The Online Photographer

...Must really concentrate the mind. Here's a nice video about a thoughtful young photographer from Los Angeles, Paloma Dooley, who is going her own way. I like the independence of thought it takes to shoot 8x10-inch film in the age of the Sony A-1, and it tickled me that she considers two exposures per month to be heavy shooting. Imagine how clear her explanations of the technical part of the work would be to a beginner or to someone who doesn't yet know about large format, and note how articulate and free of artspeak her explanations are about her thinking on the subject of land and its uses, the ways we divide it up. She touches on that near the end of the video. Knowing that, you can see what attracted her in a number of the photographs. The pictures are not made to be pretty, which I liked once I started to understand what she's up to in her work.

"Whenever and wherever we work against the landscape’s tendencies, we inadvertently flag our own vulnerabilities: any intervention made in the landscape becomes a physical marker of a danger that we are trying to outsmart." She's articulate. And yet the pictures are more so, on exactly the same topics*. You do have to look at them carefully, while being mindful of her concerns. Note the one at her website in which the central subject seems to be a tiny McDonald's sign way in the distance.

It's difficult to talk about specific pictures because they're not labeled within the slideshows at her website, but there are some terrific standout images too: my favorite, the one of the ladder against the half-chopped-down tree in "Edges / Passageways" (the same scene is in the background of the towel on the clothesline in "What it Feels Like to be a Beautiful Rectangle"), the dizzying layering of the "KLEK" tunnel, also in "Edges / Passageways," the white fence in "Plain Sight."

Pool shot
A photograph of Bodie I've never seen before? Nice to know some of those are still out there. At this link is "Empty Pockets" by Will Gibson, a onetime professional photographer whose career eventually revolved into teaching photography at Palomar and UCSD in California. To enlarge, click in the upper left hand corner. The larger version looks  better on my monitor at least.

Do an image search for "pool table at Bodie" and you'll see many more shots of the same motif, but Will's is different.

Bodie, as you might know, is a State Historic Park east of the Sierra Nevada mountains near the California-Nevada border. It's a former gold mining town that is now maintained as a ghost town in a state of "arrested decay," although of course the old buildings, which represent about a tenth of the original buildings of the town, are continuing to deteriorate, especially in the mountain winters. Bodie is also a treasured National Cliché Landmark for photographers, like the slot canyons, Horseshoe Bend, the Flatiron Building, or Ranchos de Taos. They're serious about the maintenance efforts at Bodie: there are no gas stations or food courts there, drone flyovers are not permitted, and you're not allowed to touch anything, or, especially, take anything—even rocks off the ground. Obviously someone disobeyed the no-touching rule at some point before Will photographed this old three-cushion table. Against the rules; but the "dust shadow" of the cue (not que) is what makes the photograph.

There's lots to look at at his website, too. I had a nice hour perusing it.

Three-cushion billiards, a.k.a. carom billiards, an esoteric game played with three balls on a table without pockets, is a truly strange anomaly. It was once hugely popular in the United States—match results were breathlessly reported on the front pages of newspapers—yet today it is almost entirely forgotten. Here's a link to a match if you want to see how it's played. To score a point you must hit three cushions and both of the other balls; the average scoring of tournament-level play is just 1.5 per visit to the table, making high runs like the extraordinary one at the link very rare. Just watch the overhead view of Caudron's first shot at the link (he's the second man to the table in the video, after the first guy misses) to get a sense of the insane difficulty of the game. Note also the packed crowd. It's totally weird that this was once a mainstream public sport. To the point that there would even be a three-cushion table in a saloon in a Sierra Nevada gold-mining town.

Did I just sneak in a bit of writing about billiards? Can't be; I never do that here. Bodie has long been catnip for western photographers, and I'll say no more about that.

Both of these—the video about Paloma's work and the single image by Will—were suggested by readers around the same time. They're very different in very many ways, but, if you think about it, both have to do with human efforts to cope with and control entropy, which was a nice coincidence.

Mike

*Artspeak and the work it purports to describe often do not line up all that well, if we're honest about it.

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Featured Comments from:

Neven Jovanovic: "The first page of the image search for 'pool table at Bodie' suggests that Will Gibson's photo has been taken from a vantage point somewhat higher than usual (and from an angle, and in black and white). Hundreds of ways to look at a blackbird."

[Neven's reference is to "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens. —Ed.]

David G. Miller: "Paloma Dooley's photographs are a revelation. Her location, her equipment, her age are all utterly different from mine—I am an old guy shooting APS-C on the Canadian prairies, often with panorama framing—but Dooley's images leave me gob-smacked and elated…breathless with wonder. I don't usually bother with videos (much of my life is embodied by stillness) but I watched and listened to the entirety of the one you linked to. I was struck by the total agreement between what she says and what she does. One might describe it as 'integrity,' or more informally comment that 'she's got her act together.' Thanks."

Dave Millier: "Not sure what to make of her work. It is kind of too documentary for my taste. I prefer highly simplified, very carefully composed work that looks highly deliberate and composed (if we are talking American photography, think of something like Pete Turner's 'Trashcan'). Dooley's work seems simultaneously considered and 'loose.' Looseness in composition is something I struggle to warm to but I know from viewing many a photo that you've praised, Mike, that it's your thing. It's a mystery to me to understand how taste is formed and I can't explain why I'm out of kilter with other commenters but out of kilter I am."

Ed Kreminski: "Thank you Paloma! You've rekindled my 8x10 view camera (last camera) fantasy thoughts. I really appreciate your descriptions of what it's like to shoot in the field with equipment folks don't easily recognize. I still drag a heavy tripod around and persist in a location to take a picture longer than folks find normal today. Tripod?—WTF is that? Do folks sidle up next to you with their iPhones to take the 'same' picture that you're working on? LOL. I love that LA light. Your $100 contact print pricing is way too low. Your work is worth 10 times more, easily. I wish you many years of continued photographic success and may the muses of visual arts continue to smile on your efforts! All the best and keep on shooting."