Raphael Shevelev Ideas in Photography

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  • The Thirty-Year Snapshot

    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?
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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.
     

  • Coryphaei, Acolytes and Epigones

    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 best of the coryphaei are committed to the development of more coryphaei. I know Michael Kenna’s purpose does not include creating Kennites. I have no wish to create Raphaelites, but I fear I may be too late.
    Go forth boldly. If not boldly, go anyway. But go.
    (Click on the embedded image to see the story)
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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.

  • Come Let Us Play

    Creating is difficult and demanding work. Ask any creator. We know it requires a synthesis of imagination and high technical skill, but we frequently forget that the act of creating is also allied to humor and play. Play is thought of as a childish pursuit, not appropriate for adults in an increasingly technological and empirical world. There’s a story about a man who explains to his little daughter that his job is to teach adults to draw. “You mean they forget?” she asks. Yes, they do. So, before we go further into the meanings of creativity, I’d like to invite you to come play with me. Sometimes it is challenging, but as often it is great fun.
    I’ve been a close observer of my grandson, who has just reached his early teens. Over the years I’ve been enthralled with his rich and deep imagination, and his ability to invent fantastic “special machines” meant to accomplish all manner of tasks. David is a 21st century child, aware of much of the technology with which we live. And while I have delighted in his endless imagination, which, incidentally, has helped to stimulate my own, I could also feel his frustration at not having the executive skills to realize his fantasies.
    So this is the tipping point, where, as they grow up, children are rewarded for empiricism and “the right answers” and increasingly encouraged to avoid fantasy and risk. It’s the real world. Even in California, as close as we are to the innovations of Silicon Valley, in public education there seems to be an inverse proportion in emphasis between imagination and executive abilities. We need to have both. And we have to recognize that frustration is a gift, admittedly well disguised, an obstacle which rewards those who overcome.

    When I have taught courses at arts institutions on the creative process using the medium of photography, the last thing I could possibly have thought of was to begin – or even end – with discussions of cameras and lenses. I would enter the classroom and ask my students for a description of their equipment, and hear “Canon,” “Nikon,” Olympus” and other manufacturers. It was a trick question. What I really wanted them to be aware of was their own natural equipment, their senses, their brains, their anatomy, their acculturation and education. That’s the real photographic equipment. That’s the real equipment of the painter and the author, not the brush or the pen. It’s why I called the course The Eye’s Mind.
    I have little interest in the mechanics, and great interest in perception and understanding the narrative of pictorial language. Were I to teach a class on cooking, would I really begin with the anatomy and function of stoves and pans, rather than with nutrition and taste? That’s what manuals are for. Let us not be boring.
    For my students, their first assignment was to bring to class one or two pictures found in magazines, books, catalogues, even family albums that fascinated them, and discuss them. Getting them enthusiastic about images was the engine that drove their enthusiastic acquisition of technical ability so they could author their own. 
    My friend, photographer Lady Ines Roberts, once told me that her engineer husband, Sir Gilbert, a delightfully smart, kind and generous-spirited man, invited her into his office and drew diagrams on the whiteboard of the focal length and acceptance angles of lenses, “thereby retarding my progress for two years.” At exhibitions of my own work, it’s always a man, never a woman, who approaches me with a compliment “I love your work,” and immediately follows with “What kind of camera do you use?” In a jocular moment, Brooks Jensen, the editor/publisher of LensWork reminded me that “When you buy a camera, you’re a photographer, and when you buy a violin, you own a violin.”  Mechanical instruments, however necessary, should not be confused with artistic expression.
    Creation requires the willingness to be thought of as foolish, often wrong, and to value the words of our critics. It takes considerable courage. Think of it as a kind of exploration, where the process and the ends are uncertain. There are no maps. Innovation requires the defeat of habit. We are an explorative species, but we also seek the comforts of revealed truths and established taxonomies. When I was new to photography, I kept hearing about the compositional “rule of thirds,” in which a rectangular field is subdivided into nine segments, with the idea that any element of significance should be placed on one of the four internal intersections to make the greatest visual impact. My mental compass rebelled at the thought of this prepackaging. It was happily supported not only by looking closely at many images and reading the stories behind them, but by Leonardo’s words in his Treatise on Painting: “Those who create by rule, create nothing but confusion.”
    What really counts is the intellectual bridge between artist and audience, what Arthur Koestler in The Act of Creation called “the magic synthesis.” That synthesis depends on the ability of the artist to hold and guide the attention of the audience, often with the interruption of logical flow. That’s the connection to humor and play. Is it possible to experience the work of inventive comedians, surrealists, cartoonists, playwrights and architects without knowing that our senses are being tweaked and therefore intrigued?
    For those who wish to explore the subject of creativity more fully, there are fine books by Robert Grudin (The Grace of Great Things), psychologists Rollo May (The Courage to Create), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Creativity), and that delightful read by photographers David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear. You may also be interested in my own essay for the Royal Photographic Society and LensWork, Creation: A Journey to the Reflecting Pool.
    Innovation breeds innovation. Let us play.
    (Click on the embedded image to see the story)
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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 a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, and 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.

  • Icon: My Journey Home

    In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, my father would occasionally bring home from the synagogue on Friday nights a person or couple who had survived the Holocaust.
    In the warm South African summer of 1945-6, I saw a number on a dinner guest’s arm. When I asked him about it, he looked at my mother and she gave a barely perceptible shake of her head, so a child’s question went unanswered. My parents were then, and remained thereafter, quite remarkably silent about the catastrophe. Curiosity was partially satisfied when I began to sing in the choir of the Vredehoek Synagogue, and on the single time I can recall him rolling up his shirtsleeves, I saw a similar number on the arm of the Cantor, Jakob Lichterman, a Polish refugee whose fine lyric tenor voice and sweet temperament remain pleasant memories. I didn’t find out much more until my freshman year at the University of Cape Town, a time of wonderful intellectual opportunity both inside and outside the classrooms. It left me, then as a student, and later as a professor in the United States, with the clear understanding that lecture halls are just a fraction of where learning occurs.
    I spent much of that year in the basement of UCT’s Jagger Library, reading the newspaper stories of the events from British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s signing of the Munich Agreement in the year of my birth, 1938, to the surrender of German armed forces to Field Marshal Montgomery at Luneberg Heath in May, 1945. Some of my formal academic work was neglected, in favor of an education about the numbers on victims’ arms. Almost a decade after graduation, I introduced a course on race as a factor in international relations at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I’d had good preparation: the son of fugitive European Jews, raised in apartheid South Africa.
    In 1946, a young American couple from Chicago, Howard and Elsie Schomer, accepted an invitation from Pastor Andre Trocme to help with postwar reconstruction in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a French village on the plateau west of Lyon. They took their infant daughter Karine along with them, and stayed there for ten years. The story of Le Chambon is now well known. During the years of the Second World War this largely Huguenot village offered refuge, and therefore life, to about five thousand Jews escaping from the predations of the Nazis. In what Philip Hallie in his book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, called “a conspiracy of goodness,” the heroic rescue was presided over by Pastor Trocme and his wife Magda, and the center of it all revolved around the Protestant church, the temple.
    It is a sacred place for Jews, too, and indeed for all humanity. The story has also been told in the film Weapons Of The Spirit, made by family friend Pierre Sauvage, once one of the rescued children, and by a more recent book, We Only Know Men: The Rescue of Jews In France During The Holocaust, by my friend, Patrick Gerard Henry, Emeritus Professor of French at Whitman College, Oregon.
    Howard Schomer worked as one of the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948. South Africa and the Soviet Union abstained. In later years he would serve as President of the Chicago Theological Seminary, and in 1965 walked with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the march on the bridge at Selma, Alabama. I first encountered my future father-in-law when I saw the documentary footage of the march.

     I have spent the last twenty-five years largely in the pursuit of photography and writing, and have made thousands of images in the Americas, Europe and Asia, as well as many “conceptual-art” pieces constructed for the purpose in my studio. So I’ve decided to nominate one of my own images as my personal icon.
    Famous artists usually have art historians nominate theirs. For Pablo Picasso, it is probably Guernica, for Marc Chagall, perhaps The Violinist, for Ansel Adams, Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico. My latest reading includes Anne-Marie O’Connor’s brilliant volume Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Thus, for Klimt, that is surely his icon. Mine was unexpectedly made in a little village in France.

    In 2001 I accompanied Dr. Karine Schomer, now my wife, to “her” village. The temple has none of the grandeur associated with the great cathedrals and churches of France. It is, in fact, a simple stone box, but in that box there was, at a time of great need and terrible danger, a spirit of humane commitment far beyond even the words engraved above the doorway, the great injunction from the Newer Testament,“Aimez-Vous Les Uns Les Autres,” Love One Another. 

    I made the accompanying picture of Karine there. The iconography is simple: a relaxed, confident, strong woman, raised in an atmosphere of deep commitment to human rights, before the unyielding square stone geometry of that particular Huguenot church with its heroic congregation. On her right, at face level, I added a worn, painted graffito of the bleu-blanc-rouge, the French flag. It is as worn and scuffed as was the honor of France during the war years. Le Chambon was the village that accomplished so much to rescue that honor.
    I therefore use two names to identify the picture, and they are both entirely apt: “Aimez-Vous” and “L’honneur de la France.” The picture contains so much that is dearest to me. This is the picture that brings me home to my own values. It is my icon. 
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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.

  • Have You Done This Before?

    That’s a good question to ask of a surgeon before an operation. It’s usually also a good question to ask of a financial counselor, an electrician, or the pilot of a chartered aircraft. But there are occasions when the question is the last or only resort of a potential employer who has little or no idea of what they’d like to see accomplished. It vacuums all the creative imagination out of the room and replaces it with the certain monotony of an assembly line.
    I’m very fortunate to fill my working life with projects of my own choosing, and not dependent upon the whims of clients. Occasionally I take on commissions, but only when they promise some real challenge, where I can sharpen my skills as an artist and perhaps use some of the processes it adduces to add to my creative portfolios. I love the look on a client’s face, which says “How exciting. I didn’t think of that!”
    I have a secret fantasy life. It has revolved around music, great Western classical music, and I’ve lived in that Walter Mitty state since my boyhood. As a child, I could sing all the parts of at least half a dozen grand operas entirely from memory, and as a teenager used a baton, given me by Maestro Dimitri Mitropoulos, to conduct air symphonies daily. Having lost that baton many years ago, I’ve replaced it with a lacquered Japanese chopstick to lead orchestras from Chicago to Berlin, often on the same day, and with barely any rehearsal. Once, at a schools concert by the Symphony Orchestra in my native Cape Town, the conductor, Edward Dunn, summoned me onstage to conduct Tchaikovsky’s Italian Caprice, which, he said, I knew as well as he did. While it took an effort to keep my knocking knees from drowning out the tympani, I also learned the true meaning of benign megalomania. Later, when I became a student, then a professor, of international relations, it was not a great leap for me to believe that the world’s greatest peacemakers are Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.
    I have continued to this day my envy, not of Presidents and Prime Ministers, but of great orchestral conductors. As other parts of my body age, my hearing seems to have become more acute, as well as far more educated. I once surprised a conductor friend by telling him that the only distinction between his conducting and mine was half a second. He anticipated the orchestra by a quarter second, and I followed the orchestra by the other quarter.

    As an artist and writer, one of my “mentors” remains 19th century scholar Walter Horatio Pater, Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. He wrote: “All art aspires to the condition of music.”
    A few months ago, I was approached by the leader of a classical music ensemble, and asked to photograph the individual musicians as well as the group as a whole in performance. The previous photographs that had been done of them reminded me of the music club in a college yearbook, and the group, lined up from left to right, formally dressed, holding their instruments at rest, reminded me of pictures I’ve seen on the society or events page of a local newspaper. Except for the nature of the instruments, they could as well have been unusually well dressed photographers holding cameras, or the graduating class of a medical school, holding their stethoscopes. What seemed so deeply missing was a sense of relationship, of complementarity, of harmony, of the small, significant signals that pass among musicians in full flight. The poetry – indeed, the musicality – was missing. But, before I could say anything, the leader asked me the question that is endlessly repeated by the most pedestrian of human resources bureaucrats: “Have you done this before?” That truly caught me by surprise, as it is so clearly the wrong question. I’m quite used to variations of “What can you do for us?” or “What ideas can we pursue together?” That would give me the opportunity to consider creative options, and compose scenarios, activities whose challenge I relish.
    Well, as I said, I’m pretty independent, and have no interest in mug shots. If you’re looking for imaginative work, asking unimaginative questions isn’t likely to get the result you’d prefer. So, although I’ve fantasized about photographing the Berlin Philharmonic in rehearsal, I’ve never done that. However, as its conductor and I have a mutual friend, that could, perhaps, be arranged.
    When I wrote back to the leader of the ensemble, I said no. But I added that, although I had never photographed burned out buildings before, “Vulcan’s Craft,” my portfolio on the aftermath of the catastrophic 1991 East Bay Fire earned me an exhibition in the Mills College Art Museum and a Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain; and although I had never photographed death camps before, my book Liberating the Ghosts (LensWork Publishing) won awards from the American Library Association and the New York Public Library, as well as exhibitions on both coasts. It was a cover story in the Photographic Journal of the RPS.
    If Boeing wants product pictures of their magnificent aircraft, they should find an industrial photographer who’ll give them fine results. But, if they want someone to help them create intimate visions of the romance of flight, and its importance in our daily lives, I’d be willing to think it out with them. My number is in the directory.
    My nostalgia is for the future. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “Resolve to be always beginning – to be a beginner.” With that recommendation in mind, I love the challenge of trying to render with my eyes the magnificence that enters my ears. The struggle to aspire to the condition of music continues.
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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.