savannah photographic workshop

Elaine Longwater, an old friend, passed away recently. She was independent and free-spirited with a big, generous heart, a strong business woman and a fine artist.

I don’t remember when we first met, but in the early 80s we were both part of a photo-centric group of friends. I had just moved back home after a year and a half working on a road crew, doing exploration drilling for lignite coal, and was looking for something, which I still can’t articulate.

I was spending a lot of time then walking along the Diamond and Shipyard Road causeways, photographing the marsh, looking for some kind of insight, maybe a bit like Thomas Wolfe’s longing for “A stone, a leaf, an unfound door….” (“Look Homeward Angel”) How elemental, how simplified can a composition be and still be dynamic?

Elaine’s home was a modest cottage on a large, wooded lot with enormous azaleas and camellias, fronting on a tidal creek with a long marsh view, on Burnside Island, at the end of Shipyard Causeway. It is a restful place, always seeming just on the edge of wildness, with the ebb and flow of water in the creek, and the light defining and redefining the landscape, ceaseless reminders the world is bigger than us.

She gave me an open invitation to go there anytime, whether anyone was home or not, to just hang, or photograph. I even did some oyster roasts, and there is no better roast environment than a chilly fall evening on a riverbank, on the marsh, with a big roaring fire.

It became a playground of sorts, a place where I could experiment, technically and aesthetically. I could try stuff just to see what it would look like. It didn’t have to be good, or satisfy client or critic. Failure is a big part of learning; there I was free to do that, and learning is so much easier when you are having fun.

We had some fun. We made some art. We made some memories. RIP Elaine.

We had been enjoying balsamic vinegar throughout our bicycling trip in the Po River valley, and knew we had to have some to bring home (along with some 30 and 48 month aged Parmesan Reggiano). Just writing this makes me want to run to the kitchen.

The shop, Giuseppe Giusti, was elegant in its simplicity. The staff was friendly and knowledgeable, explaining the making of balsamic, and offering tastings of different qualities/aging. As we were checking out I saw what I thought would be a very nice, formal, head and shoulders portrait: her warm-toned face, and the violet slash of the headscarf, surrounded by the neutrality of her black suit and the ground of black casks.

I asked if I could make her photograph, she said yes, and then immediately did this little vamp. Click. I think I like this better than the colder image I saw. Either way, I’ve learned not to “correct” a willing stranger-model. The photos will lose any natural feel from then on.

(This image is from a RAW file shot with the iPhone 15 Pro Max. Another way to get a “yes” sometimes is to not use an intimidating camera.)

My first exposure to balsamic was years ago, on one of the photo outings my Nikon colleague Bob Watts and I took. An old and close friend of his, Stanley Bucklin was not only a Leica rep, he marketed an Italian family’s balsamic products, and did taste testings. We spent the night with him and got an impromptu tasting event for the two of us. Bob remembers one bottle we tried was 100 years old, others decades. I just remember thinking, after sampling the most expensive offering, “I could drink that out of the bottle.”

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

I can find something interesting in any time period/style of art, but I do have my favorites; for painting, Impressionism, and for sculpture, the Baroque, Bernini in particular. I confess to being dismissive of centuries of creative work, thinking anything prior to the Renaissance was just preparation for what came next (which I suppose is kinda always true about everything), and Byzantine work felt so flat I never spent much time looking at it. It also used a lot of gold leaf, which felt like void spaces in the composition, and, unlike some folks, I think a little gold goes a long way.

From a distance, taking in the whole of a Byzantine painting, it feels flat because it predates the use of perspective in drawing and painting, using visual illusions to suggest depth. Those clues could include linear perspective (parallel lines converge in the distance), aerial perspective (scenes at greater distances are hazier), overlapping, size constancy (the same object at a greater distance will be smaller).

But visiting the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna’s collection of Italo-Byzantine work made me realize, I don’t think I had ever seen an original Byzantine piece up close, only reproductions in books, or slides in an Art History class. It was revealing. While the overall image might be flat, the interior details include substantial light and shadow modeling to give three dimensional feeling to the faces and features of the people in the scene. And in the gold leaf, the impressions made to create the halo give that dimension as well.

I haven’t changed my favorites, but came across a random show and it showed me something.

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

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.

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

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.”

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

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.

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

National Military Park

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.

Even to me, it was exquisite.

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

He was magnificent.

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…

…he was magnificent.

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

“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.

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