Dusk Walks During the Pandemic
Blog - Part One
Hi there everybody, I hope you are doing as well as possible in the midst of these too strange and difficult times. Obviously for many months I laid off doing much writing. It was never really a conscious decision, but the days stretched into weeks and then months.
I really just had nothing to say, and was actually shooting a lot of landscape and a second black portfolio of still lifes. Quite a few of those landscapes have been posted on INSTAGRAM, and it was my general sense that those newer still lifes would follow, but things have a way of not going as planned. I am originally trained as a biologist, and by early February, long before I finished putting up the rest of the work from the southwest trip in late December and January, it was becoming clear trouble was in the offing. Pretty abruptly my shooting mostly turned from purely unfettered nature or drop in objects in the landscape, to empty landscapes that were filled with found abandoned human elements, or empty public spaces usually crowded with people. These photos have an abandoned planet feel where life has disappeared or was on vacation. The photo above of a bus graveyard near Williams, CA encapsulates my sense of dread prior to all of us being directed to shelter in place. The actual last day I really went out into the world, more than a few miles from where I live, was March 15. It is now April 29th.
In hindsight, I really wish my intuition had been WRONG, but seven weeks into being mostly indoors much of each day, I will not tell you I am surprised by the trajectory of the past month and a half.
Since March 12 all of our teaching has been shifted to online, and this has been a real adjustment for many of my students. On top of that, the epidemic has made shooting people, or working on location very difficult for many of my students, as many of them have strong subject matter preferences, even though they are working conceptually. A common thread that has kept coming up in conversations with them has been around switching out genres they usually work in for others for the next month or so. For some this has been easier said than done.
Ironically those conversations actually have led to a shift in how I have been shooting during the pandemic, when in fact, I had no COVID-19 photography plans to speak of whatsoever. My thoughts in early March were on teaching online, editing older chromes and scanning the ones I kept, and trying to get in two hours a day of walking in my neighborhood everyday as I cooked one of my knees in 2008, so running was not an option.
Blog - Part Two
Doing the walks most days has really been a wonderful relief from being in the house most of the day, but photography was never designed into them. I carried my phone with me in the beginning, and on occasion took a photo of some exotic flowers in a neighbor's garden, or strange construction markings on my street. However over time, in a haphazard way, it became acutely clear to me that my area was like a ghost town visually. The area is mostly smaller individual homes, and you would hear people laughing inside their homes, or having dinner, but except for dog walkers, runners or bicyclists, the streets were void of people. In a diffuse, less than conscious way, I started in a purely intuitive way to document my neighborhood in a random reactive way.
Much as I have encouraged my students all semester to work outside their usual genres, and locales, I quickly decided to NOT try to inflict an aesthetic or concept on the work, but just shoot what appealed to me with no stylistic direction whatsoever. After close to fifteen years of working mostly typologically, this has been a truly refreshing way to work! There are no abiding rules whatsoever surrounding the Dusk Walk images, but this does not mean there have not been any surprises here. I have lived in north Berkeley for close to twenty years, and 95% of the photos I have taken while living here have either been macro photos of exotic flowers in the spring, hieroglyphic like construction markings on the ground, or traffic arrows; all very flat 2D work. However the Dusk Walk photos are overwhelmingly intimate or more expansive landscapes more in the tradition of Edward Weston and Walker Evans like the two photos above. These Berkeley photos are actually the localization of the landscapes that I was doing immediately prior to being told to SHELTER IN PLACE.
Blog – Part Three
As you can see in the grid of photos above, they are all over the place in terms of composition, subject matter, and genre. Obviously, some sort of portrait of my immediate neighborhood is slowly emerging, but at least for now, I do not want to begin to organize them into a rational sequence, subdivide them into categories, or reduce the variation in contrast, or saturation to make them more cohesive. It is such a creative release to just shoot on the basis of intuition, image to image, and not be thinking about where this is going. Right now the only thing I am thinking about is staying healthy and taking another dusk walk tomorrow evening. BE SAFE EVERYBODY!
