Raphael Shevelev Ideas in Photography

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  • My Conversations With Dogs

    We talked with each other for twelve years. To be honest, I did most of the talking, he did most of the listening. I knew he was actively engaged because he would cock his head slightly, just so, and look at me unblinkingly with his warm, beautiful brown eyes. We started at a conversational run, no baby talk. From the beginning it was all about politics, international relations, war, peace and the logistics of nutrition. The latter, I admit, was more to his liking, and I never managed to discover whether he was indeed a Keynesian, as I am. Now, in hindsight, I think he was secretly Friedmanesque, but wanted to keep the peace between us. 
    A true democrat with both upper and lower case D/ds, he socialized with everyone, irrespective of race, creed, breed or nationality. Because of that he mastered many languages, and sometimes I would see him stand on and closely study Le Monde and the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung, as well as the San Francisco Chronicle. A favorite literary pastime was listening raptly to my readings out loud of John McPhee’s essays in The New Yorker. This was no great surprise. He had earned his CD (Companion Dog) and CDX (Companion Dog Excellent) degrees cum laude, and won the Dog World Award for Canine Excellence. They didn’t know the half of it.
    We liked each other’s company a lot, and did many things together: walks in the woods, running on the beach, cuddling together for warmth on cold days, sometimes falling asleep on the living room rug. We’d stop by at Baskin-Robbins, I for blueberry cheesecake in a cone, he for vanilla in a cup. He refused the plastic spoon. 
    He was quite fashion conscious. When I changed from my city shoes to hiking boots, he would demonstrate immense pleasure. If I also reached for the case that held my shotgun, he would ululate his ecstasy with as great a precision of pitch and brio as the soprano section of the Contra Costa Chorale. 
    Though usually fearless, the onset of thunderstorms had him racing to my bed, scrambling under the covers, trembling until my embraces and caresses calmed him, and we both fell asleep. We even took turns in saving each other from serious threat.  Using a silent hand signal, I once stopped him from running toward me across a park road just as a maintenance vehicle was approaching. He even dropped his favorite toy, a pine cone, and just lay there waiting for the “come” signal, an inward sweep of my extended right arm. On a very foggy, lonely night at the San Francisco Marina, I just barely saw a figure approaching us, perhaps someone with ill intent. On my almost inaudible whisper, “speak,” he growled and barked so viciously that the figure disappeared into the mist. Then he turned to me, anxious to receive the customary praise. 
    I don’t remember what our last conversation was about, but I knew the end was near for him. Petting, holding, feeling that warm tongue, were the last gestures. This portrait of Goldlegend’s Midas Touch – Midas – remains on the eastern wall of my study decades after his death. I know that “man’s best friend” is a cliché, but every day I’m reminded of my once very best friend, so grateful for those twelve years. 
    In my teens, I accompanied my parents on three ocean cruises. On the last, aboard the beautiful Lloyd-Triestino liner Africa, I shared my cabin with a taciturn Englishman who occupied many of his hours reading books about dogs. I found that deeply eccentric, until I acquired my own library on dog breeds and canine psychology. For a time I had a lively correspondence with Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz, author of Man Meets Dog.
    My daughters Judy and Ruth became goldenretrieveraholics years ago, and still seem to be accommodating their addiction. Much more recently, my younger daughter presented me with a very fine granddog, Lily. Lily is exceptionally beautiful, though I think she may be quite fickle. When here, she and I adore each other, and kiss frequently. It finally dawned on me that, when not here, she may well be indulging in similar intimacies with others. She’s very intelligent, and I fancy that, late into the night, when her human siblings have gone to sleep, Lily is studying The Economist’s review of Thomas Piketty’s Capital. We’ll get to discuss it during her next visit.
    I shall always miss Midas, but Lily’s attentions are very consoling.
    _________________________________________________________
    © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. 
    Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

  • The Letter

    On the Saturday before Rosh Hashanah in 1946, before my eighth birthday, I accompanied my parents to visit my only remaining grandparent, Blume-Devorah Westermann-Shevelev. The others had all died in Latvia and Lithuania before I was born. We lived in a flat on the lower slope of Table Mountain, with a view of the city and harbor. My paternal grandmother – bubbe – lived in the vibrant suburb of Sea Point, two or three blocks from the oceanfront, from which one can see Robben Island. It took two bus rides to get to her home, the first down the hill into the center of Cape Town, the second westward to the Sea Point Main Road, a busy commercial avenue. The bus stopped at the corner of St. John’s Road, and we’d alight to walk a block to a very modest four-flat building. We didn’t yet have our first car.
    Grandmother lived on the left, downstairs, in a tiny two-bedroom unit. She had to put coins in the meter to generate the gas for cooking. I liked standing on a chair to help her with that. The smaller of the two bedrooms was occupied by uncle David, my father’s youngest sibling. The two men hadn’t talked to each other for years and wouldn’t ever again. During our visits, uncle David would sequester himself in his room, and I’d knock to gain entry. I liked him, and in retrospect, given the unexpected direction of my own life, perhaps it was because he sketched so well. He was then the only member of the family with an interest in art and classical music. Years later, when I was a student at the University of Cape Town, I asked each of the brothers what their feud was about. Neither could quite remember, but that wasn’t the point.
    Anyway, on that Saturday, grandmother gave me her usual treat: a sixpence so I could walk back to the corner of Main Road, and buy a packet of potato chips in which a small twist of paper held the salt. When I returned, the adults (sans uncle David) were conversing in Yiddish. I joined in.
    It must have been late in the morning, close to noon, when we heard the postman arrive. Grandmother rose to retrieve the mail, and when she came back, her faced reflected foreboding. In her hand, among other items, was an envelope marked with the emblem of the Red Cross. She sat slowly, and clearly without willing, opened it. Inside was another envelope, addressed to her. She recognized the script.
    During the Second World War, the Red Cross made prodigious efforts to ensure deliveries of foodstuffs and mail to prisoners of war and, when possible, prisoners of the German concentration camps. Occasionally, perhaps once a year, those confined would be permitted to write a very brief censored letter to relatives on the “other side.” By the end of the war, a huge quantity of mail had been accumulated, and now, in the second year of the peace, it was being distributed. The letter was from her first child, my oldest uncle, Moses. It had been written several years earlier, before he was murdered in Majdanek.
    Moses Shevelev was born, I believe, in 1908.  As a young man, he had left the family home in Libau (Lepaja), Latvia, and found his way to Paris, where he attended the Faculty of Law at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), and practiced as an attorney until the German conquest of France. The French authorities, pre-empting their German overlords, rushed to detain and deport Jews. Uncle Moses was put onto a train. The destination was Majdanek, on the edge of the eastern Polish city of Lublin. Unlike other camps, Majdanek was not screened from public view. It was right there, the fence also demarcating the border of Polish farmers’ smallholdings, as it still does. Shots and screams from the camp must surely have penetrated the air, as did the stench from the crematorium.
    Grandmother, my parents and I sat in silence. She had certainly known – or guessed – that her son was dead. We sat there for a long time. The adults said nothing, and I knew enough not to ask.
    Just before the war broke out in September 1939, my father and his brother, my uncle Max, also settled in Cape Town, made a determined effort to extract Moses from France. With their considerable diligence, and certainly bribes to officials, the offer of a visa to Madagascar came through. The telegraphed response from uncle Moses lives with me still: “I don’t want to be stranded on a remote island.”
    Among the small items that have accompanied me to homes on the other side of the world is a photograph made in the early 1920s. It shows four of my grandmother’s five children. David was either an infant or not yet born. Those depicted are, in ascending order of age, Helena, who, as a very young woman emigrated to Palestine, Max with his left hand on a toy wooden horse, my father Jacob (Jack), and Moses.
    In 1994 that photograph accompanied me to another place: Majdanek.
    I found a niche in the wall across from the ovens, and photographed the photograph there. Karine and I were doing the research for what would later become my book, Liberating the Ghosts: Photographs and Text from the March of the Living. (LensWork:1996). The book is dedicated to two men: my uncle, and a French Huguenot called Daniel Trocmé. Both were murdered in Majdanek.
    On Easter Monday, 1994, we took a short bus ride to the camp, and found ourselves alone in that vast, cold, depressing place. Taking shelter in one of the huts, we lit two votive candles on the concrete floor. One was for uncle Moses. The other was in memory of Daniel Trocmé, from the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where Karine had lived as a child. Daniel ran a children’s home in which he’d hidden Jewish refugees and supplied them with false papers. When German soldiers raided the home and took the Jewish kids, Daniel insisted on accompanying “his” children. We later discovered that, by an astonishing coincidence, we’d been in the camp precisely on the fiftieth anniversary of Daniel’s death.
    Perhaps the two men had met and gotten to know each other.
    The letter is long gone, though I wish I’d been able to preserve it. It may have been written in Yiddish, though Moses and his siblings were all also schooled in Hebrew, German, Latvian, and, of course, he was Francophone. Perhaps the letter had been written in German, to pass the censors.
    I don’t know whether Moses ever married and fathered children. Many years ago I would fantasize about finding long lost French cousins. But the story, though it continues to haunt me, ends with the letter. It was the beginning of my consciousness.
    _________________________________________________________
    © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. 
    Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

  • Martin Pretorius And The Fleetmaster

    In January 1947 my father’s pride and joy arrived. His only child was then eight years old. The brand new 1946 Chevrolet Fleetmaster, grey with a blue top, had been transported to Cape Town by rail from South West Africa (formerly German West Africa, now Namibia) where my mother’s only surviving brother, uncle Abe, owned a dealership. The license plate read OT414, the letters being an abbreviation for Otjiwarongo, an inland town a thousand miles north. 

    It became urgent to find a garage. There was none at our flat. So my Dad found one for rent about half a mile away, and the car sat there, in solitary splendor except when my parents and I walked over and opened the padlock on the garage doors. We gazed reverently at this glossy monster, touching the sleek surface (but only after wiping our hands), and sat inside with a magnificent sense of ownership, breathing that special smell, the scent of future prosperity. We told the neighbors, of course, especially those who had no car of their own, and invited them to viewings. Many of them were refugees from the recent European catastrophe, and they obliged by voicing their admiration in Yiddish superlatives. It was as though Tevye had bought a new cow.
    That lovely summer was so full of promise, though shaded by the memory of horrors that had left many members of my and other families murdered in “camps.” No longer were the streets of Cape Town populated by men in army and navy uniforms. No longer did my uncle Max, who served in the Home Guard, leave his helmet, gas mask, rifle and bayonet in my bedroom when he came visiting. No longer was there a minute of silence throughout the city when the noon gun, triggered by an electrical impulse from the national observatory, went off on Signal Hill. No longer did we have to draw blackout drapes each night. No longer was the port out of bounds to everyone except those with official and military permission. Even the armed sentries who guarded the entrance to Simonstown, home of the Royal Navy base, disappeared. No longer did recently arrived strangers with numbers on their arms come to dine at our table.
    We were all both joyous and struggling with the prospect of peace. The Chevy was a significant investment in the future, as was our new radio and phonograph combination. It was a Romeo, named after its manufacturer, Captain Romeo Buttolo, an Italian naval officer interned as an enemy alien early in the war. Captain Buttolo came to our home and installed it personally. In this kosher Jewish household, the first 78 rpm record had Beniamino Gigli singing Ave Maria on the obverse, and Agnus Dei on the reverse. I played it daily for months, turning Gigli’s solo into a tenor-soprano duet.
    Neither of my parents could drive. My mother never did, largely because my father wouldn’t trust her with the family chariot. My father only learned to drive about eight years later, and then became a nervous, uncertain driver. So my parents took advantage of their tentative step into the middle class, and of South Africa’s racial situation, to hire a Cape Colored driver. His name was Martin Pretorius.
    Martin was a gentle man as well as a really good driver. We enjoyed each other’s company and our burgeoning conspiratorial relationship – once I dissuaded him from calling me “Young Master” – an embarrassingly obsequious Victorian custom imposed upon servants. He would explain the workings of a car to me, and also tell me a little of his life and the constant struggle to survive. Aside from his chauffeur duties, my father insisted on having the car immaculately clean at all times, so sometimes, without my parents’ knowledge, I would help wash and wax our status symbol, and that gave me more time with him.
    One of Martin’s early tasks, in February 1947, was to drive the family to Kirstenbosch, the spectacular botanical gardens in the southern suburbs. There, after a long walk on gravel paths, my parents and I sat on the verandah of the restaurant, looking out on the gardens, and consuming our tea, with warm scones under clotted cream and strawberry jam. On the way home, a strange sight awaited us along Rhodes Drive. Crowds were gathering beside the road, and further along there were lines of policemen in white gloves. Cars ahead of us were waved through, as we eventually were, but those behind us were held back. As we passed by, with our new, polished chauffeur-driven Chevrolet, people cheered and waved Union Jack flags.  Apparently, a mile or so behind us, heading in the same direction, was a convoy carrying the visiting Royal Family, King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. When I realized what was going on, I became quite princely, waving to the crowds with that peculiar gesture of the King’s, rotating my right hand counterclockwise from the wrist. Seated in the rear, my parents were not amused. Martin giggled.
    During the summer vacation at the end of 1951, as I was getting ready to transition from elementary to high school, from short pants to long pants, we would, especially on weekends, be driven to the Indian Ocean beach resort of Muizenberg, so heavily populated by members of the Jewish community that it was occasionally called “Jewsenberg,” though not always with benevolence. It was a beautiful small town from an earlier age, its gorgeous beaches welcoming the rhythms of the warm breakers.
    On one such Sunday, along the road to the beach, traffic was slowed by a donkey-drawn cart filled with fruit and vegetables, driven by a black man on his way to market. With oncoming traffic, it became a challenge to pass the cart, and finally we got the chance. Martin had just moments to execute the maneuver, and, as he did so, the front left fender scraped the wooden cart. The pride and joy had sustained very light damage, but the annoyance in my father’s face was enough to dim the sunshine. He didn’t say much, but it was clear that he blamed Martin. When we got back home, my father kept staring at the scratched tiny dent, running his hands over it. The next day a body shop did the repair for four pounds sterling.
    On December 31st, Martin came into my father’s study to collect his pay. A few shillings had been deducted from his meager salary, and would be for months to come. A chagrined Martin had no choice but to accept. I witnessed that scene, and the small and large indignities and injustices of that society began to take hold. It was the first of many, many times, when I would have loud and angry disagreements with my father. We argued to the end of his life, years after I had left South Africa to live in the United States.
    In my parents’ bedroom, there was an elegant wardrobe of birds-eye maple (there were no built-in closets). My mother kept it locked and made sure the keys were close at hand. Sometimes I’d be with her when she unlocked it. Among the things she kept there was a family photograph album. I’d ask her to take it out, sit with me on the bed, and tell me about the people in the pictures. She would do that, and then, after turning the second or third page, would burst out crying at the sight of dead relatives, and return the album to its place. On the shelf that held the album was an envelope containing a small stack of banknotes. Money, she said, for housekeeping. Dad’s bank was quite far away, in the suburb of Salt River.
    One day, when mother was completely absorbed in cooking, I wandered into her bedroom and found the keys on her night table. In silence, I opened the wardrobe and took a fiver. King George VI, whose profile was on the note, didn’t seem to indicate royal displeasure. Later that day, in a shop downtown, I exchanged it for five one-pound notes, and slipped four of them to Martin. I thought of it more as an act of social justice than the theft it really was. The last pound, my social justice brokerage fee, probably went to buy a record or a book.

    The illicit four-pound investment in Martin yielded unexpected results. When we were alone in the car, driving along a suburban avenue, Martin would pull over and invite me to take the wheel. He was an exacting but humorous instructor. The conspiracy, even with its dangers, perhaps because of its dangers, was high comedy for us both.
    While I was in high school, my father learned to drive, and Martin was let go. He and I had a tearful parting. Before my seventeenth birthday, I was sent to the Cape Town Driving School. After one lesson, the instructor said “I don’t know where you learned to drive, but you’re ready for the license test.” I took it eleven days after my birthday, and passed. My parents were proud of my ability to learn so quickly, especially because it had taken two courses of five lessons each to teach my father.
    My last sight of Martin came on a day when my father gave me a ride downtown. I think we were driving on Strand Street, when he suddenly braked. An apparently inebriated Martin was weaving across the street. My father shook his head and said “Poor Martin.” It was the first time I’d heard him voice compassion for someone of a different race.
    I’ve been a licensed driver for fifty-eight years. I aced my recent renewal test at the California Department of Motor Vehicles. As I left the building, I said a silent thanks to Martin Pretorius. 
    _________________________________________________________
    © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. 
    Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

  • The Distinguished Chair

    It is simply a dining-room chair of pleasing design. Over the years it has acquired distinction because of the remarkable glutei maximi that it has cradled.

    Guests have included college presidents, scholars from Berkeley, The California College of the Arts, Stanford, Yale, Oxford, Tuebingen, my alma mater the University of Cape Town, and other institutions; authors, artists, a Shakespeare scholar, lawyers, an astrophysicist, theologians, mathematicians, editors, a museum director, musicians, psychologists, physicians, a Justice devoted to human rights law, and my “brother,” playwright Rick Foster, one of the most deeply cultured and educated people I’ve ever known. They have been guests here not because of their titles, but because they have contributed so warmly and generously to discussions over food and wine. Rick’s response to my last column was so enlightening that I invited him to be my guest columnist, to occupy, as it were, the Distinguished Chair.
    Raphael Shevelev
    ______________________________________
    In The Art of Subversion, his October 2013 column, Raphael argues forcefully and persuasively that to judge any work of art by its adherence to a set of rules is to commit a fundamentally anti-artistic act. An act destructive to the very perception of art. Yet it also points to the need for a broader discussion of rule-making and rule-breaking as essential human activities
    The birth and death of any set of rules is a complex topic. Rules pre-date civilization. The Bible and the Homeric Epics, not to mention Greek Tragedy, are filled with fraught dramatizations of the failures of the existing rules of conflict resolution – struggles that are still paramount in the twenty-first Century.
    Within the arts there is also evidence of rules – and rule-breaking – going far back in time. Look at the rules that one can infer from the extreme stability of ancient Egyptian art for over a millennium, and at the astonishing, delightful, and short-lived changes during and just after the reign of Akhenaten. 
    In recent centuries when basic values are hotly contested within and between societies, and the progress of science and technology pose so many new and interesting challenges, artists are continually faced with fresh problems to solve. But that’s what artists are: problem solvers. Their task is to integrate the raw data of our environment into stories, sounds, gestures, and images that carry deep meaning.

    Being social animals, we form a loose, or not so loose, consensus as to how a problem is to be solved in our group. If you wanted to paint a successful landscape in Europe in 1450, you had to employ the rules of mathematical perspective. The consensus begins as description but then hardens into a prescription, i.e. a rule. Other solutions to the problem are “ruled” out. Eventually our more inquiring minds either get bored with repeating the same old solutions, or external changes provoke artists to investigate totally new problems, problems that cannot be solved by using the old methods. Things generate their opposite: rules give birth to the practice of their own breaking. In this light, the rules play a useful role in change. Their rigidity challenges us to go beyond them. They clarify just what it is that needs to be done differently in order to be fresh and apposite. Conservatives are left behind feeling superior and insecure. A new consensus is formed, which will provoke new rules that produce exciting results, for a while.
    This is basically old stuff. But lately I’ve been thinking about the meta-problem—how is it that our species finds, or rejects, meanings in particular images, gestures, musical sounds, or groups of words? I recently saw a documentary called Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies. It brilliantly explores the way that films of the early years of the last century had a symbiotic relationship with the painters who developed cubism. They were actually reflecting the way that a whole civilization was coming to see the world differently – at the neurological level – because of stop-action and moving pictures.
    Neurological science is now challenging our fundamental assumptions about how we perceive, judge, describe, and remember our world. There are powerful rules embedded in these assumptions. Courts of law rule that eyewitness accounts are to be taken most seriously in determining the guilt or innocence of the accused. But there is now overwhelming scientific evidence that eyewitness accounts are extremely unreliable and have punished many of the innocent and freed many of the guilty. When we say, “Speak, Memory!” and memory speaks, how are we to judge the truth of its sincere utterances? Memory has been influenced by the stories that we have found meaningful, the values and superstitions we have received, the images we have found beautiful or disgusting, the definition of heroism that we have embraced, and all of these have been conveyed by the art we have been given or sought out.
    Which is to say that our conception of the human condition – and our reaction to art – is still shot through with old assumptions about perception and memory, assumptions that are now known to be false. That, then, is the deepest calling of art, to explore the human condition. It requires us to re-imagine the world in ways that will bring us into closer accord with “things as they are.” In order to do this re-imagining, we should make explicit all the rules tacitly embedded in our assumptions and decide which ones we need to break, and how to break them. Then we will be ready to play Wallace Stevens’s “Blue Guitar.” If that reference is obscure, I will end this note with the first section of his long and wonderful poem The Man With the Blue Guitar, which is an exploration of what Picasso was doing to our ways of seeing just before his Cubist period:

     
    The man bent over his guitar,
    A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
     
    They said, “You have a blue guitar,
    You do not play things as they are.”
     
    The man replied, “Things as they are
    Are changed upon a blue guitar.”
     
    And they said then, “But play you must,
    A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
     
    A tune upon the blue guitar
    Of things exactly as they are.”
    Rick Foster
     
    _________________________________________________________
    © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. 
    Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

  • The Art Of Subversion

    A few months ago I was invited to give an address to a local photographic arts group. I titled my talk “The Urge to Create,” in the course of which I had emphatically dismissed the idea of “rules” in the creation of art. At the end of the meeting, a gentleman asked one of the very good questions that were posed that evening: “If there are no rules, then how do we maintain standards?” As a fuller discussion of this could easily have absorbed another several hours, I thought it best to postpone, and then promptly forgot about this interesting problem. Recently, thinking about other matters that I plan to write about, that question came to mind again, and so I thought I’d explore it further and publicly offer a brief reply.
    Rules and standards are not synonymous. “Standards” refers to the quality of rendition or realization with which artists seek to convey their thoughts. These necessarily differ from artist to artist, and medium to medium, yet offer a basis of comparison to a learned, sophisticated and empathetic audience. 

    “Rules” are of a different nature, because they so clearly imply that there is the presence of some form of ruler, perhaps of an aesthetic legislature. This is certainly the most completely dysfunctional aspect of the creative process, because creating by rule leads only to a kind of metaphysical, intellectual uniformity, which is a polite term for utterly “safe,” and therefore utterly boring. It is the antithesis of creativity.
    One of the best examples of this is the rigidity with which the Salon (Académie des Beaux-Arts) of the mid-nineteenth century chose those paintings that “deserved” exhibition. In 1863, Napoleon III, responding to a huge furor, established the Salon des Refusés, which showed many of the works that had been refused entry by the official Salon. This was repeated in 1874, 1875 and 1876, by which time the official Salon came to be regarded as rigid and rule-bound, and the modern art of France, including the once officially dismissed “Impressionists,” began to achieve the wonder it deserves so well. How many of the painters of the Académie can one remember, even the very prominent and successful Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, painter of Napoleon, as opposed to the names of Manet, Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Pissarro, Sisley, Dutch-born van Gogh, and others?
    Comparing (rather viciously) the formal Salon with the adjacently exhibited Salon des Refusés, Emile Zola, in his 1886 novel L’oeuvre, wrote:
    “There was nothing to recall the lively riot of their salon, with its fresh colors and its exaggerated rendering of bright sunlight. It was one long succession of gold frames filled with shadow, black, ungraceful shapes, jaundiced-looking nudes in gloomy half-lights, all the paraphernalia of Classical Antiquity, historical subjects, genre paintings, everyone soaked in the train-oil of convention. Every picture oozed unfailing mediocrity…”

    I’ve selected four works, two paintings and two photographs, to illustrate my point: Sir Anthony van Dyck’s 1614 The Apostle Simon; Eugène Atget’s 1921 photograph Rue de l’Hôtel-de-Ville; Salvador Dali’s 1931 The Persistence of Memory; and my own recent digital photograph, Cobalt Explorer.
    So let’s see. Where are the “rules”? Van Dyck’s portrait intrigues precisely because the subject’s back is partially turned toward us. The colors are muted, as is the shape of his face, and this requires time, engagement and intelligence from the viewer. No catchlights in the eyes! Indeed, only one eye in profile. Yet the standards by which the work can be judged are superb. Simon looks his part. More than that, he acts his part. Only the heartless could deny him.
    Atget gave us wonderful images of “vieux Paris,” before demolition and modern reconstruction occurred. They are documents of a city that has now changed so much, and we owe to Berenice Abbott the fact that they were preserved after his death. Here is a street, the “street of the City Hall,” made shortly after dawn, without humans, but conveying a deep sense of time and place. Where are the “rules?” Look more deeply into his photographs, and the standards become so much more obvious. Thank goodness he paid no attention to imposed “rules.”

    Look carefully at Salvador Dali’s work. Are there really “rules” to guide us on the depiction of time and memory? Is there a “rule” that clocks can’t be flexibly draped over branches and other objects? Does this conform to creative standards? Does it free the mind of the viewer from expectation, and instead induce surprise and wonder?
    What about Cobalt Explorer? Aren’t there “rules” about not having part of a blue human foot intruding into the field from the bottom right corner? I’m sure there must be. But, is there a narrative? Can one imagine a story? I hope so. So much of art demands audience intelligence. If it is so true of literature, music and architecture, then why not of paintings and photographs? “The magic synthesis” is what Arthur Koestler called the relationship between artist and viewer.

    While surrealism brought us a refreshing and liberating renewal of the senses, a way of subverting reality and “thinking sideways,” in order to be fair, I have to quote art critic Robert Hughes in his The Shock Of The New, where he writes, with as much restraint as Zola:
    “Consequently, a good deal of Surrealism, and of the art it inspired, was not only a solemn parody of revolutionary threats: it had, as a structure, much in common with the Catholic religion…It had dogmas and rituals, catechisms, saints, baptisms, excommunications…and a singularly demanding and touchy Pope: Andre Breton…He inspired, as one of his disciples put it, a doglike devotion…He was immune to most of the deadly sins except pride and lust…and believed that art had not only the power but also the duty to change life.”
    Nevertheless, in the half-century since Breton’s death, Surrealism and many other forms of modern art continue to encourage liberation from constraints, from imposed logic, rules and expectation, and therefore have a great deal in common with wit and humor.

    Recently, a photographer friend, Mary De Shaw, sent me one of her images that had been subjected to what I regard as very silly notions of compositional “rules.” She was told by a competition judge to remove the heads in the upper left, much of the ocean on the right of the image, and center on the two boys splashing in the surf.
    However, isn’t there a powerful parallel narrative of how the ocean can offer experiences of immense energy and immense lassitude? Both are present here in intriguing ways. This image also offers a metaphor for the oceans between which the United States is located. It’s almost as though the artist had been looking across the country from the turbulence of the Atlantic out beyond California, to the calm of the Pacific (hence its name). When I looked at this picture I was reminded of two books published 50 years apart: James Mitchener’s Hawaii, and Simon Winchester’s Atlantic. 
    Of course, those trained to “judge” by the standards of much photographic instruction and many photographic associations would very likely have missed these ideas altogether, and enforced the mind-numbing “rules” of the composition police. My readers know that my least favorite word is “orthodox.” Creation and innovation require a conspiracy against rules. But keep in mind that there are also no rules for committing unorthodoxy. Imposing rules on art eviscerates art.
    As I write this, an exhibition titled “Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938” has just opened to an appreciative audience at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. René Magritte is the artist of the unsmokable pipes, rain falling upward, hats in the sky, and a forest occupying the middle place on a layered vertical scale beneath an ocean beach and above houses, Panorama Populaire (1926). As for his own compositional bent, he might have said, “Ceci n’est pas une règle.”
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    NOTE: I am grateful to the Open Content Program of the Getty Museum for the downloads of the van Dyck and Atget images, and to Mary De Shaw for hers. 
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    © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. 
    Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

  • Portraiture: Beyond The Face

    Humanity’s major preoccupation is with humanity. We are, so to speak, of the genus homo narcissus, and that describes much of our concerns. Portraiture is the natural result of the urge to record images of ourselves, in all manner of repose and activity. As Remy Saisselin wrote in Style, Truth and the Portrait (1963),
    Like all art that has survived, portraiture is bound to history, social conventions, style, and so to time; yet insofar as it may touch us in the present, draw our attention, and set our minds to wonder, it escapes the temporal and is at once of the past as well as the present.
    Many years ago I picked up a small, slim volume and opened it at random, coming face to face with a beautiful nineteenth century fin de siècle portrait of my own Eastern European Jewish grandmother as a young woman. But I was quite mistaken, for it was instead a mummy portrait from the middle of the first century A.D., excavated from the Roman cemetery at Hawara, Egypt.
    In 1911 Sir Flinders Petrie recovered 146 mummies with portraits, which, like the one of “my grandmother,” are splendid examples of artistic merit. They are very far removed from early pharaonic portraiture, stylized profiles with color applied flatly. Petrie’s discovery showed physiognomically-specific faces with excellent use of light and shade. The subjects are Hellenized individuals who were themselves, or descendants from, Romans, Greeks and Macedonians who had arrived in Egypt as soldiers, administrators, and merchants in the wake of the invasion by Alexander the Great.

    Paradoxically, the human need to provide a record of humanity’s stay on earth has suffered from some measure of condescension by artists who sometimes find it demeaning to use their talents to flatter the tastes of a patron. Yet, virtually all of the work of Frans Hals was portraiture, as was much of Rembrandt’s. Both became quite wealthy at this trade. Though both men sought to go beyond physical appearance and reach for what may lie beneath, it had not been until the arrival of Florentine and Venetian painting, that portraitists began to obey Leonardo’s admonition that the painter must depict “man, and the concept of his mind.”
    The reasons for our passion to create likenesses in clay and metal, glass and wood, cloth and paper, film, videotape and more recent technologies, are complex, and touch on the very reasons to understand our existence and to seek something beyond likeness itself. That search is fortunately endless, because portraiture finds its best expression in interpreting character, the relationship of the portrayed to their environment and in the passage of the experience between portraitist and subject, all accomplished in the language of design.
    Portraitists may wish to honor patrons, to record the affections (or disaffections) of one human for another, to make social and personal comment, or simply to display artistic skill. Confucius encouraged the making of portraits of eminences, in the hope that future generations would have something to emulate. Even now, at a time when some of our environmental din is the incessant clicking of camera shutters, there is still the notion that portraiture singles out subjects as especially worthy of being portrayed. Because of my own predilection of trying to discover something beyond the surface, one of my favorite passages records what Oliver Cromwell is reputed to have said to Sir Peter Lely, painter of the Windsor Beauties:
    I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all; but to remark all these roughnesses, pimples, warts and everything as you see me, otherwise I will never pay a farthing for it.

    As a photographic portraitist, I keep trying to find subjects of similar sensibility. In service to that ambition, and excepting for my grandchildren, I generally try to make portraits of those who have passed the age of sixty, and are quite comfortable living in their own (blemished) skin. I have interest neither in glamor nor in epidermal virginity.  I photograph only those with whom I’ve established some form of personal relationship, some trust. The expression of their surprise is my gift to them and their gift to me.
    It was King Charles I who realized the political value of grand portraiture, just as present heads of state see the political value of modern imagery. On a visit to Spain, he had seen the royal portraits of Titian and Rubens. Those kings looked like kings. Upon his return to England, Sir Anthony van Dyck was commissioned to paint the equestrian portrait by which we still know him. If the seventeenth century was the age of manners and gesture, the eighteenth became the age of conversation, and with it a form of literature and art, which, trying to penetrate the appearance of courtliness and mask, became an ancestor of modern psychology.

    By the beginning of the nineteenth century, portraits of ordinary people no longer looked ridiculous. Whereas in England, portraiture, despite its omnipresence, had generally not been the preferred medium of the artist, in America that situation was reversed, and one can easily conjure social, political and historical reasons. It was the extraordinary talents of Americans Sargent and Whistler, who dominated the last great age of portrait painting.
    The invention of photography in 1839 radically changed the nature of portraiture, and the evolution of more modern digital media has revolutionized the nature of photography, and with it, the ability of photography to influence the older media. If photography’s disruption of the painters’ and sculptors’ duopoly in making likenesses, it has forced a sharing of this function with photographers, and has created greater freedom in all media to explore new realms of expression.  This same realization, the ease with which the sitter’s physiognomy can be rendered by camera, has likewise imposed new obligations on the photographer. The challenge to all is the need to invest greater ingenuity in pursuit of more than mere likeness. Even a cursory look at the work of Andrew Wyeth, Raphael Soyer, Andy Warhol and French Impressionist Edgar Degas shows how deeply they adopted concepts of photographic vision. Art is neither medium-specific nor medium-exclusive.
    Photography is time-based to an extraordinary degree, in which a face, an attitude, an expression, an action can be captured in an instant. That instant is no more important than the receptivity and the creativity of the photographer. Sometimes there are surprises, but luck clearly favors the well-prepared. Now, especially with digital media, in which so much can be done after the initial exposure, the release of the shutter is not a climax, but a precursor. Much labor follows.

    Even without the prodigious conceptual and executive talents of photosurrealist Jerry Uelsmann, it is now more easily possible to change relationships with time and place, and even combine elements from different ages, as Rembrandt did in his painting Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (1653). Rather less well known is my own photograph Mother and Child (2013), which offers a very different sense of time compression, in which both parent and offspring are approximately the same age, depicted together in a fanciful environment.
    Photography’s immense success has also overwhelmed us with billions of poor and mediocre images, from the clichés of nature, life-passage photography, and on to the way most parents portray their children as dehumanized, pretty objects, momentarily lobotomized for the glory of the family album. My extreme distaste for the word “cheese” derives from more than my own lactose intolerance.
    As I write, The New Yorker, dated September 2nd, has arrived. It contains an elegant article by Anthony Lane titled “Names and Faces: the portraits of Julia Margaret Cameron.” She lived in the years 1815-1879 and at 48 was given a camera by her daughter, in the hope that this new apparatus would serve as a genteel hobby. Instead, it became a passion, and, socially well-connected, Julia managed to photograph such people as Tennyson, Longfellow, Browning, Trollope and Darwin, to name a few. She sought the same purpose as other portraitists have done and do. “When I have such men before my camera,” she wrote, “my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty toward them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner as well as the features of the outer man.” 
    Never before has the task of the portraitist been so challenging, or the possibilities so unlimited. All it requires is to stand confidently on a firm foundation of quicksilver.
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    Clicking on the images above will take you to their position in the galleries. A second click will enlarge them.
    Portions of this column were abstracted from my article “To See Ourselves,”  pubished in October 1989 by the Journal of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain.
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    © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. 
    Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

  • How Fruit Enhanced My Reputation As The Second-Best Photographer In The Whole Damn World

    Twenty-five years ago I first saw the wall at Battery Mendell, a reinforced concrete gun emplacement, completed by 1905, to guard the entrance to San Francisco Bay. It is situated in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, north of the bridge. In the bright sunlight one could count the generations of paint, blue, grey, brown, gold, each taking turns to escape the surface whose hold was becoming ever more tenuous. The wall fascinated me, and I wondered what I could do to portray it without succumbing to the cliché of peeling-paint photography. I concluded that an obvious strategy was to juxtapose something lively and colorful using complementary contrast for mutual enhancement. A decaying wall needed a living presence, rather than an inanimate object placed just for the sake of design. It needed the dance of life.

    Weeks later, my friend Len and I returned to the wall. This time an idea had begun to form, and now I had a test model wearing purple sweats and brandishing a borrowed trumpet. I knew it wouldn’t work, at least not yet. The light was too harsh, the model the wrong sex, the clothing too inelegant, the trumpet insufficiently dramatic. I shot a roll of film anyway. The exercise allowed other images to penetrate my consciousness, especially when I removed my spectacles and saw less detail and more color swaths. Sometimes an imposed lack of objective focus can actually improve one’s design vision. Since then, laser ophthalmic surgery has given me acute sight, so I have to resort to other means of tricking my mind.
    The processed slide film was exactly as I had anticipated: awful, but promising. As I thought and sketched and played with images of the wall in the ensuing weeks, I began to conclude that I needed a tall, shapely, leggy, female dancer-model. I’d always needed one of those, but this time it was for art.

    Dr. Karine came into my life at the end of that July, and stayed on. She not only has the required physical characteristics, but also a deeply formed intellect and the great gift of a sense of fun. She offered to find the props, brilliant red tights and perfectly color-matched opera gloves. I borrowed a brass trombone, the length of the slide being a counterpoint to the length of the model’s legs. I found out later that, when assembling the instrument, I’d placed the spit valve wrongly, but that doesn’t affect the design. Nonetheless, I offer my apologies to trombonists everywhere.
    Each day we watched for perfect light conditions, and one day we got them: bright sunlight beautifully diffused by mist, a not unusual condition for San Francisco. I posed Karine to maximize the saturated color effect, red-gloved hands holding the trombone as no musician would, red-tights-clad legs off the ground to imply dance, face obscured for enigma. To cover slight variations, I shot ninety-two frames.

    I had promised to make her a cover girl. The final image, “Brass Tights,” became a magazine cover (PSA Journal) and won the second award in the Royal Photographic Society’s annual International Exhibition, then known as the “World Grand Prix.” Thus, for a glorious one hundred and twenty-fifth of a second (at f8), I became the second-best photographer in the whole damn world. It left me with a remaining potential of 14 minutes, 59.992 seconds of fame.
    Because new techniques have enabled us to tinker forever with images and text, the work is never done. I’ve alluded to this in a previous column, “The Thirty-Year Snapshot.” So, I’ve occasionally worked on this image again, first changing it to a partially solarized silvery monochrome, and just recently using my remaining minutes of fame (and more) to add fruit to the original. The latest version is called “The Lemonade Trombone.” Click on the image. Maybe next year I’ll fix the spit valve.
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    © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form. 
    Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

  • Our Independence – A Work In Progress

    In 1964, the United States Embassy in Pretoria, South Africa, had two Fourth of July parties. One was for people of all ethnicities. The other was a reception for government officials, “sanitized” for whites only. Invited to attend, I declined, repelled by this American tolerance of apartheid. 
    A few days later, I visited the Embassy to talk with Public Affairs Officer Dr. Argus J. Tresidder about my upcoming departure to the United States as a Fulbright grantee. When I told him of my annoyance with how the Embassy had behaved on the Fourth, he suggested I express my views to Ambassador Joseph Satterthwaite. From the smile on his face, I could see that he fully expected me to accept the challenge. He was right. Growing up in South Africa, and having worked for the heroine of the parliamentary opposition, Helen Suzman, MP, had been excellent training for speaking truth to power. I followed Argus to the Ambassador’s office and made my opinion of His Excellency’s shameful conduct quite clear, in notably undiplomatic language. Argus, still smiling, escorted me back to his office before the Ambassador could recover.
    In early December of that year, I returned to my birth city, Cape Town, to say goodbye to my parents before leaving for my new American life. In the evenings we walked together on the Sea Point beachfront, looking out across the water to a clearly visible Robben Island, where, six months earlier, a “terrorist” by the name of Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned. It had been an interesting year. Two days before the Fourth of July, President Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.
    Returning to Pretoria, I walked across town to the great terrace of the Union Buildings to pause there and say farewell to my country. I could never have imagined that, thirty years later, a liberated Nelson Mandela would be inaugurated as his country’s President on that very spot, and that in 2012 South Africa’s currency would feature his portrait.
    On the tenth anniversary of my departure from South Africa I became an American citizen. In the course of those years I read widely in American history, while also witnessing the experience of the Civil Rights Movement. This year I shall be celebrating my forty-eighth in-country Fourth of July. While many of my compatriots will be watching fireworks displays and people dressed in eighteenth-century costume re-enacting scenes of the time, the day will mean something else to me. I was born and raised within the British Commonwealth, and have family and close friends in England. My visits to Britain have been delightful, and I do not hold any grudges against King George III or his descendants.
    For me, our Independence is not so much about the past, but about the continuing dynamic of our country. It’s about becoming independent of all forms of prejudice, discrimination and anti-science foolishness. It’s not only about following the trajectory of our Founding Fathers and their astonishing brilliance, but about holding dear the lessons of a continuing momentum for extending civil rights. It’s about recognizing that this country, and indeed no country, can afford to continue “traditional” attitudes to minorities, women and gays. It’s to value not only Jefferson and Franklin, but also Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez and the pioneers of gay and women’s rights. It’s to celebrate that previously excluded groups now include high government, business and academic figures. It’s to rejoice in the courage of Lily Ledbetter’s struggle for equal pay; Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the DOMA case; and Texas State Senator Wendy Davis. The arc of our Independence continues to move forward, perhaps more slowly than some would like, but nevertheless it moves.
    Just days ago, our black President addressed Africa’s future in a speech at my alma mater, the University of Cape Town. A thousand miles to the north, one of his heroes and mine, Nelson Mandela, lies in a hospital while the world waits. I believe the United States Embassy in Pretoria has had only a single Fourth of July party per year for decades now. The arc moves.
    Before the destruction of New York City’s Twin Towers, my American-born francophone wife encountered a French tourist couple on the observation deck. They told her that they admired America’s dynamism, but observed condescendingly “La civilisation ça viendra” – civilization will (eventually) come. They were wrong. Civilization has been evolving here all along, but it is unlike Europe’s more constrained and settled curriculum. In every field of human endeavor, American civilization is a magnificent work in progress. Commemorating the history of our Independence is only the preface to building our future. I have great nostalgia for that future.
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    © Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form.
    Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

  • Across Three Continents: A Greek Fable in a Jewish Story

    Many, many years ago, in deep midsummer, I journeyed to consult with the wisest of all people, the Oracle of Delphi. The arduous horseback ride north of Athens was quite uncomfortable, especially the last twenty kilometers into the mountains.
    Arriving at the top of the hill, where the temple is located, I sank to the ground and rested on the cool, shaded marble, drinking copiously from an unglazed amphora of cold water provided by an acolyte. I sat there, quietly and reflectively, for perhaps an hour, before being summoned into the presence of the Oracle.
    We looked into each other’s eyes for what seemed a long time, and then she asked why I had come. “Well,” I said, “though I’m still a young man, I’ve been wondering what kind of eggonòs I shall have.” That’s Greek for grandson, and of course we were speaking in Greek, but I’ll translate this dialogue into English for your benefit.
    To my great surprise, she answered my question with another question, strongly suggesting that she too may have been Jewish.
    “Well, what kind of eggonòs would you like?”
    I answered “A fine boy, with a very good mind and fluent tongue, and an imagination so grand as to encompass the universe. You see, Ms. Oracle (we were not yet on first name terms), our friend Albert Einstein once wrote that imagination is more important than knowledge. And it wouldn’t hurt if he were also affectionate and handsome.”
    “You want a lot, don’t you? That’ll cost you an extra hundred drachmas.”
    So I placed the golden coin on the marble altar, bowed and took my leave. I returned to Athens by nightfall the following day, and had a fine dinner of avgolemono, spanakopita, roast lamb and a full bottle of retsina, which ensured a deep sleep, and, by morning, a considerable headache.
    I soon forgot about this episode. Decades went by, until, in the autumn of 1999, my son-in-law handed me a small bundle, a baby wrapped in a blanket, and said these poignant words: “Would you like to hold your grandson?” It was, and I knew it then, a moment that would forever change my life.

    And I want to tell you about that.
    What does this lad mean to me? I am the South African-born refugee immigrant son of Jewish refugee immigrants from a darkening Europe. Unlike his father’s family, which has longer roots in the United States, my grandson is, on my side of the family, the very first American born to American-born parents, Jon and Ruth. He and his siblings are my own heritage as well as their own future.
    If they take great care to protect their rights and responsibilities by exercising them well, they will never need to know the pain of leaving their family, their homes, their friends, their country, and having to start all over again. That makes my own early long and difficult effort to secure a future in the United States so much more worthwhile, so much dearer to me. We’re home.

    An illness prevented me from saying these words at my grandson David’s recent Barmitzvah. This column gives me the opportunity to correct that by writing that I love him and his sisters greatly, and that his beautiful Lithuanian great-grandmother would have been astonished by her great-grandchildren.
    As part of my education, I was happily exposed to the ancient mythologies of Rome, Greece and both testaments of the Bible. My grandson seems captivated mostly by futuristic mythologies. But he should know that the Oracle of Delphi turned out to be completely right, and surely deserves another hundred drachmas.
    Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.

  • Art Minus One: Creating in Solitude, Living in Society

    Aloneness, solitude, is frequently a choice, even a necessity. Loneliness, however, implies a yearning for connection. Both are conditions familiar to artists, and sometimes flow into each other. The literature, including poetry, on aloneness and loneliness, is more than ample. Some of it is encouraging, some empathetic, some contradictory, some reconciliatory and some so distressing as to itself cause the depression from which it may well have arisen.
    Art is almost never done by committee. It often takes what painter, filmmaker, director, author Rebecca Miller – and many others – call the dark and lonely grind. At the same time we also know that artistic innovation does not happen in is own bubble, but comes from all of life’s formations: family, education, acculturation and experiences, especially social contact. It’s the expressive product of the sum of the good and the painful.
     
    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, “Talents are best nurtured in solitude. Character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.” Writing specifically from a woman’s point of view, Barbara de Angelis said, “Women need real moments of solitude and self-reflection to balance out how much of ourselves we give away.” Aldous Huxley, aware of the conflict between solitude and fellowship claimed “The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline to regions of solitude.” These are mirrors of words written or spoken by Thoreau and Einstein.
     
    So here I am, at this very moment of writing, having to guard my solitude against the swell of gregariousness which has characterized so much of my life. When working on my images, the distinction used to be even more pronounced than now, for I once labored sealed in the gloomy loneliness of a chemical darkroom. Now that I work digitally in a room filled with light, music and the distant sound-connections of a city, the need for solitude seems just as vital. 
     
    Then, when the work is done, the expanding umbilical connection with humanity becomes as important as the solitude of creation. Now is the time to show the work, to open it, to expose it and oneself to the “stormy billows,” and try to achieve the character that Goethe wrote about. As we need the private, so also do we need the public.

    I’ve tried to characterize my condition with an image of a tiny clump of foliage exposed in space, subject to the winds and weather of my own mind, but retaining a slender connection to the society of which I am a part and from which I draw nourishment. It is titled Autobiography. I am a single artist, creating alone, but needing peers with whom to exchange ideas, and a chorus with whom to sing my picture-songs.
     
    All my adult life, I’ve enjoyed attending galleries or concerts partly to overhear the opinions of others. Once in a while, when my own art is exhibited in a public place, I conspire to visit the gallery anonymously and do the same. I don’t believe that artists are the final arbiters of their own art. We all have limited vision, limited comprehension, and so the expressed thoughts of others are a great source of learning. Sometimes they are also a great source of surprise. There are delightful occasions when I learn how much smarter I am than I’d thought. Yes, of course I must have known that my photographs have a clearly direct connection with the mythology of the Mahabharata!
     
    Twenty years ago, when I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, I had been under some pressure to get my portfolio to their Bath headquarters in time for the judging. As my darkroom was being renovated, I used one in a friend’s home. I ran out of the gelatin silver print paper I’d chosen, so my host offered me her own. As a result, about a third of the work was printed on paper with a different texture than the rest. A kind friend recorded jurors’ comments and sent me the tape. One of them remarked about the unusual brilliance of choosing different paper textures to emphasize the peculiarities of specific images. It was a much more satisfying explanation than I could have invented. I took that as an institutional confirmation of my unconscious genius. (hic ridete)

    The invention of the compact disk and its ability to be electronically encoded made it possible for my friend and neighbor, clarinetist Bill Larson, to found a company in 1986 called To Make Music. It had much the same purpose as Music Minus One, a successful enterprise founded in 1950, very shortly after the invention of the 33 rpm vinyl LP. This new technology extended the playing time on each side from about five minutes to over twenty minutes. The CD extends this period for far longer, so it is possible for a private soloist to perform quite large works with recorded accompaniment without unwanted technical interruption. Bill has long since retired, but if he desires an appreciative human audience, all he has to do is assemble his hot clarinet, poke it out the window and play his heart out. This is a very music-friendly neighborhood.
     
    So where do we graphic artists go for our Art Minus One, for our vital connection between solitude and society? We know that in order to create we require solitude, but we also require society and our peers in order to have a life filled with the psychic benefits of being social animals. These conditions are complementary. Remove either and the other is damaged. 
     
    In his book Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience (1990), psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes: 
    “To fill time with activities that require concentration, that increase skills, that lead to a development of the self, is not the same as killing time by watching television…A person who rarely gets bored, who does not constantly need a favorable external environment to enjoy the moment, has passed the test for having achieved a creative life.”

    We are the sole, singular creators of our art. To pursue our ambitions we depend on the belief that what we create has a necessary role in the aggregation of what we call civilization. 
     
    There are, of course, the usual avenues for enlivening that slender branch between our creativity and the source and target of our life in society. These include formal and informal exhibition and publication. Here too we have our wonderful new technologies to make this possible. Like our fellow performing artists, we now have websites and the internet. Our images are seen and responded to in distant places. We are part of the symphony and antiphony of the world.
     
    Just two weeks before I wrote this, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands opened the long-awaited renewed and glorious Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. There is a photograph of her standing before Rembrandt’s Night Watch in the Hall of Honor. Peter Schjeldahl, in The New Yorker of April 22, 2013, writes that, as he viewed the painting, “I had a moment of fancying the almost hundred-and-eighty-five-square-foot canvas as a raft for the self-respect of Western civilization. One of us did that!”
     
    A healthy creative life requires us to be both soloists and members of the chorus.
     
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    Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.