ROB COPELAND FACEBOOK FRIEND

new facebook face

 

Facebook has become a part of my life, and it has become a part of the lives of several people I know and people I don't know. I even have facebook friends I don't know. Not many. I'm not one to collect facebook friends like autographs in the high school annual. I prefer just people I know. An awful lot of my facebook friends are people I call friends out in pre-cyber world. I don't have the greatest, longest list of friends there is, but when I look at the list with pictures of my facebook friends, I think they are really neat people individually. I feel rich in the people I know. Again, not numbers, but fullness of caring. It's taken a long time for me to fall into the flow of writing comments that are more than a few words. Sometimes I'll write a paragraph in the comment box. I like about facebook too, that I have become acquainted with some folks I think are cool people, people who think about things, who see fresh perspectives, both visually and conceptually. I've recently become friends with a guy in NYC from Chester, Virginia, outside Richmond, who has been taking b&w photographs of New York with his cell phone. They are gorgeous photographs. Color pictures too. He gets the curved reflection on a bus windshield of buildings across the street, and through the reflection can be seen the driver's open side window framing a section of the same building  without distortion, inside the windshield reflection. I like that he leaves somewhere a clue to help you see that the image is the back window of a car, or the roof of a car, the hood.

rob copeland

 

To go straight to the point and not beat around the metaphorical bush, I love everything about Rob's photographs. Every detail. The compositions I see first. Then, looking at the composition, the details take over and pull the eye deeper into the picture. For my eye, this picture above of a Manhattan street satisfies my eye all the way in the distance to the last trace of the buildings. It's perspective he plays with in a lighthearted surrealist way. Surrealism was originally lighthearted. Rob's images have a lightness that makes them float in place. I'm not trying to sound fancy. It's the best I can put into a few words what I feel visually in his photographs. Each one exists on its own. It's like it has its own existence. This is the quality I call art. I've seen so many by now that when I see a movie filmed in contemporary New York, it becomes a story Rob's photographs illustrate. His visual appreciation of Manhattan is there with Woody Allen's. Rob's photographs catch a glimpse of personality in the city. In my own experience, I sometimes like to make close up photos of donkey faces, looking for a portrait that gives a sense of the donkey's personality, same as I do getting a portrait of a person I know. In a lot of the donkey pictures, the eyes somehow express the personality. Jenny's eyes are so alive in photographs I tend to speak to her like her consciousness is there. This is what I mean about Rob's photos glimpsing the personality of New York City, day and night, cars, people, architecture, compositions found in pavement, stairways, subways. His pictures somehow depict a living presence I find unusual. He is making quite a catalogue of strikingly beautiful images of the city, new ones every day, contemporary as it gets.

ai wei wei

 Rob posts the day's new pictures on facebook every day. I love to go through them, image to image, the day's catch. He plays with the art of the reflection, the art of the shadow, the art of the blur. Other photographers, of my limited experience, sometimes will use a reflection in a larger image, but I've never seen anybody make an art form of reflections that makes me "reflect" -- why did it take so long in the evolution of photography as an art form for the obvious to be noticed? These reflections have been there all along, varieties of them, everywhere, and we tend to look through them. When I go to the Mexican restaurant in Sparta, it has glass all across the front, curtained on the inside, I tend to look through the reflection at the decorations they have in the window and notices in Spanish. I miss the panorama reflected image of the parking lot behind me, the houses in the distance and the sky, selfie in landscape. It's there in front of my face like standing in front of a movie screen, and I look through it. I've become aware of reflections since knowing Rob's photographs. In store windows, I see what is inside and the reflection on the glass of the cars going by and stores across the street. Instead of wishing for a way not to see the reflection, now I welcome the reflection equal the display in the window. When I see the reflection too, it makes a kind of Rauschenberg silkscreen of one image over another. I started noticing the reflections I had been seeing through and it was almost like a new dimension, new awareness, seeing the first time what has always been there. It's a Duh moment. The kind where you slap the palm of your hand to your forehead and say, Where have you been all your life?

rob copeland

Rob and I have never met and may never. We've become friends by way of the comment boxes on facebook. Writing back and forth  we're acquainted such that we could have extended conversation were we to meet. As it is, we have extended conversation by way of facebook over time instead of compacted. I believe we know each other well enough now to speak freely over the phone like with someone we've known for years. I started seeing Rob's posts when I friended a friend of his, also Rob, and Rob Copeland's photographs began to appear daily. My thought was that this is somebody in New York like Robert Frank, Gordon Parks, Gary Winogrand, and probably has a book of photographs in print. I went to amazon.com to see if he had any books. Not there. I took it for granted he had been at New York photography several years, was well known and respected in NY photography world, someone whose vision of the city is particularly his own and at the same time obvious. Until you see it, it's not there, and it was there all along. His photographs have different dimensions about them. He's not satisfied with only one dimension in his images. It turns out Rob Copeland is a guy in NY who has taken photographs for years and years, a lot of really good ones, but few that touched art. Then he bought his cell phone and started taking pictures with it, discovered reflections a little at a time until one day he saw them everywhere. He asked facebook friends to vote on possible names to call his pictures for the blogsite. Much interest in the word reflections. My anti-poetic suggestion was the word reflections is way overused unto meaningless. It was just a vote, no intent to persuade. He chose UPON REFLECTION: A UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE OF NEW YORK CITY. When I saw it I lit up with joy. Just right. The word needed to be there, and he took the Vaseline lens poetic out of it like somebody who has written a good bit of advertising copy. It's clean and straight ahead. It's a headline that tells you in a few words what his pictures are doing. Rob, that was truly a poetically inspired moment, upon reflection. It's beautiful.

 

rob Copeland

 

I don't mean to be an ongoing commercial for Rob's art, but can't help it. I feel awe when I look at Rob's photographs, the same kind of awe when I see images by Joel Meyerowitz. I've said that before and mean it so much I'll probably say it again. Rob's photographs  have a stillness about them, a window onto metropolis in high-speed motion silent as a still life. I like knowing Rob through his art form, his new found art form in a time in his life when he felt like he needed something to connect for him. I don't want to make any wishes for Rob and his art that he would not want to make himself. And I don't know what they would be. I don't wish anything for him. I feel like Rob is in his flow and doesn't need the static of other people's wishes and ideas about what he oughta, except for when he puts out an appeal to his facebook friends to give him some feedback and ideas on a given decision. The best I can do for him is encourage. Feedback is important to artists of all varieties. Feedback does not mean advising, but giving honest thoughts on the matter. Not criticizing, but addressing, talking about. 

http://robcopelandphotography.blogspot.com  This link will take you to Rob's photographic blog quick as thought itself. It's just a click away.

 

rob Copeland

 

 

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IN PRAISE OF ROB COPELAND'S PHOTOGRAPHY

 

 

 

 

Above is a photo made today of my friend Sheena. My new facebook friend Rob Copeland in NYC has been making some extraordinarily beautiful photographs of reflections in car glass, car hoods and tops that make a curved or distorted reverse image of a building or two or three that are also in the frame. Rob's pictures have a dimension that moves my heart when I see them. Gary Winogrand's images and Joel Meyerowitz's images excite my heart in the same way Rob Copeland's do. I say excite my heart because that's where I feel the sensation when I see a large percentage of his images. Some of them are breath-taking, literally. They cause an inspiration, an in-breath, an inhalation, the sudden intake of air when I feel awe. He puts pictures on facebook every day, a touch that makes my facebook pages all the more fun to look at. Rob has opened a new dimension for me. I see reflections everywhere now. They've always been there and I've always missed them, with some exceptions, the ones that jump in my face. I walk through parking lots looking at the sky and clouds on windshields, trees, signs, wires. In a world of mundane traffic, pavement, brick, cinderblock and glass, the occasional appearance of a reflection on the glass of a car passing in the other lane, the sky and clouds rolling across the glass. It is not exaggeration to say noticing reflections has added a new dimension to my world. I'm not taking a lot of pictures of them. I don't want to seem like I'm copying Rob. I send him a reflection photo I find from time to time calling them "hillbilly reflections," for the fun there is in it.  

 

 

 

 

 

This is Sheena's man, Gail, with his pickup. I was looking for a way to get his reflection in the glass, but couldn't find it for the mirror, which worked good second best. I started sending Rob what I thought comic reflections, like trash on a dashboard reflected inside the windshield on the highway. Then this picture of Sheena happened. I wasn't thinking it a Sheena portrait at the moment. I saw the reflection and thought of Rob, Sheena walked into the V-slot to put something in the back seat. That she happened to be there when I saw the reflection in the glass made it a million times better. I'd not yet made a photo of Sheena that I think of as a nice portrait of her, how she looks as I know her. I think this is my Sheena portrait. She is seen through the hinged-side opening of the open back door, her brother Justin's four-door pickup. Reflected in the glass is the rigging above the back of the pickup for hauling ladders. It is one of my favorite photographs of all I've made. It was a moment in the new dimension Rob has opened for me. Standing in the same place I snapped the Sheena picture, to the right Gail was talking with his brother on the cell phone. I don't have any pictures of Gail. He was standing beside the truck's glass reflections at a moment I was focused on reflections to send to Rob. I'm happy with this one as my Gail portrait. Gail is my definition of a good man, all the way around. Good hunter, good archer, good people. The same can be said for his brother Ronnie. I'm grateful to God for the good care Gail gives Sheena.

 

 

 

 

 

This was the scene on Gail's pickup's back glass. It's a decal of a multi-pointer buck in the middle of the glass. It's another hillbilly reflection I made for Rob's amusement. From cityscape to landscape. The cityscape makes some exquisite reflection photographs. This new dimension I've stepped into has brought in moments of found art that are specific to place, time and point of view. Every time I see a reflection now, it's like a spontaneous piece of art. I'm thinking of reflections I see as, themselves, art. Once noticed, incredibly beautiful art. Since Rob has brought reflections to my visual awareness, I look for them in movies. When I notice a reflection, I also see that the director and the photographer, both, missed a moment of visual opportunity. A moment of just seeing the reflection is a surprise moment of art, and they go as unnoticed as unwanted children. Every time I see a movie, now, I see reflections that could have added a great deal to the visual moment and nobody saw it. Reflections I see in the course of a day give my mundane world of traffic and town some visual surprises. Glass is everywhere in town. I'd never paid attention to the scenes on the windows. I've seen them, but had not appreciated them. Now they are like gems that pop up here and there. They give a bit of zing to my everyday world like anchovies in pizza.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is the windshield of Sheena's car parked under a tree. It was the reflection that initially caught my eye. We were on the way to the softball game down the mountain at Austin off of Traphill Road. Justin and Gail were playing. They promised on the way there that they'd scorch the other team, and they did. Justin went in the house, I sat on the tailgate of the truck with camera looking at the clouds and the tops of the trees in relation to each other. I've noticed that the outlines of trees are similar to the outlines of clouds. Both are created by water flow. I was looking for something interesting in the trees in relation to the clouds. Got a couple of pictures that were neither here nor there. Just looking around, seeing what I could see, mostly focused on clouds. It was a beautiful day for clouds. Big floating cotton balls pulled into every kind of configuration. It was a clear day sky with clouds floating across the blue. The trees and clouds were nice, but only for one picture. I sat looking at beautiful fields of goldenrod with late afternoon sun on them. I looked over at Sheena's car under the tree and saw the windshield. I hopped to the ground and made a few pics of the glass. Also got one of the side glass with two contrails in the sky making a white V on blue. By the time you figure out what the white lines are, it's too late. It's a joke that took too long in the telling. By the time you figure it out, it wasn't worth the effort.

 

 

 

 

It was after seeing the glass on Sheena's car that I went back to where the two pickups were parked. The back door was open on Justin's truck, I saw the image of the ladder rack in the glass, stepped up to get a look at it and Sheena appeared. It was a magic moment. It was the tree on the car windshield that set me off. I was thinking a hillbilly reflection for Rob, a tree on the glass. That was the inspiration. I saw it comic, fun, a kind of in-joke. Then the moment happened with Sheena and it felt like I'd been touched by the Divine fingertip. I thanked Rob in spirit for a fantastic moment, my portrait of Sheena. We all packed into the truck with as big a back seat as a big car, Seth, 7, going with us. At the ball game, Seth had his exercise running to find a foul ball that went over the fence on either side. The homeruns that went over the fence into the woods were hopeless to try to find that late in the day. This is Justin in the picture below, the split-second after he dropped the bat to run for first. It was a base hit. That's Gail heading out from first for second. They truly scorched the other team. 21-6. Sheena and I sat on the aluminum bleacher and talked through the course of the game. Every once in awhile, one of us would ask, Who's ahead? I valued having the time with Sheena, just us, talking about whatever. We've known each other all her life. Both Justin and Gail hit home runs over the fence. We kept an eye on Seth who spent the whole time running. He'll make a good soccer player.

 

To check out some of Rob's photographs:

 http://robcopelandphotography.blogspot.com 

 

 just a click away

 

 

 

all photos by tj worthington

 

 

 

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CATCHING THE FLOW OUTSIDE THE BOX

all photos by tj worthington

Yesterday some horoscope analysts and a friend who is an astrologer told me that Tuesday the 28th would be a day to do something outside the box. In the evening I went to a softball game in Wilkesboro, sat and watched two games. It was already scheduled. I didn't go to the game for the specific purpose of doing something outside the box, but felt like it fit the call of the day. Two of my friends were on one of the teams. Our team lost both games. It seemed to me like our pitcher threw a lot of good hits. It looked like he was throwing the ball so the batter could hit it easily. It was like he was throwing for practice batting. The other team's pitcher was not an easy one to hit and he didn't allow a great many really good hits. Afterward, the team felt like they didn't play a good enough game. It looked to me like the teams were equals and the pitching had a great influence on the game. I don't mean to imply it was great pitching by any means. The ball arches so when it crosses home plate it is descending to hit the plate or not far behind it, close to straight down. I sat with my friend Sheena and her boy Seth on a small aluminum bleacher with a half dozen others. Driving home after midnight I saw the rising half moon in bold orange.

The influence of this planet arrangement went over into today. I got a call from Justin in the morning wanting to know if I wanted to go fishing on the Willis Lake, the next farm up the road from my house. Fishing is not something I do. I don't care to prepare them to eat and I have no interest in catching them to throw them back. I thought: outside the box.  I took my camera to get pictures from the lake. I was thinking of landscape pictures taken from the water. On the water, the landscape became boring for photographing. I spent possibly the first half hour in the boat watching Justin catch fish, impressed by how he can throw the line so it goes to the exact spot he wants it. He likes to catch and throw them back. He gets a charge from catching fish. It's the same as hunting. Hunters know the addictive thrill of hunting. I experienced the hunting thrill once, felt like I got it why so many people like to hunt. But I don't like killing. That doesn't mean I have issues with people who do kill. That's their business if they want to hunt the same as it's my business that I don't want to. That one experience gave me an understanding of the thrill. I understand my friends who are hunters, understand what they like about it, a little bit of what they like. There is much more to hunting than just squeezing a trigger or pulling back a bow string. The hunters I know keep meat in freezers to get them through the year with meat they don't have to buy, meat that doesn't have growth hormones etc in it.

 

 

The water was perfectly clear today. I surveyed the sky, the land, the water, the boat for some idea of a theme to photograph. The landscape bored me. I thought: I have landscape pictures. Everybody takes landscape pictures. It's beautiful when all the leaves are fresh in their yellow-green of early spring. Big white clouds in the flow-lines of the gaps around. I saw a row of clouds over the gap where Hwy 18 to Wilkesboro enters the mountains. Parallel to that row of clouds was another beyond it passing over Twin Oaks gap at Hwy 21. Those clouds were flowing west to east. Flowing south to north over Roaring Gap a row of clouds moved around Bullhead over Glade Valley to join the other two flows eastward toward Mt Airy. I looked at all the land I knew intimately from walking on it over a number of years. I've worked the farm in the past and know the owners and the people living there. It's "next door," about a third of a mile from my house. I felt at home. I felt my love for the mountains and Air Bellows Mountain where my love enters the mountains. The wind was blowing just enough to make active ripples on the water. The boat was in slow motion with a trolling motor and the wind. Sometimes the boat went slowly in a circle. I watched sunlight sparkle on the waves, began seeing the range of colors on the surface. I've tended to think of the lake water as brown from the mud on the bottom, though the water is clear, and blue and white surface from the reflection of sky.

 



I started seeing the continuously changing patterns of colors on the water's surface. Tree reflections were refracted among the images of clouds and sky, their colors making patterns in constant change, fast change, no two ever repeating all over the lake's surface. I began to look more into the patterns and found the camera makes a rectangle of abstraction in it's manner of stopping the motion. I could never get an image as I saw it when I pushed the button; by the time the camera clicked, a split-second later, the patterns in the water were changed altogether. The slow turning of the boat showed me the colors in the reflections were different all the way around according the angle the sunlight struck the water in relation to my location. I pointed the camera to the water maybe three to four feet from the boat. The image in the rectangle of the camera's monitor was extraordinary every moment. I clicked over a hundred pictures, fascination increasing as I found in our movements around on the lake that light was different and reflections different all over the lake. Finally a short video of five minutes or less came to mind. I held the camera still looking at the water just a few feet from the boat and let the motion of the boat be a part of it. I felt like the sequence of photographs are among my very finest photographs. I don't mean I'm something special with a camera, but I get a picture the best I can, learning by experience.

The video holds my visual attention almost dramatically. Sometimes it goes slow, sometimes fast when the boat is turned by the wind. Colors changed, patterns changed; the patterns changed extremely fast. On the laptop monitor the colors and shapes are flying. It's a constantly changing abstraction, like something Clifford Still might paint that never stops changing and never does the same thing twice. Every pattern I caught is unique in the life of the lake. It never happened before and will never happen again. Something like an action painting by the abstract expressionists of the 1940s and 1950s. None of the pictures was composed. I just pointed the camera where the visual activity was at the place between looks like water, and at the same time does not look like water. I was getting my kicks walking that edge. It was simply a point and shoot experience, composition merely that zone between is and is not water. It was the flow I was attempting to photograph in a still image, and then a moving rectangle of constant change. I fell into a zone where the surface of the lake became for me a sparkling wonder of moving colors and shapes flowing in and out of each other. I spent a few hours in silence lost in awe by the changes of colors in a spontaneous dance of speed. I like to make photographs of nascar races from the flat-screen tv, looking for a still image that catches a sensation of speed. The images on the water moved and changed so fast, they became another challenge to fix speed in a still image. Outside the box I found what I can't help but think is the first art moment of my life.

 

 

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FACEBOOK FRIENDS

I have to say I enjoy facebook. I hear and read a list of objections to facebook, mostly about privacy. What privacy? I don't have any doubt that "key words" on facebook trigger an alarm to some form of surveillance. After years of sci-fi fear of surveillance in the future, future is now, we are surveilled to the minutest details. Rather than worry about it, something I can do absolutely nothing about, I just go on like before, when we were under surveillance too, as if none of it is the case. Except I'm aware to avoid such words as b - o - m - b. Oh no! That word. Already, before I put this online, I anticipate a swat team breaking down my door and pushing me face-down to the floor, hands cuffed behind my back, hauled off to the unknown. Like in the beginning of the movie, Brazil, where a swat team chainsawed a hole in the ceiling of an apartment, dropped in, tied up a man watching tv and hauled him away. Wrong apartment. Oh well. They got somebody, met their quota. As long as I avoid key words I feel comfortable with facebook. I like keeping in touch with friends by "poke" and sending public messages. Facebook is not the place for telling secrets. I see no problem in that. No place is a good place for telling secrets. When you have to tell a secret, facebook is not the place to tell it. I like the wide-open public forum about it. Not that anything of any value gets discussed, but that's not the point. The point is keeping in touch. I am able to keep in touch with a lot of people I like and seldom see or never see.

It is the keeping in touch that I like best. I like the fun "memes" different people and agenda groups put up. I like getting cartoons daily and videos of Rachel Maddow and David Pakman. I like places like Americans Against the Republican Party, Ayn Rand Collected Social Security, Addictive Info, places that post funny cartoons about republican stupidity and links to articles that are often informative and sometimes funny. I can't watch video of Rush Limbaugh or any of the Faux News talking heads. Sometimes I follow a link to hear Ted Cruz, the Eugene McCarthy wannabe, running his mouth for the absurdity of it, for the comedy, but shortly into it I can't listen to any more. The comedy ceases immediately. Alex Jones embarrasses himself every time he speaks. Limbaugh is just a pig going Oink. A few days ago, for the fun of seeing what kinds of reactions might surface, I wrote, "New oxymoron: Bush library." One wingnut hit the fan. I'm a liberal in love with Obama who is here to destroy the world. Really? One thing I know, the wingnut is not psychic. Every once in awhile somebody I know will post something in praise of police state and I pay it no mind. I like having friends who don't agree with me. I like a mutual agreement that we don't have to agree. I find I like people who don't feel compelled to agree with me, and are not compelled for me to agree with them. In conversation with somebody, I like the other to be comfortable as self, the same as I like to be comfortable as self.

I like about facebook that I see expressions of self in people I know and people I don't know. Somebody posts half a dozen pictures of the sky. I love it. I love seeing other people's photographs. Before facebook we had access almost only to photos by professional photographers in magazines and newspapers, wherever. Now, everybody has a cell phone that is also a video and still camera. I see really beautiful photographs my Friends post in varying degrees of frequency. One posts photos of some of the most beautiful chickens I've seen. Photos of pets in different ways of seeing them. Ones I like seeing are a cat named Squarehead and a dog named Ms Landers. The cat does indeed have a square head. One of my Friends posts pictures of gardens in full flower. Another Friend posts pictures of her baby in phases of development. Some artists I know put up their recent works for Friends to see. Some of my Friends put up inspirational quotations with a relevant image, and some post political quotations for comedy. Both of my sisters are nuts about cat comedy. I saw something, but haven't read it yet--it will be around for awhile--about a principal at a rowdy school with security issues who eliminated the law enforcement in the school and put the funding to pay them into art classes. The school is no longer needing security. I cannot even imagine a school board going along with such an idea. Somewhere, there is one. That's promising.

I have quite a number of people in my life I like to keep up with, but am limited in space and time. Of my friends that are on the other side, I like to think of them as my friends who are at home or someplace where I can't see them. They exist, just not in my field of vision. A cousin in Kansas City, a friend in Portland, a friend in Atlanta, people I seldom see, I can interact with conversationally, though in a briefer form. Sometimes, just a photograph, or a sentence, or a short paragraph. No more than a word or two is really necessary to say hi. And there's not much more to say than that. The rest of it follows implied I-want. I like about facebook, too, that it shows me the variety of individuals I know, each one a culture unto him and her self. Each one radically individual. I like that the people I know are different from each other. It's like living in a play where we are marionettes, our souls operating the strings, every one his and her own story interacting with other stories until the stories are all so interwoven they make a Persian carpet with the patterns in continual motion. A sentence I made a note of from Andre Gide, "A soloist must play in the same direction as the orchestra." The people I know make the flow a context I live out my days as a part of, a bird in a flock, a fish in a school. A connection in the soul holds us together, makes us click Like on a picture of somebody's dog sleeping. I like knowing I have a string of friends a click away.

 

 

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