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.

street shots

Here are a few images from the afternoon I got caught photographing the bank.

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.