"The whole enterprise,..., seems so tentative, as if it were a kind of effrontery to do any more. ... But it is also, for all its ethereal nature, luxurious in its way; a luxury that always threatens to pass away, and after a while does."
- Michael Glover on Richard Wright's Art and the Turner Prize
Treasure Island 1939: And The Pageant of The Pacific
July 22 to October 18, 2009
Wednesday to Sunday
11 am to 5 pm
Presidio Officers’ Club,
50 Moraga Avenue
Looking back to look forward at art, the market for it and survival during tough economic times...
A review of my book over at Liz Kuball's Blog and the Nocturnes ...
"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape - the loneliness of it - the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show."
"I think anything like that - which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone - people always feel is sad. Is it because we've lost the art of being alone?"
-Andrew Wyeth, Painter, American 1917-2009
To young photographers -
"find something you really love," build a "love affair" with your subject and "work on that"
-William Christenberry via Leslie K.Brown's Blog
Dear Friends,
In October British artist Andy Goldsworthy was here to erect The Spire in the Presidio. The sculpture is composed of 37 felled Monterey Cypress trees. It sits just inside Arquello Gate in a gap between the aging trees it’s made of and a newly planted forest that will replace them.
I was fortunate enough to photograph both the felling of the trees (an image of which you can see on pg. 71 here) and their construction into The Spire. Over a couple of days, I photographed the spire, the crew, the cranes, Andy, all of which was fun but I wanted something quiet, something luminous.
I wanted to get a shot of it at night with the full moon shining on the spire. When I got to the site just before sunrise one morning, the moon was setting brilliantly behind the standing forest. That was the image I wanted. I made a trip back the following day when the moon was perfectly aligned and the result is the photograph above.
The Presidio Book
My book is finally available. I am so excited. Four years in the making and it is now on the shelves. I am very proud of it - it is a beautiful heavy coffee table photography book. The book's companion website is at presidiobook.com where you can preview a full digital version.
Copies are available for purchase directly from presidiobook.com or you can also pick one up at local bookstores including Books Inc, Green Apple Books, The Golden Gate National Park Stores and photo-eye (online and in Santa Fe, MN).
Hardcover, linen bound photography book with 58 black & white illustrations, 12x9½", $50.00
An excerpt from the introduction by Presidio Historian, Randolph Delehanty, Ph.D.
“Ms.Vargas came to live in the Presidio three years ago during this momentary pause in its long life. She started exploring the complex old post looking carefully and lovingly at its gentle sleep and slow but steady revival as a national park with a new civilian community living and working here. She has an eye for what it essential about the Presidio: the very American ordinariness of its military architecture and the strange “wildness” of its man-made forests. Many of her images put the two together in a new way, as a filigree of evocative shadows cast on the “screens” of plain white walls. They almost seem like photographs of photographs with the building walls the film on which the fugitive shadows are cast. Photography - literally writing with light - here becomes writing with shadows with the unseen light source behind us.”
Thursday, December 11
12:30 to 1:30p
Pacific Room at Tides
www.presidiobook.com
Whole Earth Library at Thoreau is pleased to kick off its first literary event with a presentation by Photographer Charity Vargas. Charity will present images from her new photography book The Presidio: Portraits of a Changing Landscape and discuss the evolving nature of the park throughout it's 200 plus year history.
