#studio_mbk

[studiombk]

Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh - Week 01

December 30 - January 05

Starting a new way to post my work. A weekly journal containing images and words. I call it the 52 project. I build each week page as the week progresses. Then share. Have a look!

[mymteverestiscalling]

Difficult Month

I spent my days trying to concentrate on my photography and web design work at which I was only moderately successful. I spent my evenings wrapped in an alcohol cocoon, watching movies until it was time to go to bed or pick up my wife at the train station

Dispatch from the side of the mountain...

[mymteverestiscalling]

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Actually, mostly agony at this point. Hoping for a little ecstasy soon. I have been checking my email every two minutes (I know, seriously dude, get a life) looking for word of my success or lack thereof with my various submissions. I've actually gotten a little irritable over the fact that I haven't heard from any of the seven submissions I made in January. It's time folks. Put us out of our misery!

Read more.

[mymteverestiscalling]

A bit of a roller coaster ride.

A little over a month ago I had a portfolio review with the new Executive Director of the Center for Photography at Woodstock. It went well. I had brought one of my hand bound booklets to share if the moment seemed opportune. It was looked at and I was offered a spot in an upcoming book art show. I was pleased. The year was off to a good start. I was told that I would be contacted the following week to hammer out details. The following week came and went. The week following the following week came and went. I began to wonder if I had imagined or misunderstood her words.

Read more...

[mymteverestiscalling]

Will I be that guy?

I have always had a weak spot for movies about underdogs. Regular, or even less than regular Joes or Janes who have undertaken some herculean task that seems way beyond their skill set and any...

My latest blog post.

I am in the process of moving the blog to a new site on Weebly. I will continue to post links here to the posts I make, but they won’t originate here anymore. Hope you don’t mind the extra click.

[mymteverestiscalling]

Shots Magazine!

The magazine article I couldn’t talk too much about has come out, so now I can talk about it all I want. I made it into the 2015 Portfolio issue of Shots Magazine. I am one of nine photographers featured. The article includes my answers to a set of email questions and I thought I would make that the content of my post today. It makes for a bit of a long post, but you get to learn a little more about me.

What is your earliest memory of being moved by a work of art?

Monet's Reflections of Clouds on Water, which I saw at MoMA when I was in my 20s. It was not the first time I was emotionally moved by a work of art, but it was the first time I can remember coming to my own conclusions about a work of art and understanding that a picture could be about more than what it represented in a literal sense.

I was fascinated by the intersection of object phenomena -- clouds, plants, body of water -- with the subjective and illusory phenomenal world depicted in a painting of the reflections of clouds and plants on the surface of a body of water. While plants, sky and water can be grasped as things by all five senses, reflections on the surface of the water are experienced by only one sense, though they can invoke memories of other sensations. This is not unlike a photograph. In fact, any pictorial representation has this quality.

I see Impressionism as an attempt to explore the boundaries between object and personality. What we have in this painting is a reflective world itself reflected by a personality, in this case, that of Monet.

Monet's choice of subject matter, rendered with impressionistic techniques and sensibilities, created a sublime hall of mirrors for me. The whole universe poured in.

How was it that you first became interested in photography? Who or what were your most prevalent mentors or influences along the way?

I've had a camera of one kind or another from the time I was old enough to take care of them. There were Instamatics with flashcubes and cheap Polaroid cameras in the beginning. I got my first "serious" camera, a Minolta 35mm that I still have, when I was in high school. I remember going for walks at sunset in the winter and trying to capture the magic I saw.

My father was probably an influence. He's had some kind of camera for as long as I can remember. He owned a Polaroid SX-70 when it first came out. Like many dads, he took lots of pictures of his family and kept albums.

I've had artistic intent from the beginning, but it was not until recently that I have pursued that intent full throttle, and I give both life circumstances and the arrival of the digital age credit for that.

When digital cameras arrived, I bought a series of them to use in my profession, architecture. And because of architecture, I also had Photoshop, the digital darkroom. I've never spent time in an analog darkroom. I sent film out to be developed and printed. With the arrival of the digital age, I was in full control of the image, from exposure to printing.

Why did you choose photography versus another means of expression?

I'm a miserable failure when it comes to freehand drawing or painting. Of course I took a nude drawing class when I was in college and was encouraged to keep a sketch book, but I was much better at mechanical drafting and rendering artistic ideas in precise ways with precise tools.

At the same time, I have a poetic and emotive personality. With a camera I can bring the two together in a way that is perfect for me. It provides an accurate rendering of an object or scene, which I choose for its emotive impact, and which I then process with computer tools in ways that intensify that impact.

My wife likes to say that I paint with the camera.

Tell us about the work that is presented here.

When I got serious about photography as an art form, I began going for daily, meditative photo walks. My walks are along streets and trails in Beacon NY for the most part, but I maintain the practice when traveling. I've been doing this for three or four years now. I walk at the same time every day and I photograph whatever attracts me. When I return home, I edit the images I have captured as I feel compelled to. There is often a significant difference between the image as it comes off the memory card and the final product. People like to ask, "did you get anything good today?" when they see me on the street. I tell them "probably, but I never know until I get home and get them on the computer." It all depends on what I can draw out of them when I process them.

My work is personal and meditative. It drives at themes and questions that are on the mind of a sixty year old man -- life, death, sex, the meaning of all this, the meaning of me.

The work I have presented here is a sub-set of this larger and more encompassing effort. To me, this particular set addresses nature's fecundity (I love that word) and death.

Do you keep a journal or a sketchbook? If so, what form does it take?

I keep a written journal. Part of my meditative routine is to stop at a local cafe and write for an hour or so after my photo walk. I write using a simple text editor on my iPad. I used to write with a fountain pen in Moleskin notebooks or the like, but in the digital age I can't bear to have my written material in such an un-malleable form.

My writing starts as stream of consciousness and proceeds to whatever riffing I want to do off of that. Days, weeks, even months later I will read what I have written and some of it will be worthy of refining into a more considered piece. I've joined a local writing group to help me develop that end of my practice.

I am currently exploring the combination of images and words. My interest is in combining them so that they mutually reinforce each another without trying to describe or illustrate one another. The words and the pictures each stand on their own, on separate pages. Together they deliver a more dimensional story.

The words have a way of grounding the photographic work. They also introduce more directly certain kinds of subject material, such as people. I almost never photograph people. I am too shy to ask them. But I can sit in a cafe and observe what is going on around me and write about them without being noticed.

What's the strangest or most interesting job you've ever had?

When I was in college I worked a couple of summers on the assembly line at the Ford Motor Plant in Mahwah NJ. I had some important experiences there. One in particular stands out.

It was my last day of work before returning to school. I worked the night shift. During "lunch," one of the guys working near me on the line insisted on buying me a farewell beer. We ran out of the plant, hopped in his car and raced to a dive bar on the other side of the highway. He bought me a couple of beers and I watched him down five or six mugs himself. He sat there with tears streaming down his cheeks, telling me not to be like him; to get my education and do something better with my life; to be in control of my life.

I think he had gotten a girl pregnant, married her and the next thing he knew he was on the assembly line of an automobile plant because that was the best way to support his family.

I had a number of human experiences like that while working in the plant.

I don't know what relation that has to my photography except that the bar and we would have been perfect subject material for Robert Frank's The Americans, just a few years too late.

What album/book/movie is the most meaningful to you and why?

I think I will go with Moby Dick on this one. It is probably the most relevant to the photographic work I am doing.

I tried for years to read it and never got past the first one hundred pages. And then I read a book called All Things Shining, subtitled Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. It singled out Moby Dick as the pinnacle of Western literature as far as "meaning in a secular age" was concerned. The authors illustrated the point with passages from the book that were so beautiful. I was inspired to pick it up again and read until I encountered each of the passages it singled out. The next thing I knew I had finished it.

One passage especially stood out to me. Ishmael and his boat mates become stranded in the middle of a pod of whales during a hunt. The pod is under attack from the crew of the Pequod and it is a churning mass of chaotic anger on the peripheries, but at the center it is blissfully calm. Ishmael looks down and sees in the depths of the waters all the birthing mothers and calves swimming serenely beneath him. He sees, in effect, the birthing center of the universe. Melville has him reflect on his experience this way:

But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still forever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

Oh my...

In conclusion, what does being a photographer mean to your life?

It is the journey I have chosen to finish my life with. You reach a certain age and begin to wonder what you have done with your life and what it all means. You begin to acknowledge that there is a limited amount of time on the planet and you think that for once in your life you want to do exactly what you desire to do, and for me that is photography and writing.

About three years ago I stopped being an Architect and started being a Photographer and Writer. I have applied myself diligently and happily ever since. I have given myself the space to pursue deep questions with my images and writing on a daily basis. It's not the most intelligent financial decision I ever made, but it's a completely satisfying one.

When I made this decision I started a blog called My Mount Everest is Calling, so titled because it seemed a good metaphor for what I was undertaking. At the top of My Mount Everest is a published photography book and significant acknowledgement of my work.

I am under no illusions. The fine art photography business is an incredibly difficult one to succeed in, and the idea of undertaking the climb at my age and with my lack of connections is just short of ludicrous. Hell, maybe it is ludicrous. But when I started the blog and thought about the insanity of what I had decided to do, the image of a quadriplegic deciding to climb Mt. Everest popped into my head. I immediately wrote that into my first post as equivalence to what I was undertaking. And then it occurred to me to do a Google search for quadriplegics climbing mountains and wouldn't you know, up pops Kyle Maynard who climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. That's it, I thought to myself, no excuses.

[studiombk]

Vacation!

The few of you who actually follow my Mt. Everest Blog and seem to read it may have noticed that I missed posting last week. This was because we were trying to get out the door for some much needed R and R on Block Island, RI. Originally we had planned to be away for a little over two weeks, but the arrival of a new dog and a substantial list of things to do before we left intervened. We decide we would not put ourselves under great pressure to get the vacation going. Instead, we used the first few days of the vacation to steadily whittle down the list of things that needed doing before we left, doing some triage along the way. My blog post for last week was one of the triage victims. We have now been on vacation for a week with four days to go. We are feeling relaxed, rested and happy, so I figured I should make sure I don't get out of the habit of posting.  Tomorrow I will be returning to the mainland with a framed photograph to deliver to the Griffin Museum of Photography. Block Island is closer to Boston than our home in Beacon NY, so I thought it would be easier to deliver the photograph from here and check out the museum as well. During our stay on Block Island I have continued my daily photo walk and writing practice. I have also been working on my application to the Light Work residency program I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. The application is due shortly after we return home. I am struggling with the application. It's odd, I can feel in my bones that the body of work I am building has something significant to say, but I just can't figure out what that is and state it in a few paragraphs. I have a couple of theories about why. The first one is that the body of work has not fully matured. The practice it is built on has solidified in the past year and I am making some great images, but I have begun to believe that the extension of the practice over a significant period of time is one of the most important aspects of the body of work. I can envision the daily photo walk practice continuing for a very long time to come. In fact, I have come to believe that the daily practice is so important to the overall content of what I am doing, that I fearcely defend the time and space set aside to do it. It's not that I never miss a day, I do. But if I do, I must get back to it immediately, so as not to loose the thread of what I am developing. The other theory I have about it is that the practice, the work, is intuitive, instinctual. Conceptually, I have established a basic set of rules. I go out daily for photo walks. I go out at approximately the same time every day. I walk for at least an hour. I photograph whatever I am attracted to during that walk. I edit my images when I return from the walk. I do this wherever I am. That is it. That is the practice. Within the constraints of the rules, my shot selection and editing is totally intuitive. To try and say something more substantively intellectual about this practice may not be possible. It is not a practice that is based in the intellect. I have been thinking about the work of On Kawara, a conceptual artist who died not so long ago. He is well known for his Today series, in which he paints the date of the day on which the painting is made. If the painting is not finished by midnight of the day, he destroys it. The paintings are largely the same format. The canvas size varies and the color varies. He paints using the language of the country he is in when the painting is made, but even so, they are almost monotonously the same. A room full of these paintings can seem very boring. But then of course, that may be part of the point. And there are subtleties. Something hand made by the same person, no matter how similar in format, will always display variations of hand and mood. Something about what I am attempting with my daily photo walks seems similar to me. There is less monotony in general. Exceptional images do surface. As do recurrent themes and subject material. But as it extends over time, individual images start to receed into a stream of vague themes and curiosities. It is a diaristic record of one human being's daily directed attention between the hours of seven and eight in the morning. I have yet to get that up on a wall, or into a publication extensive enough to get that across. Give it time I tell myself. In the meantime, Light Work will have to accept it on faith that something significant will emerge, and they can help it along by giving me a residency to pursue it and refine it. Or not.

[smbkconcerts]

The Cupcakes, opening for Brother Sun at the Towne Crier, 06-14-2015. Fantastic warm up to the main event. A harmonic trio worthy of being the main event.