an eye in the world » art

The Wilderness Within

Grant — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 19:36:56 +0000

Thanks to the folks at Arts First Oakland, I’m having my first exhibition in the John Seeley Gallery at the First Congregational Church of Oakland:

The exhibition will run through September. I hope some of you will be able to make it to the reception on June 22nd, from 4-7pm; come to view the work, sit down and chat, and sip a glass of wine or punch.

For those that can’t make it to see the actual prints, you will be able to view the photographs and purchase prints beginning June 22nd at:

http://www.grantkinney.com/prints

(note that Adobe Flash Player is required to view this page)

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Friedlander

Grant — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 03:28:56 +0000

If you’re in the Bay Area and have an inkling of interest in photography as art, go see the Friedlander exhibit that just opened at the SFMOMA. Robin and I went to the opening reception last Friday. It’s incredible.

There’s a quote by Jackson Pollack upon looking through a catalogue of Picasso’s work: ”God damnit. That guy thought of everything.” It’s like that. What an amazing diversity of subject matter and creative vision, over 400 photographs in a career spanning half a century. And I’ve never seen a photographer with a better visual sense of humor–truly a delight. I am both captivated, intimidated, and frustrated–I want to be that good!

Robin’s started calling me “Kinney-lander” now. I take it as both a playful teasing about my obsession with photography and affectionately calling me to live out my potential.

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Art with Soul Prints

Grant — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 05:03:13 +0000

I’m still working on Paypal integration, but a gallery of all the prints I exhibited at the Art with Soul fair is now online. You can view the images here:

http://www.grantkinney.com/artwithsoul

If you’re interested in purchasing prints, you can select which ones you would like and use the form at the bottom of the page to indicate your name, email address, and what sizes you would like. Here are the prices:

5 x 7″ (in an 8 x 10″ mat) – $12 ($5 shipping)

8 x 10″ (in an 11 x 14″ mat) – $27 ($10 shipping)

11 x 14″ (in a 16 x 20″ mat) – $49 ($12 shipping)

Shipping for more than one print is an extra $1 per print. All prints are archival and matted with acid free materials. Credit cards are accepted using Paypal.

They make great Christmas gifts!

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Art with Soul

Grant — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 23:11:08 +0000

Thanks to everyone who came out to the art fair at PSR (The Pacific School of Religion) on Tuesday. All of you helped make this a successful first showing of my photography. It was a great pleasure to share my work and receive your appreciation and feedback.

I’m working on getting an online gallery up featuring the prints that were on display on Tuesday, so you can look at them online. Future enhancements will also include online purchasing through Paypal (which has free and secure credit card payments), hopefully sometime over the next week.

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hiroshi sugimoto

Grant — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:50:00 +0000

Photography has been many things, but it’s always been tied to art. Many of its early innovators were classically trained artists, although it has sometimes struggled for full acceptance in the art world. There are a few photographers out there today working as much as artists as they are photographers, who are able to take the process and art of photography beyond its more practical applications like advertising products and documenting events toward representing an esoteric experience of reality.

One of those photographer-artists is Hiroshi Sugimoto, who has an amazing retrospective exhibit that’s currently at the de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. I loved it. It’s not just a bunch a photographs hanging on white walls–it’s an experience that takes you into Sugimoto’s head and how he sees as an artist. It’s amazing. I’m both inspired by his work–taking such simple ideas and making magnificent art–as well as frustrated that my creative ideas aren’t half as brilliant (lots of room for growth!)

Here’s the info on the de Young exhibit

Sugimoto’s website
(it contains many of the same captions as in the exhibit, but fewer photographs)

A series of podcasts featuring presentations/interviews with Sugimoto.

If you’re in the Bay Area, go see it! The exhibit continues through September 23, 2007.

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making prints

Grant — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:45:00 +0000

We’re back from Desolation Wilderness. As always, it is good to be back home but I also miss the simplicity of backpacking–living on a minimum of material goods and having little on my agenda other than enjoying being outside and making photographs.

After returning from the wilderness, there was an order of prints waiting for me. It was a visually delicious experience to open the box and tack them up on the 4 foot bulletin board I recently installed in the living room.

Something beautiful happens when one’s experience behind the camera is transformed into a material work of art. Finally, after the click of the shutter is shaped and coaxed into a fine art print, I can separate myself enough from the experience I had while taking the picture and look at the resulting artwork to consider it on its own merits. Up until this stage, it is difficult not to be awash in the memory of taking the image, rather than actually looking at the image as it is in this moment.

Also, based on this experience, I can highly recommend Adorama’s printing services. They are reasonably priced and the quality is excellent. I’m especially loving the black and white images printed on Ilford Black and White paper. I wish I could post them here, but then they’d be electronic images once again!

If anyone out there is interested in purchasing prints of any of the pictures you see, here’s my current process, until I get a website set up later this summer:

Browse my Flickr images here: aneyeintheworld on Flickr
Write down the title of the image that looks like this “GMK_YYYYMMDD_1234“
Submit a comment by clicking on “comments” at the bottom of this post (this just allows an easy way to communicate with me; it will not be published)
In the comment, include: your name, mailing address, email address, the title of the image you want, and what size (8 x 10″ or 11 x 14″)
Be sure to include your email address in the comment, otherwise I won’t be able to get in touch with you
I will email you with payment instructions and get the print out to you within three weeks. Currently I except Paypal, personal checks, and money orders.

Prints come in two sizes: 8 x 10″ prints are $25 and 11 x 14″ prints are $45.

All prints are printed to my exact specifications on archival matte paper, then hand signed and numbered. Each print will have a small white border around the edge, so the image size is slightly smaller than the total print size. The copyright symbol you see on the web images is not present on prints.

Thanks for your support!

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finding the photograph

Grant — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 16:10:00 +0000

I’m taking a class this semester called “Photography as Ecological Meditation”. The basic format of the class goes like this: we read a meditation written by the professor on a particular topic, we go out and make photographs in response to the meditation, and then pick one to share with the class. Each class session is a slide show where everyone gets the chance to make comments about where the picture takes them. Then the photographer reveals her/himself and gives context and any personal feelings about the image. I like this a lot–it’s giving me a chance to approach the emotional aspect of viewing photographs (instead of just the technical) and see some of the amazing work done by my classmates.

The ecological part is pretty flexible–referring broadly to our surrounding environment. So it doesn’t have to be any specific kind of nature photograph. The picture above was for the first class–the theme was darkness (what I nice one to start with). Thankfully, the next one was light (balance is good).

It’s been an interesting process for me to figure out how to go about making a photograph under these assignments. Do I brainstorm possible images and then go out and make the one that I think will be the best? Or do I go out and explore with my camera, putting on this new filter of a specific theme onto how I see? Do I just try to make what I think will be the coolest photograph that will impress the professor or have the most impact on the class?

This one I happened upon (while not specifically looking), though I saw it because when thinking of images about darkness (particularly personal darkness in the form of depression, something I’ve dealt with) tunnels were on my mind. Will finding themed projects like this spur my creative possibilities and help me make images I wouldn’t have otherwise envisioned? It seems so, my friend. Sometimes structure is good, even for creativity.

By the way, don’t worry about what it is, just let it speak for itself ; )

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moving and shifting

Grant — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 23:42:00 +0000

Being back in school for the spring semester means that life is busy. With a more than full course load, I haven’t had much time to blog. If you’re reading this, thanks for coming back even though I take so long to update!

As with the rest of my life, I feel like my photography is growing and shifting very quickly right now. I’m using my intution more, letting compositions happen rather than trying to manufacture them. It feels very good to trust myself, rather than trying to control each element by thinking it through and planning what to do. I’m learning that often good things happen if I take the risk of trusting my capacity to respond in the moment (again, both in photography, and life in general).

Yet, I’m unsatisfied; part of me is really bored with my usually genre of nature photography. While I can make pictures that are nice to look at, they don’t seem to convey the meaning I want to get across. To tell stories, I need more of a human connection (by taking pictures of people) and to work with images that relate to each other in series, each painting another piece of what I am trying to say. This is sounding a lot like photojournalism.

I’ve realized that my creative process while doing photography has mostly been in response to my environment. While I sometimes seek out environments that I think will be particularly photogenic (just about any natural body of water, for instance), I usually don’t plan or envision a particular photograph or kind of photograph beforehand. I use what I’ve learned about photography to explore my environment and respond to what I see. This is a very individualistic process, and I find it very meditative. But I’m sure I could really benefit from some collaboration with others.

I have plans to try more street photography in the near future, so we’ll see where that takes me. (Yea for spring break next week!)

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wildcat creek

Grant — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 05:07:00 +0000

Since it’s a holiday (President’s day), we had the chance to do a little hiking up in the hills of Tilden Regional Park. Not exactly wilderness, but not like the city, either. I’m glad that I can maintain a relatively small ecological footprint by living in an urban area but still have places close by to which I can escape. Now only if there was better bus service so we didn’t have to drive the car.

I’m finally feeling like some of my photography is moderately worthy as art. I spent the first 2 or 3 years after I started photographing just pointing my camera at things I thought were beautiful and then wondering why pictures of them never seemed to capture the beauty I saw. Thanks to the vast amount of information on the internet about photography, some of it even good (particular thanks to the folks at the RadiantVista), I’ve been able to slowly grow in artistic skill. I’m beginning to understand the nature of translating a 4 dimensional experience into 2 dimensions and how the typical human brain moves through that 2D representation.

I’m drawn more and more to black and white photography. It’s more honest, in a way–because most people see in color it’s more obvious that a black and white photograph is not a small captured bit of reality, but a representation. I’ve been using the beta of Adobe Camera RAW 4 and the recently released Adobe Lightroom v1.0 software to do black and white conversions from my digital RAW files. It’s amazing how much faster one can work with a refined user interface, with results that would take 3 to 4 times as long in Photoshop.

Click on the picture to see the rest of the photographs from today on my Flickr page.

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an update

Grant — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 22:32:00 +0000

well friends,

I missed my self imposed deadline to start updating in the middle of January. Life happens, I guess. I’m back in grad school full time now so things are very busy. Admittedly, updating this blog every other day is an ambitious goal, one I probably won’t be able to meet. But I’ll keep trying, nevertheless. Robin and I haven’t even gotten all of the New Year’s cards out yet, and it’s halfway through February!

Though I haven’t updated in a while, I have been thinking about the purpose of this blog: here are my thoughts so far:

Sharing my photographs
Keeping in touch with friends and family
Expressing my thoughts about life as I am living it
Sharing random internet material I think is worth experiencing
Reflecting on the process of making art, both my creative process and the technical aspects of photography

I’m unsure at this point how much privacy should be a concern. I like to be open with the world, but I don’t want the information here to someday be used against me. At this point, I can’t think of a way it would be, but I’m playing it safe for now. So, if I sound a little vague as to the specifics, shoot me an email and I’d be happy to fill in the details.

The photograph above was taken on Valentine’s day from somewhere near the Emeryville/Berkeley border along the SF Bay shoreline. I’ve been wanting to explore shooting some long exposure black and whites (after seeing the work of these two photographers, Michael Kenna and Brian Chapman) and this seemed like a good place. I noticed the ruins of the pier while riding my bike one day and vowed to return as soon as I could.

The softness of the water comes from a 30 second exposure time. I had to wait until just the right time after sunset so that the exposure would be right for this shutter speed. Click on the picture to see some other pictures from this shoot.

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