It's been a while...

Being connected to the outside world requires time, patience and of course technology, these days. Sometimes though, it's nice not to be connected and apparently while my life has been continuing and doing well, I have been slacking in a few areas of staying connected- such as this blog. Well I will try to get better again and post what's going on... even though i don't think anyone besides for myself and maybe my mom reads this!

My photo company is doing well! I am now planning my schedule for the summer, so if anyone is interested in signing up for private photography lessons, kids or adults, now is the time! As always, you can reach me via my websites: www.rs-photography.com or www.rebeccasternphotography.com

hope everyone has a great day!

New Computer

So I'm super psyched because I just got my first computer since I was a freshman in college... jeez, can you believe it?!?  good ol dell's.  this computer rocks and will be perfect for working and etc.  like this, blogging... so i can create posts right from my computer and upload them super easily.  hopefully it works!  and for all of you who had given up on me posting, i'll try and post some more fun things more often now.

Peter Von Tiesenhausen

First Video from the Closing Reception

Preview for My Show!

Thesis Exhibition

My thesis exhibition will feature work from my project Green Scapes.

The show will be at the Blue Tower Gallery (675 Metropolitan Pkwy, Atlanta, GA) from May 10-May 24. The closing reception/party will be held on the 24th from 7-10pm, so if you're in the area, come check it out.

Blue Tower gallery will also be featuring the work of Walker Pickering, David Allen Jones, Rebecca Stern, Jason Franklin, Sharon Forbus, and Karen Williams.

Me Skiing!!

Mom Skiing

Alta Day 2

So here's our second day of skiing at my favorite place!! :)

Spring Break Day 1

So i'm in the greatest place on earth skiing... my favorite place, Alta, Utah. Here is a first day quick edit video (with sound that i dont know how to edit...). Enjoy!

Spiral Jetty News

Unfortunately some bad environmental news about Smithson's Jetty in the Great Salt Lake from the Dia Art Foundation.

My interview with Aliza Lelah at Gallery Stokes!

Environmental Images on You Tube

45-er...

So I have my review coming up next week and I am understandably nervous about it- as one should be. I came across an essay by Robert Adams that I wish were true in the grand scheme of things in a masters program, because I agree with him. I thought i'd post the part of the essay that I read and found to be the most interesting. Enjoy... I also have included a photograph from my new series that is my thesis work.

"Writing" by Robert Adams

from "Why People Photograph"

"Art is by nature self-explanatory. We call it art precisely because of its sufficiency. Its vivid detail and overall cohesion give it a clarity not ordinarily apparent in the rest of life. And so if the audience lives in the same time and culture as does the artist, and if the audience is familiar with the history of the medium, there is no need to append to art a preface or other secondary apparatus.

Successful writing about works of art is accordingly an unusual achievement. It is self-effacing, devoted to establishing the adequacy of the art without the writing. John Szarkowski described an appropriate measure for critical writing; “The better the writing is the more necessary it makes the picture.” There are only a few commentators who can do that – Robert Hughes, for instance, and Szarkowski himself.

Several important artists have been effective critics – the painter Fairfield Porter was, for example, an accomplished writer for the nation – but they have not earned reputations either as artists or critics by explaining their own art. Photographers are quick to note this because they are so often asked to spell out the significance of their pictures, something they resist trying to do. Yes, they can say a little about what brought them to begin, though this is not to discuss what resulted, and they can describe the equipment they used and the processes they followed in the darkroom, but they know that if these are the secrets then the pictures are not very important.
The frequency with which photographers are called upon to talk about their pictures is possibly related to the apparent straightforwardness of their work. Photographers look like they must record what confronts them – as is. Shouldn’t they be expected to compensate for this woodenness by telling us what escaped outside the frame and by explaining why they chose their subject? The assumption is wrong, of course, bu an audience that knows better is small, certainly smaller than for painting. Photographers envy painters because they are usually allowed to get by with gnomic utterances or even silence, something permitted them perhaps because they seem to address their audience more subjectively, leaving it more certain about what the artist intended.

Years ago when I began to enjoy photographs I was struck by the fact that I did not have to read photographers’ statements in order to love the pictures. Sometimes remarks about the profession by people like Stieglitz and Weston were inspiring, but almost nothing they said about specific pictures enriched my experience of those pictures. Photographers seemed so strikingly unable to write at length about what they had made, in face, that I came to wonder if there was any exception at all, a single case where an artist’s writing did not end up making a picture smaller, less complex, less resonant, less worthy of comparison with life.

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision. Other ways are relatively imprecise and incomplete. Why try the other ways? As Charles Demuth said, “I have been urged…to write about my paintings…Why? Haven’t I, in a way, painted them?” Or as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, “You want me to say it worse?”

Photographers are like other artists too in being reticent because they are afraid that self-analysis will get in the way of making more art. They never fully know how they got the good pictures that they have, but they suspect that a certain innocence may have been necessary. The poet X.J. Kennedy speaks of his in his amusing verse “Ars Poetica”:

The goose that laid the golden egg

Died looking up its crotch

To find out how its sphincter worked.

Would you lay well?

Don’t watch.

The main reston that artists don’t willingly describe or explain what they prodice is, however, that the minute they do so they’ve admitted failure. Words are proof that the vision they had is not, in the opinion of some at least, fully there in the picture. Characterizing in words what they thought they’d shown is an acknowledgement that the photograph is unclear – that it is not art.
Of course if you believe in the merit of your work you reject the accusation of failure that is implied by a request to explain it. In this respect all artists are elitists. They are convinced that some viewers lack patience to see what is clear.

Probably the best way to know what photographers think about their work, beyond consulting the internal evidence in that work, is to read or listen to what they say about pictures made by colleagues or precursors whom they admire. It is as close a photographers usually want to come to talking about their own intensions, though even this testimony must be interpreted carefully because it is guarded (no one undergoes the trouble of serious picture making if he or she believes that anybody else has done exactly what most needs doing). Almost all photographers admire a selection of work by others, though, and sometimes the achievements they notice are closely related to their own.

For photographers, the ideal book of photographs would contain just pictures – no text at all. There have been a few volumes like that, but publishers complain they don’t sell, so not many have been allowed, which leaves photographers to endure the botched clarity and wasted effort required of them. (writing under the best of circumstances is demanding; Red Smith, the eminent sportswriter, addressed everybody who supposes otherwise: “There’s nothing to writing,” he said, “all you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.”) I remember once working through more than a hundred drafts of a four-paragraph statement for a catalog, all to find something that would just keep out of the way of the pictures.

Things are not about to improve either. University presses, for example, which publish some of the best photography, hold increasingly to a policy that requires books of pictures to incorporate “substantial” texts. This often means not only layering together pictures with the photographer’s words, but also sandwiching the concoction betweens slabs of social-scientific balloon bread.

Photographers continue to write because they need to have their pictures reproduced in quantity; it is the only way they can convey an adequately sized vision of things. To get published I have tried every kind of cheating – I have quoted others to the same end as mind, I have talked about photography in general in order to imply what I was attempting personally. Experience has shown, however, that the best way to avoid talking about the pictures is to talk about their subjects – tract houses or fields or tress or any of the myriad and interesting details of life. If you have to fill the quiet of a picture, the least destructive way seems to be to speak about what was in front of the camera rather than about what you made of it. It seems the least a trick, the closet you can get to speaking about the meaning of a picture without actually doing so.

C.S. Lewis admitted, when he was asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them. Photographers know this frailty. To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters. Their gift is to see what will be affecting as a print. Mute."

Jackson Jan 27- Feb 3, 2008

My bro made some videos of the last week in Jackson of us skiing. I went out to help hang a show and the snow delayed a few things, so I skied, got a real job for when i return (yeah!), did some other things, and skied some more. There are 4 videos, so enjoy! Oh by the way, we got 54 inches in one week. My parents are still out there and I think it's up to about 80 (inches of snow that is).

Video Presentation for Black and White Craft

Lost Duffel AGAIN!!!!

Well all was thought to be said and done with losing bags these days, however I was wrong. So to make a somewhat long story short, my duffel from Jackson to Atlanta is lost. And by lost I mean probably still sitting in the Jackson airport. All the flights were cancelled out of Jackson the last few days because of massive amounts of snow that we received and I was lucky to catch a direct flight from Jackson to Atlanta. However because of the snow, the runway was really slick and in order to get enough traction, have enough fuel and take off on the tiny runway, they decided not to put anyone's bags on the plane. That's right, I said NO ONE'S BAGS WERE ON THE PLANE!! POOP. And they didn't bother to tell anyone until we had waited for 1/2 an hour in Atlanta for the bags.... and now, eventhough I was on a direct flight and I know the baggage wasn't loaded on the plane, they apparently can't find the bag... obviously it's still in Jackson. wtf.

Duffel Found!

Well it's been over a week and our duffel has just been delievered to the house. It is still a duffel but does not resemble the duffel we left at Naples a couple of weeks ago. It has been completely ransacked, destroyed and every bit of our stuff has been gone through, broken, torn and looks like its been thrown in the trash. The lock has disappeared and the color of the duffel is different. So, we have our duffel back, but there is stuff missing, broken and it feels awful. Hopefully the airline will replace the items, but they can't replace the emotional attachments.

Day 16, The Last Day (or so we thought...)

I have not wanted to write this day for a few days since we’ve been home because the ensuing events of our trip home have been quite frustrating and I wasn’t ready to write about it yet. However as I write this, I am on a plane on my way to Jackson, Wyoming to spend the next three weeks. Well, where to begin. This story is quite long and I will try and keep it short, but provide enough information to understand the circumstances. So mom and I wake up so early on Friday morning around 3:45am and get ready to finish packing the car and make our way to the airport (which as we found out later was right next to the American naval base in Naples)! We eventually find the departures section of this small airport and decide to just leave the car outside while we went inside to check-in. We were scheduled on an Alitalia flight to Rome and then a Delta flight from Rome to JFK and because the two airlines are partners there was not supposed to be any issues with that. So we get to the business class check-in line and wait for about 15 minutes for 1 person in front of us to check-in. Meanwhile, as I should point out, we didn’t have seats on this flight- they were given out as a first come first serve basis (the worst system ever). Well when we finally got to the check-in counter, the man was so rude to us- first he said he couldn’t check us in all the way to JFK because he didn’t have access to finding our tickets and so he wanted to check out bags through to Rome and then we would have to get our bags in Rome, check-in AGAIN and then go through security and still make our flight. This was super frustrating as we were told we could easily check all the way through and not have to do anything in Rome. However, this man was so unaccommodating towards us that he was mean- not even wanting to look for our correct tickets so he could check us in. So mom and I accepted whatever he gave us and went to return the rental car at hertz a few blocks away. A gentleman who was in Naples training people on the Naval Base returned a car at the same time as us and accompanied us back to the airport terminal in the windy, cold, dark morning. We went through security- which was a breeze- and got to our gate. Mom went to the bathroom to wet the washcloth and came back 25 minutes later after having found a wonderful woman who went to her supervisor because she thought it was outrageous that we could not check our baggage and ourselves all the way through to JFK. She checked us in again, gave us new boarding passes and new luggage tags which she said she would run out to the plane to put on our bags! That made mom feel a bit better. The Alitalia flight was packed like sardines and people boarded the plane in a junk show many from the rear of the very old plane. So we make it to Rome, do our tax free stuff and get to the lounge to relax a bit before our next 10 hour flight. When it’s time to board, mom and I walk to our gate and they wouldn’t let us on board because we needed boarding passes (well we thought we had boarding passes, but apparently those didn’t work)- so we had to get new boarding passes at the gate and answer some security questions, then we could board. We get onto the plane and there are people sitting in our seats so the stewardess asks them to move and they were so rude it was quite unpleasant. As we settled into our seats, it became much more pleasant on the flight and mom and I were glad that everyone spoke English (we don’t normally feel like that coming home from Europe). Well I watched 3 movies and slept for about 5 minutes; mom slept for about 2 hours. So we arrive in JFK after 10 hours and make our way through the customs check and then went to get out baggage. 3 pieces of our luggage came out, the fourth was no where to be seen. Only one of our pieces of luggage actually had a baggage tag on it, the second piece had a number on it, but didn’t match any of the luggage tags we had and the third piece had no tags at all on it. We were really surprised that any of the bags actually made it. We were so distressed about the loss of the 4th bag that it was hard to be relieved that we were home. We went to the lost baggage office and the woman was okay, but by no means helpful. We ended up being there for 2 hours as we made the claim and then a nice man said he would go back and look for it in the back. No luck. We arrived at JFK at 2:45, we left the airport close to 5pm and of course was stuck in rush hour traffic on the way home while mom called the delta lost baggage people for the first time to explain the story and make a more complete claim. The man said that they would call us if they heard anything and that we should keep calling to check-in too.

For the next 2 days straight that is exactly what mom did- every 3-4 hours she would call Delta and receive different information every time she called- it got to be so frustrating that it was stressful and annoying. She was getting the run around and even when she talked to some supervisors, they were so incompetent that mom didn’t know what to do. So we still don’t have our bags- I could go into more detail about incompetency and the details surrounding the last few days, but I am too frustrated now writing this to continue. So there might be more later, but for now, we are home, minus one bag and off to the next stage of the adventure. Ciao!

Day 15, Naples

Naples was not a pleasant city to be in and as we left the beautiful Amalfi Coast and made our ways 2 hours north to Naples, one could clearly see the difference. The people, the buildings, the drivers, and etc. There is no need to go to Naples ever- except that our hotel was nice- a new 3 star on a dead end near the airport. The night before we left, neither mom nor I could fall asleep so a long game of 20 questions was played to try and fall asleep!