Sunday, May 2, 2010

A surreal hourglass


This was the first montage print of 2010, a nice way to start the year :-)
What's above is my photoshop 'sketch' of the image, not the final print.

I had spent a number of days ruminating over many photoshop sketches of potential ideas during the week before New Year's.
I also read this NYTimes article...

Time, The Infinite Storyteller
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: December 31, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/arts/design/01time.html

...and for whatever weird reason, I woke up New year's day thinking "I gotta print this one - & this is the perfect day to print it, too."
I wake up w/ 'strange thoughts' in my head - don't you sometimes, maybe from a dream?
( 4.5 years ago I landed in a hospital w/ burst appendix/peritonitis... which got me 9 days in a hospital hooked up to god-knows-what - a drip feed of morphine, some saline/sucrose? definitely loads of antibiotics!... also a catheter and diaper (how humbling!)..& there were many side effects from all this, that none of my doc's can explain.... including *remembering my dreams*!!, which never EVER happened to me before.
Nice side effect :-) ... i have been enjoying it ever since, however scary it can be sometimes.)

This one started w/ an hourglass, of sorts, built on Ocean Beach in SF, which I shot in silhouette, no detail in shadows.
(Ocean Beach is the kind of place where most anyone can show up, and do (or build, however temporarily) whatever they want, very few rules, very little law enforcement. Nice place to be for a while, hunh? :-) )

Something needs to flow down from the top, right?
I chose a waterfall I shot somewhere in the Santa Cruz area mountains, years ago. The light was pretty dim, this is surrounded by huge redwoods, so the exposure is a second, or maybe more.
What happens at the bottom? The rushing water of the waterfall?...goes to... what?
Hhmmm....how about that it yields only a few drops, that create the ripples of water at the bottom?
(The ripples were shot at a Pt. Reyes tide pool, tide-water stranded in a shallow depression.
I threw a rock into the pool, and shot the ripples, did it a few times....
I am glad there's no one around to see me doing this crazy shit, they would definitely think I was wacko.)

There needed to be something more going on in the middle, between the waterfall and the ripples, something..uh.. 'transformative'? in some way?..
So I made a 'sandwich' of some really abstract lens-flare things shot thru a cross star filter,...and a sky, and that's what I burned into the middle.
What does it all mean?
Well... uh.... I'll give it a try -
'Time flows forward, a torrent that knows no end, and has had no beginning - but our experience of it, is a drop, a second, at a time'.

That works for me, how about you?

The final print at:
www.bobbennettphoto.net/BeachBlog_2010/Hourglass/

Next entry, more darkroom :-)