The year started out nicely, with a photograph from 2006, The Beach, accepted for a show at the Cambridge Art Association. The show ran from January 19 to February 23 this year. The theme was “Secrets.”
I looked through my portfolio, at recent things and things going back a few years, for examples that are in my current style but exemplify this theme in some way. In this case, there are not only the obscured faces of the men in the foreground, but there’s the anomaly of the important man in the red shirt. For me, his dynamic, bent-over gesture next to the straight-up man in the hoodie is what it’s all about. As for secrets, why does he look like he’s struggling into a 50-mph wind? The foreground man (like everyone else) is standing there like the Colossus of Rhodes. It was not a windy day, actually.
My other entry was The Vendor, taken in Santa Fé in 2006. Another anomalous figure: at first you tell yourself that’s her shadow interestingly silhouetted on the parasol. No, can’t be, because the light is coming from the left. It happens to be someone else’s shadow–someone off camera–who just happened to be in exactly the right spot. I wish The Beach were as high-quality a print as this, although I think in this case that the juror picked the stronger image. The Vendor was shot on the now-nonexistent E100G 35mm transparency film, which had very realistic colors, almost no grain, and very high sharpness. I was using a Leica 135mm f/2.8 lens on a Leica M6TTL; it isn’t even one of the better or more modern Leica lenses, but combined with that film, it made a picture that is very, very sharp. In the print, you can see small details in that jewelry and very little grain.
