DwF
Well-known
Just Lounging
Just Lounging
50 Summicron v5
Just Lounging

50 Summicron v5
Thanks David. I have been shooting with the M 10 a lot lately and forgot how much I love the MM. Nice casual portrait BTW David and really dig'n the new work Vince.
These are looking great Vince. I can't help pairing the number 1 image from the last two posts (each of those showcasing a single farm-worker- and both shading their eyes), and then the number 2 from previous post and #4 from this last set.....you'll no doubt be up to your ears editing when you get home 🙂
David
Well, Vince, it had occurred to me and no doubt to you that a project titled Mapping the West is really asking for your life (or for more geographically discrete titles). Why not go for it, and spend the decades you may have and the considerable empathy, talent and skills you already have?
The alternative might be to limit the scope to New Mexico—at least until you head west into Arizona or North into Utah/Colorado, or further north and west as far as necessary. The West, though, is such a vast and contentious concept, and at some point requires, as an artistic subject, an honest evaluation of whether or how one is going to consider its cities, its urban lives, coastlines—or whether one is going to define one’s territory as much or more by what is left out as what gets in....
E.g., Ansel Adams’ West is even more highly circumscribed than yours, though not nearly as humanized (which is one of your most visible strengths, especially regarding work); Robert Frank (his significance on many photographers’ minds this week) managed to register something like an On the Road version of the West in his drives of American discovery; Edward Curtis devoted his portraiture project to aboriginal people. Maybe others in this thread can suggest better and more recent examples of taking on this vast historical, multicultural, and deeply symbolic place—, but even if they do, this is still your challenge to decide how to expand or how to circumscribe.
The work itself, at ground level, image to image, is superb. And there’s a template in what you’ve done so far, about human endurance, labor, making a living from the earth, the persistence and dignity of life in little towns in an era of urban and and suburban coastal outmigrations, which could be geographically/culturally expanded or radically circumscribed—by which I mean sticking more or less to the west that New Mexico represents (unlike the west that Montana or Idaho or Washington east of the Cascades represents).
I’m enjoying and admiring the work as it comes, and will do so whether you expand or contract its scope. After living in the Pacific NW for 25 years, and traveling east of the Cascades, into the Great Basin, Utah, Colorado, farming communities and Navajo towns and mining towns (mostly before I carried a camera everywhere, alas, but I had the same eyes I have now), I know I saw some significant fractions of the plenitude and emptiness and how humans cope with—but they were just fractions, and the West is much vaster and probably impossible to reconcile in one vision. But that’s your conceptual conundrum, now. It can’t be a west that comfortably fits what sidewalk art shoppers in DC or even Santa Fe or Carmel think the west is; it should be the west you define by writing out your boundaries and covenants and restrictions, so that the existing images don’t have to compare to nonexistent images you could have made if only you had spent time in Burns, Oregon or Rifle, Colorado.
I’ll be interested and appreciative in following this, whichever way you choose to solve it.
Love these but especially 9am break. The dog even is struck by the spectacle of the elderly worker sitting on the end of the furrows.