Past Forward

Fall is nearly here. Photobloggers are beginning to kickstart the blogging year with various projects. Soon the year-end favorite photobook lists will start to surface in various places. One book which hasn't yet gotten much attention this year is Warwick Mountain Series by Philip Perkis.

Since coming across it a few months ago at Powell's, this book has quickly grown into my favorite Perkis book. Not that there is much competetion. Perkis has only published two other titles, The Sadness of Men in 2008, followed the next year by Teaching Photography: Notes Assembled. Both are excellent, but I think Warwick Mountain Series is his finest.


The book contains 43 black and white photos made by Perkis while working under an NEA grant, presumably near Warwick Mountain in upstate New York. Although the majority could be technically classified as landscapes, they show a street photographer's attention to chance, moment and formal juxtaposition. These photographs describe a place, yes, but that function seems incidental. Mostly they describe Perkis and the way he see things. Whether it's a grouping of trees or a child in the tub, a strong visual voice dominates. It's concerned with line, shadow, tonality, and being in the right spot.


"I'm not attached to any particular subject, which is unusual for a photographer," Perkis told an interviewer in 2007. "What holds my work together is the way I see and the fact that I use very simple equipment. I still photograph the same way, technically, that I started with in 1957, with a small camera and black-and-white film. I carry my camera with me all the time. When I see something that moves me or interests me, I take a picture. I don't care what it's a picture of."


A simple camera, black and white film, natural light, no particular subject. Perkis' work harkens back to a simpler time in photography, perhaps the 1970s, before the rise of color and before thinking had completely superseded seeing. The possibilities of the visual hunt still topped the list of motivations. Fans of that hunt and of that era's b/w tricksters —Friedlander, Dane, Wessel, et al— will enjoy these photographs. Not all are of trees. Humans and animals appear here and there.


Now teaching at Pratt Institute, Perkis lost the sight of his left eye —his camera eye— in 2007. "It just went - in one day - due to a retinal occlusion." It took him several months to get into photography again. Now his photos are "a little deeper, a little sadder and a little closer to the bone." (quoted here)

The photographs in Warwick Mountain Series are well complemented by the book's excellent production. Nexus Press went all out, printing a limited edition of 1000 clothbound copies, each one signed and numbered, with clear mylar cover protecting a tipped in cover photo. The interior reproductions are 200 line screen duotones made on a Heidelberg Kord press.


The tonal values are rich and extremely condensed toward middle gray (I've tried to keep this look in the accompanying jpgs). The word muddy comes to mind. This is black and white photography with no whites nor blacks. I'm not sure how much of this effect is Perkis' natural style and how much is in the printing. But once one gets use to the effect it's sort of pleasing and helps unify the book. The reproductions have an old fashioned look similar to what might've been found in books 40 years ago, further enforcing the sensibility of time passing and of Perkis' old school style.

As we look ahead this fall to what is new in photography, it's worth tipping a hat to that style, and to the past. Warwick Mountain Series may be hard to find in stores this booklover's season —New copies are already selling secondhand for $350— but those who seek it out will be richly rewarded.

All photographs shown above are scans from Warwick Mountain Series by Philip Perkis

Honor Your Elders

Charalampos Kydonakis: What Was He Thinking?

Charalampos Kydonakis, aka Dirty Harry, is a photographer based in Rethymnon, Crete.

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"This summer I went to a Cretan sheppard folk festival. Inside a crowd of hundreds of people this scene caught my attention: A man, probably a relative of the girl, had hugged her and a priest nearby had grabbed her hand. It seemed weird to me. Usually people hold the hands of priests waiting for God's help. Now the priest himself had to ask God's help from someone else. I took 3 shots there and none of the three people paid attention to me. Probably the energy between them was more powerful than anything else around them. In one click I caught the priest's eyes closed. I'm not a religious guy at all but maybe that girl was an angel, giving light to a blind man. Well, I guess not. Just a science fiction tale of my mind for a moment there."

•


"I saw this guy (or was it a werewolf?) on a summer day near the seaside of my town, Rethymnon of Crete. I was amazed by his hairy shoulders and started to follow him on the pavement, trying to shoot a photo of him. I knew that the photos I took were disappointing, as the background was awful, full of cars and touristic labels. I didn't give up and continued following him. At some moment he entered the open parking space of the port of the town and stopped, crossing his hands like this, trying to remember where his car was. This was the moment I was waiting for. The asphalt of the parking was the background I was trying for 5 minutes to frame neutrally the hairy creature."

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"I spent a night playing music with friends inside a local taverna in a small village near my town. The grandson of the owner of the taverna started to dance. Some people made a circle around him as usually happens in Greece when somebody gets up to dance. A dog joined the company. The boy seemed to enjoy his dance. When I went to take a photo he stopped dancing and looked at me this way. The last years I have shot photos of many people who got angry at me cause I photographed them without asking before. I think this boy was the most angry of all of them. I had interrupted him, he wasn't dancing for everyone. He was dancing only for him and his friends."

•


"One night on my cousin's farm I wanted to shoot photos of the sheep there. He told me that I should wait first and shoot photos after he had milked them, because they would get afraid and the milking would be impossible afterwards. When everything was finished I got in the shed and took a photo, then they got afraid and went outside altogether. This is a wireless flash double exposure click, in which I pointed the second flash on that rectangular box on the wall over the sheep. The word "sheep" in greek is used metaphorically to describe a herd of identical units with no personality and will. This box to my eyes before the click was something that could maybe distinguish that sheep's existence from the rest of the herd."

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"In 2009 I bought a flash with a cable in order to use a tool I had never tried before. This photo was taken the second day that I had my new equipment. It's the only one I kept from a 2 hour night walk in the town of Aidipsos. After shooting a lot of uninteresting shots, I tried to make experiments with different angles to the flash direction. I think this shot with the glass shadows was the only one that night that had something from me in it. All the rest were just portraits of frightened people."

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"This photo isn't a street photo, it's a portait of my girlfriend. We were walking in the woods and at some moment I asked her to hide her face with her scarf. Initially I shot the photo without the flash. It was too dark. I took a second shot with the pop eye flash. The light was too normal. Then came to my mind an older photo (below) where a random position of my flash on the cable gave this result with a shot on the opposite side of the sunlight:


I tried this time to understand how I had to place the flash so that I got a lens flare. I took some more shots of her, until I found the right angle to have the light effect. This photo made me understand that my girlfriend's thoughts are purple coloured.

•


"This photo is my first double flash exposure in one click. Not knowing yet what exactly I had to do, I first flashed the man and after some seconds with the bulb button still pressed I flashed the girl. My initial intention was to put two separate worlds together in one frame. When I saw the photo in the pc, I saw under the white confusing (and maybe connecting or disconnetcting) lines the top of the girl's t-shirt leading to the man's eye, shaped like a street. I don't know, maybe it was a man's black tear going straight to a girl's heart."

•



"After some hours of drinking and dancing at a wedding, it was late and not many people were still there. I sat on my chair to rest for a while. At the next table I saw one girl looking closely the fish in the glass bowl. I went right on the opposite side and shot a portrait of her with the camera behind the glass and the flash at the left side near her face and the glass. I didn't know exactly what the result would be or how the face would be distorted as the shot was taken instantaneously before I realized how I would frame and shoot under other conditions.

Maybe my descriptions refer a lot on my flash experiments while shooting. I try to create my own light and make pictures that wouldn't be this way under normal light conditions. The result isn't always the desired one. Sometimes it's the expected, sometimes better than the expected, most of the times worse, simply trash.

Photography will always be for me a game with light, aiming to a storytelling result. Sometimes it works, most of the times not. Always the upcoming question in my mind is how the following photos will be."

Overheard

What follows is a list of quotes I compiled for a while on my website. I'm currently revamping my site and eliminating this page along with some other things. So I thought I'd post it here to have it somewhere online still. They are various things I've heard photographers say in the past 12 years or so. Most are from Blue Sky artist talks during the time I lived in Portland before 2006. I used to attend most of those lectures (and even gave one myself), and when I got home from them I'd jot down the most memorable thing I'd heard that night. And some of the things below were just heard in passing conversation. I consider them a sort of bite-sized oral history.

"Any photo taken today, even the least interesting ones, will be interesting in 50 or 100 years."

--Chris Rauschenberg, 8/9/01

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"When I photograph, I am not necessarily attracted to specific subject matter. Instead, I'm interested in how a subject presents itself."

-- Nathan Lyons, 10/2/01

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"I used a rangefinder because I didn't want to worry about the edge thing. I just wanted to make photos of certain subjects and let the edges take care of themselves."

-- Douglas Frank, 11/8/01

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"When I look back at old contact sheets, I look for shots that look like someone else took them. I look for ones that show me a new direction."

-- Stewart Harvey, 12/13/01

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"I often look at books of photographs that don't appeal to me, to try to understand why I don't like them."

--Stu Levy, 1/10/02

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"For me, there's a sort of randomness which you cannot plan which is intrinsic to photographs which work."

--Patrick Sutherland, 1/17/02

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"There's a view that says that painting is synthetic and photography is analytical. To paint something, you start with a blank canvas and add to it. Everything comes from you. Photography is the opposite. You start with a world of complexity and you need to decide what to remove from it, or what not to show, in order to emphasize what you want people to see."

--Michael Burns, 5/9/02

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"I used to worry about things like the edges and if there were dust specs. Now I just look for little fragments that capture my eye and I forget about the rest of it."

--Marsha Burns, 6/13/02

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"Typically I make one photo when I first come on a scene. Then I explore different perspectives of the scene and make several more exposures from different vantage points. I almost always wind up choosing the first photo."

--Michael Kenna, March 2003

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"I use an 8 x 10 view camera. All other cameras are just toys."

--Jock Sturges, April 2003

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"Shooting flowers is just like making a portrait of a person. You have to be ready to catch the moment or the flower's expression will change and you will have lost it."

--Ron Von Dongen, 5/15/03

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"The introduction to one of Stephen Shore's books talks about the difference between Eastern and Western poetry. Poems in the West are about the sublime and the marvelous, whereas in the Orient poetry is about the commonplace. This Oriental way is how I view my own photography."

--Stephen Hughes, 7/10/03

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"I love the fact that a photograph can be both a factual description and a metaphor at the same time."

--Shawn Records, 8/14/03

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"My formation (as a photographer) was informal."

--Julio Grinblatt, 10/1/03

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"What if, say, Andre Kertesz had been born an hour later? His whole life would've been on a slightly different schedule and all those photos he made would've been slightly different somehow. Yet the totality of the work would've been just as impressive. Just different somehow..."

-- Craig Hickman, 1/15/04

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"I give names to my projects but I never name individual photos. I don't want to give them any associations that might effect the viewer's interpretation."

-- Ken Rosenthal, 2/6/04

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"Each day is a gift!"

-- Jerry Uelsman, 3/11/04

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"In my photographs there is a tension between abstraction and reality...I am not a documentary photographer. If I were out to change laws I would make a different type of picture."

-- David Maisel, 6/6/04

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"I think it's strange that more people are offended by my nudes, which are completely tame, than by my portraits of animal fetuses."

-- Tamara Lischka, 9/9/04

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"When I first began photographing, I had this idea that staging anything was bad and that things in the photo had to be just as I'd found them. Lately I find myself swinging toward the opposite. More and more I want to stage my scenes in order to have control over them."

-- Ann Ploeger, 10/14/04

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"The Bechers have been an influence on me and I think they've been misunderstood. People think their photographs are of Germany, but for me they are more about Germanness than Germany. Only two Germans would undertake such a project."

-- Allen Maertz, 11/3/04

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"A few days after Tony Ray-Jones died I went through my contact sheets to find photos I'd taken of him, to make a memorial to him. I only found one photo. It was because I'd been around him so much I'd taken him for granted and never photographed him. He was just always there, so I'd never considered him important enough to photograph. The lesson is, you should be photographing now the things that you really care about. That's the only thing you should be photographing, things you care about deeply."

-- Bill Jay, 11/7/04

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"I am interested in the human experience, what it means to be human. That is the only thing I've ever wanted to express as an artist."

-- Adrain Chesser, 12/1/04

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"I stopped doing documentary work when I found I was no longer connecting with my subject matter. My subject matter at the time was drunks with guns."

-- Luis Delgado, 3/12/05

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"For me, the central unit in art is not the actual art itself but the artist. Art is about the artist."

-- Christoper Rauschenberg, 6/05

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"One hundred percent of the shots you don't take don't go in."

-- Paul Sutinen quoting Wayne Gretzky, 7/19/05

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"I was following Cartier-Bresson's idea of the Decisive Moment, only since I was using a Widelux at a 15th it became the Decisive Mo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ment."

-- Abby Robinson, 11/2/05

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"The reason I don't place people in my home interiors is that when I see a person in a photo I instantly begin making assumptions about that person, and I didn't want these assumptions coloring anyone's view of the rest of the photo."

-- Susan Dobson, 12/2/5

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"I'm a shy person. Before a photo shoot I get very nervous, sometimes almost physically ill. But I think this is sort of good. If you're bored or half asleep during a shoot, that's how the photos will look."

-- Cherie Hiser, 12/7/5

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"With the subway series, sometimes I would walk around the same block five times and think, 'There is absolutely nothing to photograph here.' But on the sixth time around the block, walking by the exact same subject matter, suddenly a wonderful photograph would jump out and present itself."

-- Lisa Gidley, 2/16/06

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"I think some mining executives when they see these pictures will wonder, 'How did this guy get into our mines to take these?'"

-- Louie Palu, 3/3/6

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"After looking around a while, I finally found a house that would be perfect for what I had in mind. I knocked on the door and explained what I wanted to do. I needed to pour a perfect circle of fresh soil in the center of their yard, close their street, and park a giant cherry-picker in front of their house to support me and the 8 x 10 camera eighty feet above the scene. The woman thought about it a moment before replying, 'Do what you have to do.'"

-- Gregory Crewdson, 4/25/6

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"Cartier-Bresson roamed the whole world years and years and came back with thousands of photos that don't give you the foggiest idea what he felt about any of it."

-- Robert Frank, paraphrased by Bobby Abrahamson, July 2006

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"I am only attracted photographically to certain parts of cities. There is a word in Japanese which describes them well, and I think in English the translation is something like Nasty. I like nasty parts of cities."

-- Daido Moriyama, 11/18/06

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"I am drawn to photographing real things rather than setup situations. I am more interested in what is than what isn't."

-- Elliott Erwitt, 3/17/7

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"I'm drawn to desolate spaces. That beautiful forest over there would be great if someone clearcut it, paved it, and left it unmaintained for 20 years. Then it would interest me photographically."

-- Frank Miller, 9/30/7

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"When I press the shutter on my Leica it's like sending a prayer to the heavens. I don't know what the result will be. I'm sending a spaceship to the moon, to outer space, to see what's out there. Maybe there will be a reply and maybe not."

-- Bobby Abrahamson, 12/13/7

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"There is no such thing as chance in good photography"

-- Roger Ballen, 5/7/8

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"I don't worry about the film. I use as many sheets as I need to to get the shot. I have no idea how many sheets I am using. If I get one good photo from a shoot then the rest is unimportant."

-- Raymond Meeks, 7/26/8

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"There's a delicate balance in my family work between documenting what's happening and exploiting potentially sensitive material. When my grandfather died I thought the funeral would be a great place to make photos, but it seemed to cross the line. After going back and forth in my mind, I finally decided to leave my cameras at home, which I still think was the right decision. The instant I got to the funeral all my aunts were on me, 'Where's your camera? How could you not bring your camera to something like this?' It goes both ways..."

-- Todd Deutsch, 9/6/8

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"I think people a hundred years from now will now at the photos from this time and their main impression will be, 'In the years just after 2000, the world became a much cleaner place." With digital, we can remove unwanted visual artifacts with ease whereas before it was much harder. The results will be marked as a historical moment."

--Craig Hickman, 2/2/9

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"Photographers are ventriloquists. We send our work out into the world and it speaks for us."

--Larry Sultan, 4/12/9

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"There are three photographers I admire, Atget, Evans, and Friedlander. Father, son, and the holy ghost."

--Gerry Badger, 10/9/10

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Ania Vouloudi: What Was She Thinking?

Ania Vouloudi, 25, is a photographer based in Rethymno, Crete.


"My cousin had made me promise that I would get pictures of her, so that she would frame them and decorate the empty walls of her room. A year had passed and I hadn’t kept my promise. My cousin was let down by her role-model and I had a pain in my heart. This photo was taken on the terrace of my family home. I was visiting them after a long time away. The last day Maria gave me that look of disappointment again because I had to catch my plane in a few hours which meant no photos again. It was noon. I grabbed her hand. Time had come. Maria was happy. She wore her favorite dress and waited for my instructions. The problem was that I had no inspiration at all as I almost never stage people and things. The terrace was the only place that came to my mind. The floor was burning my cousin’s feet, so she stepped on to the railings. The rest came with the breeze."

•


"Grandma and Grandpa. The night before, I was sitting with them under dim light and around the round big old table, hearing stories from the Second World War. The next morning as I was doing laundry on the terrace I saw them down in the yard. I thought that it would be nice to take a family photo of them as I don’t see them often. I shouted. Grandpa is 96 years old and can’t hear well. Grandma doesn’t like being photographed. So, this photo belongs to the family album. A photo to remember them as they are."

•


"This summer I had an exhibition with Lukas Vasilikos and Charalampos Kydonakis. When we made this decision I had less than half of the photos that I should have for our subject (street life in Rethymno, Crete), so I started wandering around the town and looking for those pictures that would be worth the frame. This is the last one. Looking for the last photo was the most difficult part. At the end of a walk with nothing interesting in my camera I saw those two birds doing something boring which I hoped could look interesting afterwards. I stayed there for a minute or two, then they flew away and I flew back home relieved."

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"I was on a bench lying on my back after a very long walk by the lake. The weather was cruelly cold. The lake was ready to freeze. I was ready to freeze until the sun came out. I started feeling my fingers again, so I grabbed my camera and looked back. I saw upside down my friend smoking. I can’t say that I knew exactly what I was doing when I took this picture. Everything about that day, the place and that moment was strange. Tired and dizzy, with my head hanging from the bench, I turned my camera around and saw the photo that could describe the indescribable feelings I had."

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"I don’t know exactly the reason why I took this photo. And I did it twice. I was having a night-search in a village of Crete. I was flashing everything that caught my attention. I am a construction engineer and I guess that those reinforcing bars attracted me because of my profession. The first photo was boring. The second photo would be the same and yet I took it. I wouldn’t be proud to admit it if this flying being hadn’t passed through. Sometimes you get photos by luck."

•

"This photo was taken last January in Bulgaria. This man was in a big square with another man. I saw them from far away doing some weird moves. The one was walking left and right lifting his knees very high and the other one was waving his arms up and down. They looked like they were rehearsing a great choreography but my logic said that they were just trying to beat the cold. I don’t enjoy realism, so I kept thinking of them dancing. The one of the two men who seemed to have the starring-role didn’t stop when I approached him. After I put my camera down he came to me, I showed him the photo and told him the only Russian word that I know (I thought it was Bulgarian): “Krasivyj”. He saw it with no interest, smiled, pointed at me and repeated the word I had just told him. I smiled too and left them to continue their important rehearsals."

•


"I was at the zoo of Berlin, kind of depressed as all the animals seemed depressed too. I was not in the mood for photos. I stood up on a small bridge and stared at the fish underneath me. It was a very relaxing thing to do as I caught my self forgetting about everything and taking out the camera. I was thinking of nothing bad, nothing good, nothing but a fish. I had a fish in my mind."

•


"I remember everyone drinking and celebrating for days because of the upcoming marriage of a beloved cousin of mine. Kids were also in this crazy mood that everybody was all those days. One night I left the beers and the circle dance and went up to my aunt’s home. When I got out of the toilet, I saw one girl climbing up the door frame. In the time that I managed to remember where the buttons of my camera were, the girl had reached the roof and another girl was standing underneath her. I know or remember nothing further."