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While in Vernon, neighboring village of Giverny, we visited the Notre Dame de Vernon and my eye was attracted to the kaleidoscopic reflection of the stained glass in the baptismal bowl. The reflection changed as I shifted my focus and I particularly favor this reflection as the dark shape looks to me like a cypress tree landscape against a fiery sky.
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The richness of the Aspen foliage turned the water to green. I think being a painter I love the fluid flow of color reflected in water. All my photographs from this time period were taken with chromes and traditionally wet-darkroom processed and scanned into my computer with a Nikon Coolscan 5000 scanner.
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Shakespeare and Company has a long history of hospitality to writers that was begun by expatriate Silvia Beech in 1919. After her death in 1964 George Whitman renamed his bookshop to Shakespeare and Company in her honor. This shop is located on the left bank directly across fro Notre Dame and is a must see for everyone who loves reading. I visit this shop every time I am in Paris and have left reflections of me in windows and mirrors inside. George Whitman died in 2011 at the age of 98 and his bookshop is a marvelous tribute to his love of the written word, to the many writers who were the beneficiaries of his philanthropy and to the readers of the world.
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I lose myself in Giverny and see the pond as a bottomless pit of creative inspiration. Claude Monet painted hundreds of paintings from this pond and I must have thousands of photographs from my four visits. This visual tapestry reflections and water lilies is a play of warm and cool colors and smooth and rough textures that could easily be paintbrush strokes…but aren’t.
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Reflected reeds and trees and grasses make me think back to my weaving days and warp and weft. All in this tapestry is 100% natural hand-spun and carded by Mother Nature…some things can’t be beat!
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The light was clear and the air was breezy. I think I used the Polaroid Transfer filter in NIK Color Efex Pro 4 to intensify this reflection. I do not like the pejorative connotations of enhancement and/or manipulation and will deal with that topic in a blog.
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I love Paris and while scouring the city for green wall installations I did my usual building reflection searches.
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On this Sunday morning in Tasmania the harbor was filled with brightly painted boats. The reflected colors looked as though tubes of paint that had been emptied into a pool had begun to spread. I spend several rolls of film isolating and capturing abstracted images that so reminded me of the abstract expressionist canvases of the 1960’s.
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The Pont Saint-Bénézet, more familiarly known as the Pont d’Avignon, is famous medieval bridge in the town of Avignon and inspired the children’s song, Sur Le Pont d’Avignon. In 1995, the four surviving arches of the bridge, together with the Palais des Papes and Cathédrale Notre-Dame des Doms were classified as a World Heritage Site. The night was beautiful and many people came out to enjoy the sunset and the Rhone lit up.
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Vivid colors and textures were multiplied by reflections at Harriman State Park in New York provided brilliant palette and I think of Nature’s Rorschach or inkblot test…to discover creative personalities!
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The density and intensity of patterns and colors in this landscape are like a rich brocade drapery that is the view rather than frames it.
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Taken years ago with film and re-created with Nik software this landscape reflection is lush and magical. This could have been the starting-point of Bilbo’s journey in The Hobbit…
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Walking through Chicago I noticed this reflection of people on the windows of a parked vehicle and loved the juxtaposition of reality and reflection.
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This reflection was a throwback to the fad of stuffing people into Volkswagens and telephone booths. Not only were people crammed into this parked automobile but one woman was dancing and the people-filled vehicle did not even prevent her skirt to flare!
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Perhaps one of these days I will write a blog on favorite flops…and this image will be part of it. Being out with my camera has given me opportunity to see things I would never have seen if I were not out with my camera…so even duds can be remarkable sightings. It was a dull rainy morning in Carcassonne and we were up and out at the crack of dawn to photograph the medieval fortress, Cité de Carcassonne, restored in 1853 and added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites in 1997. Two of the fifty-three towers are reflected in this puddle…of which there were many…an absolutely remarkable location…Love the legend and the romance…and the architecture.
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Every evening in Maui was opportunity for another glorious sunset and on this particular evening the sun was recorded in my camera as a 6-pointed star. I have come to discover that many bright orbs become captured as star shapes…but so much of my photography is spiritual that I can’t quite be certain…. In my Saigon Starry Night image taken near Christmas Eve (see Vietnam portfolio) the streetlights became stars too)…so who knows. At any rate photographing sunsets in Maui was a celebratory act joined by many locals who just came to see and be awed by Mother Nature while I clicked away.
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In 1990 my late husband and I took a two-week black and white photography course at Maine Photography Workshop, founded by David Lyman. It was a life-altering experience. Our instructor was this young Steve Bliss, who taught photography at Savannah College of Art and Design and was brought to Maine by Craig Stevens. Little did I realize that one of my self-portraits taken and printed during this workshop would become the image that put me into my first art exhibition a few months after my husband’s sudden death…and that twenty-one years later, I would serendipitously meet Steve Bliss in Lacoste, France. While photographing my way through some hill towns in Provence, I wandered through Lacoste, saw this tall lanky fellow and shouted, “Steve.” He turned to acknowledge me and we reconnected. Now he is chairperson of the photography department at SCAD and oversees a summer program in Lacoste. Funny how life happens….
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While walking around Vernon I saw the Kodak branding reflected in the shop window and photographed it. Having been a Kodak professional partner in the heyday of film photography, I photographed every Kodak logo I stumbled upon during my travels throughout the world. I love the layers of color behind the glass on the glass through the glass. In many ways it reminds of the street photography of Saul Leiter, who died this past year and it was through articles published about his death that I focused on his photography…and discovered that he, too, was a painter.
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I can spend hours strolling the streets of New York City…or any city for that matter…that has buildings with mirrored-glass windows. Catching serendipity is the game although it is also fun to have passers-by respond to my focus and not have a clue as to what has my attention.
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In 1997 I had the opportunity to photograph with Cole Weston, surviving son of Edward Weston who was the hands for his father when Parkinson’s disease made it impossible to do his own processing. I had fallen in love with Weston’s photography as a college freshman and this opportunity became one of many incredible experiences. We hiked to this location in Oak Creek canyon, north of Sedona, Arizona and evidently it is a well-known photogenic spot because I saw it recently on CBS Sunday Morning closing nature essay. As soon as the image appeared on my TV screen it was transported back to that special place and I dug out some reflections from that shoot. This is one image of several in this portfolio that were taken while shooting with Cole Weston in Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon.
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Using a polarizer filter I captured this image during my week-long shoot with Cole Weston and several years later I went back to photograph it again…but couldn’t do it as the lighting conditions were different. This once again, shows me that photography is in the moment. The confluence of color and light make magic happen and never again repeat itself. Interestingly, when Edward Steichen’s Moonlit Pond sold for US $2.9 million, I cropped the central portion of my image to get a comparable composition….but the genius of Steichen’s image was in his application of layers of light-sensitive gums in 1907 and I shot with color film. Still, we each had an eye for that golden reflection.
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A study in rectangles…the bricks, the window, the panes of glass…and each pane has captured a different reflection….like many bits of fabric piece together to make a quilt.
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On this Sunday morning in Tasmania the harbor was filled with brightly painted boats. The reflected colors looked as though tubes of paint that had been emptied into a pool had begun to spread. I spend several rolls of film isolating and capturing abstracted images that so reminded me of the abstract expressionist canvases of the 1960’s.
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This is the image of the Chicago Bean that will launch a future blog. Since I had it printed on sublimated aluminum under the direction of printing master, Andrew Darlow, it creates a stir everywhere it is shown. I photographed it in Chicago because it was there and so was I. Funny, how snapping a picture can become so much more than a snap. This image captures the frenetic snap-happy existence we all seem to have become part of. Everybody surrounding the Bean is gazing and shooting and moving. This symbolizes the fluidity and flux of contemporary society. It boggles me that it has become such a magnet for drawing people of all ages in to study, dissect and discuss. There are so many reflective surfaces on this underside of the Millennium Bean, called the navel by the sculptor, that it is difficult to separate reflection from reality. I am present as a reflection photographing this subject many times in this image. Can you find me?
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In search of Patrick Blanc’s green walls in Paris, my botanist friend and photographer, Kathryn O’Donnell, of www.botanicus.com and I first encountered and photographed the lush 650-foot Green Wall at The Museé du Quai Branly. Capturing actual and virtual green was the ecological plan. While I was familiar with Christo’s environmental wraps, Patrick Blanc’s green wall installations were totally new to me….and very exiting to see. Actually, the seeds for this current vertical garden popularity originated by botanist Professor Stanley Hart White at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1938. We are all part of a continuum…
