Isleton

This project continues into the future, and its title may have to change to "Delta Blues."  

According to long-time resident Steve Calvert, Isleton, California is - or at any rate was - "a classic little river town, like something out of Mark Twain.  You can sit on your houseboat with a beer at sunset and catch a catfish, listen to the birds."

Isleton's location on the Sacramento River Delta made it a relaxed fishing spot with bait shops and marinas.  The town calls itself "Crawdad Town U.S.A." and hosts an annual crawdad or crayfish festival. 

But the San Francisco Bay Area and the capital in Sacramento are expanding, and so Isleton is being swallowed into the commuting perimeter.  In 2006, despite known concerns about the strength of the dikes that hold back the river, a developer proposed to build 650 homes, which would double the population.  In Steve Calvert's words, "If all those homes go in, a few guys will make a lot of money.  But everyone else will lose the whole reason for being here." 

Development began in 2006, with grading and sewer installations east of town.

VIEW ISLETON

Other People's Art

I was taught that you can't take pictures of other people's art, because” it's not your own.”  That was before a generation of artists from Warhol to Richter said just the opposite.  I'm glad to hear the other side, because photographing other people's art is a playful and rewarding treasure hunt.  Icons everywhere!  Sometimes they mix so that you just can't tell what's real or not (that old puzzle). 

In Atget’s pictures of Old Paris, you see signs indicating professions (baker, dentist, etc.), and some window displays for merchandise like pants and prosthetics.  By the time of Kertesz and Cartier-Bresson and Evans, you enter a world of advertising and see large, deliberately-placed artworks like "Dubon, Dubon, Dubonnet." 

In our time, we see things placed everywhere on somebody else's assumption that we ‘ought’ to look at them.  The assumption is that we’re all trained readers of the encyclopedia of visual messages and ‘should’ be looking at all this stuff, ranging from the eye-openers to the eyesores. 

I've been enjoying this image-world according to the value-judgment that all such things are equal, from fine art to window displays to graffiti and detritus.  At least at this level, we have quite a nice democracy. 

VIEW OTHER PEOPLE'S ART

Things Fall Apart

This is the oldest of these three sets of images.  I started on it in 2001 and the portfolio has grown steadily - though in the meantime, my sense of what I was doing has shifted focus considerably.  Now I'm not sure whether they're images of the outer world or an inner one. 

When I started the series, I thought I was making a social and political statement about how we're letting our world - our urban environment, but also the broader realm of social solidarity - fall into disrepair around us.  I thought the images were indictments for neglect.  Every time I got a good image I'd say to myself, "Take That, George Bush."

But as time went by I began to see how carefully I was composing these images of neglect and decay, so that the old buildings, cars, ships, planes, and so forth seemed to be drawn back into a new vitality  through the act of photographing them.  I seemed to be letting them express a sense of presence.  They couldn’t recover their youth, but they could still present themselves with a residual dignity.

It’s been dawning on me that these might be pictures of my own sense of increasing age:  Yes, things fall apart, but a bit of artful reconstruction can draw the aging elements back into a composed self-presentation.  As Cartier-Bresson put it, “after a certain age, people get the faces they deserve.”  If they can’t change that, at least the geezers can zip their flies, hoist their suspenders, and reveal old-fashioned individuality.  

VIEW THINGS FALL APART

Several Messy Gardens

This is a new project of garden photographs, still to be expanded and completed. (OK, let?s call it an on-growing project?)

I?ve never viewed flower or garden pictures with great interest, almost always valuing real gardens more than their pictures. But lately I?ve been attracted to the chaos of gardens trying to break loose from the gloved hand & probing trowel of human control. This naturally organized disorder is a small version of The Big Picture of nature taking over again, undoing human intentions - as will happen more and more often in a warming world. I?ve been looking for patterns in these unintended consequences, and expect to discover more.

VIEW SOME MESSY GARDENS