Celebration

When the artists of the Main Gallery decided that our next exhibition would be dedicated to displaying the artists’ old favorite pieces (ones that had not been displayed at the gallery for some time), I was in a dilemma. Which photographs should I choose for the show? Should I choose the more popular photographs that have some sale potential, or pick up the photographs that I personally like the most? This is a constant tension among all fine art artists. Artists create works of art because they feel a deep creative urge to express themselves. However, some pieces may become personal favorites. It takes time to form this emotional bondage. On my living room wall, I have a place for three large photographs to display. However, over the course of the last five years or so, I have displayed only a handful of photographs on that wall. These are the best of the best, my personal favorites. It does not matter whether these are my best selling photographs or not.

To select the photographs for the show, I decided to go through all of my prints. I stacked the prints against my studio wall and started short-listing. Finally, it came down to just four photographs that seemed pretty cohesive to a central theme. In each of these four photographs, color plays a central role. Color plays a significant role in my life, too. I live and breathe color. In spring time, when wildflowers decorate the landscapes with a myriad of hues and colors, I feel enchanted. In autumn, when the leaves turn yellow or orange, I start feeling the colors with my whole body. Using the color in a photograph that expresses a central theme is not easy, however. Painters have the liberty of selecting the color palette of their choice. We, the poor photographers, have to be satisfied with whatever color palette Mother Nature provides us. Painters start with an empty canvas and fill in the content with the color of their choice. Photographers start with a crowded canvas and make it meaningful through the process of selection and elimination.

After the photograph is captured, the color photographer toils to refine the image further, mostly by changing luminosity, color balance, and sometimes saturation. In this regard, crafting a fine color photograph is more challenging than crafting a fine black and white photograph. A color photograph is like a very complex symphony with hundreds of instruments. Every  instrument has to play harmoniously and in unison. If a single instrument is out-of-tune or louder than needed, it will ruin the symphony; the photograph.

But, I digress. Let us come back to the photographs for the show. The first one is titled “Enchanted Adobe.” I took this photograph in 1994, while visiting Santa Fe during Christmas time. I was wandering through downtown Santa Fe looking for subjects to photograph. Suddenly, the sky started changing color. The famous New Mexico sunset color filled the sky and the buildings in the most wonderful soft glow of pink. I was in front of a building with the Adobe style of architecture. Suffused in the soft pink light, the building started dancing with joy. I set up my tripod and had enough time to capture just one photograph. I never printed this photograph until now, because it proved to be very hard to print the soft pink glow, that was so apparent on the piece of the color transparency film. Hopefully, I have done the print some justice this time–you are the judge.

The second photograph is named “Poppy field and cloud.” I was visiting the Antelope valley   poppy preserve in southern California during the spring of 2007. We reached the preserve in the afternoon. Poppies were in full bloom. I parked my car, took out my heavy tripod and my large format film camera and started looking for a vantage point for taking a photograph. Suddenly, a beautiful cloud caught my attention. I immediately set up my tripod, opened my view camera, composed the image on the ground glass under the focusing cloth and tripped the shutter. The photograph contains a segment of the colorful poppy field, a lone human figure on the field, and the voluminous cumulus cloud in the sky. Does it signify an impending doom or a sign of hope? I will let you decide.

You all are cordially invited to the reception of the exhibition “Another Look”  this coming Saturday, March 24th, between 4 to 6 pm. If you can not make it to the reception, the show will be on display from March 21-April 22, Wed-Sun, 10 am – 3pm. Here is the link for the gallery for details. Thanks for your patience! Please leave your comments.

Why do I photograph? For me the answer to this question evolved over the years. When I first started photography almost twenty years ago, it was simple. At that time, I would travel to all these scenic places and capture the landscapes so that it would look the prettiest. More often than not that would mean following the compositional formula that I learnt from popular photography books and magazines. When I were successful in my mission, I would produce a photograph that would resemble the one that I saw in one of the magazines. But, it would be a pretty photograph without any of my personal statement. I would act as a composition machine to capture the landscape with my camera and produce on the monitor or print.

But, something inside me kept saying that I need to push my envelope. I started  looking at the works of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Wynn Bullock and Paul Caponigro. I started reading about their works and  of the artistic inspiration that motivated them. I read about Minor White and his advice to other photographers: “When you approach something to photograph it, first be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. Then don’t leave until you have captured its essence“. Finally, a photography workshop with the internationally acclaimed photographer and print maker Charles Cramer finally transformed me and pushed me into the fine art photography world.

These masters of photography taught me that photography is not about “decorative fragments of landscapes”,  but it is a medium of transferring the life experience of the artist to the audience.

I present the top photograph, “Cloud Melody ” as a case in point. Judy Windt from Menlo Park wrote to me about it - “I’m the one who just bought your photograph “Cloud Melody”. All summer and fall I miss the rain and the dark moist sky and your photo will let me have that feeling when I feel dry. I wrote about it to a friend:

…a vast undulating field that is gold somehow with either yellowed grass or yellow flowers, the light coming from the earth, and the sky above heavy and dense with blue-gray clouds that are about to be rain, the darkness above, the light below, the heaviness and the light all reversed, the weight of clouds giving me weight and ground, why I love rain and clouds, the weight of it bringing me quietly, powerfully, massively down.”

I couldn’t have said it better. Thanks for reading! Please leave your comments.

Dogwoods in Fog

This is my first post on my blog site. I thought I would share with you the story behind one of my most favorite photographs, “Dogwoods in Fog”. It took me three years to take this photograph. In the spring of 2002, I visited Yosemite valley. Dogwoods were in full bloom. While wandering around the valley in search of a good composition, I came to this location near the Merced river. The beautiful dogwoods bloom composed by these strong lines of the tree branches immediately caught my attention. I photographed several compositions with my 35 mm film camera I owned at that time. I made some prints, but was not happy with the smaller resolution of the 35 mm film. In that year, I acquired a 4″x5″ large format view camera. Over the course of the next two years, I would come back to the same location with my large format camera and capture several images. Finally, I was happy with my capture in 2004. The cloudy weather and the atmospheric mist added the right emotional content to my photograph. However, it would take me another six months of trial and error before I was able to transfer my feelings into the print. The emotional content is very important in whatever I photograph. In the words of Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel laureate poet from India, if my photograph can speak to the heart of a thirteen year old, I would feel more successful than if I were to be praised by an art critic.

This photograph has been admired by a wide variety of audience and has been collected by many individual art lovers. It was selected in the coveted annual exhibition at the Center for Photographic Art (founded by Ansel Adams), Carmel in 2011. The photograph is featured on the 2011 Juried Exhibition book published by the Center for Photographic Art.

Thanks for reading this! Please leave your comments or questions on this site.