The place is packed with people. Many have inexplicably brought small children. I wonder how the museum is promoting itself if this is the demographic they attract. The kids are understandably bored out of their minds. The drone of voices in here is amazing, thousands of conversations unrelated to the museum or its collections. Most of these people should have gone to The Disney Store instead. It is difficult to read the descriptions of the art being hit by purses and strollers every few moments. Losing oneself in a study of the works is near impossible, [it's like being in a cafeteria line. Perhaps coming here during the holidays was a bad idea.]

I am surprised to learn that Ray and Charles Eames designed molded plywood products for the military during World War II, substituting the new material for metals, which were then in short supply.

Also of interest were many photos, like a solarized print of hands by Man Ray. I have a book of his work at home, but seeing an original print, even the same size as it would be in a coffee table book, is interesting. There is a retained freshness in the original print that does not come through in a copy. A print by Guy Bourdin, evidently of stained concrete or plaster, I have never seen it before. Finding it here felt like a vitamin booster shot recalling certain images in my Brera series. Third was an Avedon photo, recognizable as such from across the room, although the subject was uninteresting to me. The style of light and composition stood out.

Another area of interest was architectural drawings and models, most of which were concepts never executed. What struck me was how many brilliant ideas never make it off the drawing board or out of 1/100th scale. Like the Guy Bourdin photo, this energized me, to keep trying. So many plans, models, sketches, and eventually something gets built, or they lead to other kinds of projects, like Eames military glider noses leading to so much else. Hope?

Gauguin painted on burlap, Van Gogh painted with fury, piling pigments high, Munch is virtually doing watercolors with oils.

Cezanne though, the color, the effect at different distances, amazing. Another I didn’t understand from prints.

"Turnign Road At MontGeroult" by Paul Cezanne (1898)

"Pines and Rocks" by Paul Cezanne (1897)

"Still Life With Apples" by Paul Cezanne (1895-1898)

Starry Night is mobbed; every few minutes a flash goes off and a security guard yells. The [museum's] light on this canvas is intentionally dim. Are many of the gawkers? No one else is looking at the brush strokes.

Seurat was amazing. The pointalist thing doesn’t always work very well, but he knew how to do it. He really knew how to do it.

Despite the crowd and chaos, it was a good day. In fact, after recovering from vacation, I started painting again on Wednesday. Someone discarded an art projector in the hallway a few months ago and I am using it to paint from a photograph that didn’t quite work right. The idea of the image was right though, and that is what I hope to bring to life. My mind has been chaotic lately and painting melts it away. Seeing the Guy Bourdin print in the museum, combined with reading Gauguin and reading all this material on the other Impressionists, has restored some self-confidence. A friend has an art show coming up and I hope to show and maybe even sell a few new pieces. I need to get some lazy demons out of my head. Running modaCYCLE seems to run me into the ground a little too often. I love it, helping fashion designers tell their stories is amazing, but I need to also keep telling my own stories.

One thing I noticed in the stack of what I’ve kept, the models don’t look at the camera very often. I sometimes tell new models “don’t look at the camera unless you mean it.”

I look at all of these thousands of images in the magazines I’m tossing out, and I have a visceral reaction to compelling lighting, compositions, dances of color on the page. When I look at a photo in which the model is just standing there deer in headlights waiting for the shutter to click, supremely unconfident, no matter what is going on in the rest of the image, I have a strong dislike for the whole. If it is an interesting setting, I am even angry at the photographer for wasting it on an uncompelling subject.

To me, photography is only a rush when it feels challenging, and if the model just stands there looking at the lens, waiting to have their picture taken, it is uninteresting. I don’t like when they submit to the process, when they are having their picture taken rather than being interesting.

Unless you have the confidence to stare down the lens or tell a story, don’t go near it, the lens will know you are weak. The lens is predatory. To use it is always to be hunting for something. When the prey is immediately submissive, the hunt is dull.

Choice questions for the girls came to mind…

• “Sweetheart, are you color blind?”
• “You’ve got money for cosmopolitans, but not a mirror?”
• “Did you loot that during a blackout?”

A few had put in some effort and they really stood out, especially when they walked to the bar across the street and nearly tripped every other step clomping along in their expensive high heels, looking more like they were wearing ski boots than anything in the range of a Jimmy Choo.

One of my first thoughts as we had approached this corner was “hey, look, cute girls hanging out on the sidewalk” (they were in line for the door), but after hanging around for a few minutes my somewhat jaded fashion photographer sensibilities kicked in full force and all I saw was sad confused people.

There exists a requirement in the fashion photography I favor, that the model should exist in the environment of the image and be somewhat connected to that world. Most often when I find myself believing my work on a constructed image to have yielded a failure, it is the result of an apparent lack of connection between the model and the other things in the frame. If that is not the case, the second most common culprit is having failed to control the light. Both can be improved with practice, as my own work has shown. What I refer to as the model being connected to the world, director Richard Donner calls “verisimilitude,” meaning “the truth of the thing” or “self-truth.”

There may be some universal formula for projecting how a model will play off a given prop or costume. I have not yet found it. Perhaps it is too complex and individualized to forecast. Possibly at least some generalizations could be divined, but then would their employment by an artist be detrimental to originality? I think such things are better left to instinct honed by experience, for my own work at least. Yet, still I wonder if there could be a primer written to guide outside of instinct. Can you bracket models and props like they do sports teams in a tournament?

I believe that tension, composition, and detail are the keys to a great image. The viewer must be presented with drama (or the equivalent), context, and a visual focal point in order to relate to most images. Drama is given by any notion of tension within a frame, whether that is interpersonal tension, spatial tension, or implied kinetic tension.

The story of the single frame must have a context, as all stories presented visually do. The context is revealed and highlighted (successfully or poorly) by the composition. In this use of the word “composition,” I mean the juxtaposition of complimentary and contrasting areas of color tone, hue, and saturation (or simply brightness in a black and white image). Void and filling shades and levels between them must be shaped to draw the viewer’s attention to your intended purpose in presenting the image. With multiple frames, a sequence of images, it’s a whole other ballgame.

The visual focal points are also of great importance, and without these details the image will appear totally meaningless. In photographing people, the visual focal points of an image almost always include the eyes. The detail need not be overpowering. It could be as simple as a green dot on two hairlines intersecting. What is important is the presence of an anchor of some sort. An image that is totally unfocused cannot ordinarily hold or even momentarily capture the viewer’s attention.

In most cases, a formulaic approach to fashion photography would be counterproductive. However, if one is conducting some sort of experiment to find the subconscious mechanics of one’s work, looking for patterns in the behavior of subjects would probably be useful. Finding such patterns would be a step in a long path to allowing for a conscious and controlled paradigm shift in production and visualization methods.