Lady of the Lake

©Ellie Ivanova

She is a Lady from the Arthurian legend and like most mysterious women, an enchantress in both romantic and magical ways. Belonging to a separate realm — like a lake or forest that will never be truly human — is always alluring. So I’ve always been attracted to many legendary ladies who, in one way or another, belong to water, like La Llorona.

Turns out that White Rock Lake in Dallas  also has such a legend, alhough the lady in question is not a powerful enchantress. According to the tale, a blond woman in her early 20s will appear at night, dripping wet in a 1920s evening dress and will flag a car passing along the road circling the lake. The woman will tell the driver she had an accident and needs to get home. The driver will then drive to the address given, but then the girl is gone, leaving only a puddle on her seat. The driver then knocks on the door of the house and learns that that she was the family’s daughter who died in a boat accident on the lake one night decades ago.

Summer in Black & White

Images from this summer. I included only those that don’t have a sibling in the color series. Click on each thumbnail to view larger image. Ilford film, Pentax 35mm. ©Ellie Ivanova.

Holga Envy: the Hobo large format camera

Dominique and I in a Holga comparison.

While roaming the Tuscan countryside this summer, we happened upon the gallery of a French photographer living in Italy, Dominique Bollanger. While we admired his silver and large platinum prints and joked the old jokes about my Holga whimsicality compared to his high precision contact prints, he whipped out a wooden 8″x10″ box and told us, “This is my Holga”. We didn’t believe him, of course. We thought it was just another Holga joke.

Turned out, it really was his “Holga”, the same camera he used to capture the iconic Italian landscapes and then make beautiful contact prints straight out of it, with no intermediate enlargements. And if you imagine the pain of carrying around a heavy wooden box up and down the idyllic hills, you get my initial reaction. A 4″x5″ large format is inconvenient enough – now 8″x10″ would be a torture. Right?

Elliott Erwitt’s Dogs and other Contemporaries in Bremen

Felix, Gladys and Rover, USA, 1974. Elliott Erwitt, Magnum Photos

I was very pleasantly surprised to see an Elliott Erwitt retrospective at the Focke Museum in Bremen, Germany, a great local culture museum. The connection with Erwitt? I don’t know. It could be because one of the Bremen musicians was a dog, or because dogs are beloved animals here. But we don’t really need a connection. In any case, the retrospective was in the museum’s special exhibition space and was extremely well attended. The museum was outright crowded on a recent Sunday afternoon with lots of interested patrons.

Elliott Erwitt has an unusual background as an artist and photographer. Born in Paris to Russian emigres, raised in Milan and then the US, he has built a tremendous ability to approach a city or a place without assumptions of exoticism. He manages to find universal meaning in different places, some of them traditionally presented to the Western viewer through the exoticizing lens of the outsider, like Brazil or Iran. But not him.

Italy in color (2011)

     

The Governess (1998)

This amazing film by director Sandra Goldbacher is a wonderful piece of visual poetry based on an intriguing story. But beyond its qualities as a film, I see it as a gem metaphor of the age-old conflict between photography as art expression and photography as documentation of reality. A classic must-see if you are even remotely interested in the visual arts.

The curse and blessing of traveling with a camera

©Ellie Ivanova

If you’ve been reading this blog for some time, you know what I think about travel photography - but that’s travel photos as a final product and as an approach. The experience itself though is quite another matter. And I am not talking about traveling to photograph for a project; what I have in mind is traveling for other purposes – even for fun – while being a photographer. As anyone with any level of personal investment in photography has discovered, that can be an exhilarating or an excruciating experience. Here’s why:

1. You see images everywhere. Not just people, places and things, but images with deeper meaning behind them. You enjoy the new sights in a different way. On my flight from Milan to Hamburg last week, I saw the two flight attendants working the aisle with trays in their hands. When they tried to pass each other, they faced in opposite directions and lifted the trays up simultaneously. An instant, beautiful, graceful image that struck me as a lightning – and made me sad since my camera was packed under the seat… You can’t stop being a photographer even if you have something else on your mind!

2. Just like it happens among dog owners, having a camera in hand connects you to other camera-bearers. They start a small talk about your camera and flaunt their own and include you in some sort of an instant camaraderie. You are a part of the tribe