[ Lost in the Landscape ]

for a good cause

I’ve donated one of my pho­tographs to an auc­tion to ben­e­fit Yosemite Renais­sance, the orga­ni­za­tion that now over­sees the Artist-In-Residence pro­gram at Yosemite National Park. The piece below is from when I was in the park dur­ing 1997–98 as part of the program.

James SOE NYUN. Hetch-Hetchy Reser­voir from O-Shaughnessy Dam, Yosemite National Park, 1997/2007 (from the Blue Day­light Series). Archival pig­ment print [ click to enlarge ]

The auc­tions is a great oppor­tu­nity to add to or start your art col­lec­tion and help out a deserv­ing orga­ni­za­tion at the same time. The res­i­dency pro­gram is cur­rently on hia­tus as they work to upgrade a cabin that will be used by artists. The orga­ni­za­tion is count­ing on this auc­tion to help with that effort.

All auc­tion art­work will be view­able (if it’s not there already) at the auc­tion page off the main Yosemite Renais­sance home page, where you can also place bids online. Or if you pre­fer to view and bid on the work in per­son, they’ll be on exhibit at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Val­ley Wednes­day and Thurs­day, August 27–28. Recep­tion and the live auc­tion will be on Thurs­day from 6 to 8 p.m.

August 16 2008 | Categories: art • photography | Tags: auctions • James SOE NYUN • Yosemite • Yosemite Renaissance | No Comments »

beautiful decay

Here’s another recently com­pleted image in my Destruc­tive Test­ing series, “Com­par­a­tive Wilt Test.”

James SOE NYUN: Com­par­a­tive Wilt Test: Oenothera, Osteosper­mum, Oxalis. Dig­i­tal pig­ment print, 16 x 20 inches.

The orig­i­nal pho­tos were taken in the late 90s, and my orig­i­nal inten­tion was to print them sequen­tially so that you could see the wilt­ing in process. I tried that, but then decided it wasn’t inter­est­ing enough. Recently I decided to revisit some of the neg­a­tives using Pho­to­shop. I ended up super­im­pos­ing five of the orig­i­nal images and used dif­fer­ent kinds and degrees of trans­parency for each layer. I like this result much bet­ter, though I could also see this turn­ing into a stop-motion video at some point.

The image memo­ri­al­izes a pseudo-science exper­i­ment I con­ducted to see how three dif­fer­ent flow­er­ing plants would behave when cut off the mother plant, lashed to some sup­ports, then allowed to wilt over the course of sev­eral days. The vic­tims in this case are three plants in the gar­den I was hav­ing some ill feel­ings towards: Mex­i­can evening prim­rose (Oenothera spe­ciosa), free­way daisy (Osteosper­mum fru­ti­co­sum), and Bermuda but­ter­cup (Oxalis pes-caprae).

My prim­rose prob­lems went back to a packet of “wild­flower seed” that I’d pur­chased as a sou­venir at the Grand Canyon in the early 1990s. The pic­ture on the packet was appeal­ing: del­i­cate pink flow­ers on a dainty plant. And they were wild­flow­ers! At first I was thrilled that the sprin­kling of seed I applied to some des­o­late ground in the front yard started to ger­mi­nate. I was even hap­pier when there was that first extrav­a­gant first flow­er­ing, with dozens to hun­dreds of the papery, soft pink flow­ers cov­er­ing the plants so you couldn’t see the bar­ren ground anymore.

Okay, if you know the plant, I can tell you’re laugh­ing and know where this is headed… But as I soon found out, as pretty as it is, this is one aggres­sive plant, reseed­ing tena­ciously and spread­ing quickly by putting out dense webs of under­ground run­ners. More than ten years later, I’m still pulling at the stems that con­tinue to come up in that bed. And even though they’re wild­flow­ers, they’re not native to San Diego. For­tu­nately for the local ecosys­tem, they haven’t escaped from the bed where I naively gave them the gift of life.

Plant num­ber two, the free­way daisy, had sim­i­lar issues. It started out life as a tiny plant in a four-inch pot but soon spread like a demon, swal­low­ing up a num­ber of lit­tle annu­als that stood in its way. At least the plant didn’t reseed much, and the stems, though they can some­times set down root, were easy enough to control.

The final plant, the Bermuda but­ter­cup, is a com­mon and obnox­ious weed over much of coastal South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. Dur­ing its peak bloom in the mid­dle of spring the perky yel­low flow­ers over the attrac­tive clover-ish leaves are a nice sight. But once you have it, you’ll prob­a­bly have it forever.

June 24 2008 | Categories: art • my garden • photography • plant profiles | Tags: Destructive Testing • James SOE NYUN | 1 Comment »

calla lily displacement

Here’s a recently reworked piece, Calla Lily Dis­place­ment, from the Destruc­tive Test­ing photo series I started ten years ago:

Believe it or not this work sprang from a dis­com­fort I had with the doc­u­men­tary photo tra­di­tion, where the pho­tog­ra­pher is often con­sid­ered an invis­i­ble pres­ence, and where pho­tog­ra­phy is a neu­tral and even benign tool with which to view of the world.

Destruc­tive Test­ing is a group of still life images doc­u­ment­ing var­i­ous gen­tly destruc­tive acts against botan­i­cal mate­r­ial. In these actions, I was inter­ested in ques­tion­ing that neu­tral­ity by point­ing out the pres­ence of the pho­tog­ra­pher. At the same time I wanted the image to still be a beau­ti­ful one, some­thing that bal­anced the destruc­tive­ness with qual­i­ties we expect from images we want to have around us.

(And yes, I wanted to do a calla lily pic­ture that wasn’t like the tens of thou­sands of them that have already been done…)

April 24 2008 | Categories: art • photography | Tags: calla lilies • Destructive Testing • documentary photography • James SOE NYUN • Zantedeschia aethiopica | 1 Comment »

shameless self-promotion

If you’re in San Diego, I invite you to attend The Photographer’s Eye: A Way of See­ing, one of the cur­rent shows at the Museum of Pho­to­graphic Arts. It’s got one of my works from my Going series as part of it. The show closes April 20.

James SOE NYUN: Steer­ing wheel, Mon­u­ment Val­ley (from the Going series).

Also, a few posts back I men­tioned that I’d put up the link to the Top 50 Pho­tog­ra­phers at Portland’s Crit­i­cal Mass, where one of my port­fo­lios is fea­tured. The link is now active. Take a look!

April 13 2008 | Categories: art • photography | Tags: exhibitions • James SOE NYUN | No Comments »

when landscaping fails

Desert Cen­ter, Cal­i­for­nia lies about halfway between Indio and the Col­orado River, halfway between a hot, flat desert town and the Ari­zona bor­der. Unless you need to stop for gas, you pass by it on I-10 at wide-open high­way speeds. It’d be a blur like any other anony­mous desert town if it weren’t for the palm trees.

The huge date palms there grow single-file in for­ma­tions that describe wide cir­cles, V-shapes, or a tri­an­gle that’s many acres across. Trans­planted there by Stan­ley Rags­dale in the early 1990s, most of the trees now have seen bet­ter days. Even for drought-tolerant date palms, irri­ga­tion is essen­tial here in the low desert. The water­ing proved inad­e­quate and many of them died. In their cur­rent state of falling into ruins the trees are visu­ally amaz­ing, the veg­etable equiv­a­lent of the Acropolis.

James SOE NYUN: Palms I, Desert Cen­ter, California

I first went to pho­to­graph the town and its trees in 2003 on a hot, breezy day in April. It was approach­ing noon, and there was no shade other than what a min­i­mal palm trunk could pro­vide. It’s not the sort of light­ing sit­u­a­tion that a lot of pho­tog­ra­phers con­sider accept­able, but for this body of work it was per­fect. Besides, so many of the well-known 19th cen­tury expe­di­tionary pho­tographs of the Amer­i­can West were taken in harsh con­di­tions sim­i­lar to what I encoun­tered. Palms I, above, and Palms II, below form a dip­tych: Imag­ine Palms I on the left and Palms II on the right.

James SOE NYUN: Palms II, Desert Cen­ter, California

There weren’t many struc­tures there next to the inter­state, not much beyond the oblig­a­tory cafe and gas sta­tion. The big sur­prise, though, was an aban­doned school, com­pact, con­structed of brick, and mod­ern in its archi­tec­ture. It had almost no win­dows in the class­rooms except for high cleresto­ries place beneath broad, shel­ter­ing eaves. Not that dif­fer­ent from the schools I attended up in the Los Ange­les area, I thought. In photography–and in paint­ing for cen­turies before it–ruins are often a bit of a cliche, but name me a land­scape pho­tog­ra­pher who hasn’t shot some at some point. I couldn’t resist:

James SOE NYUN: Breeze­way, Aban­doned School, Desert Cen­ter, California

Both the palm trees and the town clearly had seen bet­ter days. Stephen A. Rags­dale, the man who founded the town in 1921, died in 1971. Stan­ley Rags­dale, the one who directed the plant­ing of the trees, died in 1999. With­out their ener­gies, this area of the city fal­tered, and the palms began to fail. The town and these land­scapes shot there func­tion for me like North­ern Euro­pean van­i­tas paint­ings, reminders of life’s strug­gles, its short­ness, and the cer­tainty of entropy. Again, those aren’t tran­scen­den­tally fresh ideas, but to see them par­tic­u­lar­ized in a place that’s strug­gling though still very much alive fas­ci­nates me. Judg­ing by the num­ber of peo­ple who leave the high­way, gas up, then drive slowly towards the palm for­ma­tions, I’m not the only one who’s fascinated.

For more infor­ma­tion on Desert Cen­ter see: Wikipedia / The Cen­ter for Land Use Inter­pre­ta­tion.

For more infor­ma­tion on the large series this images are a part of see: James SOE NYUN: Blue Day­light Project.

November 30 2007 | Categories: art • landscape • landscape design • photography | Tags: desert center • desert towns • James SOE NYUN • palm trees | No Comments »