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Lester Picker's avatar

As most of you know, I've worked side-by-side with Bob for about 14 years now. I'm glad he's shared with you his technical expertise, but also his artistic sensitivities and how his mother's passing affected his work (don't our emotions affect all our work?). I can tell you that Bob takes his photographic passions seriously.

In this particular case, I remember Bob bringing in the first and second drafts. My take on it is that it is a prime example of artistic intent. The simple answer is to put the clouds on top and the wall/bench on the bottom. That grounds the page. The solid bench and the immovable wall ground the ethereal clouds above. Like I said, simple....yet...

By placing the clouds on the bottom, I found that it created cognitive dissonance for me. And that is not bad in a viewer. It causes more time spent, deciphering, decoding, dealing with our discomfort with that dissonance. I was forced to think of why the artist did this. It made me look longer and deeper and then the color and hues hit me. Yes, THAT was the artist's intent after all. Color. Hue. An interpretive image conveying his feeling about place.

So, all I can say is that we spend a lot of collective time in our studio listening, arguing, rethinking. Curation is critical. Few things can spoil a presentation as easily as thoughtless curation.

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Bruce M. Herman's avatar

It's hard to separate what you have in your book from what I now know about the photographs. Had I not read your article, I may not have seen the relationship. I'm a bit of a visual Visigoth, I guess. But from that insensitive perspective...

You've chosen to print these two photographs in a higher key and bluer hue than they were in nature, based on the one photo in your article above. That's consistent with your text on the page facing the photographs in question. Are the other photographs in the collection similarly altered to blue, green or gray?

In the text above, you mention a passing storm. I'm guessing that the cloud photograph would be from that storm or some other. The puddles in your original photograph of the wall are more obvious than those in the photograph in the book. Having seen it and with what you said about the storm, the relationship between the two photographs in the book is more apparent: they are related causally and emotionally. So I think the two photographs as presented would work better together if the puddles could be made a bit more obvious. For example if the puddles on the gravel were more silver like the ones immediately adjacent to the wall, they'd be more recognizable. In that case, I'd leave the two photographs in their current orientation.

I am interested in seeing the book when it's finished!

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