Visit his blog Altered States of Agoraphobia.

Embrace the blur…

Exterior daytime is pretty good although I had to open the shadows in post-production.

The interior white balance isn’t bad. Not much dynamic range – the windows are blown out.

An overcast day looks good.

This had a greenish color cast which I fixed.

This was taken under mixed lighting – not bad colors which can be improved with a white balance.

“It’s very different from western photography, which has this idea that photographs must exist as a print. Japanese photography, in its ultimate form, is the photobook. [...] It’s like an edition in and of itself; the book becomes an original print. No one image is more important than the other and in the photographer’s eyes, the prints themselves, which are going to make the book, are useless. They have no value other than the reproduction at the printing plant. So the photographs as a collection don’t exist beyond the book. This can be true of non-Japanese photobooks as well but it’s taken to an extreme with Japanese photobooks.”

Thanks to Jeorg Colberg for the tip.

I like the warm glow of the window light. Nice contrast with the lavender.

An illuminated tree.

More of a night look, not so much dawn.

New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape

October 25, 2009–January 10, 2010

The 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape brought together nine photographers—Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, John Schott, Stephen Shore, and Henry Wessel, Jr.—at the International Museum of Photography. Signaling the emergence of a new approach to landscape, the show effectively gave a name to a movement or style. New Topographics has since come to be understood as marking a paradigm shift with the artists thoughtfully engaged with their medium and its history in different ways. This version of New Topographics will also include some thirty prints and books by other relevant artists—clearly distinguished by physical presentation from the primary works—to provide additional historical and contemporary context. Relevant artists include key figures such as Timothy O’Sullivan, Walker Evans, Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson, and Dan Graham. Curator at LACMA: Charlotte Cotton, Photography.

I’m not entirely happy with any of them.

I found good signage on Vermont Ave., but I will have to return to try again.

Store-front and small-office Acuptuncture clinics are common.

This florist shop has possibilities, but I didn’t get the exposure right. Another re-shoot.

I love the colors in these piñatas, but the photo seems cliched.

This guy has a pretty trick motorcycle. A shame the picture isn’t better. This photo was taken on Sixth St., not Vermont Ave.

On the web, black and white looks fine, but at home my printer just can’t get the deep blacks necessary for high contrast black and white prints. It does a good job with wide tonality greyscale prints, but lacks the dynamic range for these images.

I must return to reshoot this in a way that shows the faces of bus-riders more clearly. This is at Vermont & Wilshire.

These guys were working on a construction job around 9 PM. I’m always worried that people think I may be working for a government agency.

As always, there was good signage to be found.

I really like this image but I’m concerned that it more or less just appropriates another photographer’s work. I probably won’t use it. Check out how cool it looks in color:

Here’s another one that works better in color than in black and white:

After studying Aristotle’s concepts of the “essential whatness” of the soul, Owens creates her own understanding of her mother’s diminished state and their possibilities for communication: “My mother’s “essential whatness,” however little remained accessible to me, was what I tried to touch each day I was with her.”

“As time went by, I grew increasingly convinced of one thing, at least: she [her mother] had an underlying signification system, even in the midst of her dementia. Her intelligence was now entirely emotional. One understood it only by attending to metaphor, not logic. What I watched for were gestures. What I listened for were persistent images. These became the icons through which I recognized whatever self remains to her.”

Medical research seems to have helped her resolve the question of how to react to a patient’s hallucination – to confront/contradict or to mollify by agreement. Owens “… read about a strategy called Validation Therapy used especially with Alzheimer’s patients. It disinquished four successive stages of dementia: disorientation, time confusion, repetitive motions, and a final vegetative state. The therapy aims at helping people resolve certain emotional conflicts before they reach that final stage when the cause of their internal discord will no longer be available to the memory.”

By combining validation with metaphoric interpretation, Owens developed a means of relating to the altered version of her mother – by using her personal understanding of her mother’s history and character, she was able to interpret the delusions and provide sympathetic responses: “The day before my brother or my daughters arrive for visits, she spends the afternoon cooking in her nursing home bed, propped up on pillows, handing me finished dishes to store away,” Owens recounts. “‘Is there enough?’ she asks me with a worried look. ‘Are the beds made?’ These are her metaphors for love.”

Highly recommended.

Reviews of Caring For Mother bring to light the dilemma that Alzheimer’s has created for devout Christians. From Valerie Weaver-Zercher’s review in Books & Culture:

Caring for Mother is, in a word, relentless. Owens is unfailingly honest about the agony of watching her mother lose her faculties, her own frequent sense of failure and guilt, and her floundering faith in a gracious God. She does not shield herself or her readers from the anguish of a parent’s decline with Christian platitudes about heaven or the virtue of a life well-lived; indeed, she quashes the notion that spiritual fortitude or lifelong practices of faith will necessarily carry a person into tranquil twilight years. At the end of her life, Owens’ mother found no comfort in the faith that once sustained her, and she became displeased by any mention of religion. Owens tries repeatedly to help her mother recover her belief, to “find the switch that can flip on that steadfast faith she had always relied on.” In a heartrending scene toward the end of the book, Owens’ mother has a panic attack at the imminence of her death. Gripping her daughter’s hand, she says, “I don’t want to go away from you.” Owens is speechless and can only stroke her mother’s arm, “abashed to discover she loves me more than God.”

Before reading Caring for Mother, I assumed that the serenity that characterizes my own grandmother, who will turn 100 later this year, was bought with the countless hours she has spent throughout life in prayer, Scripture reading, and spiritual attentiveness. She’s the archetypal “prayer warrior,” that most cherished of Christian images of aging: the grandmother who spends hours praying for the struggling great-grandson, the overworked pastor, the granddaughter with three small children who lives an hour’s drive from family (that would be me). It seems that for some people, a lifetime’s stockpile of spiritual resources can be cashed in for peace at the end of life. But Alzheimer’s, which has been called “the theological disease” because it ravages memory and identity, can deplete even the most saintly Christian’s spiritual capital.

Indeed, end-stage dementia threatens the popular Christian narrative of “prayer warrior” aging to its core. That narrative can accomodate some humorous lapses in memory and judgment: the old woman can forget her children’s names, confuse a nurse for a granddaughter, even hobble into the dining room in her slip. What this narrative has not managed to hold, however, is an aging Christian’s agnosticism, what Owens calls, in her mother’s case, “the amputation of her spiritual sensibility.”

Michael Pollan will moderate a panel discussion of the 2007 farm bill, now being debated in Congress, with guests Ken Cook, director, Environmental Working Group; Ann Cooper, Director of Nutrition Services for the Berkeley school system; Dan Imhoff, the author of Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill; Carlos Marentes, Director of Sin Fronteras Organizing Project; and George Naylor, Iowa corn farmer and president of the National Family Farms Coalition.

Later this year, the President will sign an obscure piece of legislation that will determine what happens on a couple of hundred million acres of private land in America, what sort of food Americans eat (and how much it costs) and, directly as a result, the health of our population. That piece of legislation is the Farm Bill, which, every five years, determines the rules by which the American food system operates, rules that end up affecting not only all of us who eat in the U.S., but people all over the developing world.

Typically, the Farm Bill is written with virtually no input from anyone beyond a handful of farm-state legislators. Not so this year. A coalition of public health, environmental, family farmer, community food security, development and immigration groups is weighing in. Few things could do more to reform the American food system–and by doing so improve the condition of America’s environment and public health, as well as the prosperity of farmers throughout the developing world–than if the rest of us were to start paying attention to the Farm Bill. Here’s your chance to get up to speed.

In addition to the panel, a wide variety of food-related groups will be on hand to pass out pamphlets, answer questions, and provide ways for citizens to take direct action on this year’s Farm Bill.

When: March 21, 2007, from 7:00pm-9:00pm
Where: Wheeler Auditorium, University of California Berkeley
Cost (for in-person attendance): $5.00 via the Zellerbach Ticket Office (510.642.9988); U Cal Berkeley students free with ID.

For those who will not be in Berkeley on the 21st–and that’s most of Slow Food Los Angeles’ members and friends–the event will be webcast live and archived within a few days of the event at: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/events.php. There is no charge to access the webcast other than your own internet connection costs.

This event is being sponsored by the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism.

–Lisa Lucas