Gloucester, Massachusetts has a special meaning to me for a variety of reasons, and I have for decades photographed there and in the neighboring town of Rockport. The harbor’s classic historic part as one of the most iconic sea capitals on the East Coast, or anywhere in the world, is one reason I and others have long-found the place so fascinating. You should, if you don’t know it, look up that history. The area has, for centuries, played a pivotal role in America’s seafaring life and has continued to do so years after places like Nantucket ceased to be much more than simply a vacation home destination for the rich. Gloucester has, to this very day, remained a serious and important fishing center and active harbor. If you saw the movie A Perfect Storm or read the book, the boat and crew called this town their home port.
So all that is there, but for me among other reasons I find this area so interesting is the fact that one of the founders of the approach to fine art photography I practice and am arguing for revitalizing in a new form on this site, Aaron Siskind, did some of his most important initial work in Gloucester. It was there he had that eureka moment that forever changed the world of art. It was here he came up one day with, more than three quarters of a century ago, the idea that you could take any space in a place like Gloucester or elsewhere and unlike with the usual predictable scenics and tropes take whatever objects were within that space and put them together in interesting highly unique compositions. Perhaps, it was the horizon of the free ocean or the rough and tumble world of a working seaport, but he abandoned at that moment all the usual mundane middle class predictability of composition that photography, including fine art photography, has so often suffered.
This was a conceptual break-through, and his ideas even had an influence with some of the greatest Abstract Expressionist painters such as Franz Kline. The great artist de Kooning supposedly kept one of his prints on his studio wall for inspiration. He is readily included, for this reason, in important histories of Abstract Expressionism and most importantly showed, although this has been too often ignored, that the fine art photographer could play with a different level of art ideas that overlapped in key ways with other top art forms including painting.
Now, this approach of taking the familiar objects of a scene and isolating some of them in a new abstraction is vital to the Creative Abstract Design style which this site champions. The new style I’m arguing for calls this freeing up of the objects in a space and then having to make some new creative design out of them as opposed to the usual taken for granted scenic, “the bracket.” In my style, this idea of the bracket, which I will explain and come back to in great detail later, is almost a metaphysical term.
Siskind in Gloucester produced one of his most iconic images, which continues to be famous for any history of photography, a photo of a simple work glove on a dock. One of the differences between the new style I argue for with Creative Abstract Design and Siskind’s earlier approach is that I believe the artist should often add even more complexity to the bracket. Hence, if you look up the photo and compare my glove picture to his, you’ll see that with mine the scene is a bit more idealized and complex to say nothing of including color unlike his black and white images. Including color can often actually be a key element in adding greater complexity.
But where my images most differ from his is the creation of brackets from a broader array of the Gloucester boats and harbor details. Now, as with the spectacle photos discussed in the last post, the goal is to take these in this case iconic elements and in a very free way compose with them where the emphasis shifts to color, form, the interaction of the objects, etc. To paraphrase Siskind but deploying the idea in a slightly different manner, these objects are to an extent ripped out of their usual context and combined in unique ways.
What is so interesting about this idea of the bracket is that while my own affinity includes the town and harbor of Gloucester among other places, this creative process, which we will discuss much more of in later posts, can be done practically anywhere. The artist does in this style have to pick places they want to do brackets that speak to them, but many places in the world have this potential. There’s no need in the style to just as a fine art photographer take the usual scenics and for standing elbow to elbow with other photographers hoping for the perfect conditions and light for what are predictable images or seeking out unique but still predictable scenics not yet done. Any corner of the world, though perhaps some corners more than others, can be raised up to the level of fine art, if the photographer really makes a deeper effort to understand the concepts involved including the idea of the bracket.
If you are interested in this idea of the bracket or the superb artistic possibilities found in this approach be sure to check out the newly released Kindle book Creative Abstract Design: Towards a New Modernist Photography for the 21st Century available on Amazon. And be sure to subscribe to this site as many key ideas and concepts and photos will be discussed in future posts. I believe you will find many of these concepts very interesting, and they can be productively used by the photographer for lots of different kinds of images and locations.
Hi! I saw this post on Tumblr. Gloucester is my hometown – my (now largely estranged) family even owns a whale watch there. I spent a lot of time at my grandma’s as a kid, and later when we moved away I remember how comforting driving into the city became: one of the first things you see getting off the highway, after the rotary that i95 ends in as you head down Washington Street, is a large sign with a hand-painted whale tail advertising the business. It was always like a big ‘welcome home’ sign to me. Seeing these photos of the boats just on my dashboard was… Wow, what a blast of nostalgia. I look at each boat and ask myself, is that the one docked next to ours? Is that the fishery just down the road, the warehouses I grew up next to? In every picture, I smell sea spray and rust, algae and salt.
I just reconnected with my mom after two years of not talking. I’m hoping that, someday very soon, I’ll come back home and see it all again. I miss home. Thank you for giving me a piece of it, for capturing the benign pieces of my childhood and reminding me why they were beautiful.
Hi,thank you so much for the reply. It means a lot to me that someone who grew up there and has family there found the post and photos interesting!