savannah photographic workshop

Valentines’ Day last week reminded me of this photograph. Our room had a rose bud in a vase, rose petals scattered and shaped into a heart on the giant bed, and more scattered over the bathroom vanity and linen.

We had caught a taxi at the airport and given the address for our hotel, Les Jardins de la Medina. We arrived on a narrow street of brick pavers, defined by long, tall, plain walls abutting the pavers. The hotel entrance was as unprepossessing as the exterior wall, but going through the door was like being Mary, finding the key to the gate of “The Secret Garden.”

Entering the hotel you are immediately in a lush courtyard jungle . You’re asked to sit and relax, enjoy a cool towel, drink and refreshments, while someone checks you in, gets your luggage moved to your room, and, when you are ready, takes you on a tour of the property, ending at your room. Of course there is no ADA in Morocco, so everyone has to climb stairs, guests and staff.

I spent almost 30 years traveling for a living and I’ve spent a lot of time in hotels. A lot of time. Often as I stood in the mind-numbing sameness of another of those corridors of repeating room doors, I thought of the hallway scenes from “The Shining” or “Barton Fink” or “Naked Lunch.” I understand why a hotelier would want to maximize ROI with as many rooms to rent as possible, and those rooms as standardized as possible to simplify and control costs for housekeeping and maintenance, but it is such a pleasure to discover a property designed and built to exploit the light and climate, where every turn you take is some new, unique vignette.

To see a new gallery of photos from Les Jardins de la Medina, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index/G0000l9OJoQjn4VM

I was assisting at a workshop many years ago and National Geographic photographer Jim Brandenburg (https://www.photoby.fr/en/8-jim-brandenburg) was speaking, suggesting a different spelling for the braggadocio bumper sticker soundbite, “No Fear!” His version, “Know Fear.” Use it.

A few years later I was one of the photography Mentors for a workshop; the trip leader had just divided the students into groups for each of us, and she said, “Bill, here is your group and here is your costumed model. Go do something interesting and teach something at the same time.” (Or something to that effect.)

One of many ways of distinguishing different kinds of photographers is between reactive and conceptual. I’m mainly reactive; I respond to what’s happening. But nothing is happening.

The model is standing there waiting for directions. The students are staring at me waiting for pearls of wisdom. Thank you Jim. Fear can be a useful motivator. Just do something, and ideas will flow from that. I need a story, a narrative. Backgrounds tell stories with the information they contribute, and I have this western gold-mining ghost town.

So she’s the school marm, leaving her home, walking the dirt street to the school house, stepping carefully, and watching for reckless riders. First composition has such contrasty light, a reflector puts light under the hat, but it feels flat, footlight-y, and her fingers look odd. Move in close, a smaller area where I can use a large diffuser to control and soften the light, much more natural feeling. Keep moving in, with a nod to Vermeer.

Walk down the dusty street to the saloon, beautiful window light bouncing off the smoothness of the worn floor. Same model, same outfit, but now she’s a dance hall girl. Move in tighter, again, for those eyes.

And then…then, there were these old railroad tracks and cars, and another actor/model in just the right outfit. So we did a quick “Snidely Whiplash and Nell.” Dudley Do-Right must have been just around the corner.

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index

Why the residue of a poster stripped from a rough stone wall? In the old village of Hongcun, filming site of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” and a UNESCO World Heritage site, from the Ming and Qing dynasties (1300s to 1900s), why is that my choice of subjects?

Part of the reason is Aaron Siskind. (https://www.wikiart.org/en/aaron-siskind) Abstract Expressionism in paintings is interesting, but Siskind’s mid-20th century abstract expressionist photographs were a revelation in seeing for me. Someone could take the paramount documentation tool, and make non-objective pictures. The objects and ideas you discover hidden in the patterns are personal; they are yours and multiply the longer you stare. Documentation can tell a great story, but abstraction lets the viewer go anywhere their imagination can take them.

After identifying a possible primary subject, that bright red slash, how did I get to this particular framing, balancing the visual weights implied by line, shape, texture, tone, color?

I don’t know. After going through infinite variations of micro-movements–in/out, left/right, up/down–one spot felt more right than any other. Of course that might have been because it was more physically comfortable, and have nothing to do with aesthetics, but I can live with that.

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index

We had some unusual weather for the US southeast coast last week. The first thing I noticed, after the snow, was the quiet.

Partly it was a muffling benefit from the snow, but it was mainly no traffic. No large (or small) delivery trucks, no buses, no touring trolleys or horses and carriages, no cars, no jackasses with their intentionally loud exhaust racing down Broughton Street compensating for some personal shortcoming, no open dune buggys blaring music at top volume (when did deliberate aural assaults on the rest of the world become OK?); just people walking in the streets, photographing the ice-encased Tritons in Forsyth fountain, adapting boogie boards, wading pools and other warm-weather instruments into sleds, making snow angels, and building (mostly small) snowmen. For one day, downtown belonged to the people who live here.

About 30 years ago I was doing outdoor winter photography work with some workshops in places like Yellowstone and the Tetons. I bought some appropriate clothing–long parka, long underwear, gloves and glove liners, wool socks and sock liners, knit caps, knit dickeys, ear muffs, etc. I haven’t needed any of that for some time, but pulled it out and it was all in great shape. Unfortunately, I have not maintained myself that well.

It was beautiful. Then it was dangerous. Then it was just inconvenient, messy, and ugly, the “circle of life” for snow, I suppose.

For more of Bill’s photographs go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index.

This photograph caused a little bit of a fuss. For the record, Mitchell has long pants on, and any bare skin of Michelle’s was accomplished by minimal disrobing under the covers. (I am also completely dressed.) You’d see more skin poolside.

The picture was set up to use for the cover of “The Impression,” the UGA student literary magazine issue themed “Sex at Georgia,” which, granted, was probably intended at least partly to tweak some sensibilities. Isn’t that what college is for?

In the early years of my career there were conversations that people needed to be educated in “visual literacy,” to understand when/how they were being massaged by images to sell a product or point of view. In today’s world of deep fakes, easily accomplished, and even easier and more realistic as AI develops, a healthy dose of skepticism is important in “reading” any image or video.

For me there are three kinds of images: 1) documentary/journalistic–just the facts; 2) illustration–to help visualize text content with no requirement to be truthful; and 3) advocacy–advertising and propaganda. A fourth might be fine art/personal expression.

For me this was an assignment to create an illustration. For the editors of a magazine, the cover is considered advertising. There is no case made for this to be documentation, but the implication of illicit sex set some folks off, including one faculty member who sat on the board that supervised student publications, and chastised me saying he would bet I would not use that photo in a portfolio.

At that point, I was in my late 20’s, an Army veteran who’d had enough BS, married, divorced, back in school on the GI Bill, feeling reckless and even more anti-authoritarian than normal. It disturbed his world view that I was not intimidated.

Looking back, I think the thing he and others should have been more concerned about in the photo was the amount of student drinking rather than the possibility that 18 year olds (legal adults) were getting lucky.

As it happens, the old guy was right; the photo never made it into a portfolio, but not for moral reasons. It just never rose to the point of being useful in a showing of work examples, like 100’s of thousands of other photographs I’ve made.

“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind” Bob Dylan

Ghosts are real. For this old man, they often take the form of fractured memories.

I know I saw Peter, Paul, and Mary in concert, and have photographs to prove it. I have always remembered it was while I was stationed in DC, and that the event was at DAR Constitution Hall.

That would stick out to some of us of a certain generation. PP&M could not have been a favored act of the DAR, and them performing there seemed such a contradiction. It was a confusing time with lots of contradictions. I was a budding hippie peacenik who was starting to forgo haircuts, but enlisted in the Army in 1967.

“How many roads must a man walk down….”

I looked online to confirm they had actually been at the Hall, and they had, in 1967, according to the World Wide Web. I was not in DC in 1967, but I have photos? Fractured memories.

They were a big part of the soundtrack of my coming of age journey. When “The Times They are a Changing” was playing the other night while Barbara was making dinner, I made the melancholy observation that we had believed it then. Barbara said, dismissively, “They always are.” Which is true.

RIP Peter Yarrow.

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index.

I can’t remember if it was in middle school (we called it Junior High way back then), or high school when we were introduced to the idea of “figures of speech.” Thinking about this recently, it seemed like it was a list of 10 or something like that. Apparently the adults simplified things trying to not stress us with TMI. I searched for the list and got back options for a list of 8, 10, 12, 18, 20, 50.

Remembering the difference between Simile and Metaphor took a little practice; I’ve come to see some photographs as Metaphors. Hyperbole was cool; you could tell your parents your sibling was being “hyperbolic.” Onomatopoeia got special attention because of the odd spelling, and the easy illustration, “Buzzing like a bee,” which is also Simile and Alliteration, but we were not encouraged to think about this multi-dimensionally, as I recall.

In the several years I’ve been doing this blog I’ve discovered I have a natural affinity for Alliteration, to the point where I police my use in an effort to not over do. A college writing instructor gave me Oxymoron, which turns out to be a lot more useful than I would have expected.

But it was becoming a newspaper photographer/street photographer, and beginning to pay attention to the ordinary, everyday things around me, that taught me about Irony.

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index

It was so long ago I’m having trouble remembering details, like trying to remember specifics from a dream that become more elusive the harder you try.

I was working as the staff photographer at a small daily newspaper outside of Atlanta, and my photographer friend Michael was freelancing in the area, often stringing for Time magazine. Our recent Governor was ramping up a campaign for U. S. President, and Michael suggested we go down to Plains for a day or so to see what was going on. We drove down, told someone we were press, and, BOOM!, we were on the media bus. No ID, no credentials even asked for. Welcome aboard.

It was a whirlwind tour, from peanut fields to Capricorn Records. In looking over the photos I had mostly forgotten about, I am struck most by the complete access to the candidate, not just getting on the bus so easily, but the way crowds clustered around him, no rope lines, no phalanx of security guards. I know it was a different time, when bullet-proof glass was not de rigueur on every speaking platform, but even then, I think some of it was the man, who, in all my photos, seems to be having fun.

RIP Mr. President.

The power of childhood mythologies seems unremitting. My mother’s favorite secular Christmas song was “White Christmas,” by Bing Crosby. It had to be Bing. In all my 77 years in Savannah, I only remember one white Christmas, but that Currier and Ives winter landscape of the northeast US was the defining visual for the season. So now, a photograph I made 3000 miles from home feels more like a seasonal picture than anything I see at home.

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index

HAPPY SOLSTICE!

I wish you a great holiday season, and a fabulous New Year!

A friend, Spencer Lawton, died recently. At a regular “guys’ coffee” session on the morning of the day before he passed we were talking about many random things, and one of those was a book series I had been reading, and how brutal and cruel the legal “punishments” had been in early human history. I am glad to remember one of the last things Spencer said to me, “As a people, we are getting better.”

Losing a friend abruptly, in what felt like an extended and ongoing conversation, is a reminder of how temporary everything is.

Getting old may not automatically convey any special wisdom, but it does give one perspective, simply because you have more lived experience, if nothing else. And with that reference point to history you have witnessed personally, it’s a little easier to see progress on many social issues.

I grew up with Jim Crow; public schools in Savannah were not integrated until I was in high school. Conversations about transgender participation in women’s sports, or who uses what bathroom are difficult and necessary, but we didn’t have to have those conversations when I was going through adolescence because leaving the closet was rare, socially risky, and sometimes dangerous.

For much of my life I saw that glass as half empty, but these days I am constantly reminded of things to be grateful for, and I aim to take that attitude with me into this next trip around the sun.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ended a 1963 speech with, “I say goodnight to you by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher, who said, ‘We ain’t what we ought to be and we ain’t what we want to be and we ain’t what we’re going to be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.'” Amen.

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index