Roadtrip: Julia Margaret Cameron at the Milwaukee Art Museum

Julia Margaret Cameron was the first photographer to break out of what was eventually to become the 20th century dogmatic f64 aesthetic of acute sharpness, long tonal range prints, and insistence on realistic documentation which continues today in HDR digital photography. Twenty-five years after photography was invented she took it where she wanted and got dismissed for her unconventional vision and her gender by the photographic intelligensia. She did sell enough of her photographs, which were of the right people, to some of the right people, so a fair bit of her work survives. The Milwaukee Art Museum was showing an exhibit that otherwise has only been in New York, and returns to the Victoria and Albert, the permanent home of most of it.

The museum has been featured in one of my first Roadtrip blogs and once when picking Andy and Kristin up at the airport.

Little Guinness (we had plans to go to a micro-brewery) was loaded with speedy Kodak Ultra-Max 400.

We drove down there in what seemed like practice for the Gran Prix the entire way. Prolific tailgating at 80 mph. Easier to deal with in a Mustang, but still not at all relaxing. We went to lunch at Edison, a posh new restaurant in the Historic Third Ward.

The dining room was very nice, but a little empty and cold. The reviews seem to be based on dinner and the lunch menu was a little underwhelming. A nice enough place to sit and recuperate after the drive.

The entrance from the parking ramp to the Milwaukee Art Museum always seems like you're entering a 
Sci-Fi film.

That impression doesn't change when you get to the soaring Windhover Hall with it's signature winged sunshade.

OK, we get it. The place is held up by arches.

The special exhibitions galleries at the left and the corridor leading to the main galleries in the older Museum building.

The Julia Margaret Cameron Exhibit was in the basement in the Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts. It was fantastic. Everything done by her hand, although she had some help with some prints. Many of them I had only seen in small format in the back of a raison d'etre volume. Most of them are signed and titled in her handwriting, with copyright often noted. Despite her literary settings, the real personalities of the sitters is what gets you. She was a really good technician with depth of field and recognized the potential of long exposure. Her original Petzval lens was included in the exhibition. I would like to retouch the dust in a few spots though. I don't think they explained very well what it took to do wet-plate and albumen-print photography, except a quote where she apologized that, in her enthusiasm, she got permanent silver nitrate stains on everything,

When we asked for directions in that long corridor, I still had the camera in my hand and was informed that the little tripod was strictly forbidden. While we looked at the first gallery, I set the unmounted camera on the bench in the unoccupied next room. I checked on it quite a few times. At the end of the ten minute exposure, a well meaning guard who was looking for the patron who might have forgotten it, was holding it with the shutter still open. He managed to keep a spotlight in the frame the entire time he carried it. Do I need to share authorship of the photo with him? Anybody understand the dotted nature of the trail?

Several rooms down, I saw the backlit banner of Mary Hillier and her flowing hair at the entrance and tried again. The soft leather benches curve down toward the edge, which you can see in the previous photograph. As I struggled to find a way to tilt up the camera (including wedging the Museum tickets under it), a new guard noticed and asked if he could help me take a selfie. I asked if instead he could just allow me to use my little tripod on the bench I would really appreciate that. The legs didn't even need to be extended, just so the ball and socket head could point the camera up a little. He didn't quite understand but was going to be there for 55 minutes so he said go ahead and it would probably be alright.

Moving on, a favorite from the permanent collection.

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to submit this for the Abstraction theme this month for the Fox Valley Photography Group.

A sparse sculpture gallery, which I think is more commonly a reception area, with a hole in the floor under a Calder mobile.

Sarah photographing sailboats in Lake Michigan through the holes in the sculpture.

The corner of that gallery. I was using the octagonal columns to hold the camera against.

Idris Kahn: Repeat After Me was in the special exhibition galleries. His work consists of repeated images laid down on top of each other in several media. These early prints were done by blending dozens of photographs by Bernd and Hilla Becher of a similar shape of buildings on top of each other. If you look at the bottom of the left photograph, you can see my reflection holding the camera against the glass of the gallery entrance. A maintanence crew came by and didn't say anything.

We had latte's on the shoreline to refuel before the drive home. The sunscreen wings over the main lobby are visible.

Looking up at Lake Michigan and the sky reflecting in the curved windows.

The Museum is located right on the trail that lines the shore, behind the breakwater that defines the harbor.

I had taken along my Hazy Rabbit and EyePA 30 Lakefront Brewery cameras to photograph the brewery and tasting room in downtown Milwaukee. 

The map out of the city looked like a bloodshot eye with red zones extending in every direction. After the challenge of the drive to get here, we decided to skip the brewery and spent nearly an extra hour getting back to Oshkosh. Unlike the morning drive, it was mostly just tedious crawling in traffic or down county roads at Google Map's command. Seconds after we passed the Ninth Avenue exit in Oshkosh, traffic on I-41 came to a slow roll for a new lane closure and it took us another 15 minutes to get one exit down to the next opportunity at Oshkosh Avenue. When we arrived at Parm for pizza and beer, I found that my tripod had lost one of it's legs in my pocket. I accidentally bought this pink tripod for Andy a decade ago and replaced it with a black one and took this one home. Not wanting attention for anything when I'm trying to take a photograph, I avoided using it for years. Recently it became the most usable, easily pocketable tripod I had, so damn the associations, I took it for this trip. 

Trying to compensate for the lost leg, I leaned the tripod against my beer glass. Not the best choice while eating very spicy pizza. Sarah kindly gave me a sip from hers.

A later view with just the tripod head and my iphone to get the camera up to see into the pizza. 

A very nice book from the V&A.

Reading it on Sunday morning. I've gotten direct inspiration from her before, once spontaneously and once deliberately.

Later, in my exotic apres le bain trousseau.

Another version. Although I was looking at the clock and listening to Sarah's metal playlist downstairs, it looks like I have very heavy eyelids in both of these.

An attempt to mimic Mary Hillier's hair. Would Cameron recognize what her influence has led to?

Little Guinness has a .17mm hand-drilled pinhole 24mm from a 24x36mm frame. The Kodak Ultra 400 was the second roll developed in an Arista.edu liquid quart C-41 kit.

The Sixth of Manic Expression

On the morning of the Sixth of July, I was musing about several things as I prepared to go to the Farmers' Market.

I am still having one of those periods where I ride around and nothing seems worthy of a frame of precious 120 film. Is there therapy for this?

The blog post done by the Master School for Communication Design about their pinhole project gave this description.

A photo is created with this camera with the knowledge that diverse and unexpected sources of error influence the result. The experimental method is an essential part of the concept and the extension to explore the topic of "fluid" photographically. These photos do not represent images of reality but are traces of light, shaped by the medium itself.

This seems to emphasize that what the average lens photographer thinks of as flaws are what give pinhole its value and uniqueness. I like the appearance of pinhole images even without camera and subject movement, exposure errors and wrinkled image planes. My approach is to try to take the best photograph possible, and then delight in any pinhole surprises that happen. Are we both saying the same thing? Maybe if I wasn't such a old fuddy duddy I could experience some of this.

The Oshkosh Photographers Lunch Group met on Friday. Two of the volunteer "official" photographers of the farmer's market were part of the group. They fire off thousands of frames both of shoppers and vendors. What would happen if I tried that?

Minutes before stepping out the door to the market, I loaded the 24x24mm format Manic Expression Cube with a "36" exposure roll of Kodak Ultra Max 400. Until recently, I avoided ISO 400 films because the short exposure times were too fast to manage with a hand-operated sliding shutter, even with auxiliary card waving. The Fox Valley Photography Group theme for last month was motion. It was funny to hear everyone struggling to get exposure down to a half-second - about the fastest I can do. I have been using some of the faster film with 120 lately. My hand made exposures in the sun haven't been too badly overexposed and cutting a 10 minute exposure in half in interiors is quite an advantage. Grain is usually given as a flaw of faster film, but it doesn't seem that much different to me than ISO 100.

So buckle up. It took me a while to get started, but once under way, kept it up rather steadily. Somewhere along the way I decided to keep going until the film was done except for other committments in my day.

Locally grown greenhouse tomatoes.

Boerson Organic Farms has been where I've been buying eggs for quite a while. I told the young man who has been a teenager until recently that, years ago, his mother had given me permission to take a photograph of their stand. He said the offer was still good.

The theme for the Fox Valley Photography Group this month is Abstraction which was defined in the little video we watched as "freedom from representational qualities in art." I'm not sure I agree with that definition in photography. This is recognizable as beets and carrots, but it's not exactly a picture of beets and carrots.

This young woman with her "saving for college" sign has been at every market for the last year including being the only busker at the Winter Market.

I started my folkie period at about this age. If there were opportunities like this then, I probably would have been a busker.




Another young man playing the violin.

This egg roll vendor had watched me photograph the violinist and took a picture with his cell phone. I returned the favor.

A variety of colors and sizes of spuds.

With the crowd divided by a trash barrel that the tripod could stand behind, I tried to capture the milling throng from the middle of the street. In my concentration to capture a moment when there was movement in both directions, I neglected to level the camera, but somehow it captures the chaos of the situation.

My former colleague, Rosemary Smith, with her husband and their daughter Jessica, who co-starred with my son Andy in their high school production of Camelot.

Another young man playing the violin.

Stanley-Cooke Project were the main-stage band at the Main-Merrit-Church intersection.

Prints professor at the University, Gail Panske, was hosting at the Art Space Collective.

In one of my favorite long exposure transformations, the lederhosen clad accordionist at Heim Farms.

The only time you can get in the proper place for a wide angle shot of the iconic Webster Block, with a rising pinhole, is when the street is closed for the market. As I was setting up behind the sandwich board which outlines the rules for the event, Market Board Chair and chief volunteer photographer Michael Cooney came by and told me only real cameras were allowed.

This cheerful lady has been selling me jam for at least a decade and thanked me for taking her photograph.

A bluesman with a shiny resonator.

When this Democratic Party volunteer saw my tripod he said "You have a regular camera." I replied "Yes, if you mean a film camera." Impressed by my DIY effort he asked if I had watched a YouTube video to make it and was surprised when I said I just made it up.

Literature with what seem to me like sensible policies.

Another crack at an abstraction.

An arrangement of today's potatoes and a few who have been in the pantry for a while.

These were delicious.

Aliums.

Change left over from the mostly cash-only market, including the most laundered bill I've ever seen still in circulation.

Lunch on the lanai.

Caprese Salad.

Elwood and new accessories in the pond.  Think of it as an upgrade to his pedal board.

The retinue of impatiens surrounding the pond.

It's always a little bit of Halloween around here.

Back out in the afternoon. A very popular day on The Fox.

I saw this sailboat from several blocks down on Winnebago Avenue and kept riding out onto the Yacht Club breakwater to get as close as possible. It seemed like it was trying to stay in the same place until I got there.

As long as the camera has a rising front option, it might as well get used.

The beach in Menomonee Park seems to be very popular even without a place to change or lifeguards.

A group of young men in Lake Winnebago. 

Another scene I saw from quite a distance and had to hurry to get set up for. The bride and groom walking through the wedding party toward their photographer.

Two powerboats trying to stay together for a conversation appear to be racing off.

Water lilies in Miller's Bay demonstrate the rehabilitation of the Fox River industrial waterway.

An addition to the series of trees along Miller's Bay framed by Ames Point and Monkey Island, from a little further than usual, reflected in the lawn of Menomonee Park.

Another possible abstraction where one of those trees lost a limb to the winds off the lake.

The north inlet framed by two trees for a change.




A cloudscape over Menomonee Drive.

Again going for the abstraction in the soggy grass.

Since my essay on Little Free Libraries, I've found numerous others, although rarely with such a comfy reading room.

This is exhausting.

Still have to make dinner.

Most of cooking consists of chopping things.

How many pinhole cameras do you have on your kitchen table?

The Manic Expression Cube has a hand-drilled .17mm pinhole mounted on an adjustable rising front with 7mm of travel above the axis, 24mm from a 24x24mm frame. The Utra-Max 400 was the first roll developed in an Arista.edu Liquid Quart C-41 kit.