Anodyne
Friday, August 11, 2023
 

The Lahaina banyen, 10 August 2023. On the left hand side of the square are three cars. Go in maybe fifteen feet to the right of the car furthest from the water, just under that huge canopy of shade, and that's where you might occasionally find me with my big camera, on an "out of office" day. I also have a few studies made early on from the upper right hand corner of the square, but I never liked the light there & slowly worked around to a more spatially complex southeast-facing view. If this all sounds insanely self-centered in the face of massive loss of human and economic life I suppose all I can offer in my own defense is my legitimate grief at the almost certain death of a living thing I've struggled to depict for over a decade, for the sheer fact of its perserverence in the face of a world inimical to it & its kind.
- posted by cjb @ 7:21 PM
Wednesday, August 09, 2023
 


Lahaina, HI, 9 August 2023. The dark mass behind the burned white government building is a single banyen tree, planted in 1873, the subject of an unfinished composite picture I've been working on since 2012.

Breaking character for a moment to tell a longer story.  Visited Lahaina in 2012 & soon learned that a vacation meant for "working on a relationship" was maybe not the best time to start making a 40" x 60" multiple-exposure print with extreme lighting contrasts & 12+ figures (+ birds, etc.), most of whom changed from day to day.

Returned to Vancouver. Relationship changed. Never stopped thinking of that block-size tree; the vendors & tourists & hustling locals & officials out on break from the government office & birds & other living things gathered in its shade.  & also of Ursula Le Guin's "Vaster Than Empires and More Slow": "a brooding calm that was half aware of them and half indifferent to them." 

I thought, I'm gonna make that picture! & had Duchamp's Philadelphia door, made silently over the years where he pretended to make no art, as a model.

So I bought a new camera, and a computer capable of the complex compositing.  & twice, since 2012,  flew secretly to Maui on points, never telling anyone where I was going & never staying longer than two or three days at a time, living in my rental car or stealth camping, so I could spend 12+ hours at a stretch with my camera(s) and the tree & its ever changing cast of extras.

That picture will not be finished now.  I hope the tree (which I have spent enough time with now to feel it must be dimly aware of me) & the broader society around it, which is of course my picture's real subject, survive the anthropocene, and that I will be able to visit again, when it is safe and respectful for a non-Hawaiian to do so, & that there will at some point be a new, & different picture, of which I'll say no more, until it's finished.

In the meantime: Hawaii can use your money.  If you are a reader or friend of this blog, or my work, please consider donating to support indigenous Hawaiians in their struggle(s) against the anthropocene. I have!
- posted by cjb @ 12:58 PM


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