We all know the work of Diane Arbus, the New York based photographer of  American oddness, the bizarre in the commonplace, the freak in the neighborhood, the misunderstood, ill defined and typed wrong, the disenfranchised, the down and out, the disillusioned, the outsider in all of us. Powerful stuff and hugely influential to me as a young man starting out.

In 1970 Arbus came to RISD where I was a photo major and a senior. She spoke to a group of us, sitting in a classroom on a raised platform, holding up print after print, talking animatedly about her work, the circumstances around which the photographs were made. The boy with the hand grenade in Central Park,  the Nudist family in the Midwest, the Triplets. This was just about when she was having her big show at MOMA, perhaps before but I can't really remember. What turned out to be a blockbuster of a show and an event in that there were lines around the block of people waiting to get in to see it. Her first monograph came out about this time too, the publishing of which rocked photography like nothing before or since. The work was edgy, visceral, deep and true. Arbus seemed to cut through everything to her subjects, some of whom she befriended and revisited many times.

She talked that day about how she didn't at first realize that shooting carefully and knowledgeably was important, and that print quality was crucial. She was close to Lisette Model in earlier years in NYC and Model had convinced her that you couldn't hope to speak with eloquence about anything if your quality was crap. I took that one to the bank. I still have difficulty looking at good ideas presented poorly, no matter what the discipline.

photograph by Stephen Frank taken in the classroom at RISD in 1970.

Her presentation was very animated and hyped up, not through nervousness particularly but I do remember thinking if she was on something, high somehow. 

About a year later she was dead, having killed herself. A life snuffed out was way too early. I wonder if what is known now about depression would have helped her. Very sad.

Seeing her that day, now so long ago, was formative and transforming for me. I don't think I'd really "got it" until then, that this thing I was studying called photography could have real power and weight, show us parts of ourselves and the world we lived in that would extend our experience and knowledge first hand, open a door to something or somewhere completely foreign and incredible.

As soon as I started teaching I used Arbus' work to slap students in the face, to wake them up to the same realization that had happened to me, to shock them out of their complacency. And it worked, not always, of course, but often enough to make it worthwhile. I wanted to imbue students with the concept that they could do anything they chose to.

People work in different ways, of course. Maybe you want to be off on your own, free with your thoughts and concentrating on what it is that you are working on. Or perhaps you want it all going on around you, noise and traffic and people everywhere. 

If you're a photographer, part of the effort can be to be free from everything, as in a nature photographer working on the east slope of the Sierras after hiking for two days. Or, say you like the idea of shooting on the street in a press of bodies at Rockefeller Center in mid Manhattan on a weekend afternoon before Christmas.

Part of photography's appeal is its incredibly diverse circumstances in how we use it. From pictures of calving  glaciers on a once-in-a-lifetime cruise to Alaska to the family portrait at Thanksgiving dinner, it spans such a wide array of intentions, purposes and final results.

For our purposes let's refine this down to a discussion of the pictures we make as art (a very broad definition on its own).  And let's assume we are going out into the world to make those pictures. What comes to mind is the word "intention", at least it does to me.

Photograph by my friend Gail Hill. Used with permission.

By that I mean going out to photograph with something in mind, be it a concept, or a place, or to acquire images to use in some way later, either in a darkroom or with a computer and inkjet printer.

With Gail's picture she used her husband Hal as a model, specified the long coat and the umbrella. Intention.

"What is your intention?" The teacher asks the student. "To go photograph" the student answers. "To photograph what?" the teacher asks and the student replies with "whatever". Feigned apathy in the face of a challenge to step up and take the initiative. I always felt if I could just get them out there, looking through their camera, that some kind of magic would happen. Often it did.

Isolation plays a big part here. Do you seek it or is it something unproductive in making art for you?  

I play both sides, liking the chaos that crowds or busy places make but also liking the serenity of working alone by myself. I do find myself looking from the outside inwards. This is classic photographer /artist territory, of course. We are often "observers" standing on the perimeter looking in. Introverts. Where are you at the wedding reception? Mostly watching them all out there on the dance floor making fools of themselves or are you right in the middle having the time of your life? 

Those newer to photography tend to make generic pictures. The key to more specificity, at least initially, is intention. Photograph some thing, I used to tell my students. So easy to say yet so hard to do.

I recently heard the photographer Lee Friedlander say that when he is out photographing he wants no project in mind. He just wants to see. Later, he might find a theme by looking through the hundreds or thousands of pictures he's made but at least initially, he isn't thinking about outcome, just seeing. There's a purity to that statement that I like. But we must also recognize who made it, an artist so tuned and so practiced in the highest possible form of seeing that it leaves those of us  struggling to make a good picture far behind in his wake.

For the time being, I'll stick with intention. This means having an idea, a concept, a precept, an inkling, a presupposition, a loosely defined aesthetic, a structure, a foundation, even a guess at what I am going after. I'll give in to the idea that this could get formed in process, on location, as it has happened to me before... take a look at Yountville on the site...here, but you've got to have something going on in that head of yours besides "that's pretty", "I like it"or, "maybe that will turn out to be a good one." Intro photo students were perfectly capable of giving me 20 or 40 frames of completely mindless dribble. How could no investment going in possibly create anything good coming out? It couldn't and it didn't. I was known as the professor that made students cry. It wasn't by design but it happened. 

Intention.

I have known Andrea Greitzer for a long time. I first met her when she was a student at Northeastern University in the early 90's. She was a graphic design major, but, like many others, photography won her over and  she is still a photographer today. Andrea is a career teacher and artist with several other occupations along the way. She continues to teach at Northeastern in Boston, but also runs a very successful program for the school as head of a summer semester in Italy in Venice and supplants her teaching by working for a catering company in the city as well. 

Andrea is a force to be reckoned with. Busy, motivated, disciplined, caring, talented, creative.

And she makes great pictures. 

It is rare for her to show her work so to hear that she's going to have her photographs at Bromfield Gallery in Boston starting January 8, 2016 is very good news.

She will show work made in museums as two distinct bodies of work. One, photographs made of sculptures in marble and the other of the interiors of museums.

Andrea stalks museums like I stalk landscapes.  Each summer, after finishing teaching in Venice, she heads off to Paris, or Prague or Dublin to go to museums. While she might glance at the exhibits, she isn't really there for that. She's interested in the spaces created for the shows, the interface between the cocoon-like interiors designed to house art and the outside world near by. These are very often clean and sterile places, created to be neutral and unassuming, painted whites, light grays and beiges designed to show off the art hanging on the walls. What she finds are scenes of powerful minimalism, quiet unassuming places we are meant to walk through, not put there for us to look at. This then paints the museum in a different perspective, attributing importance to spaces not really intended to be looked at but as infrastructure for something else; the Degas, Picassos and Stellas, etc. on the walls.

Photography has long been in the business of showing us things we take for granted: the chain link fences of Chris Enos, the NYC color street work of Joel Meyerwitz from the 70's, even Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank or Lee Freidlander. But Greitzer's interiors of museums spin concept 180 degrees and ask us to look at places created to show art, as art, not just support for something else.  

Andrea's sculpture photographs are something else entirely. Mostly sexual, they are frozen in stone closeups of the heat of passion, a charged embrace, a touch on marble that seems soft, fluid and moving. 

With all their barely contained passion the sculpture pictures are as hot as the museum interiors are cool. These will occupy the space at Bromfield on the opposite wall from the museum interiors.  Makes me think of the conversation they could be having with each other when the gallery is locked up for the night, its lights turned off, maybe a January snowstorm outside with howling winds and no people nearby. That I would like to hear.

Not to be missed, this work by Andrea Greitzer. January 8, 2016

Want more information? Go to: Bromfield Gallery website

See you there.

Andrea Greitzer at Bromfield Gallery, 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston. Opening reception Friday, January 8, 6-8:30. Show up until January 31.

Is the blog back? Well, not really. I am back home from the hospital and working my way up to things like walking and sleeping through the night and trying to be be drug free after hip replacement surgery last week. Baby steps. But I  am walking and climbing stairs with crutches and was on them the day after surgery.

One's world shrinks very fast when body parts are replaced with titanium and polyethylene but I thought I'd share this:

which is the view out my window that sits right in front of my desk where my computer is and where I've written most of the posts over the past three years or so.

Nature's display in Cambridge, MA, where I live, is completely glorious in early November. I am a beneficiary and so pleased to be here to appreciate it.

The blog will be on hiatus for a few weeks as I go in for hip replacement surgery in a couple of days. I look forward to being back on line and writing about my experiences with photography, making art and life itself, soon.

Stay tuned.