Photography Archives - Page 7 of 14

August

August 16, 2013 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Sometime in the last week August remembered itself and began changing. This is not a month obvious with new beginnings. It doesn’t announce itself with bright resolutions or an accounting of all that has been figured out. It writes itself in twigs and sprinkler water. It explodes from its own fullness: the split pod, the swollen tomato, the echinacea’s violet paper bent back like wings from a gilded heart.

It’s all too much.

I stand barefoot in my nightgown, yellow grass harsh against my toes and watch the sky grow pink in early morning. The house, unused to sun-colored earth, seems to float. Are there things to do? Did I have ambition? It melts into one impulse: to walk through the garden with my arms full of poppies, to shake them until their dry rattle is all I can hear.

Photography and text © Iskra Johnson

New Portfolio of Construction Site Photography

July 9, 2013 by Iskra Leave a Comment

Landscape With Concrete Forms, © Iskra Johnson

I photographed my first construction site over 30 years ago. At least three men with bullhorns shouted at me as I walked a long gangplank into the center of an open pit the size of a city block. I could not resist the bright red ladders, the spiking rebar and randomly thrown coils of wire, the orange triangles and cones and wooden spools, the augurs and blades – all massed against a landscape of mud brown and gray. The scene spoke of the chaos phase of creativity, when shape and sense are only dimly glimpsed, and anything is possible. Not to mention that it was BIG. A few months later the newspaper carried a piece about a woman in an evening dress with a cast on her arm who was found, drunk and asleep on a beam in the unfinished 6th story. It occurred to me then that not for nothing do they measure skyscrapers in “stories.”

My fascination with monumental structure, excavation, history, surface and the ambiguous terrain between ruin and renewal has continued as our world has moved into a phase of urban development in hyperdrive. You can visit any city in the world and see the unmistakeable filigree of orange cranes rising above the skyline. The new landscape incorporates an ever-changing theater of half-walls, scaffolds, massive draperies and open pits girded by barriers as interesting as what is behind them.

The photographs here reflect the influence of the theory of wabi-sabi: nothing lasts, nothing is finished and nothing is perfect. And within this recognition lies a very particular kind of beauty. Purely documentary photographs form the basis for much of my work in the series Construction/Reconstruction although I often obscure or alter them beyond recognition in the process of collage. The images in this new portfolio stand alone as photographs, a record of a singular time and place. Archival pigment prints are available in a range of sizes.

See more at: Construction Site Photography

“Drive-By”: The Alaska Way Viaduct at the Golden Hour

July 2, 2013 by Iskra 1 Comment

One of Seattle’s soon to be lost treasures is the Alaskan Way Viaduct. I had my office next door to it for eight years and learned to love and hate its noise and dirt and it’s hulking and fundamental “in-the-way-ness.” However, when one is not eye level from an office window cursing the dust and noise but rather on it or driving right next to it, perhaps at the golden hour, there are few more intoxicating sights than the Port and the great cranes and Elliott Bay glimpsed between its pillars.

This view is now complicated with additional intrigue by the Big Dig. If you love structures and infrastructure and seeing the bones of things, this is the place to be. I have taken hundreds of cellphone pictures on the drives to West Seattle and back, and have begun a project using these images called, quite literally, “Drive-By.” I am using digital media combined with painting to create what feel to me very much like old fashioned monoprints. I made monoprints for years using oil based ink on zinc, and I love the technique. It is a wonderful challenge to use digital technology with the same sense of play and spontaneity, using masks and layer effects to “wipe” the plate, and to print plates (translated as Photoshop layers) over each other, with infinite ability to adjust density and color.

Photography and print making are ideal ways to capture the sense of time flashing, of the way reality exposes itself on the retina and how then memory overlays one image onto another, like tissue paper through which color and a sense of the sky bleed through. In this case of course it is not just memory but motion itself creating the layers.

Three glimpses:

Drive By At Dusk The Port arachival pigment print — “Drive-by at Dusk: Hanjin” archival pigment print © iskra Johnson

Drive By 2 The Port archival Print — “Drive-by 2,” archival pigment print, © Iskra Johnson

Drive-By-In-Pink:Hanjin — “Drive-by in Pink,” archival pigment print, © Iskra Johnson

Drive-By Day Two: Cellphone Transfer Prints

I have not made any transfer prints in awhile, and it occurred to me that it might be the next step for these images. Cell phone resolution can be frustratingly chunky when printed large, but the transfer process takes natural advantage of soft blurs and ambiguities, and these images lend themselves to a tactile surface and intimate scale. On these two I used Apollo transfer film on hot press watercolor with spray alcohol (92%). It’s counter-intuitive, but for some reason the temperature today in the studio, which nearly matched that of the alcohol, seemed to help the process along.

It feels wonderful to surrender to color. I fell in love with Maxfield Parrish’s clouds in a junk shop when I was in the sixth grade. Ash Grove Cement might as well be a neo-Greek column, and that shape in the middle could be a neo-nymph looking up in reverie at plumes of steam. Who says industry isn’t romantic? And who can resist a name like “Ash Grove?”

Ash Grove Cement (For Maxfield Parish) transfer print — “Ash Grove Cement, for Maxfield,” transfer print on watercolor paper 7″ x 7″ © Iskra Johnson

"To Avalon," transfer print on watercolor paper, 7" x 7", © Iskra Johnson — “To Avalon,” transfer print on watercolor paper, 7″ x 7″, © Iskra Johnson

(Not yet printed, but I thought I would include it here to show the surface difference between the native image and prints with similar imagery.)

See more artwork on industrial themes at the print portfolios for Construction/Reconstruction and Infrastructure.

Ten Perfect Days in New York, with a Few Showers

May 15, 2013 by Iskra 4 Comments

Crossing The Brooklyn Bridge, with 10,000 other people. © Iskra Johnson

I have recently returned from ten incandescent days in New York City. Or rather, eight incandescent days and two with thunder and lightning and flash flood alarms. It’s that kind of world. Although I have been to New York many times it had been fifteen years since my last real visit of any length, and I had never committed that primal rite of passage, The Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge. Over the years it had evolved in my mind into an epic solo journey with only myself, the wind, and ancestral vertigo as company.

Ahh, those 10,000 other people, what did I know? And all of them walking home from Manhattan against my little tide. I can’t say enough about the beauty of tarps, and tarps with boldly censored grafitti which, for a person who makes their livelihood decoding the alphabet, is very close to bliss. I traveled well-protected in this billowing crib, although several Brooklyn-bound bicycles nearly took out my camera arm.

Walking Man With Brooklyn Bridge Bicycle Locks — Brooklyn Bridge Pedestrian With Lost Bicycle Locks, © Iskra Johnson

I would like to thank my dear friend and talented photographer Teresa Morani for showing me the Wonders of DUMBO and in general guiding me through the circuit overload of this astonishing city. (“Why,” asked a new acquaintance on the tarmac at La Guardia, “do they keep re-naming parts of the city that we already know some other way? What the hell is Dumbo?” I feel her pain, but I can’t really resist an acronym that stands for “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.” It pretty much lets you know that you are entering a city where people live steeped in place. They notice things. (And of course, once noticed, things become very expensive……) Here are a few of the 1,734 moments glimpsed as I mostly walked Manhattan and Brooklyn, avoiding Google maps and asking someone new every few blocks where I was and where I was going. Many of these images will be available as prints at a later date and will be posted in the prints or photography section of my website. (Click each image to see larger.)

Central Park Spring Sky, © Iskra Johnson

The Player — Music at the Edge of the Park, © Iskra Johnson

Goddess Of Culture At The Met — So Much Culture, So Little Time (at the Met) © Iskra Johnson

Manhattan Fire Escapes Morning — Manhattan Fire Escapes: Morning, © Iskra Johnson

Liberty from the Shore — The Statue, © Iskra Johnson

A Room OnThe Street — A Room On The Street, © Iskra Johnson

Crossing with Signal — Signal, © Iskra Johnson

Improvements — Veil with Tree, © Iskra Johnson

Chess-In-Washington-Square — Chess In Washington Square, © Iskra Johnson

Empire-At-Night-(From-the-Highline) — Empire at Night (From the Highline), © Iskra Johnson

AboveThe Clouds — Above The Clouds (Coming Home) © Iskra Johnson

Last night I went for a walk to see if I was happy to be home, and I was. This city is so quiet people whisper in restaurants and you can hear the clouds scrape against the sky. There is the occasional disturbance, if you look for it. As I walked towards the bay I heard a raucous shrieking and looked up to see nine crows chasing a bald eagle. They kept going until I lost sight of them far beyond the edge of the park. Here at the frontier there is time to think and recollect. Every night I am dreaming of buildings, and then I wake up and plant peas and divide the baby lettuce. If you would like to know some of the places I went while in New York and the things I recommend here is a short list:

The Highline (Oh Seattle City Council, please please please, can we do this with five feet of the viaduct??)

DUMBO

The Met, Most especially the exhibit of Civil War photography, best viewed after getting lost for a few hours in the Cycladic art collection, just for historical perspective

MOMA, especially Dieter Roth’s “Later this will be nothing.” Also, I suggest having lunch there in the cafe for several hours while reading a novel, perhaps Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad”. People will be having very interesting conversations one eighth of an inch away from your elbow, mostly in “foreign” languages, but you may hear about the custom fireplace that very nice looking man is installing for those people with the third home on Fire Island. It’s taken him two years and it’s not yet done.

Gagosian Gallery, Anselm Kiefer’s new exhibit “The Morganthau Plan” And while you are there will you please pick up the book for me? It wasn’t in stock the first week. The other book, Next Year in Jerusalem, is crazy wonderful so I have to assume this one is too. If you see the stereoscopic displays of the Civil War scenes at the Met first it will make these paintings look very different. I think anybody planning to wage a war might want to stop in to these two exhibits before firing up the drones.

Rosanne Olson’s “Rapture” at Robin Rice Gallery. Sublime.

Central Park on a sunny day. There is no greater bliss. Blow a bubble for me.

Capitol Hill 60 Minute Photo Closes

January 30, 2013 by Iskra Leave a Comment

I read this beautiful if sad elegy to one of Seattle’s last film photo labs at PetaPixel today. I went to Capitol Hill 60 Minute Photo for the first twenty years of my photo-life. They were four blocks from my apartment, and developed every picture I took. Some of my most recent photocollages are made from scanning and enlarging their 4×6 prints from my archives, and the grain and “authentic analog noise” of the actual print beats anything I can do purely digitally. Photographer Andrew Waits has done a wonderful homage to this institution and the forces of change that have led to its closing. The comments are worth reading also, as a capsule portrait of social attitudes towards technology and change. I thought this one was particularly well put:

“When my local one hour lab closed a few years ago, I lost an advisor, a mentor a collaborator and friends. The lab staff was involved in every project that I was and took a real and heartfelt interest in what I was doing. They were partners. I really looked forward to seeing them on a Monday morning. The jingle of the door bell, the strange aroma mix of coffee and stop bath, the rhythmic hum and whir of the machines and a hearty “good morning, what have you got for us today?” can’t be replicated. Here I sit, in front of my computer screen, excited about what has been downloaded from my SD cards, beautiful Nikon DSLR on the counter, printer all inked up and ready, alone.”

Whew. So true. We can all be masters of our digital universe now, if we have the money and the equipment, and it can be real quiet.

AndrewWaitsPhotoOFilm — This photo of a film strip by Andrew Waits says it all.

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