? And then there are the colors that come in and out of fashion. Sure, in one form or another fashions seem to come back around ---- but they are changed and morph into something new. Just ask the guy who invented the piano keyboard necktie. 

My point being that all these things were popular in their moments and then were bypassed or dethroned by newer stuff that is or was more contemporarily popular and coveted. When the newness wore off the perceived value declined. 

I'll stop belaboring my point. There is a photographer who has been around since at least the 1960s, anointed along with Garry Winogrand by the great "Oz" of museum curators, John Szarkowski, and rampantly published because of that,  and I have to admit that I have absolutely no idea why people in our current time continue to find some sort of deep artistic value in his work. Unless it's the counterintuitive worship of drollness. And that would be photographer,  Lee Friedlander.

Oh, I've tried hard to catch even a whiff of appreciation for his work and even went so far as to purchase a first edition copy of what many claim to the best book of his work, "Like a One Eyed Cat." But after many wasted hours staring at the amazingly banal and non-riveting images packaged between the covers I have to confess that I can only vaguely remember one or two images from the entire collection of photographs that held my attention for more than a moment, or were tattooed into my image-oriented brain. In the book of a real contemporary master of the same era, Robert Frank's, The Americans, are featured energy-charged images at the turn of every page. indelibly printed on my memory.

In the same time period Richard Avedon was cranking out absolutely riveting images that grow in influence with the passage of time. But Friedlander's street photography, or documentation of bad motel rooms, while perhaps striking because that style of work had never been done before, are relegated by the passage of time to rusty visual anecdotes of a time in the past when you could point a camera at anything and people were so amazed that the images were in focus or adequately exposed that the very provenance would provide an audience. And banality fit nicely into the wheelhouse of anti-establishment types who considered Jack Kerouac's book, On the Road, to be a bible of the times. "Taste-makers" ruled the roost and provided their services as gatekeepers and cultural guides for a number of generations. If J.S. at the MOMA liked "it" then I guess "it" had to be good. Right? Epatez les Bourgeoisie by overwhelming them with images of nothing at all.

We may come to hate Szarkowski, in an art historical sense, for pushing a number of mundane "talents" into the front of the stage while crowding out many substantial visionaries who, for lack of social entree, missed the unearned gift of annointment. The active push toward the limelights of lesser talents also included the turbo boosting of an unproven Stephen Shore, and now his protege in spirit, Alec Soth. Among the many other mundane photographers who had the ear (and the purse) of the emperor. 

My point here is not that there weren't reasons to regards some work as fresh, in the moment, but if it doesn't wear well are we really obligated to pretend that it still moves us in some intellectual or even visceral way? Can't some work just politely evaporate over time without destroying our ability to enjoy photographic art in general?

I asked two people who professed to "enjoy" Friedlander's work immensely to explain their reasons and neither could give me any thoughtful underpinnings to understand his oeuvre. Nor could they come up with more than "it's largely a matter of taste" or some other dodge. My least favorite explanation is that he put the "spotlight" on the mundanity of everyday American existence. Tough for him that Robert Frank beat him to the punch by ten years and actually did it so well.

Though I knew Garry Winogrand well enough, personally, and followed his work over the years; even buying his books, there is something in the early documentary work by the art elite of black and white, 35mm photographers in his circle, all contemporaries of each other, that just continues to lose value with the passage of time. Sure, they have their greatest hits but even those hits are "smaller art" that leaves only a vague residue in the mind after viewing. No epiphanies and certainly no revelations. 

We already knew that 1960's motel rooms in small towns were depressing. We already knew that there are weeds at the edges of parking lots. But flatly printed, small, black and white remembrances of time misspent in random self isolation hardly seems to be the backbone of a worthy art practice. 

Back to my question, because a style of art becomes popular for a time, amongst a small but influential group, do we have some sort of obligation to keep the works on life support as they progressively diminish themselves in our collective culture? And was most of the work any good to begin with?

Or was it a classic case of "the Emperor has no clothes" with the emperor being Szarkowski and the clothes being any long term or intrinsic value to several well served photographer's work? Even the direct blessing of a famous curator doesn't automatically imbue art with lasting and collectively recognized value. 

I have nothing against Lee Friedlander or his well executed plan to avoid a 9-5 job and instead roam around a country having fun shooting random images with his Leica cameras. Hell, I do the same thing and I would never expect that someone will bless the work with the wand of authority. I think he's pretty much a business genius. But a top tier, world changing photographer? Hmm. 

I could be totally wrong about all this. L.F. could have been making genius works of art all along. In one sense I hope that's exactly what's been happening instead of my portrayal. But if I do happen to be wrong; demonstrably wrong! I sure hope someone can, without an ad hominem attack, correct me by way of a good, solid explanation of what has so far eluded me for well over 40 years of trying. Why is the work good? What makes it special?

Then maybe we can move on to a cogent and profound explanation of Alec Soth's work. That might be even harder...  Let the slings and arrows fly.