Grace

Grace is my assistant for senior pictures this year.  She took both my Foundations of Composition and my Basics in Exposure class this spring at The Arts Center.  In true Grace style, she soaked it all in.   For the above image, I held the camera and set exposure, but the composition is all Grace, and it's brilliant. 

 Grace has photography completely her own.  She likes street photography--particularly night scenes.  She also uses photography as a medium to document her life. Some of my favorite pictures are from a school walkout she participated in this spring. Over and over, I saw her images posted on social media as the means of telling the story of the day.  That's powerful. 

Photography is a pursuit of creativity, but it is so much more than that.  Paul Strand said,  "I've wanted to use photography as an instrument of research into and reporting on the life of my own time."   The "research" part of that statement is what stands out to me.  I wouldn't see the world the same without my camera.  That's the most rewarding part of being a photographer.  My camera helps me observe so that when I am ready to "speak," I have something worth saying.  

These are some of my favorite of Grace's pictures.

gesture

"After I take your class, I will be able to do photography, right?"  

I knew what the woman meant when she asked me this, but it still made me laugh.  If she gets photography in a two hour class, I'm going to be pissed.  It's taken me a lot longer than that.   I just read a blog post today and the author Guy Tal included this quote by Alfred Stieglitz,

"This class (of photographers) devote the best part of their lives to the work, and it is only after an intimate acquaintance with them and their productions that the casual observer comes to realize the fact that the ability to make a truly artistic photograph is not acquired offhand, but is the result of an artistic instinct coupled with years of labor.

One subtle but important gift photographers bring to their viewers is the gift of gesture.  Today, as I ate my fried eggs and tomato for breakfast, I watched the dandelions out my window.  Every living thing has gesture. It is the job of the photographer to capture that precise moment when the life of a thing is exposed.  In my mind, that is the definition or art and perhaps, as well, the definition of beauty.  

Where Light Falls

Skinny Bird Legs

Gethsemane Cathedral

"Think of drawing water from a well.  You pull the magic inside of you as one might pull the water up from the well, slow and steady.  You try to measure what you can do on your own, and then you imagine what you would like the magic to improve.  Then you pour the magic from your fingers right into the threads–not too much, though, just a little spark.”

Her hands moved quickly over the loom, pulling threads in and out, the colors swirling and shimmering.

“Where do you pull the magic from?”

“Everywhere!” She laughed.  “Magic is everywhere.  In the air, in the ground, in fire and water and the stars and clouds and the sun.  The sun is bursting with magic.  You pull it in from all around you.”

From “Rump” by Liesel Shurtliff