buenos aires

New Work Coming Soon: Blanco y Negro !!

coeur pur

Buenos Aires

On Sept.10/08 I leave officially for Buenos Aires, Argentina. In all I will be away from home for eight months traveling through out South America. Countries I plan to visit include Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. Unfortunately while I'm traveling I will not be able to post pictures to my blog. So far I've been exclusively a film fotographer and wish to remain as such. However I will maintain this forum with updates in writing as to my life happenings and whereabouts. So for those of you that wish to speak to me please leave any thoughts or ideas in the comments section below.

excerpts from an interview : andre kertesz

When did you begin to take photography seriously ?

" I bought my first camera in 1912. The photograph " The Sleeping Boy ", taken in Budapest in 1912, is one of the
earliest things that i did. "

Was your work shown in Hungary ?

" Yes. We had a very good illustrated paper in Hungary then, called Erdekes Ujsag, which means Interesting Newspaper. There
were very many good intelligent and Hungarian photographers, although the only one who became famous was Munkacsi. Perhaps it was because our culture was a cross between East and West. We had a very special spirit in Hungary, especially Budapest, and this was expressed in our photography. "

You established your own style in Paris very quickly, a style that became almost uniquely your own - photo reportage. Was this a conscious decision?

" Absolutely not. I only did what i felt, for my own satisfaction. "

Did you know Chagall and Mondrian then ?

" Yes. Chagall was an acquaintance. I would see him often in Montparnasse and I photographed him for Vu. Mondrian was a good friend and he liked my pictures very much. "

When did you come to America and why ?

" I came over to stay for one year in 1936. I had never wanted to come here, I was at home in Paris and I was never interested in America. But, for a whole year, there were people after me to come over. Every month a telephone call would come to the Keystone Agency in Paris from their office in New York asking them to send me over. Finally, after a full year of this, the New York director came to Paris to see me. Before i left to have lunch with him, my wife warned me that if I agreed to go to New York, she would divorce me. And now - just two or three days ago - we have been here for forty years long years. It was impossible to go back once i was here. And later the war came and by then I was an enemy alien finger-printed. They thought I was a spy if i walked in the streets with my camera. "
" But in the beginning, I was sure I would be gone for only one year. I thought of it as my sabbatical. Just before I left, an official came to see me from the French State Department and offered me French citizenship based on the basis of artistic merit. You can imagine how i felt, it was the most important honor i could receive. It meant that the french had accepted me as an artist and a French citizen. I promised I would come back to Paris. When I arrived in New York, the curator of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art came to see me at my hotel and told me that he wanted material for an international exhibition at the museum. He selected four or five pictures - one was a distortion - on the condition that I cut out the sex. He told me: " If it's with sex, it's pornography; without sex, it's art. " Bienvenue to America ! In the end I gave in, I was to green. The director had everything in his hand, he had my reputation, but he had absolutely no idea of what he had. In all those years, the director never asked me to do a one-man show. He was concerned with perfecting and sharpening a technique. If a little boy learns to write his ABCs perfectly , that is beautiful calligraphy, but it is worthless unless he can express himself well and use technique for his own art. You should feel what you are doing ! Even if you are imitating, you must feel. Technique is only the minimum in photography. It's what one must start with. I believe that you should be a perfect technician in order to express yourself as you wish and then you can forget about technique. When I went to Life magazine, they told me they liked my photographs, but I was talking in them to much ! They wanted documents, technique, not expressive photographs. "

Could you talk about your relationship with Brassai and Cartier Bresson ? It seems to me that you really started both of them on photography.

" Brassai was a fantastically talented man - an excellent painter, excellent sculptor, excellent caricaturist and writer, too. He had his own special philosophy, but he also had the normal problem of an artist - money. I told him he could remedy this by making photographs and selling them and I took him with me on many reportages, explaining everything that I was doing - interpretation, technique, including the night - photograph technique, everything for my friend. Cartier-Bresson is much younger than I . He is absolutely honest and very nice. "

vertige

excerpts from an interview : george rodger

Quite early on in your life you developed a wanderlust. Could you tell us how this urge to travel and explore came about ?

" It was probably inbred. Most of my ancestors were travelers and I think I just inherited it from my father, my grandfather,
and my great-grandfather. They were merchants and they dealt all over the world- in Egypt, in South America, in China. "

What sort of education did you have ?

" Education! Me? I was never educated. "

Was that on purpose ?

" Yes. I was sent to English public schools-ghastly kinds of institutions-and i just didn't like the restrictions. I just didn't
go back. When I turned seventeen , I went to the sea with the Merchant Marine. "

How did you come to photography ?

" Right from the beginning I wanted to document what I was seeing. I didn't know why, I hadn't clue. But I just had an urge
to do that. I have one or two of my old diaries and I find that I'd taken photographs to illustrate what i was living through.
But it wasn't any deeper than that, unfortunately. "

Did you take pictures when you were in the States ?

" Yes, I did. Always travelogue sort of things. "

Did you see any photographers work ?

" No, unfortunately not. I wasn't really interested in photography as photography at all then. I was only using photography as
a kind of mechanical way of expressing what I felt and what i thought. I think that's the only way- I can't presume to any early
inclinations toward photography. "

Were you supporting yourself doing odd jobs ?

" More or less. I became a professional wool-sorter. I can still sort fleeces of wool even know. And I was making lenses for spectacles in an optical company. I was with the American Can Company, working on the automatic lathes. That's only three of the jobs- there must have been a dozen in all. "

How long were you in the States ?

" Seven years altogether. I spent five years in Boston and two in upper New York State, near Seneca Lake. I was managing a fruit farm there, which was very nice. I enjoyed that. "

Was it the Depression that brought you back to England ?

" Yes, absolutely. I was stone broke and I hadn't been home for a long time, so I thought I better come back. "

What happened when you returned ?

" I wasn't altogether welcome. When the only son goes away to make his living, the rest of the world is expecting him to make
good somewhere, which i failed to do. So I left home ( which was in Chelshire then ) right away and came down to London. I got my first photographic job, which was with the BBC, on the strength of six prints which i had made in the bathroom of my place in New York State. "

Pictures of Lake Seneca ?

" Yes, of Lake Seneca and one or two other things. For some reason they seemed to like them at the BBC and they gave me the job, which was probably about the luckiest stroke I've had! "

How did you handle the job ?

" Very cunningly. I had an assistant a young girl I called Esmeralda, who came from what was then the Bloomsbury School of Photography. She'd just graduated and we use to stay late in the evening to figure things out-time, temperatures and that sort of basic stuff - so we couldn't go wrong. I learned all my basic photography from her - how to use studio cameras and lights and so on - I didn't even know then how to load a dark slide. "

air

moderne travailleurs

excerpts from an interview : robert doisneau

Would you speak briefly about your background and education ?

" So there I was in this little universe. My father worked in a roofing and plumbing firm and he wanted me to have a sedentary job. He thought that by putting me in a school for the book trade I would find a profession that would make me what might be called a semi-executive, in a profession that would be stable, sedentary and without problems. But it turned out that, after being enclosed for a while in the discipline of that school, I escaped for a trade that is the least stable, the most adventurous and the least guaranteed by security! I escaped for photography! I have a need for liberty that must be greater than my contemporaries. I can't stand to be held back by people or things. I was miserable when i was in that school because the discipline was very strict. I was miserable when i was in the Renault factory for five years because you had to clock in and out and the people working there was so large. I've always aimed for that solitude, that liberty and that desire to play."

In the end, it was school that made you feel the importance for liberty ?

" School made me feel constraint and constraint has one fine aspect to it. It's like a kettle in which steam is enclosed. When there is a real need to explode, there is an explosion! I even feel this from time to time when I'm asked to work on an advertising or commercial job. I get so fed up with it after a very short time that i just explode. Automatically then, I find my way back to the street, toward liberty again. The street is something I need right now."

In the past, you have occasionally mentioned what you call the "visionary sense". Would you talk about that ?

" I find that the profession of photography gives a certain sharpness to visual observation. it gives one a clearer visionary sense than that of the average person, whose perception is generally somewhat dulled by watching too much television. The visionary sense, plus one's own sensibility, go hand in hand, of course, to create a kind of visual ecology. I think that this ecological balance can help disentangle us from the immense influence of the media, which is so very powerful. Photography is really a return to the visual source. I think that when someone who is humble looks at things made by his own eye, the primordial tool, he understands them. The eye is the instrument of the poor. Photography is akin to this. The eye is something one has at birth. If you use it well , you can struggle against the maleficent powers that pollute the media. I think this is very important. Maybe this is why I'm so grateful to be able to practice the profession of photography."

You're a solitary individual ?

" I am very solitary. I am troubled when i work with people around me. It is not, however, the people in the street that impede me. There i don't care at all-that doesn't bother me in the slightest. But to have technicians around me that are paid by the hour- it's a little bit like taking a taxi when you don't have much money. You just can't take your eyes off the meter that ticks and ticks and ticks. And i have something of this feeling for the team. It scares me."

To come back to a previous question about Parisian personalities- did you know Atget, or see his work ? Did it mean anything to you ?

" I knew him when he was very old. Atget was a fellow in whose spirit i often find myself. Atget did a body of work that is tremendously important, like the people who did postcards of the period. These people did an important document of how people dressed, how they travelled, what the setting was. I believe in the importance of these unknown people, much more so than in the aesthetics of the photographers from the old French Society of Photography."

All of your life you worked alone. Is there an existentialist attitude that permeates the way you have worked ? Or is it perhaps, that the idea of solitude is an idea that is somehow romantic ?

" I do not know if it's existentialist or romantic, it's only the presence of someone at my side physically that hinders me. I'm a little ashamed of my illogical steps, my gesticulations. I take three steps to the side , four to that side, I come back, I leave again, I think I come back, then all of the sudden I get the hell out of the place, then I come back. People would think I'm insane. The way i work is so illogical and my movements are so unfunctional that I must really do it all alone."

robert doisneau

f.y.i. > Starting now i will extract pieces of interviews from different people that i admire. In addition i will always post a link to the artists work via the title which is at the top of the page in BOLD print. Just click on the title for more information regarding an artist.

spagere

Le Voyage

L' Avventura

Mourning Sun

BIENVENIDOS

The Witch Creek Fires

Spent the afternoon with my mom raking dry pine needles that blanketed our countryside property. Already well over 100,000 square acres have been scorched and 250,000 people in Southern California have been evacuated. Many schools are closed and The National Guard has been called upon for help and relief. Our Governor here in California Arnold Schwarzneger has declared a state of Emergency. Already the fire has claimed one life and injured nearly 20 fire fighters. The winds are lashing non stop at 45 mph furthermore stoking the flames. Last night i didn't sleep as i was glued to the television (news) Horses were being corraled and led to safety although some were badly burned as others perished in the inferno. Countless people are homeless and one hospital has been emptied as the fire encroached upon the grounds. Further speculation is that the fire will spread to the coastal terrain. A pine tree in my familys yard well over one hundred feet tall with a circumference of at least five feet has split and almost destroyed part of our house. My mother and i witnessed this act of nature and i can assure you that natural disasters are real & frightening. The wind continues to sweep over the hills and whips around corners howling at the blue black sky ..

jag niwas island

Along the Oregon Trail

Bleak House

Sumba Island

Aceh Province

Indonesia

Michelangelo Antonioni Modernist filmmaker dies @ 94

Swedish Minimalist dies @ home 89 years old on this morning peacefully

Ingmar Bergman is FAAROE ISLAND in the Baltic Sea

w robert angell's studio

crocker street los angeles

w robert angell

anna brozek

Dachau Concentration Camp

"But my mind clung to my wifes image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile,
her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was begining to rise."

" A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into songs by so many poets, proclaimed
wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth that love is the ultimate and the highest goal in which man can aspire. Then I grasped
the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart. The salvation of man is
through love and is love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world may still know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way; an honorable way; in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, " The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."

" This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when i talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this
knowledge." ' I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,' she told me. ' In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.' Pointing through the window of her hut, she said, ' This tree here is the the only friend I have in my loneliness.' Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch two blossoms. ' I often talk to this tree,' she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious ? Did she have occasional hallucinations ? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied : ' Yes ' What did it say to her ? She answered, ' It said to me, " I am here - I am life, eternal life." pp. 89-90 from " Man's Search for Meaning."

I should mention that all quotes above are Victor Frankl's quotes. Dr. Frankl was a survivor of the Holocaust and was imprisoned at Dachau Concentration Camp. Dr. Frankl was a key figure in existential therapy. Furthermore; he was an
Austrian neuroligist and psychiatrist. Viktor Emil Frankl (march 26,1905-sept.2,1997)

NICK CAVE ON LETTERMAN IS ON

THE ESTATE THEATRE CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Estates Theatre

" The Estates Theatre was built during the late 18th century in response to the Enlightenment thought regarding
general access to the theatre, and theatres themselves demonstrating the cultural standards of a nation. The
Estates Theatre was built in a little less than two years by the aristocrat Frantisek Antonin Count Nostitz Rieneck.
In it's first few years of existence it was known as Count Nostitz's Theatre."

" The Estates Theatre in Prague is one of the most beautiful theatres in all of Europe. The charm is unique. One
can sometimes feel the the spiritual presence of the supremely talented musicians, directors, artists, poets, and
playwrights who have passed through it's doors.; either to perform on stage or to take their seats in the audience.

The Estates Theatre will forver be forever linked with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the musical genius whose fortunes
of life , art inspirations and work had such a dramatic impact on the city of Prague.

Mozart was extremely fond of Prague, and in particular the Estates Theatre. The marriage of Figaro was first performed
here in 1786. In 1787 Mozart himself conducted the premier of "Don Giovanni." The repertoire of the Estates theatre
consists mainly of Mozart's operas. However; other composer's works do feature occassionally, as well as ballet &
classical concerts. "

The Balcony

CZECH REPUBLIC OPERA HOUSE

Polaroid Series I

The Fotographer W.Robert Angell

In Loving Memory Of Jimmy Berryhill

French Dramatist

Frozen Film>EXPIRED

Below you will find eight images that were all composed around dusk.
camera i used for this series was an Olympus mju-11> fixed lens f2.8
35mm. The advantage to using this camera is that by nature it's non-
obtrusive. This enables me to work very fast and allows me to be
virtually invisible. At this time i had been experimenting with film
that had been frozen & expired. This film is Fuji Sensia 200 that i
had payed $200 dollars for well over one hundred rolls of film. All
8 fotos were made in different regions throughout Rajasthan;India.

The Golden City

Udaipur

Rajasthan

Udaipur

Rajasthan

Leh

Leh

Leh

LEH

Leh

A RITUAL