 |  | | | | | Welcome to this edition of Rory's Adventures in Photography! In this episode, we have a quick visit with the remarkable Steve Satre (pronounced sat-tree, like you 'sat on a tree' :) whose music and website you might want to visit here. Anyhow, it was a Saturday in the fall, and I still had a bunch of funny stuff hanging in my studio from the previous day's shoot with the wonderful Kim Linville, as seen below with her baby (who is actually performing roundhouse kicks at the time of this photograph even though you cannot see it!). |
| | The funny stuff is cheese cloth, and it serves well to help separate egg whites from their yokes, or to help filter out cork from wine in cases where the cork doesn't hold together. I had a hankering to use it after being forced to shoot through a similar fabric at Katie Rudd's wedding, where it was used as dividers to make a big room feel more intimate (see below). |
| At the time, I was unsure if my images were going to appear too milky, and without contrast, but afterwards I found that the prints looked dreamy and were rather appealing. I made a mental note to start shooting through fabric in the future... Enter Steve Satre, whose face naturally appeals to the camera. I wasn't satiated with my cheese cloth adventures thus far, and wanted to use them yet one more time. I borrowed some funky colored gels from Mr. Scarpati (www.scarpati.com) that have the legend of having been used on the video set of a 1980's Michael Jackson video. Well, they are utilized here in more humble circumstances in both the Kim Linville and Steve Satre images to color the lights on the cheesecloth. I inevitably desaturated the image in favor of a heavily toned black and white image. The colored gels are fun...so I'm on the fence at the moment about which one I like best. You can see the differences below. |
| My favorite elements of the Steve Satre photograph are his wonderful, root-like veins that run over his hands and wrists. This serves for me as an effective way to communicate the strength of his arms as a result of using his braces to walk for so many years. As with most of my favorite images, I didn't see ahead to highlight his arms in this way, but as I reflect, so many wonderful things happen to have fallen into place that carry meaning. I haven't been able to apply meaning to the pony clamps and the PVC pipe in the background, but perhaps I'll get around to it. (wink) This brings me to the following photograph of J.P. Morgan by Eduard Steichen from 1907 accompanied by a dashing image of Steve on the right. |
|  Steve looked so dapper that I felt it would be amusing to make a very classic image of him, with this old image that I had seared in my memory from my bootcamp days in a History of Photography course in college. Instead of the arm of a chair, the form in J.P.'s left hand was later likened to a knife blade in regards to Morgan's aggressive maneuvers in the marketplace. Steve helped make a gentler appropriation of this image. Bono says "every artist is a cannibal; every poet is a thief-all kill their inspiration and sing about the grief." Is the appropriation of an old image cultural strip mining? Perhaps, but in my opinion, it also serves as a salute and affirmation to the initial image-maker. Thanks Eduard (yes-that reads correctly: E-D-U-A-R-D).
In summary, I am extremely pleased with these images though they seem to have come together on their own somehow despite my clumsy experimentation. "Here is what is" is a wonderful album by Daniel Lanois, where he includes a thoughtful sound bite from Brian Eno, who says "Beautiful things grow out of sh*t....the tiniest seed in the right situation grows into the most beautiful forest...it gives confidence to people in their own lives to know that that's how things work. If you walk around with the idea that some people are so gifted with wonderful things in their head, but that you're not one of them, that you're just a normal person and you could never do anything like that, then you live a different kind of life...you could have another kind of life where you say 'well I know that (wonderful) things come from unpromising beginnings, and I'm an unpromising beginning--and I can start something." Well, it's worth hearing on a cloudy day...thank you for reading so much of my email. You see, if you are diligent enough, you might even get a cuss word at the end of a long email, and then its all worth it!!!! Until next time--many cheers! Rory |
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