Here is part two of Dream Eye. These images are all photo-collages from various series I’ve done over the decades.
Some are close ups of larger collages so you can see the dream eye portion.
Photography © 2022 Marty Coleman | martycoleman.com
In Many of my photographs and photo-collages going back decades I have images of people with one eye open and one eye closed. I’ve always been attracted to this imagery because it’s both visually disconcerting and emotionally resonant. The person is grounded in reality but also allowing for an interior life, a dream. This is the dream eye.
Some of the images were the result of two photographs photoshopped together but many others were actually just one image where I asked the person to simply close one eye. It is easy to do but not easy to do in such a way as both eyes looked relaxed. When I found a person who could do that it was a real treat.
Here is a selection from that series.
Thanks to all my friends and models who trusted me with their faces.
Photographs © 2022 Marty Coleman
This past week I went to Fort Worth to visit my niece Jenna at TCU. While there I determined to finally have a visit with an old friend from my time in Tulsa who moved to Texas back in the early fall.
When we both lived in Tulsa I was doing several large scale photography projects and she was kind enough to model for me on a number of occasions. She’s a friend who is up for anything, often seeing my vision for the image, but when not, trusting my ideas and the images that will come from my often odd posing requests.
She moved away many years ago but we kept in touch as she moved around the country for her career. We said if we were ever in the same city again we would have to get together. That finally happened when I moved to Dallas in 2020 and she moved to Fort Worth in 2021.
When I visit Fort Worth I love to hit their museum area. They have 3 world-class museums, not just for the art inside but for the architectural masterpieces they are housed in. On this day I decided to visit the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth for the first time. I invited her to meet me there to catch up and do a mini-photo shoot for old time’s sake.
I brought out my very old DSLR camera, a Panasonic G1 from 2008. I hadn’t used it in probably 3 years so it definitely needed some care to get it back in shape. It’s pretty archaic by today’s standards (even iPhone standards much less current DSLR cameras). It is bad in low light and can be quite grainy. I had to refamiliarize myself with how it worked, it’s been that long. Way more things to pay attention to than my iPhone, that is for sure. But it’s like riding a bike. Give me a few minutes and it seemed like no time had passed.
As you can see from this photograph the Museum itself is a work of art. The signature architectural element of the Modern is a reflecting pool that surrounds half the building with 3 stories of long vertical glass panels that look out on the pool.
There are 3 pavilions that jut out into the reflecting pool that you can see from the other pavilions. There is art in each space so it’s interesting to see it through the prism of the water and architecture.
The sunlight and shadows combine with the ripples in the water and the strong structural elements to make amazing visual impressions. The building itself is a work of art.
Here are a few images from my earlier shoots with Brittany in 2013 and 2014.
I was doing a photo-collage series at the time called ‘Visual Poems’. She contributed to that as well.
If you would like to see more of my photographic work, click on the ‘Art’ drop down menu at the top of the page.
A friend of mine, Brittany Rainey, had modeled for some experimental images I was interested in doing. In exchange I created some images for her. We took them in the buildings and gardens of Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The restaurant experience was not indicative of the entire trip. It got much better after this!
I didn’t include the gross guy sleeping at the table next to us, or the stale, greasy smell in the
restaurant, or the 4 disgustingly dirty men at another table or the really bad smell in the
bathroom or the hair in my wife’s mashed potatoes. My patty melt was good though.
Second in the series on Color Composition. I loved finding the little baskets sitting
in the sun next to the crumpled piece of paper that had the same color. the deep rich
version of that same color in the umbrella pole and the shadow cutting between the
other two made the composition worth capturing. The background had colors in the cool
spectrum and that made all the difference in bringing out the warmth of the orange.
#4 of 10 stop signs to creativity
Stop sign #4 – I am not educated in art and photography.
Answer: Praise the Lord God Almighty you aren’t! Get over it and take some photos.
There are many highly educated ‘artists’ who are picking their noses watching TV and
eating too much instead of using their talents. They aren’t worth doodoo compared to
one person with passion and vision even without a formal education. What matters is
the doing. If you do the work you will learn.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t things to learn in a formal setting, there are. I
have 2 degrees in art because I wanted to learn. I learned about printmaking,
drawing, art history, certain artmaking techniques, and a bit about the art world.
But I had no formal training as a photographer at all. My sole educational work in
photography was about 3-4 sessions in a dark room during grad school with another
student who taught me the basics in exchange for me teaching him the basics of
lithography. The truth is the vast majority of my creativity and my end results as an
artist are not a function of my formal education, they are a function of my desire
and my passion.
There is a woman on Flickr, Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir, probably the most visited of all
the millions on flickr. She was doing pencil portraits when she found flickr and
decided to try photography. Within 2 years she had 3 million views and a contract
with Toyota to photograph their cars. She is a single mother of 2 sons. She lives
in….ICELAND! She is as far from the center of the photography and art world as you
can imagine. But she didn’t use that as an excuse. She didn’t use her children as an
excuse. She didn’t use her lack of photography education as an excuse. What she did
was go out into the middle of the dark Icelandic winter and take photos of 100-200
second exposures in FREEZING cold. She is now getting an art education, but the
point is she didn’t wait. She went and ACTED.
This is the fifth in a week long series on Photography. Check out Monday’s offering
to get the scoop on it from the beginning.
One of my favorite artists, Robert Irwin, has a saying that became the title of his
biography. ‘Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees’. That is why
drawing instructors teach on how to see negative space because negative space doesn’t
have a name, it doesn’t make you conjure up what an elbow is suppose to look like, or
a breast, or a tree or a couch. It is just a shape and it is just defined by the line
or the shadows or texture, that’s all.
So, when wondering what to take a photo of, don’t worry so much about the ‘thing’ you
are trying to photograph, all named and defined, but look at it without naming it.
Find the line or tone or texture or color that is within it and make an image of
those things. Your photos will be much better, I promise.
This is the fourth of a week long series on my take on photography. Go to Monday’s posting to see the series from the beginning.
Actually, I say stand too far away or too close… or too low or too high. The demon
of creativity is often the eye level shot and the ‘just right’ distant shot. Break the
plane of your own eye level, of the model/photographer comfort zone and the resulting
‘well composed’ but boring shot. If you are worrying about what someone will think,
the model or an onlooker or whoever, then go back to your house and sell your camera
because you are only going to create something that looks like someone elses work,
since you are allowing someone else to decide what you do while in the act of creating
an image.
This is the third in a week-long series on my take on Photography. Go to Monday’s posting to see it from the beginning.
The rule is to get the whole face in the frame, the whole person, everything perfect.
But my rule is that that rule sucks. Are their times to do that? Sure. But for
Christ’s sake (and everyone else’s) don’t be a slave to the perfect shot. Try
getting the persons face just partially in the frame with most of the image being a
background or something else. Try working with angles and composition in an abstract
way instead of worrying so much about the subject matter being perfectly upright.
Here is the important thing though. Don’t think every experiment is just so cute and
precious that you just have to show it to the world. Remember, chances are every
experiment you are attempting a lot of other people have tried it as well. So go look
around, see what other people have done. Be self-critical but NOT self-condemning.
There is a BIG difference. Being Self-critical means you evaluate and look honestly
wat what you have done in context of your own work and others. Self-condemning means
you deride yourself for not being perfect or more like someone else, etc. It is
boring and selfish and oh so last century to wallow in that. Get over it.
