Summer’s here, in the northern hemisphere, and so is my June blog, with links and images from my latest collections of photographs, Rob’s collages, and musings about the rather strange business of being alive.

Finding Things

Photographers talk about ‘making’ rather than ‘taking’ photographs. This is as it should be - a good photograph is made, in stages, from the moment it is first ‘seen’ or visualised by the photographer, through to its translation and recording via the technical business of capturing light on film or a digital sensor, and on to the final processing and presentation.

Often, though - in my case, pretty much always - the subject of the image is found, rather than made or constructed, or it is discovered, or uncovered, through the ancient techniques of walking, climbing, crouching, leaning over, or out, or peering under, all to find the right angle of perception and moment of expression.

Speaking of found images, the abstract photograph, above, that headlines this month’s blog was captured - found, discovered, and shamelessly appropriated - appropriately enough, in the bowels of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town, the converted grain silo on the V&A Waterfront that is a marvel of modern architecture as well as a temple of African creativity.

I share this first of all because I really like the image, but also as a caution. Which is to say, my interest in signs and symbols, in the semiology of daily life, carries over into a love of the abstract, and so I am working on putting together a portfolio of abstract images, culled, caught or extracted from many years of work, which I will promulgate in due course.

You have been warned.

Being There

There is a wonderful scene at the end of that magical 1979 movie, Being There, where Peter Sellers, the wise simpleton whose garden is the world, walks out on a lake, seemingly on water, his shiny black shoes stepping precisely and calmly over the unruffled surface (this, at any rate, is how I remember it) while from the shore the smart-aleck Washington big-shots gape and gawp - is he mad? Is he a saint? Is he really not an idiot after all, but a guru, a genius? Leader of the free world?

We can take many things away from that scene, without exhausting its meaning, or its delicate mixture of humour and pathos, but at the bottom of it all, for me, anyway, there is a reflection of life that is at once simple and profound: we know so little, and yet we dare so much. Like the Bugs Bunny movies we saw when we were children, we screech off the edge of canyons and precipices, but - so long as we don’t look down - we don’t fall, we go on….

Joni Mitchell, in her elemental song, Both Sides Now, offers us the same paradoxical solace - her voice and phrasing, in her recent remake, bringing the kinds of tears to one’s eyes that you are happy to share, with others you have shared life’s journey with - ‘I’ve looked at life from both sides now/From win and lose/And still somehow/It’s life’s illusions I recall/I really don’t know life at all….’ The words, despite themselves, are oddly comforting and reassuring - we are all human, mortal, prone to error, and yet - and yet - we live, and love, and if we are lucky, we make something lasting and beautiful, like this song. Do yourself a favour, and listen to Joni here.

You had to be there, I think to myself, looking back, in my 70th year. You have to be here.

Songs of Light, Songs of Water

This image is from a new portfolio of photographs, Songs of Light, Songs of Water. The photographs were taken on the Cape West Coast, about two hours’ drive from Cape Town, in and around the salt water lagoon at Langebaan. The landscape here is starkly beautiful, and the light as the water ebbs and flows with the pull of the tides and the sun rows overhead is changeable yet eternal.

Simple, serene, I’ve tried in these images to capture something of the liminality of these wide open spaces, the light and the water.

Click on the link to view.

Travel Journal

Germany, Switzerland, France

The Burg Hohenzollern, Baden Wurttemberg

Alas, I neither speak nor read German, and my knowledge of Germany, and of German-speaking Europe is, outside of literature and the history books, sadly limited. Our trip, in May, however, to southern Germany, offered - along with the food, the wine, the beer, and the joy of meeting up with old friends and exploring the neighbourhood together - a fascinating glimpse of different histories and cultures, within Germany itself and across the Rhine, in Switzerland and Alsace Lorraine. Following my earlier postcards from Amsterdam, I have put together a new portfolio which offers a personal and idiosyncratic ‘reading’ of the region - an accidental semiology, if you will.

Do click here and take a look.

Quote of the Month

“To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. it is at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”

The great, the inimitable Henri Cartier-Bresson

Tale of the Dogfaced Boy

Rob writes:

A favourite of my collages is Dogfaced Boy Watchdog. This image is the first and by far the most successful of my Dogfaced Boys Series.

Dogfaced Boy Watchdog (see images below for details)

The idea of a Dogfaced Boy had been floating in my head for a while, not so much the meaning of such an image, but the idea of simply making a DogFaced Boy and what it might look like. For me, the visual always comes first and the process tells me the story I am making. When I thought about the origin of the concept, I realized it must go back the late 1970s when I saw the sculpture, Dogface Boys’ Picnic by Sherry Grauer at the Victoria Art Gallery in British Columbia. As I recall, the nearly life-size Boys, made of wire mesh, were seated on a bench. Although the piece evokes Edouard Manet’s Dejeuner sur L’Herbe, it more likely appealed to my strong awakenings as a young independent woman that men can be dogs, albeit cuddly ones at times.

When I found this image of this casual but confident fellow, I knew he’d become my first Dogfaced Boy. Standing before open doors, I wondered what he was doing there. I tried to insert image after image in the doorway without success. Nothing worked. I set it aside on my always-cluttered art table atop other images piled up there and voila! There was the answer: this was a fairy tale. He was guarding the Princess assisted by the Kingfisher perched on her elaborate headpiece. What had been a metal doorhandle became a shield indicating her royal status. Clearly, this is a casual non-threatening relationship furthered by the tiny heart hung above the doorway—the Dogfaced Boy loves the Princess and would happily stand there all day keeping her safe.

This popular image of mine encapsulates of the true bliss of collaging when it all comes together and reminds how my best work comes about:

Rely on chance and think less.
Just let it happen.
Forcing it always leads to disaster.
If it’s not working, put it aside.
Walk away.
Return later.
Sometimes, repeat.
Over and over.

LIMITED EDITION PRINTS ARE AVAILABLE OF Dogfaced Boy Watchdog. DM me on Instagram @robrob_pazdro or contact me via this blog.

Poetry

Once upon a time (as all good stories begin) I wrote verse, and thought it was poetry. I published in little magazines, attended poetry readings and writing groups and scribbled furiously, often leaping up at night from my darkened bed to wrap my net about the latest butterfly of imagery or thought….

And then I stopped. Probably because I was no good, and because I didn’t have it in me. My excuse is that life happened, and poetry didn’t. But I know it’s an excuse. The only way to write is to write, and I didn’t. Or didn’t anymore.

Except that, sometimes, I still do, the lines, the images, entering silently stage left, and dancing or miming under the lights.

Here is a short poem I wrote not all that long ago - it is about my father, and my complicated relationship with him, but it also, as I read it now, in the midst of these thoughts about writing and not writing, a poem about application and work.

The dad works, in the poem, on ‘another project that he will never finish;’ all that the boy wants to do is to daydream and play.

The Saw
Hold this, my father said,
Meaning the board he was cutting
For another project he would never finish.
The silver-toothed saw snickered and whined.
It was his way, I guess,
Of reaching out. I saw nothing at all,
A small boy who wanted only
To go out and play.

Being Seen

Praxis Photo Arts Center, Minneapolis

I am thrilled that the photograph below of Dyer’s Bay, on the Bruce Peninsula, Lake Huron, has been selected for the Praxis Photo Arts Center Liquid~Sky exhibition in Minneapolis, USA. This is the second time I have submitted to Praxis - my first submission, some time ago, was unsuccessful - so it is especially gratifying to have made it through the selection process for this exhibition. And, I have to admit, I do really like the photograph, one of a series on Dyer’s Bay that you can see on my website.

As I write in the introduction to the full portfolio,

We drove down the narrow hillside road to Dyer’s Bay, on the Bruce Peninsula, Lake Huron, after the sun had set. The light on the water was exquisite, pink and lilac, a soft silky sheen rippling like cloth upon the surface. There was no time to set up a tripod - I had to work fast, find the right angles and perspectives, compose and shoot hand-held before the light was gone.
Only as I wrapped up the shoot did the reality sink in. Those lovely skies, those skeins of colour cast upon the surface of the lake, came not from the setting sun but from smoke from the wildfires consuming vast tracts of Ontario and Quebec. These photographs, then, are not innocent. The beauty you see is the terrible beauty of the future we are creating, through climate change and our failure to take action.

Click here to see the rest of the photographs in this series.

The Glasgow Gallery of Photography

The two images above have been selected for The Glasgow Gallery of Photography’s upcoming Night Falls and Nature exhibitions, respectively.

The photograph, above, of Kolmanskop, an abandoned diamond mining village in the Namibian desert, has been accepted for the Glasgow Gallery’s Abandoned exhibition, which will run from 4 -29 October.

You can see another photograph of mine, in the online gallery of the Glasgow SOGO Arts 2023 Exhibition, by clicking here.

Frames Magazine

Zaha Hadid Fire Station, Vitra Design Campus

This abstract architectural image from my Travel Journal portfolio received ‘editor’s applause’ in Frames Magazine, the online photo journal, in May.

And, on 24 June, the photograph below, from my Songs of Light, Songs of Water portfolio, also received ‘editor’s applause’ from Frames.

Summer of ‘23

Finding Things

Being There

Songs of Light, Songs of Water