Looking Back in Black and White

All images are copyright, George Cannon, all rights reserved.

When I first began photography seriously, I shot black and white film. Mostly Tri-X, developed at a community rental darkroom and printed by hand. I learned a lot about photography by doing this, about light and contrast and film density and filters and highlight and shadow detail and film latitude.

I went through boxes of paper, experimenting, running test strips, making print after print until I got what I wanted. I also relied heavily on the old Time-Life series of books on photography. I don’t believe there was ever a more instructional and inspiring series for beginning photographers that taught about the basics of film and cameras, light and exposure, tricks and techniques, and exposed me to the very best photography by the best photographers in the world.

 

Digital has changed the way of looking at much of the technical aspects, but the basics of exposure and making a good print still apply. Photoshop has given us a whole new set of tools for rendering the final results. The days of paper and chemistry and hours on my feet under the glow of the safelight are pretty much behind me now. Although I still have a great appreciation for a finely crafted silver print.

 

In the last couple of weeks I have been scouring over my old black and white negatives looking for images I loved to print in the past and digitizing them so I would have access to them on the computer. I use a Minolta slide scanner for this. I have been fortunate because I had the good sense to organize and file my negatives safely years ago in binders with corresponding contact sheets. So my negatives are virtually scratch and dust free. Something I can’t say for my color slides. But it has been inspiring to look back over years of images and pick out those pictures that I always loved as well as some that I have found a new appreciation for.

When I lived in Atlanta, I would often spend my Sunday mornings driving about the city in search of images. Sunday mornings were always a quiet time with little traffic and fewer people up and about. I would drive around listening to “Concert Hall”, a classical radio program (even though I was somewhat of a hippie and preferred rock and roll in general), because the music just seemed to fit the Sunday morning mood.

 

As I collected images from around the city I began to be aware of how our environment changes. Things I took pictures of one day would be gone a week later. Buildings torn down, trees cut, areas that were run down eventually replaced with something new. Without recording things, I probably would have simply not noticed as changes happened. But by being aware of my surroundings as a result of peering at it through the camera’s lens, I became more aware of how things changed.

I think that’s one of the things photography does for us. Makes us more aware in general of our world and how in flux it is all the time. That’s one of the driving forces that causes us to take pictures in the first place, that desire to hold on to a passing moment so as not to loose it or to just preserve that memory of it, lest we forget.

My black and white images span a time from when I first began photography to the early 1980’s, about 15 years. I shifted to color slides in the late 70’s in an effort to produce material for the publishing market. So these negatives span a very important part of my creative development as a photographer.

 

They cover time in Georgia, my years in Rochester, and then in Boston, as well as my transition to upstate New York. They bring back memories, as photos should, of events and friends, people I have lost touch with, and places I have seen, lived in, and moved away from.

They represent growth, and changes, losses and gains, experiences and trials, beyond just an artistic statement. A journal of sorts. They help us sort our past and see our life as a time line. They are our record and our statements about life.

 

 

Winter is not so bad afterall, when you stop to look.

As much as I may complain about the winter weather, it’s really a beautiful time of year. I grew up in the South so experiencing winter in the Northeast was a wonderful experience when I first moved up here. I don’t ski or snowshoe like I used to, but still appreciate the winter beauty of this region. I often complain when I come in from shovelling the drive but mornings like today make me realize how nature can please in any season.

Normally Sunday mornings are my day to sleep in, but my wife and daughter are down in the city this weekend and I have morning dog duty. Margot woke me at 3:00 a.m. to go out, so I put her back in her crate, threw some more wood in the stove and went back to bed until she woke me up at 7:00. I looked out the window after coming down to let her out. There were four does casually strolling through the yard, pawing about for whatever they could find to eat. After a small breakfast I took the dog out to walk up our hill. The landscape is amazingly quiet in the winter. I could hear our waterfall out back but there was little else until we reached the top of the hill where two crows were harassing a large red tailed hawk in top of the trees across the road. Margot loves the snow and digs about attracted to the scent of every small mouse or vole that burrows under the leaves.

The sun was just coming over the treetops and small clouds sent light flurries drifting down. The morning sun across the surface of the lake illuminated wispy steam rising off the warmer surface. My ears hurt from the cold.

The Fingerlakes region is known for its gorges and waterfalls and I am fortunate to live in close proximity to several. In winter they freeze and thaw and create amazing ice sculptures and frost all about. Winter is not so bad afterall, when you stop to look.

More from Willimantic, CT

In my last post I included a photo I took in Willimantic, CT over the Christmas holidays. I visit there often because my mother-in-law lives in Columbia nearby. My wife and her family grew up there. Her sisters have moved away as has her father, but her two brothers still live in the area as well as other family. Christmas has always been at her Mom’s house as long as we have been together.

I ventured out the day before Christmas, early in the morning. I like that time of day for street photography because there are few people about and I like that deserted feeling of the streets before people rise and traffic picks up. The early morning sun creates nice shadows and textures.

I went looking primarily for Christmas decorations. I have a section on my website I call Ornamental America. It’s mostly about things people use to decorate their yards. It’s always fascinated me to see what people do with whirly-gigs and old tires and unused toilets and shrines made from old bathtubs. So I look for these things and other interesting bits of yard art. And Christmas, of course, offers great opportunities for decoration.

The area between downtown and Eastern Campus changes rapidly as you move up the hill, from a more economically depressed neighborhood to rather well-to-do and upscale. There are many large old Victorian houses in various states of renovation.

I spent some time walking the main drag through the business district. Numerous store fronts are empty as is the case in many old industrial towns. I often look for displays of Americanism. And the Hispanic flavor is evident nearly everywhere.

All images are Copyright George Cannon, all rights reserved.

Out Of Context

All images are Copyright George Cannon, all rights reserved.

 

 

One of the aspects of photography that I enjoy most is the ability to isolate a small portion of the world from its surroundings. To take out of context a piece of the visually chaotic world and look at it on its own, for what it offers, without the distractions of everything else.

 

 

When I have taught students about composition, I have pointed out that composition is a decision making process that involves arranging a picture. Choosing what will be in the frame of the image as well as what will not. And how will those things that are included interact with or relate to each other as well as to the frame of the image. Sometimes this requires a great deal of thought. Sometimes it happens in an instant.

 

 

On my web site I have a section I call “Out Of Context”. These are images that aren’t really about anything in particular except design. Color, line, form, light, shadow, texture, shapes, and the relationship of all of these things isolated in a single frame.

 

 

They suggest things, they sometimes include signs or words. But they are mostly about isolating something from everything else in a way that makes me happy to look at it. Sometimes they feel humorous. Sometimes they illustrate some emotion or stimulate a question. Sometimes it’s simply the play of color I react to or the juxtaposition of elements that seem incongruous.

 

 

What ever attracts my attention to these things, I am thankful for it, because it helps me to see the wonder and beauty and humor and serendipity of the everyday amid a lot of visual stimulus that has little meaning to me. We are bombarded daily with so much to look at. And the joy of photography is the ability to pick and choose what I will take out of context and hold on to. Those snippets of everyday that are worth a second look.

Every Picture Tells A Story, Don’t It?

All photos are Copyright George Cannon, all rights reserved.

I’ve been working over the past several months to scan and catalog a lot of my older slides. They have been through numerous slide shows and class discussions when I was teaching. Many have been scratched and show some wear and tear from years of use. So with the help of photoshop and my slide scanner I can preserve these images, clean them, and add them to my digital library for safe keeping.

So as I look over these images I begin to think about where I was when they were taken and what the story is behind these shots. When I used to teach I used to always open my first class with a quote from Freeman Patterson. “Every photograph has its origin in the desire of the photographer to say something meaningful.” I would talk about how photography is a visual language. We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words. The interesting part is what are the words that picture deserves? What is the image about? What does it make you think of? I would always stress to my students that a good image should be able to stand alone, without explanation. Nothing is more tiring than watching a slide show of someone’s pictures and with every image hearing, “and here’s Bill standing in front of our motel in Mobile….and this one is of a pretty flower I saw but it’s kind of small. See it there in the corner.” Photos need to tell a story. It may not be the story that is really attached to the image, but one that the viewer can hear in their mind. Or one that causes us to question our perception of what’s taking place. Maybe ask ourselves why or how the image was created. As photographers we are trying to say something meaningful, so our challenge is communication. As the creator of pictures we will always associate more with an image than most viewers, except perhaps the person who might be the subject of the picture. But for the photographer, the image will always bring back more of an experience. Where you were, what you felt like, what your mood was, whether you were cold or hot or hungry, what the smells were, who was with you and what those moments meant to you as you took the pictures. These things are hard to convey to a viewer. But the viewer’s experience does not necessarily need these things explained. They only need their own experience to be one of interest and value. To gain something from looking at the image. Whatever they feel is valid.

This image has a story for me. It speaks of a time in my life when I was isolated and on my own. I was living for a while in a studio apartment next to Buttermilk Falls State Park in Ithaca. Sandbank Road began there at the bottom of the hill and wound upward and every day I would walk to the top of this hill and then run for another mile or so. It was a huge energy release for me and a place to be quiet and think. It was also a time of great transition and, at times, lonliness. The picture feels like it expresses that loneliness for me. A barren time in the winter when the trees were bare, an emptiness. A picture that expresses a journey. Life with twists and turns. But a journey all the same, leading somewhere unexpected. Very much a picture of where I was at the time.

I was so taken by the desert when I drove out west years ago. I felt like I would live there one day when I was old and retired. When my partner had perhaps tired of putting up with me and kicked me out. I would pack my bag and move to the desert and live there in the vastness of that sky among the sage and cactus and rattlesnakes with an old cat. Maybe in a place like this. I found this old trailer off the highway in Nevada. Parked beside what appears to me a miner’s shack and maybe a mineshaft. My imagined story is one of an old prospector digging away at a small vein of silver everyday. Looking for that one glint of something shiny that would mean reward for years of beans out of a can. The backbone of a burro or some animal hangs on the side of the shack. The place is enveloped in the darkness of the desert at night with a view of the stars like no where else and maybe that occasional UFO that frequents these remote areas. Who is this resident, and why is he (or she) there? They are creative, and artistic. The trailer is sponge painted outside with the colors of the desert sage. I’d be curious to know what they read at night in the quiet of this place.

Years ago when I lived in Boston, I would travel to New Hampshire to ski and photograph in the winter. Near one of the ski areas was one of those old mountain hotels that used to be so grand. I took this image behind the hotel and have always loved it. There’s something about places where people have thrived and lived and played that are now left to decay and reclamation by nature, that I find so interesting and appealing. I imagine the times when children splashed and squealed in the water of this pool, escaping the city heat. When families came to hike and play golf and ride horses through the woods and young girls hung out by the water hoping for that summer romance, while their mothers read novels and sipped cocktails in the afternoon with other mothers, awaiting their husbands’ return from the golf course. There are ghosts in places like this. And in the quiet of a winter day you can almost hear their voices and laughter.

There’s a beautiful wildlife refuge in Concord, Massachsetts called Wachusetts Meadows on the Concord river. One winter after days of heavy rain, when the river was swollen to flood stage, the temperature dropped like a rock falling below zero and amazing things happened. The surface of the river in the refuge froze solid to about a foot or more thick with ice that was, in places, so clear you could see well down into its depths. I spent a very cold morning out skating across the ice with a tripod and camera trying to capture the beauty and amazing quality of this winter phenomenon. In places the ice appeared like space, like galaxies and stars and clouds of gas. Nature is like that. Opening the world, or the universe to our eyes in the small space of a pond or a puddle. I understand why Thoreau and Emerson were so taken with the beauty of this area. It was a magical day.

Much of my photography today is from the urban landscape. While in Connecticut over the Christmas holidays I spent some time driving around the streets of Willimantic. Willimantic was an industrial town know for its thread mills years ago. Today this area is populated with many Hispanic residents and many of the large old Victorian homes are divided into apartments in the old neighborhoods on the edge of the Eastern campus. I took this photo on one of the neighborhood streets. It was one of those scenes that seemed so full of story possibilities and questions. Here among the trash behind a building of several apartments, old TV sets, packaging from Christmas toys, was what appeared to be a nearly new baby bassinet, in perfect condition. I almost expected to look inside and find a child. It was sort of a flash of a modern day Nativity scene. Strange juxtaposition at an inspirational time of year. As an observer behind the lens, we have the rare opportunity to slice out of the surroundings, a piece of art that stimulates our imagination, causes us to question, and connects with our mind in surprising ways. What a gift!

My photo journey – Installment #3

All photos are Copyright George Cannon, all rights reserved.

In spite of Boston being a cool town with a lot to offer, it was also an expensive place to live with the worst drivers I have ever experienced. I found I was living there but continuing to come back to New York to work, to photograph. In 1979, just before our book came off press, my wife and I moved to Ithaca. They have a motto for Ithaca… “Centrally Isolated”. It describes it well. An upscale college town with Cornell and Ithaca College, little industry, a generally good economy, and a very diverse population. But our draw here was the landscape, the parks, the farm land, the gorges, the lakes. The Finger Lakes were formed, legend has it, by God’s hand holding the earth during creation.

We worked here building relationships with New York Alive, Horticulture, Adirondack Life, and other magazines. We also did some work with Minolta Cameras and Fuji Film. But I found as I worked at being a professional photographer something terrible happened. I lost my creativity, I lost my drive. I became so concerned with whether I could sell each shot I took, that I quit shooting for me. I lost my eye. Nothing appealed. The only time I really enjoyed what I was shooting was when I was able to just shoot without thinking about marketing the image. So after about three years in Ithaca, I changed careers. I took my artistic drive and creativity and opened a stained and leaded glass studio. I had begun working with glass in Rochester as a hobby. It too, like my photography, had grown to a very involved creative effort. And so Lumiere Glasswork Studio was born.

It saved me as an artist. I had great clients that gave me free reign to create. Many pieces were a result of photos I had taken over the years. It also saved my photography. I was able to shoot for myself again. I also began teaching photography to students in adult education classes. I found a new love for my own work and became inspired by students who truly wanted to learn.

Three years later my wife and I divorced. I closed my retail studio and began to work strictly on commissions. I continued to teach and photograph. My friend Mark had moved to Tallahassee to get his phd at Florida State, and I spent a great deal of time traveling back and forth to visit him and Renee, the woman he eventually married. We often took ourselves down to St. George island on the Gulf coast near Apalachicola.

I moved to Trumansburg, outside of Ithaca to a fantastic apartment on Main Street. 2000 square feet for $400 a month. It was the former Odd Fellows meeting hall on the top floor of an old brick building, and large enough to house me and my glass studio space.

A few months later I took a month off from work, bought a new Caravan, packed all my photo gear and took off to drive across the country. I first went south to visit Mark and Renee and Sally, a woman I had met at their wedding. We hooked up at Cedar Key on the Gulf. Renee was pregnant with their first child.

I drove from there across the panhandle of Florida and along the Gulf to New Orleans. Then up to Dallas where Sally flew in and met me. We drove to her family’s home in Oklahoma for a couple of days, then across Texas to Albequerque where she caught a flight back to Florida. I continued to drive and photograph where ever I wanted, stopping when ever I felt like it. Up through the four corners, red rock country, the parks of Utah and Colorado. Never in my life have I ever seen country as spectacular as Utah. I was in awe. Arches, Canyonlands, Zion. This is unbelievable country. I spent several days in Utah and on the border with Arizona. Then drove on to Nevada and Death Valley.

I made my way over to California, up through Sequoia and Yosimite before turning to head back home. I shot a lot of film. It was by far one of the grandest experiences of my life. I drove 9000 miles in four weeks, and I would do it again tomorrow if I could.

My glass studio was the source of many changes for me. Many new friends, accomplishments, artistic opportunities. It’s also where I met my third wife. Tanni came into the studio one day to buy supplies for a class she was teaching at a community center. We became close friends and had a great attraction for each other. Unfortunately for me, she became engaged to another guy soon after and married. I took the photos for their wedding invitation. Sally eventually moved up to Trumansburg and we lived together there and in another house in the country south of Ithaca for about four years. It was a stroke of fate that Sally and I split, as did Tanni and her husband at about the same time. We married in 1991.

I now work at an art museum. I have given up the glass work (almost). I no longer teach. But my photography has become more important to me again, much as it was when I was twenty and starting out, although with a much honed vision and far more experience than I had then. The influence of my mentors and photographic idols over the years, Freeman Patterson, George Tice, Eliot Porter, Joel Meyerowitz, and many others, have shaped my vision and taught me how to look for the essence of the image. The introduction of digital and the photoshop generation and my reluctant acceptance of these has been an awakening. Don’t know what I was waiting for. And the growth of the internet and the opportunities to express yourself with a worldwide audience is not like anything I would have imagined when I was shooting with my first 35mm camera. And so a new website, and a blog, and a world of images. Who would have believed it. Life is full of surprises.

Freeman Patterson said, “Every photograph has it’s origin in the desire of the photographer to say something meaningful.” So I think this blog is about saying something meaningful. For myself, and to anyone else. It will become, I hope, an exploration. A new way of looking at the images I take, and a way to put some meaning to them.

Getting Started, Installment #2

After my first wife and I divorced I moved to downtown Atlanta for a while. Photography was my haven, my release, my companion. It was the first time I had ever really lived alone. In my life I have only one real regret, which I suppose is not bad for a man my age. I was only three days past my nineteenth birthday when my first daughter was born. I missed a big part of her childhood. She was six when my wife and I split.

I left Georgia in 1974 and moved to Rochester, New York, hoping to attend RIT, where Barrie was going to school. In my first meeting with the faculty adviser there I was told they would allow me to skip my Freshman year based on my portfolio. I took a few night classes there but never really got enrolled as a full time student, much to my disappointment. I worked for a medical supply company and drove all over the upstate area delivering medical supplies for about a year and a half. My cameras always traveled with me and the changing seasons on the back roads of New York provided my initiation to the beauty of the upstate landscape. My image of New York, coming from the South, was much the same as many people who have never been here. I expected big cities, skyscrapers, traffic, industry. But the area was a total surprise. Rolling hills, lakes, gorges, farm land, orchards, woods, wildlife. Not what I imagined at all. I believe it was the New York landscape, the Finger Lakes, the Adirondack mountains, that inspired in me a love of nature I had never really known quite so strongly before. That and the influence of Neil Croom, a professor of nature photography at RIT. So my photography became more and more about nature and the landscape.

Barrie and I lived in an apartment on the ground floor of a large house on Brunswick Street in Rochester. The area is full of big old houses, devided and broken into apartments, mostly occupied by students. We could set up our darkroom in the bathroom with our enlarger in a closet off the hallway. We had black plastic covering the doorways at either end of the hall and over the bathroom window. It was pretty light tight and worked fairly well, unless you needed to use the bathroom. I began to shoot pictures for others during this time. Portraits, some product shots, an occasional wedding. Very basic stuff, but began to build a collection of nature material. Although Rochester and New York fed my creative self with imagery, from a business standpoint I felt isolated and confined. I longed for a bigger city. In 1976 we moved to Lexington, Massachusetts outside of Boston. We had been recently married and moved there hoping to build photography careers with a New England base.

Lexington was an upscale town with great historical significance, shot heard round the world and all, Paul Revere, the Minutemen. Our house was four houses up from John Hancock’s house. And here we were in the birthplace of liberty in time for the bicentennial. It amazes me to think back today and ask myself why I didn’t photograph everything in conjunction with that event. Instead I was shooting mushrooms and marshes and wildflowers. We received an offer and opportunity to do a book of landscape and nature photos while there and spent the next few years compiling images, traveling, and designing the book. In 1979 we published Coming Into The Light/An Invitation. The book was well received and won an award from Meade paper as one of the top 60 printed pieces for the year, and a distinctive merit award from the Art Directors Club of Boston. We didn’t sell a great number of the books, but it opened numerous doors for us as photographers eventually leading to work with Minolta Cameras, Fuji film, book and magazine publishers, a small show in Citicorp Center in Manhattan, and general recognition within our community.

While working on the book we traveled to Nova Scotia to take in a week long photo workshop on a Cape Breton farm. It was run by a photographic workshop organization out of Boston with a good reputation, but because of the unusually dry August that year, the farm well had dried up and there was no running water. We arrived early enough to claim a fairly nice room in the farm house, but late comers were relegated to camping outside. Bathing was done in a stream about a half mile up the road, and food from the gardens was running low so it was important to get to the dining table early. About four days into the workshop we skipped out and took a night at a motel a few miles away just to be able to get a shower and some good sleep. In spite of the situation, the image opportunities were good. We had a new yellow Dodge van at the time we had named Grover. Our best time spent there was an overnight excursion up through Cape Breton Highlands National Park with several other students riding in the van with us. We would drive a few miles and when the spot looked right, park the van and pile out with cameras and tripods, shoot for a while and pile back in and continue up the road. We drove up the west side of the cape that day, spent the night in the park, and drove back down the east side the next day to finish the loop.

The important result of the trip had little to do with photography, but instead more to do with friendship. It was in Nova Scotia that I met Mark who would become my closest and dearest friend. Mark lived in Brookline, Massachusetts. Was a psychologist and an amateur photographer. He had a great eye and took really nice pictures. We connected and began a friendship that would last about twenty years. Unfortunately we have drifted apart over the last several years, but we spent years sharing everything good friends share, marriages, divorces, school, children, moving, caring.

I suppose I hadn’t really anticipated when I began to write this blog, that it would be about anything other than photography. But my photography has guided my life in so many ways and lead me to so many important relationships and changes, that I guess it has to be about more than just images. It’s really more about life, and choices, and relationships, and adventures, and disappointments, and discoveries, and regrets. Funny how you don’t realize the impact something has had on your life until you sit down and really reflect.