12-10-10

From

An image about many things. Looking back at the history of photo, in general, and my images as well. Like a foggy mirror of oneself through the lenses of noumena. To begin, looking at the end, the start of the end, a subtle and slow dieing of the light. A fading into darkness, the light that is and creates color. Like the feeling of wading too far into the ocean at night, up and down in a seamless continuum of brine. The green limey light in the nursing home, seeping sickly through the windows, trying to warm, and then falling cold upon death incarnate, another one of the event horizon. Hearing back at Burroughs, effects of, hearing the immortal, what passes on...

"Consider an apocalyptic statement: nothing is true everything is permitted. Hasaan I Sabah, the old man in the mountain. Not to be interpreted as an invitation to all manner of unrestrained and destructive behavior, that would a minor episode, which would run its course. Everything is permitted because nothing is true. It is all make-believe . . . illusion . . . dream . . . art. When art leaves the frame and the written word leaves the page, not merely the physical frame and page, but the frames and pages that assign the categories."

...The slow lingerering decay of the light, looking back at a day, a time, the past. Everything that has a beginning, has an end.

Thoughts of Hiroshi Sugimoto, sameness, simplicity, a reductive process. The world has taker outs and puter inners. I take out, I guess. Thought evolves from process which evolves from thought which evolves from process. Under the weight of all things there is little light which escapes.

 

11/27/10

Upon Retrospection

Trying to follow the Max Ernst idea that came back from Houston about cultural, or really just changes over time, but taking it to the next level. How do simple systems change over time and can that be more easily documented, change, the basic factor of entropy, narrative. Working on this image, trying to bring everything together, soften, rationalize. Lookingt back at Keystone. I always was absorbed by that name, Keystone, since I was a very young boy. I lived there for wuite a while, in my Jeep. Got stuck in the sand, adventure. Spooks' house and there muddy beyond. Many great moments of understanding, and fear, watching the way in which change ocuurs over time. Study, the great science of cause and effect. Keystone, sleeping on top of my Jeep, the sky, smells, and dim city lights. All tangled in the web, almst putrified, but part of what pushes onward. Lessons learned.

11/21/10

Meditating

I have found myself staring into space alot in my free time, when I have it, so I decided to make a short video about that. Just trying to embrace an emptiness, not having to always feel, positive or negative, restrained or inhibited. Feeling mildly schitzofrenic lately, these moments of staring into space thinking deeply about life, photography, loss, sometimes nothing at all. And that is what I wanted to represent with this video, just being there, watching the clouds drift by, exposures so long they really dont even delineate the clouds but rarely. Largely lost in colors, inperceptible movements which bear an obvious direction and flow but never approaching any cohesive narrative. Sometimes photography can serve to recreate a moment, a specific circumstance in time, which can be rebembered again and again through the details of the image, but with this there is little memory, just the feeling of the clouds drifting by all in one long flash, timeless, meaningless, and without any semblance of objectivity.  

11/14/10

Portraits

 I did some Senior Portraits this weekend, worked out pretty well. Tried to get as much of a range of styles as posible in shooting, a little something for everyone. Still found myself compulsively just purely trying to look at light, not subject, but it was good to be drawn into subjective process through posing, coaching, interaction. Sat down and tried to have fun editing the images last night, not the usual approach. I still lazily used mostly Actions on Photoshop, but really pushed a couple of them towards painterly, aesthetics. Just kind of playing the line between cliche and poppy, the ridiculous and the contemporary. 

11/7/10

Visual Metaphors (Revisited)

Reality is like the branches of a tree, in that ideas, as represented by each divergent offshoot must be allowed to fully expand and subdivide before a new major vein can be created. The leaves and buds of each branch provide the intellectual nourishment needed to create an entirely new system of thought. The root system of the tree represents our subconscious mind, ever growing deeper into that unknown darkness as its' counterpart, the youngest buds and tendrils of the treetop find light for the very first time every day. 

 



11/6/10.2

objectivity

...is realizing that we are just human, frail things, and that we are a passing, singular event. what we are is so deeply immersed in what we have come from, the here, and now. we immerse ourselves so deeply. objectivity is remebrance, knowing that knowledge is only created, not reality. The feeling of trying not to feel, objectivity. No connection, no inner empathy. But still a greater understanding. A sense that I was there, once, outside of myself, comfortable.

44 at 18. and the text that night.

no such thing.

in hopes merely a greater approach to the reality of depth

11/6/10

objectivity vs. subjectivity

the larger notions,

      This work needing to be so subjective, for a new approach, I seemed to find new consistency in the formal, compositional approach to this sort of process. At certain times it seemed that having peered so recently at Cartier-Bresson, I had tried to so closely wheave the subjective approach with the purely objective. Find underlying form in the surface appearance. Discover the true sincronisity of it all. Whether things come together or do we put them there by our own study. Is it in the nature of dakrness, to create light, and if so, does all light ultimately stem from darkness.

10-28.2

Went down to Houston this last weekend, to visit an old friend from high school. We went and saw several museums, which I found highly inspiring. On the drive down I took major highways, but on the way back, I wandered through country roads in Texas all day. Mostly around Texas 19 North, but getting lost often enough. I begun experimenting with several different ways of documenting the houses I found, different ways of looking at the process. Came up with many new ideas through the trip.

In the main museum, cant remember the name, but the big one in Houston, I could give a damn about names lately, but I saw the Cy Twombley Museum and I still dont know how to feel about it. But I saw a pai ting by Max Ernst that really spoke to me. Day and Night. 1941/1942

Terrible reproduction, but it gave me many ideas for shooting processes. Sort of like an HDR but taken of a huge span of time, day and night, and then why not really play with that process and utilize the digital multiple layer portrait technique, as I call it.

It might get a little abstract, but I imagine thats what Max Ernst said too. It could be honed to a subtlety, just lighting a repeating figure in very different ways. I like the complete lack of lighting in this one, but it would be interesting to really create a unique and impossible lighting situation with multiple exposures of differing value and lighting ratios. Looking at LINE SHAPE FORM TEXTURE and CONTRAST. And typed, double spaced essays on Ansel Adams. Sounds like a good idea. Documentary photography.

10-28.1

I took a bunch of pictures at the pep rally today, mostly got nothing, but I thought this was an interesting composition, how the girl looks over the crowd like a hawk, vision, really. Thats what its about. Something powerful in moments like this, which I am not usually used to seeing in houses of the dead. A good chance to play with composition outside in an uncontroled atmosphere. Felt much more like searching than creating to capture than I am used to. Weve been looking at a lot of documentary phtographers in class lately, Larry Clark, Dijkstra, Ballen, Curtis... A good aesthetic, documentary; clean, removed, almost sterile. But then you have moments like this. Full of color and timing, awkwardness and envy, form and repetition. I am reminded of Tim Robins, my advanced art history teacher constantly saying, "The Gaze"; emphatically.

10-20-2010

Noumena
There are numerous reflections of myself in this photograph. First, and most obvious is my shadow, cast upon my friend Shawn. Secondly is the main reflection on the surface of his lens which is backlit by the sun. There are some three other reflections of my silhouette within the interior of the lens echoed about within the circle at smaller size. Those are the literal, evident reflections of myself. Within the latent image on his film there is a theorhetical image, which might or might not have ever been developed. And finally there is the reflection of myself that I leave on many of the more advanced students who pass through my classes. But, uet, as I realize this, the visual metaphor would imply here that while my student here is pointing right at the light, I am but a filter, or maybe an obstacle around which the true light of photography might bend. Or rather, maybe I too am just a reflection of the darkness which is used to control light itself. 

10-16-10

Walking_

Thus is the surface of life, pocked, so many textured, some times white, and sometimes very dark.

Cantor through the shadows, walking on broken glass and feathers, close to dark. One only hears

the surface and let loose the whiperwils.  On bended and broken, one clean walk, away with the 

Shadows breathe, slowly, among us. But most finally, should the wind blow, not a fiber might stir. 

10-11-10

So I was inspired to try some HDR's the other day by an old friend of mine, Roy so I did a bunch of bracketing when took my long drive this weekend. The camera moved for so many of them, I am going to have to start using a better tripod, mine isnt the most stable. I had been trying to use the Photoshop Merge To HDR function, but never really liked what I got from that, so tonight I started just taking two or three of the shots and layering them manually and just experimenting on which blend modes worked best for each image, and I think it yielded some good results...

Some of these got to be much more abstract than I had originally intended with the process, but I just wanted to see what the process yielded for several different kinds of shot. I found it gave me a greater amount of color range control, as well as uielding some very interesting histograms. I was talking today about having a conceptual photography show of just latent images, and its basically undeveloped prints in black photo bags.
Reminds me of how Stephen Shore started showing his prints in 4x6 glossies in postcard racks in Amarillo, by the side of the Highway. He knew what he was doing. Might be interesting to have a show of just histograms. Just ask hundredrs of people to submit histograms, make it into a book. Weird. The show would have to be huge prints, entire walls, a billboard, and then really small, like contact prints of 35mm shots of Histograms on screens.
Ive been getting back into thinking about Noumena again. Helped a student make a series on Noumena afer school today. Really gets you back in it. Dreams.

10-10-2010.2

Well the goal of this blog is to be a venue for me to discuss some of my images, and possibly get feedback on some of the ideas and processes I am working with. So I will get into it...

This is an image I shot yesterday afternoon while taking along drive alone outside of Sand Springs out West of Tulsa. This is something I do quite often, take long drives, searching for abandon houses, churches, whatever, sometimes just driving to find peace, calm down, get out of town for a while. I usually stay within about 50 miles of Tulsa, but really most of the time I take a long drive I get lost and really dont know where I am. Its a good way to clear my mind, just feling the breeze through the window, trying not to go anywhere specific really, just thinking about being on the road as opposed to trying to arrive at a destination. Its a notion I try to carry with me, to try to enjoy just being on the road and not always looking for the destination.

I think this image really appealed to me for a number of reasons. Mostly the light coming through the doorway was nicely diffused, so it spread out into the house in a uniform way as opposed to being to strong and creating harsh contrast. This house really felt like it had been left alone for a while. Thats one of my favorite things about being in these old houses, trying to get a feel for how long they have been abandoned. Picking up on sometimes very subtle clues about other people who had come and gone in these houses since they were lived in. Its interesting how you so often find the same objects in these houses. I quite often find the usual emptry beer bottles, left behind clothes and shoes, couches etc, but you so often find large collections of stuffed animals, Polaroid photographs, and a couple other objects I find alot. Anyway, I felt this was a good image to start this blog with writting about, as it is very indicative of the style of work I have been doing when i can lately. I am very much a wandering photographer; I have probably 10-20 running series at any time, but I find its good to explore in the process of image making in order to keep yourself fresh.

10-10-2010

This being my first post to my blog, I would like to introduce myself. My name is RAWakeley and I am a High School Photography Teacher. I have been professional photographer for several years now and a fine art photographer for many before that. I have a BFA in Photography and Art History from the College of Santa Fe, New Mexico and am fully certified to in Technology Education in the state of Oklahoma. My full resume is at my website. http://www.robertwakeley.com/
I intend to use this blog to chart my course through the coming years of photography; the delicate and sometimes painstaking process of making images. I will post here only what images and notions I consider relevant to my path, if you wish to view a broader scope of my photography, feel free to view my flickr.com page. http://www.flickr.com/photos.rawakeley3
As for now, i leave with inspiration. A line from the great Kinnell;
Stop.
As you approach an echoing
cliffside, you sense the line
where the voice calling from stone
no longer answers,
turns into stone, and nothing comes back.
-Galway Kinnell