Ideas in Photography

David Hockney is a genius. To see his work in several media is to become deeply entwined in what Arthur Koestler, in his book The Act Of Creation, calls ‘the magic synthesis’- that intimate, lasting bond between an artist and the audience. It’s as profound as, for instance, the deliberate act of listening to every note, every emotion, every moment of brilliance in Haydn’s music. Hockney has a magnificent show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, David Hockney: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life. In a recent PBS interview with Jeffrey Brown, he said that painting isn’t dead, which assured and delighted me, and that photography isn’t good enough, especially as the latter takes only ‘a snap’. Hockney’s portrait subjects, he said, were obliged to sit for twenty hours over a period of three days, and even that may not have been enough time to complete the work. A former acquaintance of mine also referred to photographs as ‘snaps’ — which is one of several reasons that he is now a former! As a frequent photographic portraitist, I’ve never had the work completed in a snap. It’s just never happened. If the snap refers to the shutter release, it’s an anticlimax, a stop along the way between pre-visualization and post-production, both of which entail a great deal of time and labor. I don’t wish to get into an argument about the relative merits of painting versus photography. I love both art forms, and those who excel in either are remarkable artists. Some deeply wise person said: “I like some paintings more than most photographs, and some photographs more than most paintings.” Nowadays, it is not at all strange to find pictures that display rare merit in combinations of both media. Mr. Hockney, a consummate artist, knows that perfectly well. I believe he’s teasing…or I must be missing something! I do a lot of portraits, and have yet to be satisfied with the sound of a released shutter. I have portraits that I’ve been in the process of refining for days, months, sometimes years. Some not continuously, I’ll admit, but not sporadically either. Changes have come with increased aesthetic awareness, a kind of intellectual evolution, as well as consciousness of technological change, and my desire to ‘be a beginner’ as Rainer Maria Rilke would have it. My comfort zone is the discomfort of challenge. It has become possible to combine portions of images, some of which were made years ago, to enrich a final portrait. Here is one such example: Miriam at 100, the Melody Continues. The background is a repeated single image, made many years ago, fashioned into a combination of two images, mutually reversed in overlapping orientation and tonality to signify night and day, suggesting the passage of time, also inherent in the subject. Among my oldest friends is Professor Christopher Johnson, a notable thinker at the California College of the Arts, and also at my dining table. I never have enough of his company, and I like to think that our conversations could go to nearly midnight if I didn’t require the sleep. My author friend Risa Nye infuses both her literature and her readers with the infectious fullness of her presence. Her last book There Was A Fire Here: A Memoir, was published for the 25th anniversary of the 1991 East Bay Firestorm, which cost lives and consumed many homes, including hers. The image evolved from hours of thought about her personality and her experience of the fire. My friend James Rehmus is a deeply scientifically oriented physician by training, and a deeply committed, impassioned painter. My honorary sister, Susan Lambert, physician, musician, artist and wondrous conversationalist, applies some of her considerable talent to making beautiful art quilts. The model for Sounds of San Francisco is closest of all, my bride of 31 years, Karine Schomer, scholar, writer, linguist, historian, musician, editor, and the center of my world. As with Mr. Hockney’s portraits, my sitters are also close friends of long duration, and no money exchanged hands. My greatest pleasure is to portray people of my own generation and build narrative into the image. On occasion I like to play with the concept of time, usually regarded as intrinsic and fixed in the photographic image. I’m reminded of Rembrandt’s fiction, Aristotle With The Bust of Homer. a painting done by the artist in 1653 A.D., of a 4th Century B.C. philosopher gazing at the bust of an 8th Century B.C. poet. Now, using modern digital tools, I was able to portray two young girls as approximately ten-year old companions. Yet the child on the left, my daughter Ruth Ann, is the mother of the child on the right, my granddaughter Hannah. My ideal for commissioned portraits is contained in the sensibility of Oliver Cromwell, who, addressing Sir Peter Lely, painter of the Windsor Beauties, is reputed to have warned: 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. That statement is included in my piece titled Portraiture: Beyond The Face. I’d like to start a conversation with Mr. Hockney. His age at 80 seems to spark special interest, as though it were surprising that an octogenarian can still be so productive. I hope they’re wrong. I’m 79, David, and if you are willing to converse with me and sit for a photographic portrait, I’ll fly to see you from my home in the Bay Area, and let’s see what I can do with your presence. I’m sure the ideas will come. _________________________________________________________ © 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 … Read more

I am not now, nor ever have been, a threat to the reputation of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. I had climbed Table Mountain, then almost in my back yard, and the view of my birth city, Cape Town, and its harbor, from the elevation of 3,500 feet, was spectacular. That effort made few demands on me other than to remember a hat, a water bottle, and to wear stout walking shoes. Six years before Hillary and Tenzing had thrilled the world with their ascent of Everest in 1953, King George VI had visited Cape Town and, impeccably dressed in suit and tie, had walked up Table Mountain in the more relaxed company of his shirt-sleeved wartime friend, Field Marshall Jan Christiaan Smuts, then Prime Minister of South Africa. Memories are such an important part of inspiration. More than sixty years later, climbing mountains is well beyond my physical capacity, but it still stirs my imagination, so I have to make mountains that I can climb in my fantasies. As an artist, I have long since learned the lesson that to name objects is to dismiss them, to conceal and therefore steal their uses as design elements, as other than the uses which their creators had intended. A corkscrew can be, with a little thought, a remarkable sculpture, as can be so many of the things we take for granted at home or beyond. We have the choice of seeing them for what they prosaically are, or experiencing what they can be. We can read the labels, or we can drink the wine and discover truth. Some years ago, my wife brought me a gift from the studio of my favorite ceramicist, the renowned Catharine Hiersoux, who is also a neighbor. I was captivated by the design. Catharine’s products are usually smoothly elegant and subtly glazed. I have several examples. This was not. It was rough, craggy, almost, do I dare say it, unfinished, and therefore, a stimulant to my imagination. It wasn’t just a vase, so it might be something else, many other things. Each time I saw it, I remained puzzled by its draw on me. And then, having examined it from every angle, one morning I upended it, and found my mountain, Mt. Hiersoux. Over a period of weeks, I thought of how I could represent it in my studio. When I felt the desire for authentication of my effort, I sent an image to my friend Edwin Bernbaum, scholar, mountaineer, conservationist, identifying the peak as Mt. Arjun Niwas in the southern part of the Aravalli Range in western Rajasthan. He admitted an unfamiliarity, which I found most encouraging. The next part of the process was finding an appropriate, dramatic sky background, rendered simple by the beautiful, color-saturated winter sunsets that illuminate the western windows of my home overlooking San Francisco Bay. Then came the need for a light snowfall on the upper reaches of Mt. Hiersoux. For that I’m grateful to the manufacturers of Gillette Foamy Shaving Cream (original flavor), which made unnecessary a trip to the Sierras in winter. The last element was finding an appropriate human figure in the foreground. Among my friends is the prolific environmental author Kenneth Brower, son of the late David Brower, mountaineer, environmental advocate, former executive director of the Sierra Club, founder of Friends of the Earth. Ken also looked right: a handsome bearded gentleman, made even more right by wearing my favorite cold weather sweater, navy watch cap, and a pair of goggles borrowed from a neighbor. Ken’s face is never far from a warm smile, but I urged him to look fierce and determined, about to face his coming climbing ordeal. A decade ago, after coronary bypass surgery, I contracted e.coli in the hospital and was confined at home for almost a year. To sustain me through that great difficulty, I photographed the most quotidian of objects in my home, watching the light move daily from one side of the house to the other, using photography to prevent despair. The book Light and Recovery: Vaulting the Walls (2011) was the result, and I got into the habit of an imagination that expanded as my freedom of movement contracted. I learned first-hand the dramatic notion of creative augmentation in the face of narrowing parameters. I believe they are essential partners. It’s called focus. I titled the final image Scaling Mt. Hiersoux. A matter of scale, really. _________________________________________________________ © 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 GREAT INDOORS was originally published in Click the Shutter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A friend who is a fine, accomplished and well-published poet recently stopped by. She looked at one of the pictures on the dining room wall and said “Photoshop?” I said “Cerebrum.” Then I asked her what word processor she used to compose her poems. From her chastened look, I gathered the message had leaked through. I continue to be dismayed at how many photography publications request, and print, details of photographers’ equipment. Yet, I don’t see literary magazines demanding and revealing the kind of pens, pencils, typewriters, paper, computers, printers, word processing programs used by their authors. What is this fetish with mechanics all about? I think it is largely fueled by asking the delusional, wrong question: “How did you do this (so I can replicate your steps and show off my creativity?)” The right question might be “Why did you do this?” and other variations of inquiry about observation, interpretation, philosophy, mentation. I’ve been writing and lecturing about this for decades, but that’s a hint that the message hasn’t yet gone viral! Even the world’s oldest continuous photographic publication, the Journal of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, does this. When examining a photograph do I really give a laxative about which camera, lens or tripod was used? A few months ago, the educated, cultured, and very personable Editor of the Journal called from Glasgow to interview me at some length on my portfolio Light and Recovery. Next month, the September issue will carry some of that work. We talked of the many, many things that go into making a portfolio of images and text, not the least of it being the intensely personal history and emotions involved. Then, at the end of the call, she asked “What kind of equipment did you use?” I responded “Mostly my brain. Does that make me different?” Other than saturated cultural conditioning, there may have been practical, subtle, even entirely unconscious reasons for the question. The Journal carries quite a few advertisements from manufacturers and retailers, and I am aware of how vitally important that support is for a non-profit organization, known in the U.K. as a “charity.” Less than a year ago I prevailed upon the Director-General of the Royal Photographic to terminate the Society’s common practice of limiting entries to exhibitions and competitions on the basis of when the image was made. I did this for two principal reasons: unless dealing with the scholarship of especially precious, unique, or antique photographs, aesthetics should be the primary issue, not provenance; and because of technological innovation, a photograph can easily evolve and become a combination of several images made at different times. I’ve changed or added to photographs that first began their life on film more than thirty years ago. The Society used to request information on where the photographs were made, which makes not much more sense. Mine are commonly made north of my neck and in the region of our planet, though there are exceptions. I originally arrived from outer space, you know. My first published photograph, a monochrome picture of runners at a high school track event, made it into a newspaper in Cape Town when I was a teenager. Even then I resisted numerical reductionism. When an editor insisted, I wrote 1/10,000 of a second at f64. I was astonished when they printed that. It didn’t have to make sense. In previous lectures and publications I have talked about the analogy of teaching cooking by emphasizing organic ingredients, nutrition, health, presentation and sensual delight, without spending much time on the structure of a stove. Recently I came across a short, pithy, and pointed article by Texas artist Jann Alexander “How to talk to a photographer like she’s an artist.” It’s a good read from a good artist. It must be good: she thinks the way I do. At a reception in San Francisco some years ago, a senior Indian diplomat told me that the essence of photography is the direction in which you point the camera. He might have added that the essence of literature is in the choice of words. As a student and former professor of international relations, a similar riposte about diplomacy sprinted into my mind. Uncharacteristically, I was diplomatic enough to smile and keep my thoughts where my photography dwells: in my brain. But I confess that I took great comfort from the then-unexpressed thought that I knew much more about diplomacy than he did about photography. As to equipment, I once insisted to a magazine editor that I wouldn’t reveal the brand of camera I used until Nikon paid me for the advertisement. _________________________________________________________ © 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

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 … Read more

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. _________________________________________________________ © 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.

She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I couldn’t avert my gaze for many minutes. Her eyes met and held mine for that entire time. I knew then that in the years to come, she would have an effect on my life and work. The red hair, those amazing blue eyes, the perfect symmetry of her face, as though it had been manufactured with fine tools rather than being the random product of mere human genes. I never did find out her name, but decided to call her Siobhan, Irish being somewhat exotic in my family. I met her in Santa Cruz, where she worked as a wax mannequin in a store window. That was thirty years ago, and I remember it as though it had been yesterday. A few years later, once again heading south on one of many trips to Carmel-by-the-Sea, I spent time photographing at the Carmel Mission, particularly the south wall, where there was a lovely confluence of sculpture, foliage and weathered paint. It’s just the kind of place, I thought, that Siobhan would love, so I conspired to put them together. They’ve been together ever since, without a word of complaint. I’m sure she’s Catholic. Several years went by and Karine and I purchased a home in the East Bay. Conveniently, the house next door was bought by a contractor and his family, and though Rob subsequently did very good work for us, he was also busy reconstructing his own home. On his north wall, a levered bathroom window appeared, and day by day I watched as the light sketched new images through my dining room window. By now it had reached my twenty-fifth anniversary with Siobhan, and the image of her and her Carmel Mission home continued to linger in my mind. The wall next door became more important to me during a period of illness, the difficulty relieved each time I concentrated my attention on making photographs. While Siobhan remained the exotic, the wall next door became my daily palette. This week I worked on combining them, in what an art historian friend called “the perfect yin-yang of photography”: negative becoming positive and, upon rotation, positive becoming negative, fitted into the dual-sized negative and positive “frames” of the window next door. This month Siobhan and I celebrate our thirtieth anniversary together. We are neighbors, now. She’s lost some pigment (as have I), but is still as beautiful as the day we met. For decades I’ve claimed that pressing the shutter release button on a camera is an anti-climax, not a climax, or, at the very least, a premature climax. There’s so much more to be done. Kodak invented the slogan “You press the button. We do the rest.” Really? Did Kodak invent the term “snapshot?” They may have been right. The last thirty years have gone by in a snap. Is there still a Kodak? __________ 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.

Earlier in my life, when I was much more engaged with politics and macro-economics, I was offered an executive position in the international department of a major bank. During the interview I was asked about my economic philosophy, particularly whether I tended to side with Milton Friedman of the Chicago School, or John Maynard Keynes. As I have never believed in rigid categories, I responded “Sometimes bits of both, sometimes borrowing from the thoughts of many, including Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, Karl Marx, David Ricardo.” I declined the offer. In the last 25 years as I’ve been more deeply engaged in the art of photography, I’ve encountered much of the same kind of thinking. During a college radio interview I was asked about my photographic inspirations, my icons, my exemplars. I knew what my interlocutor wanted – the usual names of great photographers – but I decided to be truthful: “That’s an easy question. Their names are Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare, Vermeer, van Gogh, Dali, Magritte, Picasso. Many others.” As a photographer, am I confined to the thinking and processes of photographers alone? Why can’t I take my inspiration from anything or anyone? From a Keats poem, from a friend’s letters, from the feelings engendered by embracing my loved ones, from my own fantasies and dreams? I am so grateful for the marvelous work done in the relatively brief, but immensely rich photographic history from Daguerre, Fox Talbot, Silvy, Watkins, the early 20th century Photo Secession, to more moderns Brandt, Cartier-Bresson, Adams, Weston, Bullock, Bernhard, the brilliance of surrealist Jerry Uelsmann, the brooding, tonally rich, sometimes minimalist qualities of West Coast contemporary Michael Kenna. So much to admire, so much to learn. Comparisons are delicious. SFMOMA, in its former civic center quarters, had a major exhibition for the sesquicentennial. I recall looking closely at two adjacent pieces, one a giant flower print by Robert Mapplethorpe, the other a small contact print, titled “Nude Foot,” by Minor White. I thought the exquisite subtlety of the White dominated the neighborhood. As I stood there, the curator of photography, Dr. Sandra Phillips, passed by. I asked her the gently provocative question whether the juxtaposition had happened by chance. She cheerfully replied “Nothing here happens by chance!” All these artists have something in common. They are all coryphaei, leaders of thought, pioneers in one form or another. We are all familiar with the scene where painting students set up easels in museums and attempt to copy great works. That may have some utility, but I suspect not as much as it would seem. Translating that into my own medium, I know from visits to Yosemite National Park that many thousands of photographers try repeatedly to capture their own inner (or outer) Adams. It would not surprise me to learn that some have brought models to pose nude in discreet places at Point Lobos, or a nearby beach, to “do” a Bullock (Wynn or Edna). No doubt vegetable stands sell some peppers for the inevitable purpose of mimicking Weston. A wealthy stockbroker friend (with a nice camera!) once asked me to co-author a book with him, a manual for the very busy traveling corporate executive, one that would show great spots from which to photograph when time is restricted, as in the lunch hour. I await the arrival of an “app,” which, combined with Google Earth and radar, will show the tripod holes of famous photographers. Coryphaei, leaders, tend to create followers, who perhaps – to be truthful – create themselves. Again, much like the painting students doing copies, they are acolytes. There may well be some useful purpose in mimicking the works of the great, but it seems to me that the effort should at least be time-limited. The best acolytes serve self-imposed, intensive but relatively brief apprenticeships, then move on to their own distinctly individual disciplines. Imitation isn’t flattery. After a short time, it becomes, at best, sycophancy. We know about the need for children to “individuate” from their parents. (As a father I’ve recently learned how important it is for parents to individuate from their offspring). Is this not also true in art? When we’ve learned from the greats, and when they’ve learned from us, their acolytes, is it not time to separate, to individuate? How often are we condemned to repetition or even to the most benign of plagiarisms? Ted Orland, who began his career as an assistant to Ansel Adams, shows originality and great wit in his works, including a very different take on Yosemite. As far as I know, Michael Kenna, who once served as an assistant to Ruth Bernhard, has not done any nudes in boxes. Holding a recording in my hand, I once rushed down to visit an old friend who was then the conductor of a symphony orchestra. My purpose was to persuade him to include Muzio Clementi’s third symphony (“The Great National”) in future programming. Maestro: “Why should I?” Me: “He sounds a lot like Beethoven.” Maestro: “Well, if you like Beethoven, play Beethoven!” The Maestro’s fine musicianship exceeded his knowledge of history. Clementi preceded Beethoven, influenced him and was his London publisher. But you get the point. Epigones are the least talented of all. They may have been failed or tardy acolytes, or those who simply never had much going for them in the first place. They have a lot in common with musicologist Peter Schickele’s fictional character, P.D.Q. Bach, “the last and least” of J.S. Bach’s many children. “In an age when it was common to steal from other composers, he was the only one to use tracing paper.” As I’m impatient, I don’t have much acolytic material in my DNA, or perhaps I choose to “borrow” subtly, carefully, widely, from the best of many diverse sources, including myself. The embedded image above, hommage to René Magritte, is probably the closest I’ve ever gotten. Click on it and it will take you to the photograph and related text on my website. The … Read more