Last October on an ominous Sunday afternoon, with storm clouds building, I took a long walk around downtown taking photographs of the sites covered in the ULI report. Hustle as I might, the clouds broke open with a vengeance before I could make it home with what I needed. Fortunately, the last site to photograph was Henley Street and I walked out on the covered pedestrian walkway across the speedway and hoped the lightning wouldn’t notice I was encased in a metal cage suspended in the air.
That was when I met Bart Ross. He was also taking photographs and saw my camera, introduced himself and we had a great conversation about the city, photographs, what he does and what I do. He explained why he and his wife were in town from California (his cousin Fred Brown, Jr. was being honored by UT) and we connected the way people do in Knoxville – or the way people do in a suspended metal cage in a lightning storm. In any case, I felt I’d found an instant friend and we’ve stayed in touch with plans of sharing his photographs here.
I’ll let him tell you more about who he is, what brought him to this point in his artistic journey and what precisely he does with his images. View the video at the end to see more detail about the process. The video helped me understand how he gets his end result. I’ve deliberately not labeled the photographic locations here, so you could see how many you can name without help. The key is at the end. These and other photographs from our area, as well as many others are available for viewing and purchase on his website. The first three are filled with images from our area. Check it out.
Here’s Bart:
I think it’s genetic that I am in the arts. My father is a dabbler artist. He’s been a painter, printmaker, sculptor, jeweler, collector and at 91, an award winning needlepoint artist. My mother was a collector and supporter of artists and arts organizations. My four brothers have all been involved in one fashion or another in the visual arts.
I come from a blended family, multi-cultural multi-racial. A true “California Family”, I call it my United Nations Family. We have Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, Japanese, Filipino, Nepalese and the most recent addition, Armenian.
I, my siblings and my step siblings were all encouraged to be creative; we were all “exposed” to “culture” – everything from the Bolshoi to African dance. Growing up in Pasadena, my parents were members of the Pasadena Art Museum. We also frequently visited the Huntington Library and the LA County Museum of Art and even made the trek to the folk art of the Watts towers. The adults around me valued Art, so I did also.
My earliest memory about photography revolves around a trip to Disneyland. I was about 10 years old and was given access to a Kodak Instamatic camera for the trip. The finished prints that I got back from the drug store were very different from what I had seen at Disneyland. It was a surprise and a realization that the camera records things differently from what I expected. That disconnect / transformation of photographs versus the reality of what I saw showed me that the camera had a different way of looking at the world.
In the snapshots from that Disneyland trip was one photograph that stood out. I took a photograph on the Jungle Cruise ride of an animatronic baby elephant sitting under a water fall playing. In the picture that I got back, it looked as if the elephant was sitting on the boat’s railing. I thought, “Wow! What else can I do with a camera?!” I was hooked. That image woke up the visual side of my brain to prints and images. It’s the crop. It’s the slicing view of the big picture into small areas that tell a story. It’s that sliced composition that gives pleasure to the brain. What I saw may not be what the camera sees but I can adjust the camera’s setting and its point of view. I can manipulate “the Image” in the dark room (now Photoshop) to get that pre-visualized result or story that I want to express. I have been looking for (and finding) those special images ever since.
At 18, in the spring of 1974, I went to a photography seminar sponsored by the Friends of Photography, in Carmel, CA. There were lectures by Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock, Bret Weston, Cole Weston, and Minor White, to name a few. My portfolio review session with Ralph Gibson and Arthur Taussig was pivotal to my career. Their insights helped me find my visual voice. San Francisco State University (SFSU) was perfect for me. It gave me every opportunity to develop artistically, academically, professionally and personally. At SFSU, Neal White, Don Worth, Ralph Putzker, Catherine Wagner, John Collier and especially Jack Welpott had great influences on my photographic approach and philosophy.
Art photography is a visual and when most successful, an emotional medium. Shot with a large format camera, most of my unmanipulated photographic images are quiet, still, sometimes stark. The photographs are very deliberate. I will look at a possible photograph for months. I am always looking for images. I look for the essence of what most would consider mundane and give it a visual perspective.
My current work starts there and through the magic of Photoshop, reveals a place for emotion, for meditation that the original image keeps hidden in its claim to existence in the real world. I began innocently trying to capture what I saw and to my surprise, produced what the camera saw. Now I capture what can only be felt, not just visually but emotionally, maybe even spiritually as well. The journey continues.
An Exploration of Emotion in Photographic Manipulation: Modern Mandalas
My goal here is to start with a single image, multiply it by 4 and transform it into something that can stand on its own as one image (not be duplicate images even though they are copies). It is a different way to see the world and because I have a new paradigm of the world, it has to be re-photographed. Since 2009, I have done exactly that. Instead of using a large format camera as was customary for me, I now use a digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera. I first shot everything in my house and yard, then the wife and kids. Now I take that camera almost everywhere I go. My shooting style has changed from the deliberate large format camera with carefully planned excursions, to almost Street Photography. If I see a possible image while driving, I circle around and stop the car.
Some property owners ask me what I’m doing. People see me and call the police to alert them to strangers in their neighborhood. I have even been told that I cannot take pictures on or of a property. The camera commands our emotions even before it creates an image.
In the days of the dark room there was a technique called “Flopping”. You can create this effect if you take a negative and print on one half or, in our case, one quarter of the page while not exposing the other half (or three quarters). You then flop the negative over and expose the other half of the photographic paper. I first saw this technique in the digital age in 2007 in the work of John Paul Caponigro while surfing the net looking at photographers’ work. I thought it was gimmicky. Little did I know that in 2 years, I would be obsessed with this gimmick. Let me digress here – the gimmick has its history in photography. Photographers will try anything to make something interesting with light. Whether inside a camera, outside a camera or with special chemical processes, it doesn’t matter. If a gimmick can make something visually interesting and mentally stimulating, photographers are addicted to it. We can be makers of photography or takers of photography, capturing that found object or arranging a scene, we are just trying to get our next visual hit.
The Mandalas for me were just like crack. Still are. I think I know why. I feel it has something to do with the visual sympathetic nervous system. The brain likes patterns, visual rhythms, the brain likes symmetry – balance and again visual rhythm. I feel a meditative euphoria when looking at these images. I am convinced that my brain releases pleasure chemicals when it can create patterns and form shapes out of visual nonsense.
When I look at something pleasant, I feel emotion. When I look at a great painting or photograph, I feel emotion. I found a way to keep enhancing that emotion. When I look at art, something happens in my brain, I get a pleasure rush. With a painting I think, ‘Now that’s something familiar.’ My brain starts forming patterns for recognition, but because of the symmetry, the nervous system emits bio chemical pleasure and I become more visually meditative from having made patterns.
The symmetry and patterns stimulate my visual sympathetic nervous system which dispenses pleasure chemicals- Visual Crack.
Meditation is what Islamic artists achieved in their visual presentation of geometry and math. Islamic art frees the visual sympathetic nervous system from the task of processing the visual information that is a representation of a thing or figurative image. The patterns and geometry allow the brain to enter into a visual, meditative state of Consciousness that they describe as the god consciousness – You can get the same sort of meditation visually that you get from a mantra or chant.
One other visual transformation for me as a photographer took place when creating these images that differs from my standard visualization process. The composition of the image shifts from the center of the image to its edges and corners.
When photographing for these types of images, the composition of the image is shifted from the traditional middle of the frame to the edges and the corners of the frame. The corners and the edges become important because in the aligned composite image they become the horizontal and vertical middle – the center of the new image.
Key:
- Be Grateful For What You Have: Amphitheater
- 24 Windows: Knoxville Convention Center
- Listen To Your Mother: Regal Riviera
- Moora Troop: Knoxville Convention Center and Sunsphere
- Mark Twain A Blog Post October 19: Mechanics Bank and Trust Building
- Moora Troop: Knoxville Convention Center and Sunsphere
- Never Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth: Envious Composure by Albert Paley
- Remember: UT Conference Center
- Remember: UT Conference Center
- Smile It Makes Them Wonder: Envious Composure by Albert Paley
- The Dancer Script: Amphitheater
- The Dancing Sisters: Amphitheater
- The Dancing Sisters: Amphitheater
- Visual Basic Is Not Supported: Bank of America Building
- We Call Him The Bear He Yelled: Knoxville Convention Center
- When In Doubt Consult Your Inner Child: Mural on Gay Street