I have previously mentioned the strong influence my old professor/mentor (tor-mentor), Wiley Sanderson, had on my work. One of the great variety of weekly assignments he gave was to execute a diptych of “related” images. The thing was, you had to show something that went beyond any superficial, obvious connection between the two photographs, and he got to decide what was superficial, as well as what was too much a reach.
So, before you read any farther, study the two photographs and see what connections you can make between them, aside from both being made in Italy.
My argument for them being “related:”
One way to think of photographic composition is that it is simply an arrangement of assorted variations on three basic shapes–circle, triangle, and rectangle. I think the arches, horizontal lines, and rectangles of the two images repeat each other.
Another argument: while different in character, the color palette of both photographs is lush.
A couple of years ago Barbara and I decided we wanted to have more physical activity when we travel, so we signed up for a point-to-point self-guided bicycle ride along the Danube, mostly flat terrain, an “easy to moderate” physical ability category, and with e-bikes. The outfitter provides bikes, a GPS nav app, hotels along the route, and moves your luggage every day. Much of that trip was like a fairy tale setting of castles and vineyards, and ended in Vienna.
We recently finished our second of this type trip, riding in the Po River Valley of Italy, from Cremona to Bologna. It was a good trip, like Austria, but the difference in the landscape was dramatic, in reverse, sorta.
Where Austria is like a Disney set, the “Food Valley” of Italy is dominantly agricultural; our ride was mostly through farmland, a more mundane scene, but oh, the food. I “discovered” gramigna with a sausage sauce, and indulged in aged, thick balsamic vinegar drippled on aged Parmesan Reggiano.
As for photographing the “mundane,” I have often considered that my job is to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, or, as Thoreau put it, “The perception of beauty is a moral test.”
Duomo di Cremona, Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta
I read an essay recently that talked about an American visiting Europe, and frequenting churches and cathedrals, as a secular experience, for the Art and History. I understand that. I do that, and on our recent trip to Italy saw some smaller communities punch above their weight class with their edifice, and the volume and quality of artwork.
Cremona, birthplace of the modern violin and viola, is like that; only a population of about 72,000, but the city can be dated back to B.C.E. times, and was an early northern Roman outpost. The Cathedral on the main plaza is predominantly Romanesque, built in the 1100s, with some later styles showing up in renovations. The interior work is so extensive, and lush, it reminded me of when the Sistine Chapel was cleaned some years ago and the colors were so bright and vibrant, almost cartoonish, people thought they were wrong, but not.
In making my last shot (bottom right) I was mainly using Barbara (small white dot in lower middle) for a scale reference in the vast church setting. I didn’t see the giant tonsured friar, from the back, cowl down, arms raised to greet the crowd in the plaza with a benediction, until editing later.
Giovanni Arvedi Auditorium at the Museo del Violino
The violin on the piano is 60 years older than the United States of America, a Stradivari c. 1727 Vesuvio.
Cremona is all violin, all the time, or at least it feels that way. There are shops focused on making and repairing them, monuments related to them, artistic representations of them in storefront displays, and restaurants.
In a town that was the home of Stradivari, Amati, and Guarneri, what would you expect? As they created the modern violin from a Middle Ages fiddle, the instrument spread throughout the world over the last five centuries. The Violin Museum there, in addition to the details of that development and displays of how they are made, has an enormous collection of them from throughout that history, as well as violas and cellos. The museum includes an auditorium where performances are held using the historical collection because they need to be “exercised.”
On the one full day Barbara and I had there we heard there was to be a performance (with this violin) and quickly decided to attend. It was also the day of the large weekly market–food, clothes, electronics–the stalls flowing from the large central piazza all through the ancient, winding city streets, where Barbara found a pink sweater she has been looking for for a couple of years. That also made it more confusing for us to find the auditorium so we asked several people for directions. The first two people sent us in opposite directions, both wrong.
Continuing to travel under the blessing of Blanche DuBois (“I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers.”), our third “per favore” elicited an effort from a women who, frustrated by her inability to speak English to help us, apologized (really! Like the inadequacy was hers instead of ours), and motioned for us to follow her, leaving her own shopping to lead us to the museum.
The auditorium was designed and built with the same attention to sound quality as the instruments that are played there. After the performance, Barbara (an audiologist) declared it acoustically perfect. For me listening is more complicated. I have to close my eyes or seeing dominates any conversation of my senses. I have no musical education. I do have a hearing loss–age, plus listening to rock and roll with headphones, on LOUD, or sitting in front of large speakers amped up to 11, feeling the thumping of the woofers vibrating through my body. Some of you know what I mean.
We had been hiking for a while, and I’m a sea-level flat-lander. The rough, fluctuating terrain, elevation, deep snow slogging, and cold were starting to get to me. And then he popped up, and made it all worth it.
Well, sorta. I’m actually standing next to my car with the engine and heater running, on the road between the Gardiner entrance and Mammoth, where a few of these guys had wandered down close.
The only thing you can know about the content of a photograph is the information included within the frame. Every image offers one, limited, point of view. Assume nothing beyond that.
It’s also great someone who might not have the time, ability, or inclination to do back country exploring gets to see something like this, thanks to our wonderful National Parks system. Because even if he came down to my car and posed for me…
“Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer Those days of soda and pretzels and beer Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer Dust off the sun and moon and sing a song of cheer” 1963 hit by Nat King Cole
I spend a lot of time going through old image files these days and recently noticed these photos from a raft race on the Oconee River running through Athens, from when I was a student at UGA. The word “carefree” came to mind. It’s such a simple word to cover so much ground. I remember life being so much more spontaneous then.
It’s been spring in Savannah for several weeks now–lots of pollen and lots of falling oak leaves, luxurious dogwood blossoms and the bright colors of azaleas exploding everywhere, and of course the blanket of green on St. Patrick’s Day. The real tip-off, though, is when the bright plumage of teenage girls in formal wear appears in Washington Square, along with the spiffed up, Bond-esque look of their escorts in rented tuxedos. It’s Prom Night, and groups of graduating seniors gather in our square every year with family–parents, siblings, grandparents–to photograph every combination of couples and groups they can imagine, before the stars of the show head to the dance.
They, all of them, are gorgeous in their party clothes, eager to go through these last few gateways to adulthood, not thinking about this likely being the last whole summer they can take off, or the hurdles and shocks the life they seek will throw at them.
I am a little envious of the often carefree adventure they are starting.
When our “Go West…” tour left Wyoming, into Utah, the landscape went from ascendant to eroding. As we continued into Arizona, the wearing away continued deep into the earth at the Grand Canyon, and in the emptiness of Monument Valley.
I think most “abstract” photography, an effort to remove or minimize objective references, is attempted by moving very close to the real world subject. Sometimes that can also be accomplished in the opposite direction, from a great distance.
The layers of color and texture represent eons, the millennia of slowly building up the sedimentary landscape, then the millennia of wearing it down, exposing the timeline. It’s easy to feel small in the American West; like the line at the end of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show:”
We now return to our boys’ “Go West Old Man” tour as they leave Wyoming and the Grand Tetons.
The overwhelming visual of the Tetons is the vertical explosion of the mountains from the valley floor. It feels strong, vigorous, and youthful. Granite and gneiss are the hard materials of that area, but heading south into Utah, that changes to softer sandstone. The landscape begins to feel weathered, tortured, then ancient, and arid.
Temperatures vary from hot day to cold night. Moisture condenses in nooks and crannies, in the slivers of niches of sedimentary rock. Freezes. Expands. Erodes. Sloughing skin. It’s easy to see things–figures, faces–in the rock, without peyote. It’s the kind of landscape that warns you there are consequences for being careless.
Mahamuni Pagoda (L) and Soon U Pon Nya Shin Paya Buddha Hall (R)
I have been curious about Burma most of my life. Dad served in the China-Burma-India theater during WW II, and growing up I read the great, true, adventure stories of Chennault and his Flying Tigers, and of Merrill’s Marauders. I finally had the chance to see it when Barbara and I visited in 2017, as the Rohingya confrontations were becoming widely known. It didn’t fit with my understanding of Buddhists that they would be a faction in a civil war, but we were never in any area where conflict was happening. People seemed warm, friendly, welcoming, but no one would engage in a conversation about the issue.
Mandalay has been called the City of Gold, because of so many shining pagodas. It is one of only two places in the world making gold leaf. The other is in Holland where the process is machined, but in Myanmar it’s still done by men swinging a sledge hammer onto a small booklet of interleaved thin gold layers all day long. That could be an indicator for how un-modern much of Myanmar is, how extensive the earthquake damage will be, and how difficult the task to recover bodies and rebuild a country that already had limited infrastructure, and, likely, fluid building codes, not to mention an ongoing civil war, and a xenophobic military government.
Called the Soft Gold Pagoda, Mahamuni Pagoda’s face is washed daily and no gold is ever placed on it, but since the early 1900’s the statue has grown substantially from the constant application of gold leaf everywhere else, approximately 2 tons. Reports and photographs of the earthquake damage are limited for now and probably anytime soon, but one story I saw said 270 monks were assembled here at the time for some testing; now 80 are dead and 100 are missing, thought buried in the rubble. It’s bound to be much worse. The well-visited monument is only a few feet from an entrance to a large shopping mall, modern looking but almost certainly built in layers over a century of evolution.
On Sagaing Hill, overlooking the Irrawaddy River, Soon U Pon Shin Paya, with it’s Buddha Hall and gilded stupa, at the epicenter of the 7.7 magnitude quake, is closed. There are online photos of the decapitated stupa.
Mandalay Palace (L) and Soon U Pon Shin Paya stupa (R)
Barbara’s relative tallness and blonde hair attracts attention when we are traveling in Asia, and it’s not unusual for a woman, or group of women, to approach her for a photograph with her, as was the case here. If Barbara looks a little splotchy, it’s a local makeup custom that looks liked dried clay. The Palace area had substantial damage; the Clock Tower and Relic Tower are collapsed.
Kutho Daw Pagoda
Near Mandalay Palace, Kutho Daw Pagoda, the “World’s Largest Book,” is 729 inscribed marble slabs, each in its own small stupa, presenting the entire 15 books of the Tripitaka, built between 1860 and 1868. You don’t have to know what that is (the teachings of Buddha) to appreciate the human achievement in building such an extensive monument. It is reported damaged.
Losing beautiful centuries old structures is a terrible thing, but the real tragedy is the thousands who will ultimately be destitute, injured, missing or dead.
