Chris Bickford

The Flight of the Dove, 30×20″  archival cotton rag print, first print of open edition.  Bid here.

Dusk on the Canal Grande, 30×20″ archival cotton rag print, first print of open edition.  Bid here.

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Starting this week, I will begin auctioning single prints from a new series called Scenes from a Venetian Carnival, along with copies of a companion magazine-style folio under the same title.  This is something new we are trying, and if it is successful we will continue to auction prints one by one as a fun way to encourage participation and add a little cha-ching to the purse so I can keep working independently and traveling and making books and living the dream–or at least continue to maintain the appearance of doing so…

So this is how it works:  I will be putting up two prints every three days for auction.  Though I will not be editioning these prints, I will be numbering them, and each photo in this auction will be #1.  In other words, this is the first time that any of these prints will be up for sale, and I will only be selling one of each during this auction.   The first two prints are up for auction now here and here,  and bidding will end at roughly 2 PM on Tuesday February 5.  Once the first two prints have been sold, the next two will go up for auction.   After that we may put up three prints up at a time throughout the duration of the Carnival season.   After that I will retire to my monastery in the misty mountains and spend my days fasting and meditating.   That or go surfing.

Concurrently, I have released a companion booklet for the series, (cover below) which you can purchase here.

If any of you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email me at chris@chrisbickford.com, or send me a message on my facebook page.  This is somewhat of an experimental endeavor, so I welcome any feedback.  I’ll be happy to talk your ear off about it.

If you would like to know more about the history of the project, which began in the winter of 2007, you can take a look at the some of my previous posts from Venice, which will give you some idea of both the evolution of the project conceptually and the logistical hurdles and misadventures that befell me along the way: La Maschera, Il Ballo Tieopolo, Making Friends, Finish What You Started, The Glory of the Republic, Masquerade, Venice Impressions.   You can also dig around for missives from my Carnival adventures in New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro if you find yourself so inclined.  This year I am taking a break from Carnival, so rather than diving into another mosh pit of masked balls and gay parades, I’m rolling out this new series, and experimenting with some different product offerings to get it out there.  Those of you who have me in your Instagram feed may have seen a few teasers, of which there will be more to come throughout the rest of the Carnival season.

The project has taken on a whole new look and feel as the result of a few fortuitous nights I spent this fall ignoring social obligations and pressing business responsibilities to geek out in Photoshop.  Truth be told I think I was under the lingering influence of a strange liquid brew from South America…but wherever the creative inspiration came from, things started to get really strange and really cool.   It started out with a few design ideas I was trying out for a book on the Venice project, which at the time I had unofficially titled “Songs of Glories Long Since Past: A Venetian Carnival”.   My idea was to create ten chapters, each exploring a different aspect of Carnevale, and each beginning with a chapter page constructed out of composited images–combining everything from wall textures to water reflections to crumbling frescoes that I had photographed around the city as backdrops for the text of each chapter title.  For instance, Chapter One was going to be titled “La Citta/The City”, and after a certain amount of messing around I came up with a rough draft of a title page that looked like this:

Chapter 2, “La Maschera/The Mask”, was going to look something like this:

However, I got so carried away by the results of these compositing experiments that I began to apply the same techniques to the main body of images themselves, and gradually the whole project transformed into something entirely new.  Whereas previously I had straddled the line between documentary and fantasy with this series, I was now stepping into the uncharted territory of—gasp–digital art–by layering images on top of each other in such a way that the surreal and imaginative spirit of Carnival came to life in a much more powerful way.

Most important to this transformation was the use of photographs of the walls of Venice to add texture and context to the images and amplify the themes of decay and lost lost glory and the struggle between the tangibility and intangibility of the past, which have come to be the driving motifs of this project.   In Venice, as in any ancient city, history is written upon the walls.   Unlike fields and forests and rivers and living bodies, walls and paving-stones do not regenerate; they do not heal.  They simply withstand the forces of nature that rain upon them and are transformed, year upon year, century upon century, by the unrelenting creep of decay.  Buildings can be rebuilt, façades can be repainted, streets can be re-paved; but if, as in Venice, the marks of history are allowed to remain upon the walls and bridges and canal-banks, they eventually create such fascinating patterns that merely gazing upon them can bring about the same kind of inspirational delight that you might get out of looking at great works of art in the Louvre, the Uffizzi, or the National Gallery.

Since my first rambles around the city in 2007, I’ve been fascinated by these abstract works that the hand of God has wrought upon the walls of Venice, and at some point I considered doing a series consisting of nothing more than photographs of some of the more interesting patterns and patinas I came across while losing my way down a dead-end street or waiting for a friend by a back-alley bridge.   So I had a fairly generous storehouse of images of decaying stucco and weathered stone to work with once I stumbled upon the idea of combining them with images from Carnival to create the fresco-like scenes that constitute the newly-imagined series.

Once I began to combine the images with the background textures, sometimes compositing multiple scenes and multiple textures, it was like magic.  It just clicked.  Everything started to fall into place, and the work immediately assumed a personality and a color and a thematic depth that I had only been able to hint at in my photojournalistic work on the subject.  I spent several blissful weeks combining random scenes and textures just to see what would happen, while grudgingly and tardily attending to other business, much to the exasperation of my clients.  Those of you out there who are photo-purists of whatever stripe, please accept my apologies for such shameless ignorance of the boundaries of truth-telling and total abandonment of the rules of photojournalism, but if you’ve been following along you should know me better by now anyway.  This piece is all about fantasy and imagination, and if there is any “truth” at all to it, it’s a truth about the images that seep through our eyes into our psyches and rearrange themselves into dreams and symbols, creating a tableau of archetypes through which, if we pay attention and let them work their magic on us, we can begin to see and understand ourselves and the world around us in a new light and a new depth.

So without further ado, let the auction begin.  The auction for “Flight of the Dove” will end at 2:57 PM on Tuesday the 5th, and the auction for “Dusk on the Canal Grande” will end at 3:04 the same day.  If you are interested in purchasing one of these prints and the timing is bad for you, please contact me and we can discuss your bidding options.  If you would like to keep updated on this an other auctions and events, you can subscribe to the chrisbickford.com newsletter or follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/chrisbickfordphotographer.   Thanks so much for your time and support, and happy bidding!

(NB:  Watermarks as shown on these photos are for copyright protection only.  Final prints will a contain much smaller, barely noticeable watermark, which will be seamlessly integrated into the composition of the images and will not have my name over the compass icon.)

It’s raining in New Orleans.

That shouldn’t come as any surprise; it rains all the time in Louisiana. But since I came down last week there has been the most incredible string of perfect days–what the old black families call “SNOW” (”Sweet New Orleans Weather”): clear skies, daytime highs in the seventies, beautiful sunsets, cool nights–that it was easy to forget that this city ever experiences bad, not to mention extreme or dangerous, weather.

Now that the weather has turned, I’m looking out the window watching the drops bounce off the tree-leaves and pavement of North Lopez Street, and pondering the journey this town has taken over the last seven and a half years.  Before Hurricane Katrina dealt its near-death blow, New Orleans was a forgotten backwater, a curious corner of America, a place people came to let their freak flags fly, a place with a rich cultural heritage that remained relatively unknown and misunderstood by the country at large.  New Orleans was a caricature, a cartoon version of reality, a place lost in time.  It was the place were they did that Mardi Gras thing and girls would flash their boobies if you threw them beads.  It was the place that sounded like old jazz from the ‘40’s, the place that had that really lousy football team.

New Orleans was all this, to be sure, but it was much, much more.  It was a city with deep and complex cultural roots, and a musical heritage like none other in the country. It was poor, run-down, and dangerous, but it was rich with small pleasures and a beautifully subversive sensuality; a place where fun, celebration and community held almost religious importance.  It was, in many ways, a country unto itself, a world unto itself: seductive to the point of addiction for some, and strange to the point of repulsion for others.  New Orleans was a place you either loved or hated, a place you either got or didn’t get.   But most of all, New Orleans was a wellspring: a swampy, muddy, fountain of culture, where a dozen worlds converged and bubbled over in an ecstatic celebration of life, death, food, drink, and sweet sweet music.

After Katrina, New Orleans became an island of woe, a ward full of shell-shocked citizens and abandoned houses.  The saltwater flood strangled the unruly grass, the majestic oaks, and the sultry Spanish moss; and bereft of their habitat the birds and bees joined the human diaspora, leaving the place lifeless and eerily silent.  The city was a dead zone, the floodwaters stinking in the summer heat, the dispossessed crying out to be rescued from soggy rooftops, sizzling overpasses, and a bombed-out stadium; and suddenly a nation who never paid much attention to the place was tuned in, day after day, to stories of despair and misery, of police brutality, rape, and looting; of governmental incompetence and municipal corruption; and poor black people begging for help.  Conservative talk-radio hosts said, let them drown, let it wash away, nothing but a bunch of uneducated people who don’t know how to take care of themselves.  The place is underwater.  Let it wash away.   Even National Geographic posed the question, “New Orleans: Should it Rebuild?”

How little they understood what was at stake.

The push-back was slow but deliberate, infused with the old Mardi Gras Indian “Won’t Bow Down, Don’t Know How” spirit.  Writers who knew and loved the city churned out essays and books such as “Why New Orleans Matters” and “Do You Know What it Means To Miss New Orleans?”…Musicians, restauranteurs, hairdressers and religious groups held benefits, raised money; volunteer groups from Vermont to LA piled on buses and headed to the city to help in the cleanup and rebuilding.  Aaron Neville’s cover of the Randy Newman song “Louisiana 1927″ (”They’re tryin’ to wash us away, they’re tryin’ to wash us away”) became an anthem for the times, playing on radio airwaves across the country.

What those unfamiliar with New Orleans failed to understand was just how important the culture of the Crescent is to the soul of American culture at large, though its influence might be hidden and indirect.  This is a hard thing to explain in a few sentences; it’s even difficult to explain in several hundred pages.  But spend some time in this town, listen to the old blues and jazz and r&b tunes being broadcast reverently from the legendary WWOZ radio station as you drive down the wide, tree-lined avenues; listen to the Brooklyn-esque accents of the descendants of Irish and Italian immigrants who built half the city; walk down St. Charles Avenue and gawk at the Victorian mansions nestled in the shade of oak trees; pass a strutting black man on the street who raises his head in greeting and smiles as he says “All Right, All Right”….Hit Frenchmen Street on any given night of the week and hear the music spilling out of the clubs, from reggae to dixieland jazz to bebop to salsa and even country and western; stop outside some random bar where someone is brewing up a crawfish boil, or selling tamales, or grilling ribs, while on a street corner a block down two teenage brass bands are having a sound-off, standing on opposite sides of the street trying to outdo each other in call-and-response; go a little further and see, in the alcove of a closed café, a rag-tag band of young minstrels, dressed like extras from “O Brother Where art Thou”, wielding banjos, violins, double-bass, and a muted trumpet, playing a strange but perfect mix of bluegrass, dixieland and tango, while on the street a couple dances, stopping on their way to dinner to participate in the endless street life of this town…and ask yourself, can you think of another city in this country that has such a rich, natural outpouring of culture and soul?   I challenge you to try.

In the years since Katrina New Orleans has gotten more of its due, as a new generation of hipsters, dreamers, and activists who came down to help, to support, to understand, has fallen in love with the place, and a new creative class has begun to migrate to the city, bringing with it an appreciation for the homegrown traditions that have been fermenting in this town for over 300 years.  Novels like “Nine Lives” and “City of Refuge” have brought to life the drama and diversity of this town that has suffered and prevailed over so much, and the hit HBO miniseries “Tremé” has brought the sights, sounds, personalities, and tribulations of the city into Sunday-night living rooms across the country.

At the same time, those that knew her before the rest of us were paying any attention lament the loss of a Golden Age in New Orleans, a time and place removed from time and place, a sweet sultry pleasure-den where you could disappear for years and years and not regret one single moment of wasted time.  Read André Codrescu’s “New Orleans Mon Amour”, and you will find yourself yearning for a place you never knew, and according to Codrescu, you will never know, because New Orleans will never be the same after Katrina.

To be sure, Codrescu is right in more ways than one.  The back Lower Ninth was demolished.  The Mardi Gras Indians, and the Social Aid and Pleasure clubs, despite receiving more exposure now than they ever have, have suffered major losses in their numbers as dispossessed black families have emigrated to Houston, Denver, Seattle, Boston, Baton Rouge, Chicago.   Many of the working-class families who made New Orleans what it was lost everything in the flood, and having lived in the same houses for generations, had no insurance, no money to rebuild, no path to return home once the floodwaters had receded.  The old New Orleans is lost.  But the new New Orleans is brimming with hope and pride, and still looks reverently to its storied past, still carries on into the future with the same funky, devilish, dangerous soul that makes it such an iconic and beguiling city.  It will not become a Disneyland replica of itself. It will not lose its soul to corporate interests wanting to capitalize on its “authenticity”.  It will merely walk a second-line step in to the millennium, singing the same tunes, perhaps with a different lilt, but with the same sense of pride.  There may be a lot more white kids in town these days.  And they may be a little too enamored of all this Creole culture, a little too quick to want to immortalize it with photographs and video, a little too anxious to be on the inside of the experience, anxious to hurry up and become jaded so they can really fit in, too eager to get the tattoos and adopt the streetwise walk…but hey, somebody’s got to keep the flame alive, even if it is white kids.

As one with little direct experience of the city that was before the flood, I can only speak to what remains, and to what promises to be.  And in that regard, I see a lot to be hopeful about.  New initiatives are ushering in innovate charter schools; urban agriculture and farmers’s markets are greening the city; plans are underway to set up New Orleans as a tech center, bringing in much-needed employment  opportunities to a town that mostly consists of artists, musicians, cooks, and bartenders.   Sounds of construction and renovation resound in every quarter.   Street by street, brick by brick, things are coming together.

New Orleans today is a city on the rise, with an incredibly fertile arts scene, a rebounding housing market, and a lot of optimism.  Every time I come back here, there are more freshly painted houses, more new restaurants, more newly-paved streets, and a little more traffic.  Don’t get me wrong, there is still an incredible amount of blight, especially in the ninth ward and the eastern part of the city; but even those neighborhoods have pockets of new growth, as artists, writers, musicians, and others who are no longer able to afford the high rents in the French Quarter and the Marigny are buying old shotgun houses for a steal and fixing them up into beautiful bits of gingerbread along otherwise shelled-out streets.

Yes, the crime is the same as it ever was.  Bad, brutal, and senseless.   This is not a city for the faint of heart.  But just maybe the renaissance in education and community-mindedness will eventually transform the dismaying statistics and nightly news flashes of domestic abuse and robbery.  It’s not far-fetched to believe they will.

Earlier this week I wandered the riverside end of the Lower Ninth Ward with my friend Joe Crachiola, a photographer and musician who recently bought a house in the neighborhood for a price too low to mention.  ”I love it here,” he told me as we walked down to view the old riverboat houses and walk along the levee.  ”It’s so quiet, so peaceful.  I don’t feel like I need to go anywhere.”   We passed plenty of abandoned houses, but there were just as many freshly-painted, brightly-colored bungalows, with a nice mix of people either working on their houses, walking dogs, or just stopping for conversation. It really was quiet.  Like, living in the country kind of quiet.

I came down here for some portfolio reviews sponsored by the New Orleans Photo Alliance.  I made some good connections, but unfortunately I’ve been running myself so ragged over the past couple of months that I fell ill Saturday night and actually missed my last two reviews on Sunday morning.  Since then I’ve been recuperating in mid-city and enjoying a sudden feeling that there’s nothing in particular that I have to do right now.  And even though there’s so much happening here all the time, from lectures at Tulane to killer bands playing at Tipitina’s to gallery openings and farmer’s markets, New Orleans is also a great place to do absolutely nothing at all.  So forgive me if my photo selections are a little paltry.  I just couldn’t be bothered to get off my ass and hunt down scenes.  I was too caught up in recuperation and reverie.

It all ends tomorrow, though.  Just as I’ve gotten my energy back and have started to wander around town a bit, it’s time for me to leave.   And I absolutely don’t want to go.  I still haven’t reached that point where I’m ready to sell my house on the Outer Banks and move down here, but I can tell you, I’m tempted, sorely tempted.  If only the summers weren’t so damn long and miserable.

Today New Orleans has a new anthem, Steve Earle’s “This City”.  Written after Katrina and featured in the HBO series Tremé (in which Earle plays a wise old street musician) the song exemplifies the spirit of New Orleans today: mournful of its past, quietly hopeful about its future, but bound and determined to survive and thrive and keep the spirit and soul of its forbearers alive.  There is a pride, hope, and reverence here that refuses to die, refuses to bow down, refuses to be washed away.   May it always be so.

“This City” by Steve Earle:

This city won’t wash away
This city won’t ever drown
Blood in the water and hell to pay
Sky tear open and pain rain down
Doesn’t matter ’cause come what may
I ain’t ever gonna leave this town
This city won’t wash away
This city won’t ever drown

Ain’t the river or the wind to blame
Everybody around here knows
Nothin’ holdin’ back Ponchartrain
Except for a prayer and a promise’s ghost
We just carry on diggin’ our graves
In solid marble above the ground
Maybe our bones’ll wash away
But this city won’t ever drown
This city won’t ever die

Just as long as her heart beats strong
Like a second line steppin’ high
Raisin’ hell as we roll along
Gentilly to the Vieux Carre
Lower Nine, Central City, Uptown
Singin’ Jacamo fee-nah-nay
This city won’t ever drown
Doesn’t matter cause there ain’t no way
I’m ever gonna leave this town
This city won’t wash away
This city won’t ever drown

I never get much sympathy from people when I’m out on a travel assignment.

No matter how much you try to explain the complex logistics, the feeling that you’re always in a hurry and you’re so focused on getting the right shots that you don’t really have time to relax and enjoy whatever beautiful place you’re in; no matter how much you try to explain that you’re constantly stressing about the light and waiting for a cloud to move out of the way, or to roll in and soften things up, and how you’ve got a list a mile long of phone calls to make and appointments to keep; how you’ve got to listen to some old guy tell his life story when you’ve only got fifteen minutes to take his portrait; that you’ve got to figure out how to make a good picture out of terrible lighting conditions because you won’t have time to come back later when the light is better; no matter if you tell them you’ve got a hundred tiny pieces of gear that are really easy to lose and each of them is somehow essential to the assignment: a tripod head, a screw that attaches a plate to the camera so it can fit into a waterproof housing, O-rings, polarizers, colored gels for flashes, batteries, transmitters, fifty Compact Flash cards that you absolutely CANNOT lose–the list goes on and on–it doesn’t matter.  People keep telling you you’ve got a dream job.  And on a beautiful day in the Caribbean when the sun is out and you’re swimming in crystal clear waters photographing divers and stingrays, well, it’s hard to argue with them.

Working an assignment for a large media outlet, especially one as well-known and venerated as National Geographic,  gives you an incredible amount of access.  It’s like having a key that unlocks the world and lets you in for free.  In Italy, working on a food assignment, I found it impossible to pay for anything.  The restauranteurs would just hold up one hand while I was reaching for my wallet, shake their heads, smile, and refill my wine glass with the other hand.  In Hawaii, two barefoot jungle rats refused to let me take their picture, because they were hardcore anti-western society types and rejected just about everything about modern culture, especially having their picture taken; but when they found out I was on assignment for NatGeo Traveler, they totally changed their tune and posed for me with their best jungle-rat faces.  In the Cayman Islands, I was ushered through barbed wire to get access to the red-footed booby preserve on Little Cayman, and was left alone for half an hour to photograph a rare blue iguana in a restricted area of the Grand Cayman Botanical Gardens.

The fact that I work for National Geographic Traveler, and not the actual National Geographic Magazine–which is a major distinction within the organization itself–seems to fall on deaf ears.  These days it seems, the first thing that comes to mind for people when you utter the magic words is National Geographic Television.  Which is pretty frightening, considering that NatGeo TV is one reality show away from destroying the credibility of the National Geographic brand.  I mean, really–how many shows do we need of people in prison?  And “Doomsday Preppers?”  Really?

But I digress.  My intention here, having just returned from a 2-week assignment in the Caribbean, was to try to inject a little dose of reality into the whole “travel photographer” mythos, and explain that as glamorous as it may sound, it’s really a fairly grueling job, and when you factor in all the time spent on an assignment before (phone calls, planning, buying things you need, organizing a schedule, figuring out transportation and accommodation, consulting with the editor, etc), during (getting from point a to point b, packing and unpacking and packing and unpacking, rushing to airports, picking up and dropping off rental cars, waiting for someone to show up, waiting for the light, working from dawn to the late hours of the evening, getting lost because you’ve never been here before, trying to ingratiate yourself with total strangers in five minutes, oh yeah, and taking pictures) and after (downloading and backing up all your 30,000 photos, organizing them and re-naming them, making your selections, tweaking the ones you like the best, sending off a hard drive to the editor, consulting with the fact-checker about caption information, providing some sidebar information, etc)…your pay probably comes in somewhere around $10-15 an hour, more or less.  Which certainly isn’t terrible, but probably much less than most people would imagine.  And that, of course, doesn’t even take into account all the time and expense of the projects that you worked on independently to generate a reputation strong enough to get hired in the first place.

But who’s complaining?  Not I, not I.  Hell, hand me a ticket to anywhere.  My bags are packed already.   For all the logistics and the hurry and the hassle, there really is no other job I would rather be doing.  Being sent to a place you’ve never been before–never even thought much about–and suddenly having to crack it like a nut to extract some kind of essence, spirit, or true color, is an exhilarating challenge; and as a photographer it is one of the greatest privileges of the profession.  To represent both yourself and a highly respected organization to a people and a place that you hope to represent to the rest of the world with photographs that do them justice in all their beauty, history, and soulfulness…well it honestly doesn’t get any better than that.  And I hope I have the good fortune to continue doing work like this for years to come.   I just wish they would give me more time!

There were a great many people who helped me out on this trip, and once the story is published I’ll write a second post and mention them by name, but I can’t let on too much more about the story, for non-disclosure purposes and all that.

Tomorrow I leave for New Orleans, then to Miami, then back home to the OBX mid-December in time for the holidays–but sometime around the holidays I’m going to start editing the pics from the trip and will be posting a few fun ones on Traveler’s Instagram feed, tag name natgeotraveler.  So check ‘em out.   The story itself probably won’t be out for another six months or so, but I’ll post when it goes on the shelves.  Happy Holidays to all!!

Underwater photo by my dive buddy, divemaster Michelle Davis, who had my back as I darted around using up air looking for the right angle, and grabbed me as I passed the 100′ mark on the Bloody Bay Wall, again, trying to get a better angle…

Somewhere around 11 AM this past Friday I pedaled over to Avalon Pier as part of my lazy late-morning coffee-and-surf-check, only to find my erstwhile sleepy beach-town beach packed to the gills with technicolor umbrellas and out-of-state fun-seekers, and thick with the smell of suntan lotion.  It was like somebody threw the “summer” switch and BANG!  the alarm went off, rousting us all from our off-season slumbers. Wake up, folks; its SUMMATIME!!

Children were shrieking, seagulls were squawking, skimboards were skimming, bikinis were baring, flesh was frying…

It was too much to fight, so I gave in.  I pulled off my shirt, threw it into my bike-basket, and rode up the beach singing the old Porgy and Bess tune.   Emails and such could wait until the euphoria passed.

I don’t know what it is, but I’ve got a really good feeling about this summer.  I know that’s what I say to myself every summer, but this one’s going to be a good one, I can tell.

Now, in truth, I have no reason to be so irrationally optimistic.   We are already on our second named storm, and it’s not even June yet.  The mosquitos have already reached mutant proportions, thanks to an uncannily warm winter and acres of standing water left over from Hurricane Irene.  I’ve already had two near-death experiences at the hands of Extreme Pennsylvania Drivers on the bypass…and my bank account continues to suffer from a chronic case of manic depression…

But I refuse to give in to such dire omens.   Nay, this summer I pledge to pursue a full-fledged flip-flopped, bare-backed, crotch-rotten, hang-fivin’, bon-fired, bikini-chasing, beach-cruiser-cruising, salt-cheeked, toe-headed, honeysuckle-wind season with reckless abandon–because you never know; next year one of those drivers on the bypass might take me out for good.  Or one of those storms might wipe this place off the map.  Or those mutant mosquitoes might infect us all with some nasty pandemic blown over on the hurricane winds…so while the sun shines and the water is still fresh and clear, it is incumbent upon us to dive in, catch a few fun ones, and kick back with a few good friends.   Summertime is the one time when all that psychobabble live-for-the-moment shit cannot be ignored.  For reals, yo; you gotta taste the nectar while the flower is in bloom.

So here’s to the first sunburn of the year, the first stubbed toe, the first bite from a black fly, the first flat spell, the first pair of flip-flops lost at a bonfire…bring it on, y’all, bring it on.  Bring on the blue crab and the sweet corn, the watermelon and the Weber grill, the fireflies and the back-porch jam sessions.  Bring on the little bitty waves and the big ole longboards.  Bring on the salt and the sand and the sun and the the sweat and the sweet sweet smell of suntan lotion.  ‘Cause it’s on, my friends; it’s on.

Here’s to wishing all of you a long, hot, hell-raising, heart-thumping summer.  Lord knows each and every one of us deserves it.  And even if some of us don’t, it won’t hurt nobody to let us enjoy it anyway.

подаръциикона за подарък

Some months back Brazilian art journalist Roberta Tavares did an interview with me for the Brazilian magazine “PHOTO”, and the editor liked it so much they made it the cover story of their end-of-the-year special issue.   Roberta asked some really interesting and complex questions, and I had a great time thinking up interesting and complex answers.  Since the feature was published in Portuguese, I won’t post the text of the actual article, but I can post the unabridged email interview, which is quite long, but has some interesting nuggets in it.  It’s fairly wide-ranging, referencing everything from improvisational jazz to bad ’80’s haircuts to Australian Aboriginal culture, but it was a really enjoyable intellectual exercise to put it all into words, so I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to decide how much of it you want to read.   Thanks so much to Roberta for her enthusiasm and great ideas, and to Giancarlo Nicoloso and the rest of the staff at Photo Brazil for giving me so much space in their magazine.     The title of the article translates roughly as “The Art of Repeating Mistakes”, which I think is just perfect–in an imperfect way, of course!   NB: I have made a few edits to the language of the questions to make some of Roberta’s themes a little more clear in English.

A far as I remember, rituals have seemed to me to be happenings exclusive of different, specific, and often distant people. But through the lens of North American photographer Chris Bickford, ritual becomes something more simple, close, natural, and beautiful to behold. A repetition of patterns, feelings, goals, preparation, commitment, the worship, what to believe in–the repetition that defines a culture, creates common ground and brings individuals together in ways that celebrate both their uniqueness and their bonds with their culture and the whole of humanity. The synthesis of these themes defines Bickford’s body of work in documentary photography. He seeks to re-define and re-discover the ancient idea of celebration and tradition in contemporary examples: the exhuberance of Carnival, the joy and pageantry of weddings, the natural art of surfing, the flirtatious and uninhibited dance of love-seeking youth, and the pilgrimage and mystery of travel.

Rituals are dubious in nature, mysterious and personal…Chris’s interpretations create a narrative that is faithful to the instance, a document not on the celebration, but on the motivation that transcends geography and people.  He is always on the lookout for the spiritual urges that motivate us to create and perform these ritual dances with one another and with the world around us.

RT: We could define you as a contemporary documentary photographer. But with your pictures in hand, the artistic content, image processing, color preparation, conceptualism,  it’s hard not to identify elements of fine art, a type of photography with potential to please galleries and generates buyers. In this new technological era, there is much discussion around  image manipulation programs, but do you think that there might be tools to move the market, to create a more creative and versatile machine, to be out of the ordinary and make people notice you?

CB: Let me see if I can break that down into a few elements.  I think the worlds of art photography and documentary photography are starting to merge more and more, and to my mind there’s a lot of room for interesting things to happen there, though by necessity we will still have lines that need to be drawn and rules that need to be followed in terms of journalistic integrity and truth-telling.   I don’t think there’s any need, in today’s photographic world, to be an either-or kind of photographer, unless you want to be.  Many photo editors are willing to take risks these days in terms of running photos that take artistic liberties–maybe the image is intentionally blurred with a slow shutter speed, maybe it’s shot with a really wide aperture so there is vignetting and a lot of out-of-focus elements.  Likewise, many conflict photographers and photojournalists have been showing their work in galleries and selling them as art pieces.  So right now the playing field is wide open, and that’s pretty exciting.

As far as new technology goes, there’s a lot of different facets to that question.  If you’re talking simply about digital imaging, there’s no doubt that digital has changed the aesthetic of photography. You see a lot of work now that just simply could not be created without Photoshop, and you see a lot of imaging trends, like HDR, sub-saturation, extreme retouching, etc that are hot right now, but it’s anybody’s guess as to what will last and what won’t.  Five years ago it was cool to put fake photographic “sloppy borders” around your picture.  Now it’s passé.  Kind of like hairstyles in movies from the ’80’s.  You’d be embarrassed to be seen in public with that kind of hair these days…

So there is a risk, in digital imaging, of going too far with image manipulation, and creating work that might seem really edgy and cool and different right now, but won’t necessarily stand the test of time.  At the end of the day, it’s really about the picture itself.  You can dress it up in a million different ways, and if you bling it out in a really cool way it might be more attention-getting, but really, it’s still the picture that counts.  It’s the moment, the gesture, the expression, the composition.  For me, the back-end of playing with color temperatures and dodging and burning and adding contrast and saturation, etc, is all about completing my conception of the picture, bringing out what I see in the image, enhancing the mood I’m trying to convey, and hopefully in the process making the image stronger.  I’m not thinking so much about whether or not adding more color or changing the photo to black and white will grab an art buyer’s attention.  I’m simply working the picture to make it look the way I myself want it to look.  If anything, I sometimes have to tone down my photos before showing them to editors, because some photo editors still think “Photoshop” is a dirty word.

In terms of the new technology and how the internet is changing the world, I find it both exciting and problematic.  The exciting thing is that an artist can very much take control of his or her own destiny.  Photographers can manufacture their own aesthetic, get really creative with their websites and blogs, try new things…there are just limitless possibilities in terms of creativity, and you can really express your personality online.  I’ve really enjoyed all the work that I’ve put into my Travelogue.  We spent weeks tweaking out the design of the original pages, and since then it has grown into a very special record of images and recollections.   I take a lot of time crafting each post, and each one might take me as much as a few weeks from start to finish.  But I only post every couple of months usually, and I really try to make each entry a complete experience, with strong writing and an equally strong set of pictures to accompany.  It’s not the way most people use a blog, but for me it works.  What I really like about it is that people will literally look through the entire site, click through every picture on the blog, and read every article, in one sitting.  They may never look at it again, but the fact that they got so absorbed with it that they spent three or four hours in hang time on my site–I just get a kick out of hearing that from people.

Other people are using blogging and Facebook in other creative ways, whether it be a “picture-a-day” kind of journal–say, for example, with Instagram–or an evolving sketchbook of a long-term project which allows readers a window into their process.  There are as many different ways to use the web to showcase photography as there are photographers.

The downside to all this freedom though, is that because social networking has become so popular–and within a period of only a few years has come to dominate the media and communications landscapes–there is this huge frenzy and pressure to make use of those tools for business and self-promotion.  Which is great, if you like that kind of thing and are good at it.  But it really doesn’t have much to do with how good a photographer you are, and therein lies the problem.  You might be really good at self-promotion, and if you are, then you’ll probably do pretty well regardless of your talent as a photographer. But conversely you could be a really great photographer, but have little aptitude or interest in blogging and social media.  If so, in the current market, you probably won’t get seen unless someone else takes up your cause.   And I think the whole thing can be a huge distraction when you are trying to focus on doing good work.

For me, the biggest problem is that the world of web 2.0 requires CONSTANT updating, which means that if you’re really taking your web presence seriously, you’re updating your blog every day, you’re putting something up on facebook every day, you’re tweeting several times a day, etc….and that’s just way too much being “in touch” for me.  I like to disappear, retreat into my own world, or just live my life.  It’s enough just keeping up with emails and delivering work to clients and working on assignments, portfolios, etc.  The last thing I want to do after spending the day on the computer working is to get on Facebook or Twitter.  I’m only speaking out of personal preference here; I realize that this attitude puts me at somewhat of a disadvantage in the current media landscape, but at the end of the day we need to live our lives the way we want to live them, regardless of the opportunities we may miss out on by not living otherwise.

The web is a strange beast; you can get a lot of “exposure” on the web and still not make a lot of money.  You can be really popular, and still penniless.  Very few media outlets on the web pay any money at all for pictures, and magazine editors that find you by way of the web are usually working for small magazines and also don’t have any budget for photography.   So I am still skeptical about it.  I think the old systems are still in place, and will continue to be despite the way things are changing.  If you want to work for a big magazine, you have to contact the editor, get a meeting, show him or her your work, follow up with emails and phone calls, etc.  If you want to have your work shown in a gallery, same thing.  Being able to point people towards favorable reviews and articles on the internet is definitely a plus, but it’s a minor convenience.  You still have to get in the door, shake somebody’s hand, and show them some real work, preferably on paper.  Despite everyone’s calls for the death of print, a printed article is still worth at least ten web articles, because web publishing costs nothing.  An editor really has to believe in you to commit one of your images to the expense and logistics of printing; and if you can show that your work has been printed on paper in major publications, you’re going to have a fairly higher status, at least in the business, than somebody who might have a really cool blog.  But who knows, things are changing so fast these days, that might not be the case next year.

I hear a lot of people talk about an internet model for print sales, but I think the people that are making good money selling their work on the web are few and far between.  I’m not saying it’s not possible, but you’re pretty much running a Mom and Pop shop kind of operation, unless you connect with an agency or cooperative or online gallery or other such entity, and they are going to take half of your money right off the top.   If you choose to go it on your own, then you have to build your own infrastructure of marketing, sales, monetary transactions, accounting, packaging, distribution, etc.  It becomes a full-time job in and of itself.  It’s potentially profitable if you have a popular product, but you can potentially shoot yourself in the foot if you ever intend enter the fine art market.  The fine-art market and the popular market are very different beasts.  In the popular market, you want to reach as many people as possible, and make as many sales as possible, so you need to price your work at a rate that is affordable to a large number of people.  You need to have a marketing vehicle that will reach the masses, and have work that appeals to the general public.  The fine-art market tends to eschew populism, and prefers to buy rare, limited-edition work, so you have to price your work high and hope that through making the right connections, getting the proper benedictions from the gate-keepers of the art world, connecting with the right galleries, etc, you can sell your prints for ten thousand dollars or whatever.  And additionally, your work needs to be edgy or somehow in line with what is considered “good art” in whatever decade and circles you hope to appeal to.

I can’t claim to be an authority on selling and the art market, because I’m still biding my time until I figure out the best avenue for me personally.  My work tends to straddle the line between popular and fine art, so it’s been a bit of a dilemma trying to figure out which way to go.  But I do know that I’m better off waiting until I’ve got a better grip on it before I begin a full-out image sales campaign.

In the end it really comes down to plain old business, and being a good salesperson.  You can have stellar work, you may have a cool website, you may be blogging and facebooking like crazy, but if you or someone working on your behalf are not aggressively working to sell your images, they won’t sell.

As you can see, it can get pretty maddening just thinking about it, when all you want to do is make a decent living doing what you love.

RT: As a documentary photographer and with your aesthetic concern, your  commitment to composition, the  ability to capture the decisive moment … that must require such patience, and patience means time, but when time is the hallmark of this new century, in the new advent of communication, where the news comes and tends to be transmitted faster … the time required to capture the right time and from that on, to develop art can also be an aggravating financial factor. Do you try for a beautiful photo  instead of ten objective ones that  probably the editor would like in the file. Is one great  image is enough ?

Oh I’ll go for the one beautiful photo every time!  But there is a time and a place and a function for every kind of photography, so it all depends on what is being called for.  Sometimes you HAVE to be first; that’s why news is called “news”.  I don’t come from a news background, so it kind of took me by surprise the first time I lost a page-one photo on a New York Times assignment because a  Reuters photographer got his picture in before I did.  The picture the page-one editors ran was a photo anybody could have taken, it was just a picture of a piece of machinery.  Meanwhile I had sent them (two hours after the soft deadline, but at least an hour before the hard deadline) this killer picture of the welders working on the thing, with sparks flying and lighting up their helmets, a strong diagonal thrust to the composition, and background stuff too, adding context to the story….but because it was breaking news, they had chosen the first picture that came in over the wire.

Shooting news has always been like that though, and new technology hasn’t really changed anything as far as that’s concerned.  If anything, it’s made it easier for photographers to get their photos in on deadline, and it means that everybody in the newsroom can get to bed earlier because they’re not waiting for the film to get developed.   Generally speaking most photo editors aren’t speed-freaks.  Yes they have deadlines to meet, but the best photo editors are in the positions they are in because they have good taste in photography and they know what makes a strong picture.  And most of them have backgrounds working as photographers themselves, so they are sympathetic to the fact that sometimes it takes a little patience to get the right shot.

Sometimes though it’s the opposite, in terms of time.  With feature magazines, you might wait an entire year before they run your story.  Even in a newspaper, if it’s a feature article or a human interest story that is not time-sensitive, the piece could languish for a month or two before it gets run.  If the story can wait, believe me, it will.

Most of my personal work is not really time-sensitive, so I don’t really worry too much about time unless I’m on assignment and under a deadline.  And I generally find that if I hang around a REALLY long time, after I think there’s no more good pictures to take, the light is gone, everyone has left the scene, whatever…sometimes literally I am packing up my camera and thinking about food or sleep or something…then suddenly out of nowhere something happens, and bang, you’ve got this amazing picture.  Won’t make the front page of next day’s paper, but it might last for years and years as some of your best work.  And for me personally, creating work that lasts is more important than making headline news.   But like I said, there’s a time and place for both kinds of photography.

RT: You work almost premeditating your  themes and subjects, relying on them, that they will not disappoint you and that seems to work out to you.. You display  sensitiveness  at reading people. Does working this way give you peace of mind ?

CB: Hmm…that’s an interesting question.  I’ve never really thought of it in that way.  My main attraction to ritual is that it provides a window into the unconscious and the archetypal, but I suppose the other important thing about ritual is that it is habitual, seasonal and premeditated.  Rituals are events that generally take a lot of planning and forethought, and their timing is generally something you can set your calendar to.  And there is usually a lot of aesthetic work that has already gone into creating the scene–costumes, lavish ballroom sets, streets decorated, fires and candlelight.  But that being said, you’d be amazed how rare it is to see really good pictures of something like Carnival.  I think sometimes when people see my Carnival pictures they take the quality of the photos for granted.  Like, of course you got great pictures, it’s Carnival, all the world’s a stage.  But I’ve got books and books full of the most boring Carnival photos you’ve ever seen.  Matter of fact, the only photo book I have of really good Carnival photos is a book by Marco Bertin called “Masquerade”.  It’s a phenomenal set of images of the Venetian Carnival scene–a beautiful fantastic world of decadence and sensuality….only thing is, every single photo in the book is staged in a studio.  The entire book is a fantasy.

So even though, yes, I gravitate towards subjects that already have a strong built-in aesthetic, that doesn’t guarantee good pictures.  The thing is to find the humanity within the artifice, to find the liminal moments when the real and the unreal meet, or when the artifice takes full control and the fantasy becomes the reality…It’s hard to explain, but I know it when I see it.

As for having a sensitivity in reading people, that’s nice of you to say. It’s definitely useful to have as a photographer in any situation.  I want people to let their guard down, just a little, but at the same time I do want to see a performance.  I like performance; I like drama; I like a heightened sense of reality.  But it has to be honest, and it has to come naturally.  I can tell when people are faking it or feel uncomfortable, and when they are I usually wait a little longer…sooner or later they get tired of trying to hold in their gut or whatever and they breathe a little sigh, and that’s when the good pictures come.

Everybody is a little different.  Some people are born actors and you can see the roles they are playing running through them like a demonic  possession.  Some people always look worried or angry until the lens gets pointed at them, then they give you their “camera face”…Other people freeze in front of a camera, and those are the people you need to catch unguarded, and sometimes it takes a lot of patience and sensitivity.   Often it helps if they are with someone who makes them laugh or whom they feel comfortable with.  If they are not, as a photographer you need to become that person.

Photojournalists often talk of trying to capture “non-camera-aware” situations–which are much rarer than you might think because I can assure you, in this day and age, everybody is aware of cameras.  You can see people change their behavior immediately as soon as a camera comes out.  And I’m kind of a big guy and I like to shoot wide angle and get close to my subjects.  So generally most of my subjects know I’m taking their picture.  Usually it’s a simple matter of eye contact and body gesture that lets you in.  Sometimes you have to say something, explain yourself, but most of the time if you are in tune with the situation, and carry yourself with confidence and deference, you can get in as close as you want, and answer the “what is this for” questions after you’ve gotten the picture.  Unless you’re planning on spending a lot of time with the subjects you’re shooting, or you want them to take you somewhere, or they are providing you with a gateway into other picture opportunities, too much explanation and permission-seeking beforehand is going to ruin the moment.  So getting in quick and getting the picture you see before the moment is gone is paramount.   You can exchange cards and buy them a beer or whatever afterwards….or you can just disappear into the crowd.   I don’t feel it’s necessary always to be a perfect gentleman when it comes to getting pictures.  Most of the time it’s good to be polite.  But not always.

As for peace of mind, I can’t really say that being a photographer is very conducive to peace of mind, ever.  I wish it were different, because I’m a really big fan of peace.  But I think most photographers’ minds are crazy, scary places, overflowing with half-baked ideas and philosophical wonder and social concern and to-do lists and deadlines and unfinished projects.  That’s just the way it is.  You learn to live with it.

RT:. Documenting events that have so many repetitive themes and are covered by so many other photographers can run the risk of either getting dull or degenerating into cliché. What does it take to be original , to have a signature and an agenda filled in with clients?

CB: I’m not overly concerned with being original.  It’s not that I don’t recognize the importance of it, it’s just that I don’t think originality should be the primary intent when one sets out to create something.  I think we are too much in love with the idea of new-ness in the contemporary world, and it has led to a culture that, to my mind, dismisses work that is beautiful, well-executed,  and emotionally evocative, in favor of work that is “original”.   Focusing on that which is new or somehow unprecedented removes us from our visceral response to an image, and over-intellectualizes the artistic instinct.

That being said, there are plenty of artists that strove to challenge the artistic conventions of their day and created great art in the process.  The French Impressionists.  Picasso.  James Joyce.  Hemingway.  But these artists practiced their craft in an age where there were still artistic conventions to challenge.  In the contemporary world, most of the classical rules of art are considered irrelevant, and the focus is more on being innovative, or ironic, or hip, or different, or edgy.  And so we are at a strange place where being different, being “eclectic”, or being “edgy”, is a cliché in and of itself.

True originality, I think, comes from an inability to be anything other than yourself.  I sometimes joke that what makes my work my own is that my imitations of other people’s work are so poor.  But I don’t really mean it as a joke.  It’s like they say in jazz, if you make a mistake, repeat it. Because it’s your mistake, and you own it.  The way you make mistakes is, in essence, the way that you differentiate yourself from “perfection”, which is predictable and boring and soulless.  Think of Frank Sinatra.  He always sang a little flat of the note.  His pitch was not perfect by any means.  Yet he turned that limitation into a signature style that even today is admired and imitated the world over.  So really, originality comes from making mistakes.  You catch that mistake in your hands, finesse it a little bit, then it becomes a theme, a signature,  and it’s something that you pulled out of the ether—you were trying to do one thing, but instead something else happened.  And it’s that “something else” that makes for the magic.

Some of my best photos are mistakes.  I guess that’s the thing, is that if you’re not afraid to fail, then you’ll undoubtedly come up with original work, because it’s the grace with which you fail that defines you, both as a person and as an artist.  Originality, to my mind, is just a by-product of the process.

RT: Professional photographers are more than the hands pressing the shutter , they are creative minds. You are also a musician, composer, designer, does it interferes with the way you see photography … does it create more closeness and depth in your work ?

CB: I think it just gives you a lot of different ways of experiencing, interpreting, and expressing things.   Being a musician helps, I guess, in terms of seeing the “music” in a particular scene, or creating rhythm in a photograph or photographic series.  To me being a writer, a photographer, a musician, it’s all related.  You can be creative in a million different ways, but if you want to be a professional then you generally have to pick an established medium to ply your trade in, and if you’re smart you’ll pick the one you’re best at and keep the others as hobbies. But all those other ways of tapping into the sources of creativity give you a broader palette to draw from when you are working in your professional métier. For instance I’m a pretty crappy surfer and never in a million years could I be a professional surfer, but having the experience of surfing is in some ways essential to the way I approach photography.  You see an opportunity beginning to develop somewhere out on the horizon, you race like hell to put yourself in the right position at the right moment, and once you’re locked in, you ride it as hard as you can until it fizzles or you have to kick out because there’s danger ahead.  I know some phenomenal pro surfers who play music…they’ll never be rock stars, but I know that their connection to music and their connection to surfing come from the same source and inform each other.  I think if you were to poll every musician, photographer, painter, actor, dancer, singer, or writer you could find, you’d be surprised how many of them would be fairly well accomplished in another art form as well.

I also find that reading helps me a lot in getting a deeper understanding of things, or just getting a deeper understanding of myself.  It makes a huge difference in my work; whether it be in order to understand the historical and social context of the cultures and places I am photographing, or in order to have greater access to the imaginative world.  A lot of my work is about imagination, so I pay a lot of attention to my dreams, I’ll let my mind wander into flights of fancy, I’ll read things just because they turn me on in an imaginative way.  For me, all of that is part of a larger search for meaning.  I think for many photographers, it’s the same.  We’re out there in the world with our cameras because we want to understand things, we want to find out about something.  For some, that search for understanding is more about social contexts, gender roles, race, identity, conflict and war, what have you.  For me it’s about the presence and experience of the sublime in the everyday world; it’s about hearing the music of life, seeing the poetry.  It’s about trying to ride the edges between the material world and whatever it is that lies beyond the limits of our abilities to perceive and communicate.  I know that might sound a little new-age, and I don’t mean to suggest that every photo I take is about dreams and liminality.  But it’s definitely a predominant theme in the life of my mind, and I think it informs the way I see things, and it shows up in the best of my pictures.

In traditional Australian Aboriginal culture, there really wasn’t a concept of time as we know it.  There was only the here-and-now, and the Dreaming.   And the Dreaming existed side-by-side with the here-and-now, separated by a very thin veil which was permeable through song, dance, ritual, and story.  To me, there’s probably no better conceptualization of reality than the way the Aboriginals had it figured.  Because when you think about it, what is the past but a memory, which is kind of like a dream; and what is the future, but a fantasy, which is definitely a dream.  And the only way to access the past or the future is to “dream” it.  You can’t touch it. So for the Aboriginals, the world was imbued with all kinds of magic that they were constantly tapping into, and their entire lives were animated by this duality of the seen and the unseen, of this world and the otherworld, of the here-and-now and the Dreaming.  When you start to conceive of the world in this way, reality takes on all kinds of different layers of meaning, and simple objects or moments can become imbued with all sorts of numinosity.

There was an English writer named Bruce Chatwin who traveled to Australia because he had heard about the Aboriginal Song-lines and he was fascinated by the idea and wanted to learn more.  Basically, the Song-lines are pathways across Australia that were mapped out in song by the Aboriginals.  By learning a song, which generally meant also learning some new dance moves and sometimes even learning a new language, an Aboriginal would be initiated into a new place.  The song would recount ancient legends of their animal ancestors, while in the process tell where the singer could find water and food in the area, what kind of hunting practices would be most effective, and what sacred places must be visited and  what songs must be sung in order to keep the world alive.  The Song-lines were pretty much containers for the entirety of Aboriginal culture and identity, written on the land, and sung into existence every day by the people.

Now this is a very simplified explanation of Song-lines and Aboriginal culture, and might seem a little tangential to the question, but one of the most interesting ideas in Chatwin’s book  is that, according to one Aboriginal elder, every song-line has a particular “smell” to it.  This “scrambling of the senses”, describing space and sound through the medium of scent, is commonly known as synesthesia, and is a common thread in many descriptions of states of ecstasy and higher consciousness…we hear colors, see music, smell poetry, taste beauty.  To me, it is this kind of all-encompassing experience that great art aspires to, and I think it is why the arts so often bleed into one another.

So that’s a very long-winded answer to the question, but my point is that what we are getting at in all this art-making–in our songs, our pictures, our poetry, our dances—is an experience that moves between and beyond the five senses, but we have only the limited palettes of our artistic media to use as pathways into this larger thing.  I think that’s why you find that so many artists experiment with other branches of the arts.  It’s like adding one more dimension to something that is ultimately ineffable, but with just a little more knowledge, we can understand and express just a little bit more about it.

RT:. Which is more difficult: exceptional photos of surfing or an original photograph that captures the struggling of areas after disasters like the ones you brought from Haiti ?

CB: Well, they each have their challenges, but if I were hard pressed to answer either/or to that, I’d have to say working in Haiti is much harder.   In a place like Haiti, there is so much suffering and destruction, and so many people everywhere you look, that it gets to be overwhelming.  And at the same time that your heart bleeds for the people and their situation, your mind is racing and your guard is up, because you know that you stick out like a sore thumb, you don’t speak Kreyol, and you don’t want to get into a dangerous situation.  You’re also very aware of the sheer complexity and near-hopelessness of the situation, and that can make you lose heart, which you absolutely don’t want to do because if you don’t go into something like that with some sense of hope that something can change for the better, then you’re basically a pornographer of disaster–that, or you’re just looking for the paycheck, the byline, and a new stamp on your passport.  It’s really tough to remain sensitive to the situation and be in photographer mode at the same time.  When I was in Haiti I was shooting a lot from the hip and not taking a lot of time to work any particular shot or situation, because after about three or four clicks of the shutter at any given moment, you become a paparazzo, a voyeur, and for the most part the Haitians, like any self-respecting people, do not appreciate being photographed by drive-by journalists who want to get a picture of somebody forced to shower naked in the street because their home got destroyed in the earthquake.   So the best you can do is just be there and take it all in, talk to anyone you can communicate with, and hope that when you get home there are three or four grab shots that mean something, and can convey a sense of what it is like there without making it just seem like hell on Earth, which is what I used to think of Haiti before I went.  Now that I’ve been there and made some friends, it has taken on a greater sense of reality.  You see the hope and potential amidst all the rubble and you think, man, if only there could be a happy ending here.  There is so much spirit and heart and soul in Haiti, but everybody’s so mired in the latest disaster that they can’t catch their breath long enough to move forward.   So for me, I think the best response as a photographer in that kind of situation is, and I know this is going to sound corny but I’m going to say it anyway, shoot with your heart and forget about  “getting the shot”.

As for the surfing stuff, I only shoot surfing in one place, my home on the Outer Banks.   In some ways it’s kind of the direct opposite of something like Haiti.   My home is a very laid-back beach, and we don’t have massive insurmountable social problems.   People are here because they choose to be here, and there’s not much big change that happens around here.  So I’m not tackling any big headline news stories or grand social issues.   The work is more about conveying a sense of this wild and windswept chain of sand dunes and this crazy sport that is more like a dance with the gods than any other human pursuit I know of.  Thematically it’s about the experience of the most raw and elemental forces of nature–sun, wind, rain, sand, storms, waves, etc–and how the surfing community on the Outer Banks, through the peculiar geography of the place, is especially close to that experience.   For me it’s a very immersive project–literally–because I am sitting out there in the impact zone with a pair of swim fins and a camera getting tossed around by the surf.  It can be physically challenging when the surf is high, and it can be frustrating sometimes because sometimes months can go by without a single decent picture…and sometimes I miss really good opportunities to shoot because I have other work or I’m out of town.  And trying to document something that you like to do yourself, you are always presented with a dilemma: surf or take pictures?

If you only have a week, which is all the time I had in Haiti, you can come up with a lot more images in Haiti than on the Outer Banks.  Things are less concentrated here, time is a bit slower, sometimes nothing is happening at all.  So it requires a lot of patience.  In Haiti, there’s always something happening, always people, always some kind of picture.   Still, at the end of the day, shooting in Haiti is a constant challenge and a major heartbreak, while shooting on the Outer Banks is just a hell of a lot of fun, but it requires time and patience.

RT: You have photographed and participated in Carnival celebrations in Venice, Brazil, New Orleans. How was to lead this project and to make them evoke some idea of similarity…but to avoid  the idea of being the same thing ?

CB: It started off just on a whim one winter when I was having romantic troubles and decided a trip to Europe might give me some perspective.   A week later I was in Venice during Carnival, and I got totally caught up in it, and from there the thing just grew.  But I think the seed of the whole project actually was sown a year or so before that, from a sidebar that I saw in The New York Times Travel section, where they did a very short listing of the four great Carnival celebrations as they saw them: Venice, New Orleans, Rio, and Port of Spain in Trinidad.  I just had that tucked away in my mind somewhere, and somehow it stayed with me.  To me it was interesting that this ancient celebration, with the same name, occurring at the same time of the year, had migrated from Europe and flourished in all these other places.  And what has been so interesting about the project is how strongly each Carnival represents the culture of the cities they take place in.  The Venetian Carnival is all mystery and artifice, very classical and full of fantasy and secrets. There are masquerade balls in ancient palaces and ancient ceremonies and parades.  The New Orleans Carnival has is a lot of racial and social differentiation, and each social and ethnic group in New Orleans has its own Carnival–there’s a gay Carnival, an “old-line” upper-crust Carnival, a working class “Carnival Noir” with the Mardi Gras Indians and other cultural icons of black New Orleans; there’s a bohemian Carnival scene, “marching societies” mainly made up of working-class men’s groups….there are women’s krewes and “superkrewes”–it’s a very funky, American melting-pot kind of celebration… The Carnival in Rio is, hands down, the sexiest of them all–no surprise there–and I don’t think any other Carnival anywhere can match the incredibly elaborate performances that the samba schools put on in the Sambadrome.  But the Sambadrome, for all of its beauty, is pretty much like watching a spectator sport, and Carnival is, in its original spirit, a participatory event, so it’s cool to see that the blocos and bandas are bringing Carnival back to the streets. In Rio, people really are DANCING in the streets, moreso than at any other Carnival I’ve been to…

So it’s been great fun exploring the character of three of the most interesting cities in the world from the point of view of their Carnival celebrations, because it’s during Carnival that they show their colors if you will—you get kind of a heightened sense of reality and a glimpse into the soul of the city, because they are putting themselves on display, creating their own city-wide communal art project.  It’s really quite a special thing, when you think about it.  And the amazing thing is that the locals never tire of it–at least in Rio and New Orleans.  On the contrary, they LIVE for Carnival.   In Venice it’s a little different, since the modern Carnival in Venice is only 30 years old–it was banned way back in the 1800’s by the occupying Austrian government–and so most of the locals still don’t see it as a real indigenous part of their culture, but more of a spectacle to increase winter tourism.  That being said, those at the vanguard of creating the new Carnival in Venice couldn’t be more on the mark in expressing the soul of the city, which is a glorious achievement, because they really had to start from scratch when they were reviving Carnival in the ’80’s.

But on a deeper level, there is something about the very concept of Carnival that I find endlessly engaging, and which I could take a lifetime to explore in pictures.  I think it taps into a very deep part of the human psyche that wants to lose itself in a stream of what writer Barbara Ehrenreich calls “Collective Joy”.   In her book “Dancing in the Streets”, she discusses the history of the Carnival spirit, tracing it way back into prehistory, where communal dancing and singing served as a “technique of ecstasy” and made it possible for large groups of people to live together in relative harmony by way of rituals which allowed them to merge their individual beings into a single writhing, entranced, spirit-possessed organism.  As she traces the various forms this kind of ritual has taken throughout history, she comments, “the core elements are, again and again, the dancing, the feasting, the artistic decoration of faces and bodies.”

So here we have, in the twenty-first century, every year, in the days preceeding Lent, tens of millions of people around the world–in Venice, Rio, New Orleans, Port-of-Spain, Salvador, Recife, rural Louisiana, Switzerland, Germany, France, Alabama, Spain, Peru, Haiti, Bulgaria, Romania–all engaged in these ancient rites of collective joy. Painting their bodies and faces, dancing, drinking, feasting, making love.  And though some will decry the commercialism of this or that Carnival celebration–though I assure you there’s not much commercialism going on in Mamou or Bulgaria–the essential thing is that there persists, even into this most modern era, an urge within the collective human consciousness to put on a mask, walk out on to the street, dance and sing and make love with strangers, and generally drop all taboos and norms for a few days of wild Bacchanalian revelry.   And unlike a rave or a nightclub, this is a celebration that is for young and old alike, that reaches deep into history for its particular cultural expressions, and speaks ultimately to a kind of religious need within us to experience something otherworldly alongside our human brethren.

What is so engaging about it as a photographic project is that each new place is like a folksong you knew in a different language, and it had a slightly different melody, but you still know it’s the same song.  I already know what the basic pattern is; I’ve danced in the streets and palaces of Venice, Rio, and New Orleans with Mardi Gras Indians, Harlequins, Samba Queens, nuns, ballerinas, vampires and sailors….  So every new Carnival, even though different, seems familiar to me.  And tracing the patterns, noting how each culture uses variations of the same basic elements to create their own cultural identity….it’s just a trip.  Such a trip.

RT: The flirting, the women’ sensuality, libido, the nature of desire … Is this the primordial ritual that will ever inspire more attention ? is the reason you hence emphasis on these elements ?

CB: Leave it to a Brazilian woman to ask a question like that!!   I guess to some extent that’s true.  The dance of love is definitely one of the oldest and most primordial…and it is, literally, the thing that ties us all together.  Every single one of us came to be because two people did the bumpidy-bump…it’s the essence of human creation….So yeah, that’s definitely an aspect of my work, although it’s more suggested than anything else.  It’s not like I’m taking pictures of people having sex.

It’s funny though, at a show I did recently there was a woman who worked in the gallery who objected to some of the sexier photos in the exhibition.  She said she was a Christian, and such imagery offended her.  To my mind that’s very telling of a major disconnect in our society, because the way I see it, sexual practice at least has the potential to be one of the most sacred acts human beings can participate in.  The Hindu Tantrics knew this, as did many other pre-Christian religions.   Instead, we have politicized, commodified, commercialized, trafficked, and exploited sex in just about every way possible.  So I don’t blame anybody who objects to sexual imagery.  It’s a very thorny issue, because as humans we are complex, selfish, imperfect, and ruled by our desires, and sex can be a very violent and destructive beast, which is why different makers of “law” have almost always sought to regulate or forbid it.  But you might as well try to stop a hurricane.

It’s important to remember, however, that while sexuality is without question a huge primordial force, and probably the most significant creative act that human beings can participate in, there are much more ancient, more primordial forces at work in the world.  The sun, the moon, the wind and rain, the movements of the stars and planets, the roar of the ocean, earthquakes and typhoons, the march of the seasons and the bounty of plant and animal life…The thrust and parry of two sweaty human bodies is but a blip on the radar of the great primordial dance of the cosmos….remember that next time you get dumped by your lover.

But that being said, for us, sexuality can serve as a portal to participating in the greater forces of creation that animate our lives.  In Greek mythology, all of existence flowed from the coupling of Uranus and Gaia, heaven and earth, which in some ways could be interpreted as the original sexual act, and perhaps the great wonder of human sexuality is that it allows us to participate in this archetypal marriage of heaven and earth, to experience some small shred of the original orgasm, the “big bang” if you will pardon the pun (which probably doesn’t translate well into Portuguese anyway), that released the energy that set creation in motion…

And yet so often we approach our sexuality in the most petty, small-minded ways, obsessing over physical appearances and wrapping up so many personal and psychological issues into the sexual act.  We have come so far, in science, in medicine, in technology, in psychology–and yet at the same time we have strayed further and further from direct experience of the sensual, and further and further from direct communion with the sources of creation.   It’s ironic in some way, that with the rest of our sensual experience being atrophied by the conditions of modern life, we are left only with the sexual act as our primary universal means of dancing with creation…and yet rather than protect it and sanctify it, what do we do?  We commercialize it, trivialize it, forbid it, pornograph it, buy and sell it, torture teenagers and mid-lifers alike with insecurities about it…it all seems so sad, when if there’s one thing that every person should have, after food and shelter and loving parents, it is a satisfying, fulfilling, meaningful sex life.  But so few of us get to have that, get to really have it.

Which I guess is another reason why it is so endlessly fascinating a subject to explore.

RT:  First, you strengthened  the rhythm of  your pictures: sensuality, defining moment, focus, mystery…but you have also developed certain techniques, such as your use of flash, and have been recognized for your skills with it. Would that be your secret weapon, to know how to use deliberately this artifice ?

CB: Well it helps to bring the right tools to the job, and it helps even better if you know how to use them!  I’m honestly not very technical about my work; I know just enough to get by, and I kind of fake the rest.  I do like to mess around with things though, whether it be different colored gels on my flash, or tweaking color temperature settings once I have my photos into the computer.  But the whole process is pretty loose, and is kind of an endless feedback loop: you try out certain techniques, and if the results excite you, you keep moving in that direction.  Then, maybe you start to think you are over-using a certain technique, so on your next project you try to change things up a little bit.

I figure I still have a lot to learn in photography, and there are a lot of things I still want to explore.  There’s so much more I’d like to do with lighting, and even more I want to play with in terms of perspective and composition.  I’ve got a list a mile long of different projects I’d like to do, very few of which would ever make it into a magazine article, so they’ll either have to become huge book projects or just little web essays.  I’m also interested in working with tilt/shift lenses, not to get that kind of “toy village” look that’s in vogue right now, but to get really dramatic architectural photos with wide angles, and to add people into that mix for added intrigue.

At the same time, I’ve always wanted to ride across Europe with nothing but an old Leica and a bunch of store-bought film, a single 35 mm lens, and no real agenda.  No flash tricks, no crazy angles, just take off on an adventure with a little camera and see what happens.   Get back to basics, if you will.

I think the great “secret” is to never stop trying to learn and grow.  At least that’s the way I’m looking at it.