Tag Archives: Spirituality and Photography

Central State Hospital

Posted on by

3

I was invited to join some friends from the Photo Venture Camera Club this morning on a photo shoot at Central State Hospital, a facility abandoned some years ago.


It was a beautiful morning and we got to Central State early, ahead of the heat.   Central State was occupied, I think, until sometime in the 90s.  The deterioration since then was quite evident.


In addition to walking around taking pictures, I was also going down two other mental paths, one concerned with the stories I have heard at our church, Church of the Saviour, about a mission group within the church that worked to close down this mental hospital.  The other path, distantly connected to the first, concerned the work I did at the Hutchings Psychiatric Center in upstate New York.


The church mission group had as one of its tasks finding and furnishing apartments for hospital residents who were being released to the community.  They also spent time with inpatients.  One inpatient had not spoken in many, many years.  One of the women in our church had children who were profoundly deaf and she could gesture American sign language.  She tried it with this woman and to everyone’s surprise the woman responded.  A beautiful hunch.


This image might represent the confused state of mind that someone who had been living as an inpatient for years might experience on hitting the streets.  This brings up the other path my thoughts were taking.  Many years ago I worked in the research department at Hutchings in Syracuse NY.  One of our jobs was identifying optimal locations for community outreach centers.  At the time Hutchings was charged with maintaining a relatively small inpatient unit and an extensive set of outreach units around the county staffed to provide medication, socialization, group therapy and some individual therapy in the community.  What I saw was that the system worked pretty well although there was significant return to the inpatient unit even with solid community programming.  I don’t know what the community programs are like here in Indianapolis, I would guess not as strong as the Hutchings program.  I’ve met some of the people who would have benefited from that when our church has fed the homeless.  That’s where some of them are now.


When out photographing, I’ve come to think about windows as metaphors for gateways to the human mind.  Windows can give us a hint about what is going on in there.


But often they simply reflect the world back at itself.


If they reflect anything more than the sky.


Abandoned.  The Central State institution is abandoned.  I think many of the people are as well.  One of the people on the shoot is a school speech therapist and as we were walking around this morning, she was describing the plight of of some young people going into the world after high school who stand little chance of anything meaningful in employment.  Somewhat retarded, they aren’t retarded enough to qualify for the help that is provided and they don’t have, and likely will never have, the skills needed to survive in the world.


This is Memorial Day.  My dad and all of my uncles who went into World War II came home safely, some level of miracle.  As we remember those who sacrificed for freedom, let us also remember those who are being passively sacrificed right here at home.


I don’t want to leave the impression that we have pulled the plug on all those people who came out of Central State.  We haven’t.  But care is needed for a lot of people, more care than is being provided.  Let’s remember that too.

Water

Posted on by

4

Photo Venture Camera Club went to Spring Mill State Park this past weekend and befitting the fact that rainfall is over 50% above normal, I found that most of my shots involved water in one form or another.  We were fortunate though, it didn’t rain until Saturday midafternoon.


It’s surprising what lengthening out the exposure does for images of flowing water.  The image above was about .3 sec. in duration.  If you had walked past the stream you probably would have done just that, walked past.  Human vision is fast enough that you would not have seen the silky effect a camera can show.


It’s just a matter of learning what to look for and hoping for the best.


But once you see the possibilities it can get tedious for those with you.  You’re snapping away and they probably don’t see the possibilities.  Which is fine, they see something else.


It can be very satisfying to see a possibility and have it pan out.  Digital photography helps a great deal here.  We can take chances and shoot a lot of scenes that might (probably) won’t be interesting once we see them on the computer.  But there is no particular cost.  I took 600 pictures in about 24 hours.  Perhaps 2% of them are worth looking at.


We weren’t the only ones on the water.


That’s why I love photography.

This morning

Posted on by

3

It was a varied morning of shooting.


I’ve been following this trillium sessile for a few days and it is getting ready to pop.  It will be purple.  It is in the backyard.

Becky and I went to the Ecolab at Marion University later in the morning, a good place to go just about any time of the year but Spring seems to best suit it.


The bluebells are in bloom there.

The lily pads were dancing and who wouldn’t join them?


It was a good morning.


It was a spiritual morning, a morning to know we are connected to all life in this world.

Spring is in the details

Posted on by

2

I’ve been out some over the last few days looking for the details of Spring.


New growth and a cocoon hanging on.  Something new and something old in the changing seasons.


I started out looking for that soft green, rather indistinct, we see in trees just coming out but it was the details that pulled me in.


So much beauty in small places.  If nothing else, it gets one to pay attention to what is there.


Stopping to look is key whether a camera is available or not.


We usually see the hyacinth in the plural; but individual blossoms are gorgeous.  And they smell good.

I guess we are often too much in a hurry to really look.  Georgia O’Keeffe said that the reason she painted large images was that that was what was needed to get people’s attention.


Maybe I’ll try that. Make some very large images.  Maybe make a large image of some beautiful small thing and then hang the image outside, right over the subject of the image.  Probably have to put an arrow pointing down to tell people what this was about.

People need to look at what is there.  That is very important.  By the way, I walked no more than a couple of hundred feet (at most, at the very most) off my normal daily paths to get these images.


It’s dark out now so I can’t go look some more tonight.  I’ll do that tomorrow.


For sure.

A trip to New Winchester Indiana and beyond

Posted on by

20

My friend Eileen and I were on our way to Cloverdale, IN to photograph flowers at Hilltop Orchids (which will get its own post later) and we passed through New Winchester along the way.  There are some deserted homes there that just beg to be photographed and we were there to oblige.


This place is at the corner of highways 36 and 75.  I’ve been by there several times and always wanted to stop.  This was the time.  That building to the left was probably a convenience store and perhaps a gas station.  A house is to the right.


Buildings like this seem so much more attractive to photographers than homes presently occupied and taken care of.  Perhaps part of the attraction is that lives were shaped in these places at one time and what happened to the people remains a mystery.


I find that the way I shoot, the windows remain largely opaque giving only a hint of what is inside.  Technically it would not be a problem to show inside detail but this is a metaphor for me – looking through the window into the past and the past remains a mystery.


Or a mostly blank wall.


This place is out in the country.

Who slept there?  Who dreamed their dreams there?


Again a wall, and opaque windows.


Who hung their coats there?  I don’t know.

Change of season

Posted on by

3

Spring is popping and the shift over to shooting flowers and new growth is following in kind.


One of the features of local flora I find funny is that some of it is green all year round but I don’t really notice it until Spring is coming.


The ivy is green all year even if the grass is not.


In a few weeks these trees will be verdant and not desolate looking at all.


A real sign of Spring.

I’m seeing a shift also in my work.


More painting effects, less straight photography.


I’ve seen enough Springs to know that changes in people can occur along with changes in the season.


So perhaps a Spring season is coming to us as individuals as well.


We can always use another Spring.

Darkness and light

Posted on by

2

Winter is often thought of as a time of darkness and there is something to that.  We often have days at a time with little or no direct view of the sun and nights are longer.  Life isn’t as evident.


This calls me to note darkness and share some of its beauty, for absence of color is not absence of beauty.


But the sun has come out in the last day or so and that is to be celebrated too.


I like to shoot the little things.   There are so many of them and their patterns are beyond description.


It is a time for gratitude whether there are clouds in the sky or not, whether it is night or day.


By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness
Luke 1:78-79

Early Spring break

Posted on by

1

I’ve not been out shooting much recently and neither had my friend Becky so we went to the grounds of the Indianapolis Museum of Art this morning.  It was a sunny day and quite inviting.


Surprisingly green for the second day of March, but no leaves on most of the trees.


It was cool but not cold enough for gloves or even zipping up my jacket.  Altogether pleasant.


Water in the canal and ponds was high, we’ve had a good bit of rain.


I don’t know if those are weeds or not.  Probably not.  In any case, I liked them.


The greenhouse was open and there were many photo opportunities there.


I suppose I should have stopped to find out what each plant was but I would have forgotten anyway.


The IMA grounds, a definite member of the short list of places to go for photography in Indianapolis.

Feel free to touch the paint

Posted on by

6

My brother is an academician who studies Mormon missionaries – why they are so dedicated to their mission, what it is like to be one, etc.  He himself is not Mormon but has had a long standing interest in that religion.  He told me about a couple of young missionaries who were going door to door in a small town.  They walked up the sidewalk of this one house and across the front porch.  They knocked on the door and after a few moments it was opened by a very irate man who said ‘What’s the matter with you?   I just painted the porch and can’t you see that paint’s still wet?  Who are you and what do you want?’   Thinking fast, one of the missionaries said ‘We’re Jehovah’s Witnesses and we’ll come back another time!  Sorry to have walked on your wet paint!’


I’ve been working with Corel Painter 11 along with Photoshop and have been so immersed in it I haven’t even been out to shoot much let alone write about it.  Lots of paint here but no wet paint.


One of the first things I found out about this program is that it destroys details and presents pretty much only the larger elements along with tonality and color.


In other words, it puts a high premium on basic composition.


One quickly finds out that ‘it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.’  And the swing here is composition.


I’m starting to get it.  The good thing about it is that many elements of composition can be learned.  Probably not all of them, certainly not all of them, but enough that any photographer or painter can improve.


Painter is almost as complicated as Photoshop so the learning curve is long.  But one can do enough right from the start to provide encouragement.


I’ve mentioned before that I’ve always wanted a painterly effect in my work and now that possibility is here in spades.


We had a lot of rain night before last and there were puddles in the driveway.  As soon as I saw them I knew I had to photograph them.  I’ve photographed puddles before and been disappointed because too much detail showed.  Gravel and blacktop aren’t that interesting to look at.  That’s changed now that I am using a paint program.


It’s fascinating to notice that I’m looking at the world differently now.  I’m not sure how to describe it, but having some idea of what I can do with images – standard photographic techniques and now painterly effects – affects what I look for.


Makes for a larger world. And it’s a world where the paint doesn’t need to dry.