I am having a completely nonverbal experience.  I am looking for a composition that has the maximum amount of depth, chaos, and tension, while still resolving at a very high level of order.

Sometimes when I am photographing, I imagine there are these tentacles going out from my eyeballs, long strings that have these little fingers on their ends, and they are literally scrubbing the surfaces of everything I look at, emotionally and physically.

Richard Rothman

The other day, I got a copy of the new book by Richard Rothman in the mail, Redwood Saw.

The photographs were made in Northern California over a period of several years.  Originally, Rothman set out to photograph the old-growth forests on the northern coast.  The project evolved, and Rothman worked beyond the old-growth forests, and additionally photographed clear cuts, the coastline itself, and the people and architecture of Crescent City.

The photographs of the redwoods and the old-growth forest are lovely, full of wonderful light, complicated compositions, and a profound natural beauty.

As Rothman explored more of the landscape and the project evolved, his work became a much more complicated, offering a look at the complex mix of beauty, tragedy, hope and pain that characterize the region, the people, and the time.

The book is remarkable.  The pictures are black and white, made with a 4×5 view camera.  The compositions and technique are exquisite, and the reproductions in the book are of the highest standard.

And I found an important and refreshing reminder in these pictures.

Invention is not the result of compositional trickery (perhaps characterized by Abe Morell’s tent photographs), nor a sort of gamemanship often seen in contemporary work (like in the novelty of Joni Harbeck’s and Neil Krug’s work), but rather is the result of seeing a subject with clarity, honesty, and integrity.

The invention in Redwood Saw is in the quality of seeing, and the quality of story-telling, or simply as Sommer put it, in the quality of attention.

It was negative 4 degrees, and yet I spent an hour and a half photographing at an elementary school up the street.

Well, it was even better than I thought.

Perhaps hard to tell from what I’ve got here – just contacts and proofs, and on rc to boot – but I made some good pictures that night.  The negatives have that certain glow characteristic of a good photograph.

It’s been 20 years or so since I read Psychotic Reactions, but I remember pieces of this essay.  One afternoon, drunk and home alone with a saxophone, Bangs lets loose with the horn, and ultimately lands in jail for disturbing the peace.  Down at the station, he’s placed in holding with another man.  Bangs asks him why he’s in, and the man replies for Being ahead of my time.  Bangs response, Me too, man, me too.

The other night, I was out photographing on the streets of Ithaca.  I had my headphones on, lost in my visual experience, and I was caught by surprise when a flashlight came from behind.  I turned around, and was confronted and questioned by a cop.  He asked me what I was doing and why.

Surprised and annoyed, I answer curtly:  Practicing my right to free speech.

He didn’t offer any argument in return, and I finished making my pictures.

I just returned from photographing.  Walking with my camera, my feet were numb, and my cheeks hurt.  The joints on my tripod were stiff and hard to move, and if I touched the tripod with my bare hands the metal was so cold it burned.

Strangely, I found a wonderful kind of freedom.  The snow muted all sounds.  The air was still, with no real wind.  The light was warm and glittered on the new snow.

What’s that famous line by William Carlos Williams?  Ideas only in things.  It was one of those nights when the world seemed a little more real, and it felt wonderful to be apart of it.

Though I can also add, that despite this feeling of serenity, these pictures were hard won; it was fucking cold.

I can’t tell a lie, but I never really read anything by Dylan Thomas.  I did often pick up this small and tattered little anthology she kept by e e cummings.  The binding was coming apart, with signatures and pages separating from the whole; it was obviously a book my mom had spent a lot of time with.

mr youse needn’t be so spry/concernin’ questions arty

each has his own tastes but as for i/i likes a certain party

gimme the he-man’s solid bliss/for youse ideas i’ll match youse

a pretty girl who naked is/is worth a million statues

e e cummings

I also shared my mom’s enthusiasm for Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.

Matt and I smoked a bowl, and then got in the car and drove 30 minutes north of Denver to Thornton.  We were headed to a used record store, Don’s Discs.

I spent my last two years of high school stoned, reading counter cultural literature (mostly sci-fi), and collecting records.  Matt and I, we did it all together.

Don’s Discs wasn’t our favorite, but they had a huge inventory and good prices.  But you had to be willing to look, put in the time.  It was worth an occasional trip.

Somethings we bought as collectors, really just for the obscurity or small editions, but mostly we loved listening to lots of music.

And because Don’s was so cheap, we could take chances on things we’d never heard before.  Or because we liked the cover art.

The day I bought Maggot Brain, well we had never heard it before, we hadn’t even heard of Funkadelic.

Well, we were convinced and became fans.  I like to think of it as part of my legacy, turning my friends and family on to Funkadelic.

There were lots of great things – chief among them were these photographs of dry-land farming in Spain made by Edward Burtynsky – but nothing left me with that feeling.

This past summer, I spent close to a month in Indonesia, in Bali and Java, and finished the trip in Jakarta.  Strangely, this was a highlight of the trip; actually, an afternoon in the sculpture garden at the Indonesian Nationally Gallery was the highlight.  The courtyard is filled with wonderful stone carvings from the Mataram and Majapahit (the medieval Hindu-Buddhist empires of Indonesia).  I spent hours here; I really just wanted to share my presence with these pieces.  There was a magic or mystique to it all.

I love this feeling, a high from art.  It is what drew me into it all from the beginning.

I spent the last week in Denver, and again found that feeling I had in Jakarta.  I went for a few reasons, among them to make some photographs (a series I began a year ago, photographing along Colfax Ave), and to see the Robert Adams retrospective at the Denver Art Museum.

It’s an extremely well organized exhibition, put together by Jock Reynolds and Josh Chuang at the Yale Art Gallery, and Eric Paddock at the Denver Art Museum.

Each of his major bodies of work is included, from the Prairie photographs made in Colorado in the late 1960′s (begun while he was a professor of English at The Colorado College) to his most recent pictures made in Oregon.

Walking into the gallery, the viewer is immediately greeted by two large grids of photographs.  The pictures are small, on 8×10 paper, but each grid is stacked with a number of photographs.  Each grid is composed with multiple looks at one tree, the same cottonwood.  One can presume the tree was close to Adams’ home in Longmont, CO, if not simply in his backyard.  It is striking and poetic to see how dynamic, wonderful, and full of love this one trees can be, how much of life is in the tree, the best and the worse.

After discovering the two grids, at the end of the same wall are three more small photographs.  Again, the same tree, but this time in the the photographs we witness the destruction and removal of the tree, and immediately recognize the magnitude of our lose.  All these photographs of the cottonwood were made over about 18 months.

And this is a wonderful introduction to the life’s work of Robert Adams.  Throughout his photographic life, Adams stayed close to home, and time and again has reminded us of all the poetry, beauty, and longing that constantly surrounds us.

From here the galleries are designed to show each  of his major bodies of work, shown in chronological order.  All of his iconic images are here, as well as many I’ve never seen (including pictures from Sweden, the Bodhisattva series, and Iraq war protests in Oregon).

First are the photographs from the late 1960′s, as he gave up his career in academia and began photographing full-time.  Originally published by the Denver Art Museum in 1978, Prairie is a collection of works photographed in eastern Colorado, right around 1968.  Many of these pictures are on display.  These show Adams embracing his homeland, though don’t yet reveal his distinct style or voice, but rather seem reminiscent of Dorthea Lange and the FSA, looks at the humble beauty of small town farmlands in middle America.

Next to Prairie are some works from a smaller body that I’ve always rather liked, The Art and Architecture of Early Hispanic Colorado, photographed largely in the San Luis Valley and Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southwestern Colorado.

And this brings us to the 1970′s, and Adams’ most innovative and influential works.  I believe first exhibited in the seminal exhibition New Topographics (though around the same time, Adams exhibited at MoMA in New York, a show with Emmet Gowin – it’s possible the MoMA show as the first exhibition of these pictures), in the first years of the decade Adams photographed that wonderful trilogy – The New West – Denver – What We Bought.  The last of these three, What We Bought, was first published about 20 years later than the others, printed in Germany.  Apparently at the time, these pictures were deemed too cynical to publish.

Strangely, these photographs are quite beautiful.  Despite the candid look at the socio-political development of Denver and the surrounding landscapes, these pictures are full of a wonderful sense of the light and space characteristic of Colorado, fully articulated and radiant in the small and intimate prints.

In the second half of the 70′s, he completed Summer Nights, as well as the parking lot pictures – snap-shot portraits of people in parking lots.  Originally, these pictures were published as Our Lives, and Our Children, as a protest to Rocky Flats, and was later published by Matthew Marks as No Small Journeys.

Then, a bit to my own surprise, I entered that galleries with what proved to be my favorite part of the show, the galleries with From the Missouri West and Los Angeles Spring.

From the Missouri West documents Adams’ first trips outside of Colorado to photograph (aside from a short series – displayed in this exhibition – made in Sweden while visiting Kirsten’s family), photographed in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Oregon, and California.  Perhaps because I don’t know this book too well, but I was deeply attracted to these prints, showing a deeper kind of space, and greater vistas than the earlier works.

The photographs in From the Missouri West evolved into the Los Angeles pictures, which I think are ultimately Adams’ darkest works.

The Los Angeles photographs are full of a competing ugliness and lyricism.  The tones are darker, and carry a misty light brought upon by air pollution.

These pictures are unrelenting in their anger about an abused landscape, and a human inability to see beyond our own needs.  Still the pictures contain a wonderful longing and poetry, perhaps best understood in the lovely and moody tonalities – deep, dark, and warm.

The was the first I’d seen the Los Angeles pictures short of the books.  I felt I was seeing them for the first time.  The tonalities of this work are such a necessary part to complete the poetry.  First published by Aperture in 1986, the printing technologies of the book simply couldn’t fully represent the photographs.

After Los Angeles, Adams completed my favorite work, Listening to the River.  These photographs were first published by Aperture in 1990′s, coupled with poetry by William Stafford:

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me/mistakes I have made.  Ask me whether/what I have done is my life.  Others/have some in their slow way into/my thought, and some have tried to help/or to hurt:  ask me what difference/their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say./You and I can turn and look/ at the silent river and wait.  We know/the current is there, hidden; and there/are comings and goings from miles away/that hold the stillness exactly before us./What the river says, that is what I say.

All verticals, the pictures in Listening to the River present multiple views of different landscapes, and reveal Adams negotiating a unique sense of space.  Reading the pictures across the page is like reading free-verse poetry at its best, as one can feel Adams responding to a landscape one step at time, and trying to find meaning in the different spaces, trying to find beauty while recognizing all the damage and loss.

These pictures are published in three different volumes.  Listening to the River was the first, and is still my favorite; it was his first edit – and with these pictures I trust that first instinct – and I love the pairing with the William Stafford poetry.  The other books are Notes for Friends, and more recently Gone? (beautifully executed by Steidl).

The last galleries are mostly his photographs of Oregon, the beaches and the clear-cuts, and Pine Valley.  While I will never argue anything short of true vision and mastery for these pictures, they simply don’t interest as much.  Perhaps having lived in Colorado between 1970-1996, these early pictures reflect more of my own life and biography.  My immediate response, however, is that the photographs lack the same degree of nuance.  The beach photographs err too much towards sentiment, and the clear-cuts are just clear and blunt descriptions.  Adams’ pictures are at their best when both of these sensibilities coincide, and thus is the originality of his poetry.

Of the Oregon landscapes, I am most interested in Pine Valley, which really seems about the pursuit of visual pleasure rather than anything more.

Also displayed with the Oregon photographs was a small gallery set aside with a few smaller, lesser projects.

These include Bodhisattva, and photographs made at protests of the Iraq war.

Bodhisattva interests me in great deal, more for its place in his greater life vision than as an unique visual statement.  A bodhisattva is a follower of Buddha who works out of compassion, choosing life on earth over samsara in order to help in the cultivation of Buddha’s path for humanity.  In viewing this work, I’ve often wondered if Adams sees himself as a boddhisattva, one suffering in hopes to spread the truth.

I left the Robert Adams retrospective, The Place We Live, with that same feeling I had among the artworks of the Majapahit and Mataram I sat with in Java.  I know I sat with greatness, and left with a better understanding and feeling for my own humanness.

My sophomore year in college I lived in a single, an all male dorm on the west side of campus.  It was one of the wonderful old buildings of The Colorado College.

I was really into music, and was growing as an artist out of my roots found in the industrial-primitive scene I discovered in Denver (courtesy of  Tom Headbanger, and ReSearch).  At the time, I read pretty voraciously, lots of works by Robert Anton Wilson, Philip Dick, and a whole range of anti-establishment thinkers.

That fall, I was reading The Dada Painters and Poets by Robert Motherwell; rode my bike down the train tracks meeting the homeless, the drunks, and the otherwise disaffected; and collected objects from junkyards and other industrial sites to use as percussion instruments.

I took a class from the composer Stephen Scott (a very interesting composer I’m glad has been part of my education and performance career) on experimental musical performance, application, construction and design.  For the class, we were to experiment with the most fundamental forms, and we were not allowed to use any traditional instruments (or at least we weren’t allowed to play them traditionally – changes an instruments construction and perception were fair-game).  We all composed one piece during the month.

For the final performances/projects other students played glass bottles with sticks and by blowing into the mouths of the bottles, performed on a racket ball court for maximum reverb; performed with whirly tubes purchased from the dollar store; played modified trumpets and pianos to change how the instruments were played, as well as the tonality; and a slew of other things.

Practicing on my found object percussion set, I ultimately staged an improvised performance in a junkyard on the south side of Colorado Springs.  By the end of the improve, all of the students plus Stephen joined in.  The men that worked the yard looked on with a great curiosity.

I wrote a score for the piece.  It was a narrative description of the planned improvisation written out on music staff with a drawing by Jullian Tate, a tattoo artist I group up with in Denver who was also influenced by the modern primitives in Denver.  There were also two quotes at the bottom of the page:

Introduce symmetries and rhythms instead of principals, contradict the existing world order.          Hugo Ball

You who pass, pray for dada.      Tristin Tzara

In Paris, Denpasar, and Firenze.

And in Chicago, Toronto, and Hangzhou.

Yogya, Chios, and Bologna.

Really in many corners of the world.

Nowhere have I ever really been challenged or questioned for photographing.  Nowhere but Denver.  And every time I photograph in Denver, I’m questioned.  I wonder why?

It happened sometime ago, but I can still feel it like it was yesterday.

I was traveling away from home, and was spending most of my time alone. I went to a club about 15 or 20 minutes away from my place at time.  It was a cold night, and I mostly wanted whiskey to help me feel warm, and to spend sometime watching people.  I often find when spending so much time alone, I can see more in others, what they want and how they behave.

I was surprised – after thirty minutes and on my second drink – when she came and sat down next to me.  She introduced herself as Kia, and I was immediately struck by her exceptional beauty.

Conversation was easy.  We laughed a lot, and found an immediate repoire.

We spoke for maybe twenty or thirty minutes.  I finished my drink, and she prompted me to drink more.  Not much of a drinker, I decided against it.

After thirty minutes, she invited me for a dance.  Not typically one for dance, but I couldn’t refuse.  We found a quiet corner in the club, and had one dance for one song.

We danced as effortlessly as we spoke, and with what seemed real intimacy.  Kia’s body felt so wonderful against mine.  I felt a rush of real emotions, both warm and complex.

Our dance ended, and we were stuck with an awkward transition.  I think (I hope) we were both overcome by the depth of the connection we found. It struck me like magic.

And yet after our dance, we both bade a quick farewell, mostly polite thank-you’s.  The time of the dance seemed perfect, and there was so much I thought I should say to her, but as quickly as it came our connection vanished.  I still wonder today if she felt it the same as I did, do.

The next morning, before leaving town, I drove by the club.  Just in hopes that’d it help me to relive that moment.  What I saw in her and of her struck me as perfect; Kia’s beauty was of an essential form.  It was thrilling, shook me to the core.