KUDZU

I finally got around to finishing this roll of film. It took me about a year. I wanted to attempt double exposures that made places around Knoxville look like they were overtaken by the Kudzu. It just might be my favorite invasive... followed closely by honeysuckle. The base of the roll is kudzu from South Knoxville, and some more landmarks from across the river are on the second exposure. Here are some of the best attempts.

FROM THE RETINETTE

It's getting better. Selections from the next roll from the Kodak Retinette

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RETINETTE

Last weekend I treated myself to a new camera. It is similar to a camera I have that is not currently in working order (my dad's old rangefinder), however, this camera is a little different in that it is completely manual. It needs no batteries, and gives me no clues as to how I should set the camera to expose the film. I picked up the Kodak Retinette at the second branch of Nostalgia, on McCalla. My version, with a Schneider Reomar lens was made in Germany in the late 50s or early 60s. I removed it from its brown, leather case and opened the back. Standing among racks of polyester dresses and fur coats, I held it up to the light to watch the shutter open and close. The shutter opened large, and it opened small. It opened quickly and it opened slowly. The film advance turned round and round. It seemed like a safe bet. The next day I loaded in a roll of film before heading out to enjoy the spring time and the Dogwood Arts Rhythm and Blooms festival. I am impatient about some things, and was eager to discover how well my camera worked (and how well I worked with a completely manual camera.) The first roll wasn't a total flop, but I need some better judgement about f-stops and the distance between my lens and my subject. Here are some pictures from that Saturday.

The Cruze Farm Milk Bar and Food Truck. Maker of excellent ice cream and Indian Foods. A favorite at the weekly Farmers' Market.

Carolina Story performing "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" in the Daylight Building.

Mamie Bear the Great.

Pianos were out for folks to play in Market Square. This image is probably my best successfully focused shot. I'm a creep taking pictures of random children, but I see now I'm not the only one.

SQUIRRELCROW

Once upon a time, I had a terrible landlord. He owned a terrible building, and I lived in its worst apartment. Unbeknownst to me, I had a roommate, and he looked a little like this and lived in a hole behind my stove. Now I like to keep a ceramic one around. Just for security.

LONDON SIEGE

It seems like a million years ago, but was really only six. I did a semester abroad in London. While I was there, I bought this little wooden diorama of London to take back with me, and now it sits on my living room window. For added humor, I threw in some plastic Army men I won at an amusement park in Pennsylvania.

EXPERIMENTING

I did some experimenting with my last roll of film. My camera lenses have Hoya UV filters on them. I wondered what would happen if I colored on the outside of the filter with different colored dry erase markers. I didn't notice a drastic change between different colored markers, but below are the results of marker versus no marker. The results resemble smearing Vaseline on the lens, but they are a little more subtle. If my memory serves me correctly, the top image was treated with blue and purple dry erase markers.

with colored filter

without colored filter

with red and brown filter

RECENTLY

HANGIN' AT THE CO-OP

Stop in for some healthy things and check out my photographs for the month of September!

 

 

SPRAYIN' ALIVE

You can tell by the way I hold my can, It's an artist's hand....
 

I'm getting some frames ready for a show of my photography in September at Three Rivers Market here in Knoxville. My double exposures will be hanging in the food area of the store until October! Tomorrow I am taking down my show at the Tomato Head in Maryville. Monday I'm hanging at Three Rivers.

GOOD NEIGHBORS

A new, summery image of good neighbors and great friends. Happy Friday.

UPDATES

Until last night, I hadn't held a paintbrush since about 1:30 am on July 6th.... or when I finished my Strip watercolors. The break has been nice. I've always been a believer in taking time off from something instead of continuing to move full steam ahead ALWAYS. When I ran cross country and track in college, most of my teammates used Spring Break as a time to train more. I usually sat on my duff for a week, but came back rested and looking forward to the next practice.  I jumped back into a painting I had started a while ago, but abandoned for The Strip. It's called Northern Ireland Gave the US Ten Presidents. Until I purchased Around the World in 10,000 Pictures, I had no idea this was a true fact. Can you name all 10? I'm not sure I can. I like presidential facts, but this list is out of my league. I'm still working on my Strip blog post, and maybe another one about the short trip I took to DC last weekend. Filled with old friends and older art, it was a great time.

New plants. Rosemary, a favorite herb.

Mint and a succulent

Meat Manager's Special film! Expect some new photographs soon.

A corner of the new painting.

New business cards ordered.

bringing some of memphis to knoxville

You've seen this picture before. I wrote about the building here. Last week, I received another piece of good news. This photograph was chosen for the next Arts in the Airport  show. I had no takers on the Plane Art, but that just means I can use it somewhere else. 

I  sat down a few days ago and worked the drop-off and reception dates into my art calendar deadlines. I started to panic a bit because I've got a lot on my art plate right now. It gives me a headache to think about how I'm going to get some of it done, but I'm more than thankful for being chosen to participate and show.

This is the second of my photographs that will be shown in Knoxville this summer. My photograph of Yee-Haw will hang at the Bijou Theater gallery through the end of June. Sears Crosstown, Memphis will be at the McGhee Tyson Airport through October.

I only really started taking these photographs about a year ago. It's nice to know that someone besides me thinks they are compelling.

for thought

Robert Frank spent two years on the road. In that time, he shot over 28,000 images. Eighty three of those photographs would become The Americans.

we'll see

This month marks the first time I have created art specifically for a set of criteria in a call for art. Normally, I make what I want, and then look for calls that seek a similar theme or subject matter to what appears in my drawings and paintings. This month I decided to enter 2 local calls for art. The first one was from Knox Heritage. Each year they hold a photo contest asking for photographs of a particular neighborhood or street in Knoxville. Here are some cool examples of the winning entries from last year.

This year Knox Heritage selected Gay Street (all buildings, bridges, and viaducts) one of the main thoroughfares in Downtown Knoxville. The criteria were -- the building had to be directly facing Gay Street and the building, or bridge, or viaduct had to be at least 50 years old. I have photographed Gay Street before. Most of the images I shot on the day I was confronted by the security guard outside the bank were shot on Gay Street, but those buildings weren't old enough. I decided to try my hand shooting older buildings and ended up submitting a mix of double exposures and TtV shots.

Here's an example.

Not one I submitted, but another image from the same roll.

The second application I submitted was to the Arts and Culture Alliance of Knoxville seeking entries for their Arts in the Airport show. My work has been juried into this show twice before.

Both of my pieces are on the left sides of the walls -- the blue landscape and the smaller landscape.

Typically, the alliance wants art of any subject matter and medium. The only restrictions really are in dimensions and weight of the entered pieces. I wasn't planning on entering this particular time because of a few sentences on the entry form. "In honor of the 75th anniversary of McGhee Tyson Airport, the spring and fall 2012 exhibitions will both share the theme 75 Years of Making Memories in Aviation. Interested artists are encouraged to broadly interpret the theme in their submissions for the spring exhibition. The fall exhibition will welcome submissions that have been especially created in response to the theme."

Yikes. Plane Art.

I have no interest in planes really, and felt that anything I tried to make about aviation just wouldn't come out right, because I wouldn't be sincerely invested in the subject.

Well, as it turned out, last Saturday night, some possessions I randomly acquired all got together and whispered, "Sarah, make plane art tomorrow."

I'll explain. About a month ago, Knoxville had their Friends of the Library book sale. Lately I've really been plowing through saucy biographies. I enjoy them because, to be honest, the ones I pick out are like 400 pages of TRUE CELEBRITY GOSSIP. Exciting, historical, and always a little scandalous. I went to go stock up for the year. Impulsively, I passed through the reference book section. My mom is an English teacher and will never say no to another unique dictionary or book of etymology. Next to all the dictionaries were the atlases. For no distinct reason, I poked through them, and tossed the oldest one into my cart. Everyone needs a grossly outdated atlas with colonial overtones, right? It looked like it had some loose pages in the back. I assumed the binding in the back was completely blown and some kind person had stuffed Africa, Persia, and the Soviet Union back in before giving the book away. Boy, was I wrong.

A month passed. My mom got her new dictionaries, and I finished Thomas Hoving's memoirs and began the biography of The Duchess of Windsor. The atlas sat in the corner of my living room with some sketch pads and pieces of wood. I don't know why, but I opened it on Saturday night and hit on the mother lode. Africa, Persia, and the Soviet Union were not in the back. Instead, I found a bunch of plane things -- an almost-complete Aeronautical Chart of the Southeastern United States, an ink and marker drawing of an Air Force fighter plane, and the Air Force certificates and appointment letters for a gentleman from 1957. In the atlas was also a page showing air routes. How could I ignore all of this?

Air Routes atlas page

The goodies.

I got up early on Sunday, made a giant pot of coffee, turned on NPR, and got to work.

I knew I wanted to make something with the atlas, but I wasn't sure I wanted to cut it up yet, so I decided against using the actual Air Routes map page. However, the aeronautical chart was missing a chunk already, so I didn't feel so odd about cutting another piece from it. I briefly considered using the Air Force certificates and letters somehow, but also felt strange about that because I don't actually know the person they belong to. Eventually I settled on taking a piece from the aeronautical chart and combining it with what interested me the most about the Air Routes map -- the spider-like network of connecting flights from city to city enclosed in two connected ovals. I began the laborious task of tracing all of these lines onto tracing paper so I could transfer them to the aeronautical chart. I trimmed out and taped a section of the chart to my drawing board. A few layers of white paint and marble dust gave me the perfect ground to transfer my tracing onto. I spent the rest of the afternoon painting, and building up colors and layers of the map -- deciding to highlight towns and radio stations with the color yellow, emphasizing large circles that signified municipal airports, and tracing map lines with graphite. After about 9 hours, this was the end result.

Everywhere you can fly in 1951. 

I approached plane art on my terms, and really enjoyed it. I have no idea of the results of either of these calls for art yet, but we'll see.

on cameras and nervousness

I've been having a difficult time figuring out how to start this post. I'll begin with a little story from this afternoon. Today I was taking a roll of film with the last light of the day. The "rule" for this particular roll was that I could only take pictures of reflective surfaces -- windows mostly. Downtown Knoxville has some great buildings that are all plexiglass and mirrored windows. They also happen to be banks. It was well after 6, the light was good, everyone had gone home for the day, and the building was closed. After three or four shots, a large man in a suit walked across the bank plaza and over to me. Turns out, he was a security guard. He wanted to know what I was doing, why I was taking pictures of the bank, and definitely wanted to make sure I wasn't aiming my lens into the bank windows. Admittedly I had -- there was a neat looking palm plant behind one of them. So I told him I was doing an assignment for art class instead. If I had been painting the bank, I wouldn't have been questioned. If I had been sitting at one of the picnic tables on the plaza, he wouldn't have thought twice about my presence. My camera triggered something on his security guard checklist. I had a old, noisy Konica and cuffed jeans. I was dangerous? People with cameras make other people nervous.

I had been thinking on and off about cameras and nervousness since I read the New York Times article about Cindy Sherman's retrospective in February. Not only about my relationship with my camera, but also the way I behave whenever someone near whips one out.

 In a piece Sherman wrote for the March issue of the Wall Street Journal Magazine, she said, "I usually don't let others take my portrait. It means giving up control. It's terrifying."  From the article in the Sunday New York Times a few weeks earlier, Sherman recounted a college photography assignment designed to force students to address something that made them feel uncomfortable. Sherman noted this assignment as what prompted her to turn herself into her art. "I took a series myself naked in front of the camera. I did a couple of these series and that was when I started using myself, but at the same time, not as an art practice, just for therapy or something. I would transform my face with makeup into various characters just to pass the time."

While I have not gone to the great lengths Sherman did to begin to confront her issues with being photographed, I have mastered a relatively decent fake smile. However, I have only made a small dent in the gobs of pictures of me rolling my eyes, slouching, making weird faces, and blocking the lens with my hands. People also get uneasy about someone photographing their houses, their cars, their children, and any number of other things. There is even a device that can be screwed into the end of a camera lens that is a periscope for cameras. With a friend as decoy-subject, the general public and large security guards everywhere can be at ease while you get whatever shot you want. This seems like a great camera gizmo, but normally, I don't photograph on foot.

I take most of my pictures from the refuge of my car. I drive and snap at the same time -- sneaking more precise shots at red lights and on empty roads. My mom hates that I do it, but I'm careful, and will always wrangle someone to drive me if I think I can't get the shot I want in a way that is safe for me and other drivers.  I work with the landscape, and the car is quick. It allows me to cover much more ground than if I always parked and walked around each location. The car adds an additional element of chance to my already random double exposures. Sometimes I am simply aiming the camera out the window or balancing it on top of my steering wheel, trusting that the image is in focus, that the light levels are good, and that I'm not actually photographing half of my dashboard too. Shooting from my car has an added bonus -- people don't ask me what I'm doing, I am raising no suspicions, and I don't have to worry about whether or not I am making people uncomfortable. I don't like to draw attention to myself, and taking pictures in public is one of the quickest ways to do so. People paying attention to me makes me fairly nervous, because, even though I've grown out of most of it, I am still a shy person.

My dad is also a shy person. The kind of shy person who endorses Powdermilk Biscuits on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion. He takes a lot of pictures too. I picked up the whole taking-pictures-out-of-the-car-window bit from him. (Most of his car shots are for this current project...) But that hasn't always been the case. When I was younger, my dad had a camera in tow for most events -- family holidays, basketball games, first days of school, and track meets. While I have some great (and some unfortunate) pictures from my growing up days, I later realized that my dad's camera was like an invisibility cloak and a safety blanket. It was a way of interacting without really interacting. Taking pictures excused him from jumping into conversation all the track mommies. I have yet to master the art of hiding in plain sight with my camera, but I don't want to hide behind it either.

One more story and then I'll quit.

I ride the bus to work. A couple of weeks ago, one of the art students from UT was at the station and asked if he could take my picture. He had a twin lens reflex and a quiet voice. I agreed, because I had a hunch of what the picture was for, and immediately got back to my book because I wanted to pretend the camera wasn't pointed at me. Later, I asked  UT's photography professor about the student and assignment. He explained that the project was designed to challenge the class' comfort level with photography. For each image, the student had to ask permission to take the picture. Apparently this particular student was fairly shy, and approaching me was a big deal. Being photographed was big for me too. Most other times, I would have said no.

With all of this said, this is something I think about quite a bit now (clearly). I may never enjoy being photographed, but eventually I would like to stop feeling like I have to be so sly about my photography.

new photographs

Yesterday morning I finished a roll of Film. Here are my favorites from the batch.

flycatcher journal

 ... Memory is a funny thing. My ability to recall events and entire days years later, including what everyone wore, contrasts with hundreds of vague recollections. These photographs are about memory, place, and journey. Shot almost entirely from my car, they are images of chance. I do not plan which two images are exposed on the same frame.  I am not even bothered if the two images are misaligned in the frame. In the same way my memory works, for every compelling photograph I get, there are five or six unsuccessful blurs...

In January, I had the privilege of having a photo essay published in the inaugural issue of Flycatcher Journal. Flycatcher is an online literary magazine featuring content that explores what it is to be native to place. Visit Flycatcher Journal's website to view the rest of my photo essay and read other wonderful submissions.