Merging of Blogs

In the interest of "getting it together" I have merged three of my other blogs into this one. If you were one of the few followers of

Vermont Directions (my Art of Action blog)

Vermilion Hue (my painting blog)

Clair Dunn PHOTOGRAPHY (my, duh, photography blog)

Their contents have all been moved to White River (you are here!). I am posting this because I don't know if Google transfers the followers along with the posts. My artist's web site however remains the same at:

clairdunn.com

New Work

After months with no posting -- it's time to pony up.

I've been concentrating on iPhone photography and it has already morphed into work I am pleased with. My approach matured fast from idle shooting and tinkering to real work.

I'm fixated on pushing the iPhone to the limits of its native capabilities. To that end, I shoot anyway I can get an image and that's that.  No cropping or manipulative post-processing with the exception of turning some images to sepia.  What I saw is what you get.

From now on, organic images and pure abstractions will be in their native colors, as will the odd shot of something which caught my eye (like Matching Attire at the left) . For the most part, man-made things will be "sepia-ized" as in Freight at bottom right. All prints are made in the native iPhone size (5.33" x 4"); 8" x 10" matted and framed.

Newest images are here:
New iPhone photographs.

My Growing Rural Urban Collection

This blog is schizophrenic or bi-polar or whatever, but I just don't want to split it into photography and painting because, for me, it all hangs together. So now I jump to the black and white side of my brain.

And, if I can't afford to get my images printed and framed, at least I can show them here!

On the Edge of Town

This one was a real piece of timing luck with the light. It's in Enosburgh Falls this spring. So now my list of "Urbans" includes, St. Albans, Morrisville, Randolph, and Enosburgh Falls. Slowly but surely it grows. I've been mucking about with my Randolph images that I shot at the end of February, and think there will be a couple of keepers.

What is this plant? Besides lagniappe.

It's been weeks that I haven't been out shooting--too much hard scrabble going on to do that. But, I had to go to Enosburgh to hang my photographs in the Artist in Residence Gallery AND it was a stunningly gorgeous spring day!

I did get some good shots which I am still processing and a couple of them I know already are keepers. It was long work in the gallery and so I was ready for lunch at the end, starving and dying of thirst. As I was trying not to chew on the menu, I saw some sort of plant off to my left--it looked artificial, but because artificial "restaurant plants" usually attempt to resemble something common and this one certainly wasn't "common" to me, I took a second look. Didn't help. So, I got up and walked up to it and touched it. It was not artificial. It was incredibly beautiful and real. But, no one in the place knew what it was. And I need to know what this thing is.

The Bones of Vermont

This barn is near me, a little over two miles from my house. (This was shot about a week ago.) A bit more than a year ago now I first photographed it. When I looked at the shots, I was struck, as I had been when I looked at the barn itself, by its uncluttered beauty. The neat lines of its roof, the proportion of the building, its setting. It was, for me iconic.

For days after shooting it I couldn't get it out of my mind. So I began sifting through the images, picked one and went immediately to black and white. I didn't even think about it. It was then that I saw a picture of what my mind "saw" when it assimilated this barn. I hit "save" and knew now what I was going to do with my camera in Vermont. It was all there, the starkness, the emptiness, the sharp, hard edges of abandonment, the bones of Vermont.

With apologies to my painter friends, color hides. Color enchants. Though this might sound odd, I think it's true: color often enchants us away from reality. The incredible palette of the visible colors sucks us in like moths to a flame. Perhaps it's because we live in a world of color, all the time. And, like anything else that happens "all the time", we become desensitized to it on some level. Sometimes that world needs to be uncolored; so we can see what is there, and only what is there.

Damn!

The previous posts that might have been were consumed by my actually WRITING my proposal the last couple of days and by yesterday I was approaching cloud nine, sort of. And, this morning . . . !@#$!@#$!%*.

I woke up with a totally new idea. All along I've been wrestling with contrast, a tool I feel is among the most powerful that photographers have. The proposal that I just trashed doesn't cut it on that score; it just wimped around the edges of it.

With contrast it is possible, as was once said of the job of a diplomat, to hit you over the head and also make you like being hit over the head.

I know this: I don't want to get to just the people who normally look at art and visit galleries. I want to include images that might just appeal to those to whom an art gallery is a foreign country. (My relatives are mostly in the latter group, so I know what I'm talking about!).

I grew up in a small New York town on the St. Lawrence River. When I was 9 or 10, I was yelled at by my teacher for being late for school. The same day I was yelled at by my mother for being late coming home. Between me and the school was a steam shovel digging up the earth for a cellar. I couldn't tear myself away from it. The sound, the rhythmic swinging of its arm, the cascading earth as it fell from the shovel. It was blue and huge and it ate things. And, no one ever made a cute, squishey Barney out of that dinosaur.

The Snap

Something snapped when I was tuning my friend Ellen's piano (see previous posts for other mentions of Ellen).

She was glued to her computer while I was tuning, and when I took a break, I went over to see what she was doing. And I saw images--gorgeous images. I was sucked in.

She had just discovered photography and was off the deep end with it.

I drove home in a daze. And all I had was my Nokia (previous post).

The rest of the story:

I went further into hock (What's another $1K when you've already HAD to run up the CC for car transmission replacement, gas tank replacement, vet bills, dead laptop, etc. etc. all within an 8-month period.) All for necessity and not one penny for the soul. It was then, in late September of 2007 that I said "screw it". And bought my Pentax K100D. Joined BetterPhoto. Got Adobe CS2--remember that crappy first photo of my cat?

When I was about to throw the image away, something about his eyes stopped me. Here he is transformed. The image also now has a title--Essence of Cat--and sells well as a matted print in my local gallery, STAART.

The Brass Ring

Listen up AARP!

I'm 64 and fed up with working a jobs that were at their best, bearable. On Sept 29th, 2007 (oops, was only 63 then) I went into more debt and bought a digital camera. A good one.

I'm making pictures. I used to do this a long time ago but the lack of money forced me to stop. Not any more. I'm going into hock for a last chance at the brass ring. I know what I'm doing and I'm doing it right.

And here starts what I think about taking pictures. And making images. They are two different things entirely. But when they work together, you get something greater than the sum of the two.

This is the short intro and I end with this magnificent quote from Dorothea Lange:

The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.