Dr. Ralph

The downside of all the work I've been doing lately has resulted in some weird neck and shoulder pain. Last week I was really having a hard time just moving my head. For the fist time in my life, I sought out a chiropractor. The good part, besides the pain relief, was that we got talking about X-Ray art. Now I have X-Rays of my neck, but even more interesting might be these old films from 1947 that the good doctor was kind enough to lend me to photograph. The full spinal X-Ray shows the nerves all lit up like little negative lightning bolts. This was achieved by running an electric current through the nerve while the image was being taken. Sounds a little dangerous to me! No way of telling if the patient survived the procedure, but it did make for a beautiful image. The last one is an extreme case of scoliosis. Looking at this mess made me feel almost instantly better!

Finally Ready!

Fireflies last night

30 second exposure at ISO 1600 was barely enough to capture the lightshow.

mmm....Meat!

Another Shopper

The American Consumer

Not sure how, but I think this guy will have to play a role in my new collage. I think a lot about Western over consumption and its relationship to the developing world. Certainly this relationship is far too complex for me to understand, but I can explore it visually, from my point of view. One of the most striking things for me when I return from time in India is my first trip to the grocery store. The over abundance of everything is quite shocking compared to the vendors I get used to seeing with their modest stock of vegetables piled neatly before them as they sit cross legged on the street. I wonder what an American grocery store would look like to such a person?

And so it Begins

Getting started on a new collage is very hard for me. I still haven't yet wrapped my brain around the problem of how to create these things..The technique is not the issue at all, but more the story. It seems as if the images suggest a narrative to me, but not until I physically put them together. I have no idea where the process will take me. But today, I am allowing this lady of Delhi to begin the story. She reminds me of a touristic folk painting that my parents used to have up in their house. It depicted a sari clad woman carrying a water pot on her head. She was painted in glowing color on a velvety black background, the ultimate cliche of Indian womanhood, I suppose. With supple grace and beauty, and dutiful as well, she served as the domestic goddess of my parents' wallscape.  The woman in my photograph seems a little more earthbound, but perhaps she will still inspire an idea for a new collage.

on Nature Photography

It's kind of a standard question to ask an artist how they began their work..."What inspired you to become an artist?" or some formulation of the same query. For me it was a number of factors, but one very strong inspiration was a love and connection with the natural world. In my childhood and teenage years, my idea of fun was to skip school, not to smoke pot behind the 7-11 with the other truants,  but to steal my mother's SLR camera and macro lens and spend the day in the woods and fields near our house, photographing bugs, trees, and plants. It wasn't until I began my formal training in photography that I realized that the art world had little use for such images, and my nature photography was forgotten, or relegated to images that I would make for fun, but rarely share or exhibit.

Today, the summer solstice, and my first full day at Saltonstall, as I awoke to the early sun and the sound of birds, I decided to regress a bit to my childhood, and just enjoy taking a walk in the woods with my camera, to reawaken that first inspiration I felt to begin photographing. Art? Probably not, but what fun it was to forget about all that and spend time enjoying the play of light on foliage, and play the game of composition with my camera!

Saltonstall

This is my first full day in residence at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. I feel very lucky to have been chosen to spend a month in this amazing place, which offers "Time for inspiration, a quiet studio, a beautiful setting, and a stimulating community of artists working in diverse disciplines." The gift of time spent away from life's daily responsibilities is really the most precious boon an artist can receive.So often work goes stagnant without a change of scenery, some time and space to recharge creatively. The last few months have been a whirlwind of teaching, as well as planning and printing for exhibitions. While it has been very gratifying to be included in so many exhibitions this summer, the details and logistics have left little time or energy for new creative work. Now I have that time.

Already after only 24 hours here, I can feel my mind relax & creative stirrings beginning. My day began early with breakfast and coffee as usual, but instead of getting bogged down in computer work, I decided to begin my residency with a long walk to explore the vast wooded grounds of the foundation. On this first survey mission I brought my light camera.....

The Blog is Dead! Long Live the Blog!

Alas, my days of blogging here are over. Please visit my new, much more active blog, and my all new website! www.neilchowdhury.com. Cheers!