Exhibit Announcement: The American Drive-in Theater

The Camerawork Gallery is presenting an exhibition of selections from my Drive-in Theater project during the month of September. The show went up yesterday, and has pictures of 16 theaters from 12 states, selected from approximately 250 theaters I've photographed since 1998. Next Saturday I'll give a slide presentation with many more theater pictures, a timeline/history of the drive-in, stories and anecdotes from my many interviews with drive-in theater owners and managers, and a Q&A period. Followed by a reception in the gallery space.

Camerawork is the oldest continuously operated fine art photography gallery in the United States, founded in 1970. The exhibition space is located at the Lorenzen Conference Center, Legacy Emanuel Medical Center Campus, 301 N. Graham Street, Portland, Oregon 97227.

Another Statue Taking a Selfie

Hartford, Connecticut

At the Hartford Atheneum.

Artists and Revolutionaries, Plus, Web Site Notes

Hudson, New York

Artists and Revolutionaries is the name of the store. Don't know how accurate the name might be as a description.

Before the storm and power outage interrupted, I was just finishing an overhaul of my website at www.carlweese.com. The frontend of the site is set up in Muse and has pretty nice navigation features, but the content heart of the site is the Online Galleries page, which is another matter. It's a Muse page, but mainly consists of links to pages I made over the past nearly twenty years in at least half a dozen different web page generation programs. I don't want to remake all the pages, not just because I'm lazy, but also because they're kind of a history of my web presence over two decades. For example the earliest pages have scans of platinum prints that aren't up to my current standards (I mean the scanned files on the web page, not the original prints). The earliest galleries are ones that I made by hand in programs like PageMill, and many had broken links that I've managed to fix now, I think. The pictures in the galleries go back as far as forty-eight years ago.

More recent galleries were generated from within Photoshop using the Bridge Output Module. I'm very disappointed this been discontinued in the current PSCC. A pale imitation of it is available in Lightroom (which I dislike, though of course I have it as part of the CC suite). 

I've added several new galleries to the Online Galleries page. At the top is the first of a "Four Seasons" portfolio from a local forest preserve. I shot the pictures in the gallery/folio with digital capture, then made enlarged digital negatives and printed them in platinum/palladium at11 inches wide on 11x15 sheets. Then I made copy photos with the same digital capture equipment (much better results than scanning) to make the files for the web gallery.

Next, there are two new "Month By Month" galleries. Each of these is a tight edit of the pictures posted to my Working Pictures blog—twelve from each month. It's largely an editing exercise, with the monthly collection of twelve establishing a goal for the editing. Perhaps because digital capture leads people to overshoot, I see a lot of complaints about all the time people think they are wasting, editing their pictures. I disagree that this is time wasted. Editing is an essential tool for understanding our own work. David Vestal said that your contact sheets are your photographic autobiography. He also said that people shooting color (at the time that automatically meant slides—color transparencies) suffered from the lack of contact sheets. They lost the learning experience of keeping, and returning to view/edit, all of the exposures made. Over the years I have returned to my contact sheets of 35mm work and found pictures that I now liked better than the ones I printed at the time. Now that I've been doing digital capture as a part of my serious work for fourteen years, I'm finding the same thing; returning to pictures made several years ago, I not infrequently disagree with my original edit.

One of the best ways to improve our next photographs is to study the ones we've already made. In the process of editing, the rejects may be more informative, may teach us more, than the most successful pictures.

Opening

Roxbury, Connecticut

Mural and Doorway

Peekskill, New York

The scale in this picture fascinates me. Walking past the building, I took in the oversize figures of the mural. Then I noticed the "miniature" door and chair and nearby stairway. My scale perception shifted and then I realized how much larger-than-life the figures are. I think the effect I encountered in reality is still there viewing the picture.

I didn't stop to talk to anyone, but the sign in the window at the left announces the 2013 grand opening of the New Era Creative Space, which seems to be an interesting organization aimed primarily at enriching young people's lives and experience.

Stores and restaurants, not to mention people, around Peekskill, indicate there is a large Central American and Caribbean population, which I think must be a fairly recent development. Twenty years ago I was a frequent visitor in the area because I did a lot of work for Peekskill Hospital.

Another thing I noticed was that there are taxicabs everywhere—far more than you would expect in a small city with a population under 25,000, on the Hudson River, just over an hour and a half from NYC.  Some months ago I learned, from unrelated research, that an abundance of taxis is a strong indicator for a large population of undocumented workers. It turns out the most dangerous thing an undocumented worker can do—in terms of risking deportation—is to drive a car without a valid driver's license. One of the better jobs for a documented worker is to drive a taxi...

Willie and Frank

Peekskill, New York

Gallery Opening

Torrington, Connecticut

We went to an opening this evening at  the Five Points Gallery, in center of Torrington, a major part of the urban renewal efforts that are going on there, with a particular eye to attracting the creative and arts communities. The gallery space is beautifully finished, though I found myself also looking out the north-facing windows, up Main Street.

Consider

Derby, Connecticut

detail

The Large Head

Hudson, New York

There's Nothing Wrong with Taking a Snapshot

Woodbury, Connecticut

Especially if you send a file to your friend, of the picture at her opening of a show of paintings, with her granddaughter. That kid is so engaged with everything around her that it's just awe inspiring. Go for it, Amelia.

White Chairs, Blue Horse, Birds

Hudson, New York

STATELINE AUCTIONS

Canaan, Connecticut

Washington Depot, Connecticut

Lots of art gallery openings around here today, which will likely feature in upcoming blog posts. The sentiment commercially expressed at this gallery gives me a mixed reaction. It's 100% correct if you buy a work of art because you love it, respond to it, want to live with it in your home, and can afford it. In that case there is only the risk that you were too hasty in your judgement and bought something that has lots of impact but no staying power for you, in which case you can probably resell it before everybody else also figures out it's vapid.

But the comparison to the stock market is troubling. In financial terms, contemporary art—by which I don't mean any school or style but simply work by people alive and doing their work today—is about as secure an investment as penny stocks, or Enron, whether it's a hundred bucks or a hundred thousand. When it gets into the stratosphere of millions pricing it becomes self-fulfilling for a while, but that too shall pass. Especially when paid for a chromogenic print that will fade away. Fools abound.

Three Ladies

Bennington, Vermont

Baccant and the Elders

Bennington, Vermont

Lawn Ornament

Stockbridge, Massachusetts

Public art in a front yard along Main Street (US Route 7).

There's a continuing series of new posts this week at The WPII Blog, pictures from a health care reform rally in Hartford, CT.

Two Galleries

Kent, Connecticut

Lakeville, Connecticut

Nude with Label

Washington, Connecticut