jeromemartin.ca

The Summer of 2011

This is the Labour Day weekend, the time that we celebrate the passage of summer into fall. Mornings and evenings are cool, skies are big and blue, and afternoons warm and dry, just right for harvesting if you are a farmer.

This is also the time of the summer lament, the period in which no matter how warm and wonderful the summer has been some people say it should be longer and should have been warmer and what is the world coming to. But most of us love the four seasons, whether we realize it or not. Planes fly in and out of our city daily so if we need a warm interlude during the winter we can have it.

The summer of 2008 has been a remarkable time for me and my wife, Merle. Our son Paul, daughter-in-law Mona and grandchildren Emily and Aidan have moved from Vermont to Edmonton where he has taken a position with Grant MacEwan University. They now live minutes from us, and we are delighted to have them back.

The move gave me an opportunity to fly to Ottawa and drive back to Edmonton with my son who wanted to see northern Ontario rather than ship his vehicle. Driving across this grand country is a great experience at any time, but travelling with my son through Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta was a once in a lifetime experience. We kept our friends in touch with our trip by using Twitter and Facebook, ate in fine restaurants and fast food emporiums, drank Tim Hortons coffee in Ontario, and had our first meal on the road in a Don Cherry's Sports Bar. Only prairie folk think that driving 1100 km in a day in northern Ontario constitutes a normal day on the road.

Merle and I spent the first two weeks in August travelling in Ireland with our daughter Heidi and son-in-law Dale. The photographer Frederic Sommer said 'We never go to strange places'. Indeed, Ireland seemed like home to me, although I have no family connection to it. I loved the landscape and history, the art and the literature, but mostly I loved the people. I'll continue to experience Ireland with the photographs and the stories we brought back with us.

The Colours of Belize 2011-2

I'm missing Belize, but I can share some of its colours with you. I hope you enjoy these images.

The Colours of Belize, 2011-1

I returned from Belize two days ago. It was my second trip involving a Rotary project in that country.

As I travelled throughout Belize I enjoyed the colours of the country: the land, the water, the colour, the buildings.

I'll be publishing more colours of Belize in the next several days.

One note of regret: I did not have Kodachrome film to capture the colours. Digital cameras may be considered as great products, but they took my Kodachrome away. Colour images will never be the same.

Untitled

The Year of the iPad

I won't use the term tablet as a catch-all: 2010 was the year of the iPad, a product that focused on design and function, in that order.

Design involves form and function and yet has been ignored by many companies who manufacture personal communication products. Why would one ever buy something that is poorly designed and ugly? We want products that make us smile when we see them, products which make us want to pick them up and use them. But they have to work well and intuitively. No one wants to have or need a thick manual for a cell phone, and no one wants to ask his children how to operate a computer.

The iPad is a metaphor for the future. We know that new, even more innovative products are coming: but this one is here, pointing the way to new personal, portable approaches to creating and consuming.

See what it will do for you. You already know how to use it.

iPad

My Last Kodachrome

I exposed my last roll of Kodak's classic colour reversal film ('film for color slides'), Kodachrome, today, using a Nikon camera and a 28mm lens. It's a warm, Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, very appropriate for this film which has preserved so many subtle colours during its lifetime (1935-2009).

I've used Kodachrome since the 1960s, shipping it home to Canada from Africa for processing in 1964, photographing a trip across Canada in 1967, and photographing my children, in the 1970s. Most of my work has been done with black and white film, but I used Kodachrome for subjects that worked well in colour.

The film came with special envelopes with the address of the processing company on them. The purchase price included processing and the slides were returned within a week or two.

The Kodachrome that I used primarily was Kodachrome 25 (25 ASA) although for the last several years the only Kodachrome that I could buy was Kodachrome 64. In my opinion, Kodachrome 25 was the finest colour film ever produced.

I'll now send today's roll of Kodachrome 64 and several others I exposed earlier this year to Dwayne's Photo in Kansas for processing. They will process Kodachrome until December 30, 2010.

The good news for me is that I have thousands of Kodachrome transparencies, filed and labelled. They include a forty year history of my family, our farm, our homes, my environment, and my life. I'll miss being able to buy and use more of it, but I'll delight in working with the images which Kodachrome has helped me to create.

Photography is a tool which can be used by the artist within each of us to preserve moments and to interpret what is happening in our lives. We can do that best when we use the best films, cameras, and lenses available. I'm glad that I chose Kodachrome.

Please join Paul Simon and me in giving this film a great send-off by singing along to Kodachrome.

Films

Road Trip to Waterton

I left Edmonton this morning and drove to Waterton National Park via Calgary, Fort MacLeod and Pincher Creek, to attend the annual meeting of the Book Publishers Association of Alberta.

Waterton is very close to the US border, on the edge the Rocky Mountains and the Alberta foothills. I get claustrophobia in most Rocky Mountain parks, but Waterton does not cause me as much anxiety as the rest: I can see the route to open country and I don't have huge mountains hanging over me as I drive in and out of this park. It's a fine place and is not crowded, especially at this time of year.

I stopped a few miles north of the boundaries of the national park to make these images late this afternoon.

The Fields of Saskatchewan

I spent the last several days in and near Regina, playing music with and for good friends.

Most of Saskatchewan has had a lot of rain this year, so much that some fields have not been seeded. However, the crops that were seeded on time are looking great: and the big skies always are impressive.

Saskatchewan

Photographing in the Key of C

I subscribe to the podcasts from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University through iTunes and was fascinated to see the title Photographing in the Key of C listed. I could not have predicted or guessed what the title meant even if I had read the introductory comments: 'Watch Cedric Chatterly talk about and demonstrate his amazing handmade large format cameras!'

The cameras are amazing, but the title comes from the last one that he demonstrates. Enjoy the two minute video on YouTube.

Cameras

Today's Photographs

For the last several weeks I've been working with photographs and contact sheets which I've made over the last several decades, organizing them, scanning them, and ensuring that they're stored archivally and are accessible when I want to work with them.

I love working at a desk or in a darkroom, but I often have to remind myself that there are new photographs ready to be made. This afternoon I walked into the woods which are only half a block and across the street from my house.

And there were photographs. I hope you enjoy them.

  

Edmonton

Karsh: Image Maker: an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Alberta

Yousuf Karsh (1908-2002) was one of the most famous and successful photographers of the twentieth century. Karsh: Image Maker, an exhibition currently at the Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA) in Edmonton, tells Karsh's story using his photographs, letters, cameras and equipment.

Karsh began photographing at the age of 16 after his parents gave him a Kodak Brownie. When he was 20 he moved to Boston to work with a respected photographer and fellow Armenian John H. Garo. He returned to Ottawa where he established a photographic practice.

He is described in the exhibition as a '...displaced refugee, eager apprentice, striving entrepreneur and intuitive artist' who knew pictorial, technical and social codes.

'Karsh of Ottawa' had sittings with more than 15,000 people in his sixty years of work between 1932 and 1992.

This exhibition includes some of his cameras including one the two Calumet 8x10 view cameras he bought in 1956 for his Ottawa and New York studios. Karsh also used a 4x5 Speed Graphic and a medium format Rolleiflex when he travelled. Most of the photographs in this exhibition are black and white enlargements made from 8x10 negatives, although there are some contact prints and several works in colour.

Karsh was indeed an image maker: his images of famous people like Winston Churchill, Alberta Schweitzer, and Nelson Mandela are famous. He ensured that he portrayed his subjects in a positive way and considered his photos to be beams of hope.

'The question ... whether I should record the legend or something else about the personality...I am satisfied that no purpose would be served if I were consciously to seek to convert what could be a portrait of greatness into a moment of weakness. Such moments are not worthy of recording.'

Yousuf Karsh

If you've always wanted to use a view camera to create an image similar to the ones made famous by Karsh you can do so at this exhibition. One can photograph someone, or be photographed, using a digital version of a view camera. Adjust the lighting, frame your image, press the bulb, and use the computer which is part of the exhibition to send the digital image you have created to your e-mail address.

Karsh: Image Maker will continue at the AGA until May 30, 2010.

Photographers