Archive | working

Back on Paros…

By John on January 27, 2014 in beauty, biking, Greece, Paroikia, Paros, quiet islands, spiritual journey, spring in the Aegean, Uncategorized, working

–It is quiet here. The rain falls through the night and the clouds cover the sky during the day. There are moments of sunshine–brilliant, silver and brief. I hope to get out and shoot some film in a couple of days when the clouds roll away.

–I have been out biking, for which I am grateful. The sense of freedom on a mountain bike that one does not have in either a car or walking. Fast, but not too fast, panniers full of cameras.

–The people, food and music of Greece keep me here. The light is nice too.

–I will be going through my files and uploading all my past “header images” from this blog to my Flickr site. It might be interesting to see how they all look together.

–I have decided that I would like to be known as someone who worked hard rather than someone with any great talent. Dedication and hard work has always brought me farther than subjective opinion. I can measure the first. The second is fickle and none of my business.

–In February I begin a new 7-year cycle of life. I can already feel the shift. It feels tectonic.

JDCM

Pinch me…

By John on January 17, 2014 in Athens Greece, beauty, craft, Greece, Paroikia, Paros, quiet islands, rangefinder camera, skill and craft, spiritual journey, spring in the Aegean, Uncategorized, working

–They say our reality is Krishna’s dream while he sleeps on a lotus flower.

–It seems like a dream. I woke up a few minutes ago, startled and disorientated. Jet lag. I am in Athens. I walked out onto the small balcony of my hotel room overlooking the street. It is quiet at 04:00. The city sleeps, breathing slowly. Two days ago I was in America, visiting family and friends. I am in a different world.

–In America I ate hot dogs, apple pie, toasted peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, beef jerky. There have been excellent sit-down meals too. Very American food. I have been able to stave off the calories at the gym.

–There was lots of snow there, and rain, and frigid cold. It was lovely. There was an abundance of water. On the little island I call home water can be scarce. We use less. Long showers are a luxury. I luxuriated.

–On the Massachusetts Turnpike I drove through the kind of rain, wind and fog that made it seem as if I was driving underwater, surrounded by a screaming mass of tractor trailers and SUVs all moving at 80 mph. I had little choice but to keep up. Every light on my little car was switched on so people would see me.

–Photography during the winter allows for simplicity. Sticks, snow, shadow, light.

–So I am back in Greece. Last night I ate yigandes, patzaria, and briam for dinner. Greek food.

–I am back in Greece. I have a few days here in Athens then I hop the ferry back to Paros. What is waiting for me there?

–I was thinking of taking pictures of metro stations. I need a new header image before I post this entry. I’ll use one of those.

–Life is like a dream. Row, row, row your boat…

JDCM

Dreams and thoughts from the Old Year…

By John on January 1, 2014 in Greece, Paros, quiet islands, skill and craft, spiritual journey, spring in the Aegean, working

The New Year is here and I have some thoughts about life and some dreams I have had.

–I dreamed the other night that my heart chakra was clutched in an enormous, dark fist. The fist was my own. It has been a necessary part of my life, protecting my heart from being damaged. This reminds me of a country-western song about a personal ad…”one heart, slightly cracked and only comes in blue.”

–I dreamed the other night that I was a member of an historical re-enactment troupe and we were acting out events of the Holocaust. The project required months of rehearsals and location scouting. I played the part of a Jewish man, escaping down a rushing river to safety. As I drifted past towns and hamlets in the chilly water, scenes of terror and brutality lined the shore. I was swept along with the current. I washed up on a rocky shore. I staggered into the foyer of a large hotel in the south of France and was re-united with my fellows. I wept. We embraced. There is more to it than that. It is hard to put into words. You had to be there. It was actually quite uplifting.

–I dreamed the other night that instead of eating the gavros fried by the fisherman on the beach in the noonday sun, a taxi driver and I sought out the best gavros in town, cooked by someone’s grandmother. We ate them in the cool shade of a small taverna.

–May 2014 bring us all the dreams we wish and revelations that fill our hearts.

My Flickr site is here Feel free to peruse. I will try to add images as I feel the need to do so.

JDCM

Happy Christmas!

By John on December 24, 2013 in craft, darkroom work, Greece, Paroikia, Paros, Paros Portraits, silver darkroom, skill and craft, spiritual journey, Uncategorized, working

Snowy morning sunrise, December 19, 2013

Snowy morning, December 19, 2013, 16*F. Leica M8

…and a few days later, December 22. 68*F. Very weird. Leica M8

Christmas is here and all through the house it is very quiet. The cat plays with her tail, my mother sits in the living room reading the New York Times. Tonight is Christmas Eve and we are having a Mexican dinner–pork quesadillas, guacamole, salad and a candied pumpkin dessert. The tree is up, decorated and there are presents beneath its bangled branches.

The best gifts this year have not been material. They have been the deep changes I have felt within myself and how I perceive the world. This, in turn, gives me the opportunity to respond in new ways. I am not always familiar with these aspects, nor am I always comfortable, but they are for the best and I feel have improved as a human as a result. Here are some off the top of my head…

— My role as a teacher is not to reward or punish via the archaic system of “grades” so common today. I am there to guide, lift up and hopefully inspire.

— My own work is a testament to long labor, arduous and fulfilling. I am grateful to have been able to have an exhibition of my photography this year. I am also grateful to have been allowed to exhibit it in a place I love–Paros and The Aegean Center for the Fine Arts.

— My future is unknown and uncertain. The best I can do is show up and be part of life’s rich pageant.

— That’s OK most of the time.

Merry Christmas and have a lovely New Year!

JDCM

Mid-December update…

By John on December 12, 2013 in Athens Greece, autumn, beauty, biking, craft, darkroom work, Greece, Paros, quiet islands, skill and craft, spiritual journey, working

Phrenology at the Street Market. Leica M8, Voigtlander 28mm; f/5.6; 1/125; ISO 320

-I haven’t posted in a while. I have been busy with the ending of the 2013 Autumn Session at the Aegean Center. I have been very pleased with this session. My steep learning curve as an instructor has taught me a few things and I have been able to avoid some of the pitfalls common to any novitiate. My overall opinion of teaching is that the small rewards outweigh the tragic gaffes and stumbles. I keep searching for the Golden Key which unlocks the door. It has been a humbling three months.

-I am currently in Athens, making my way back to the USA for the Christmas and New Year holiday. I will visit with family, close and dear friends, and enjoy driving my car.

-It will be frigid in the little town where I grew up. This will make exercise difficult and lazing about watching movies easy. For the month that I am there I will probably join a gym and try to burn off the calories as I gain them. I have no desire to return to Paros 6 kilos heavier than when I left. One of the many benefits to living on Paros is the ability to get out and about without donning the kind of winter gear I will wear in New York. There is also no snow on Paros, or none to worry about anyway. This allows me to ride my bike. It’s all about layers.

-I was sitting in a café yesterday with some Athenian friends and I was astounded at the general din of this large, ancient and sprawling city. After the quiet of Paros, the noise is deafening. It troubled my sleep last night. I tossed and turned.

-I still adhere to the belief that I am not an “artist”, per se, or at least would rather not be known as one. Call me a “skilled technician” or “an able-bodied craftsman” or “a journeyman photographer”. The world has become a market for the “artist”, a place to sell goods, like a street vendor selling fruit, or perhaps something darker. In order for “the artist” to really be a mainstream success, he or she must conform to the trends and fads that guide the fickle opinions of gallerists and marketeers. For me, this is a trap. If I am creating to please the public, then I am on an ego-trip. It urges me to be the center of attention, in the limelight. I am not comfortable with center stage. Once in a while these lines intersect. The rest of the time I have to be patient with hard work, working long nights and being a wallflower.

JDCM

Notes from the mainland…

By John on October 31, 2013 in autumn, beauty, craft, Cyclades stone walls, Cycladic stone walls, Greece, rangefinder camera, skill and craft, stone walls, Uncategorized, working

October 30, 2013

–The weather is still hot during the day but the mornings are cool so I wear a sweatshirt when I leave the hotel. By 10:00 I am in my t-shirt. I have driven through hundreds of orange groves in two days.

–The ruins in Ancient Corinth are vast and the typical jumble. The Temple of the Corinthian Apollo is Doric. Lots of Roman stone. St. Paul was here.

–Akro Korinthos, 3 km up the mountain from the site, is massive. I have walked the walls. Easily as large as the outer walls of Dubrovnik…5km if I remember correctly. Walls built on walls…Mycenean, Byzantine, Ottoman and Venetian. Everyone knew a good site for a fort when they conquered it. Impregnable and all but hewn from the living stone. Few people there today. Some workman digging a new drainage ditch. They are stone-faced when I say “kali mera.”

–I have seen more Golden Dawn graffiti here than anywhere in Greece. Lots of spray-painted Greek meanders…this is a ubiquitous symbol. It is on my bathmat in the hotel where I sleep. It’s on tourist swag. Now it means something else, something terrible. They have taken a design everyone knows as good and twisted it with their broken thinking.

–Nafplio is not Paros. The mainland is not the Kyklades. There is a roughness here, less open than the Greece I know. Fewer smiles. Gruff.

–Epidaurus tomorrow and Schliemann’s second site at Tyrins. My last full day here and I want to make the most of my little car. I might brave the winding mountain road to Ermioni for lunch after visiting the theater.

October 31, 2013

–Epidaurus, Tyrins…quiet but there are still buses and tourists. Mostly older groups and I seem to be shadowing a school group of American kids. They were at my hotel too. Quiet as mice. A nice thing to experience. Corinth yesterday and the theater today. Also the Nafplio museum…

–The winding road to Epidaurus and grove after grove of olives and oranges.

Epidaurus: ancient script. Leica M8, f/2.8, 1/2000, ISO 320

Epidaurus: ancient script. Leica M8, Voigtlander 28mm, f/2.8, 1/2000, ISO 320

–A group of Russians at the theater…testing the acoustics with pebbles. Wonderful. Tyrins on the way back to Nafplio. Not much to see but an observation: the technique used to build the large Mycenean walls is the same as the wall building I have seen all over the Kyklades. No walls here, nothing crisscrossing the landscape. The Mycenean civilization was large.

–Blue domes are now terra-cotta tiles. I had forgotten that about the Peloponnese.

–When I was a boy, about 5 or 6, my grandmother gave me gifts from her time in Greece: a small model of a Greek house with a windmill, a komboloi, an Evzone figurine. She planted this seed. She was here.

–I am still enjoying my short DoF exercises. The stones, greenery and blue skies are perfect for this. Shooting at f/1.8 to f/4 only…

JDCM

A column section from Epidaurus. Leica M8, Voigtlander 35mm Nokton, f/2.0 at 1/4000, ISO 360

Mid-October update…

By John on October 15, 2013 in autumn, beauty, craft, Greece, Paroikia, Paros, quiet islands, spiritual journey, working

This is a short missive from my table here at Port Cafe, overlooking the Bay of Paroikia. To mis-quote George III, not much going on here…except art, art work and art students working! It is always pleasant to feel the hum of busy schedules being negotiated, smell the aroma of oil paints, inks and darkroom chemistry and encounter Aegean Center students writing at cafe tables, wandering about with cameras and expressing their enthusiasm for just being here on Paros. One student exclaimed last night in the darkroom, “I love this process!” I can dig it.

There were times in the past when I would hear the ferries come to dock and realize that I could be on one of those boats, running from the changes that were necessary for my own growth. Two nights ago I sat on a friend and colleague’s roof terrace eating dinner. Four blocks away, the evening boat to Athens was putting in. I heard the massive chains that hold the ramp unwind, the garbled announcement for disembarkation echoing across the platia and through the narrow winding streets. There was a slight tremor to the ground as the massive diesel engines skewed the craft laterally in the harbor, righting itself against the concrete pier. It was a musical, nautical poem of industrial tones. My heart was struck by just how much I love living on Paros. I am at a hub, the islands in the sea like stars circling the Parian Galactic Center. I am here, now. With all that passes for current events in the news-of-the-world, I am pleased to report that calm activity is the name of the game here. The thrill is palpable.

Some of us went olive raking the other day. It was more a cultural experience than work, since the owner of the olive trees had paid workers laboring along side of the students and teachers. Due to my healing hand, I was not able to rake, but I did take some nice images of olives on the branch. I relished a shallow depth-of-field. I went as close as my lens would allow. With a Canon 50mm L-Series f/1.2, that is damn close.

-JDCM

The weather turns towards autumn…

By John on October 5, 2013 in autumn, beauty, biking, Greece, hiking in the Cyclades, Paros, quiet islands, skill and craft, spiritual journey, working

I woke up this morning to blustery, grey clouds and very cool temperatures. Last night, before laying my head on my pillow, I switched on my electric mattress pad for the first time since March. Yesterday’s Aegean Center for the Fine Arts Friday hike was sunny, brisk and invigorating, yet not the stuff of late spring or summer. Cries of “Wow!” and “This is amazing!” punctuated our oregano, sage and thyme-scented walk above the hill town of Lefkes. The air was so clear that looking north, I counted the houses on Syros and the already narrow channel between Paros and Naxos seemed a mere stone’s throw. In New England or northern Europe the leaves are currently a brilliance of fiery tones. It is autumn in the Kyklades so we inhaled the blue skies, dark evergreens, golden underbrush and brilliant light spilling around us.

Tomorrow I compete with a team in the Paros Autumn Triathlon. I will be bicycling 15km while my two teammates will be swimming and running, respectively. It is not a competition so much as a community event. The only race will be against myself. I am looking forward to this event and am very excited. It is important for me to realize that here on Paros I am more than just a man with a camera, or an ex-pat American in Greece. I am more than a summation of my parts, and that whole grows exponentially if I allow myself to be drawn to the larger, communal rings that ripple through my parochial nucleus. There was a time when I craved a closed system for necessary self-preservation. This attitude is self-defeating and limiting. I have been increasing my orbit over the past couple of years and this event will signal a shift in my personal trajectory. Excited, nervous and looking forward to it.

Lefkes, Paros, October 4, 2013. Leica M8, Voigtlander 28mm, 1/125, f22, ISO 320

A stop in Athens and a return to Paros…

By John on October 1, 2013 in Athens Greece, autumn, beauty, darkroom work, Greece, Paroikia, Paros, working

Last week I made my way to Athens, meeting up with the Aegean Center students and teachers fresh from their September sojourn in Italy. I was very nervous, not having met any of the new students yet and feeling as if I was under a microscope. Perhaps I was the one with the microscope, I am not sure, but that is how I felt. Anyway…

The 24 students all arrived safely and we made our way via motor-coach to the hotel in the Monastiraki area of town. The Hotel Attalos sits just below the Acropolis of the Parthenon and close to some of the best museums and archeological destinations in the world. The next three days were spent visiting these sites and listening to Jeffrey Carson’s excellent orations on history, culture and art. The Parthenon, the Parthenon Museum and the National Archeological Museum were our group destinations, but afterwards the students enjoyed enough free time to visit other places, shop and eat some excellent Greek food. On Saturday morning we all awoke very early for another short bus ride to the Port of Pireaus, boarded the Blue Star Naxos and made our way back home, back to Paros and the Aegean Center for the Fine Arts studios and labs.

The classes began yesterday and I have several students in the darkroom. Some have no experience whatsoever while there are others with some darkroom history behind them. It is a vibrant and excited group. They are also taking other courses so in order to meet with them it must always be after all their other commitments, later in the evening and never all at once. This will make necessary demonstrations (film and paper developing, for instance) difficult to arrange. I will work with what I am given and be grateful.

I have added a couple of images from the Athens segment of the art history tour…

JDCM

At the Parthenon, September 2013

At the National Archeological Museum

Bike-hiking and new gear…

By John on September 17, 2013 in autumn, beauty, biking, Greece, hiking in the Cyclades, Paroikia, Paros, quiet islands, skill and craft, spiritual journey, stone walls, Uncategorized, working

I have been exploring the island these sunny, warm days. I have found a couple of small, very rocky and rough beaches on the north side of the bay, facing Syros, north along the coast from the cave of Archilochos. They are all but inaccessible unless one rides a bike, hikes or has 4-wheel drive. A few days ago I went back to one of them with the goal of not returning the way I arrived. From a decent height I could see smaller paths and a narrow road. I knew I couldn’t bike it, and that I would have to push/carry the bike a certain way uphill, over rocks and walls, before I reached the road. According to the map, the road wound about until it reached the Delion of Apollo, one of the higher points on the island and an ancient temple site.

So that’s what I did. I biked down to the beach area, went for a swim, then packed up my panniers (more about them) and pushed the bike up the hill. There was some real problem solving involving a small gorge, some backtracking, plenty of thorns (shades of Sikinos!) but I eventually made it to the road. It was a pretty easy ride to the Delion after that and then a downhill ride back to town. It was only about 8 km but with all the uphill struggle and 15 kilos of bike and gear, I’ll add another few km to that count. A nice day, and fun.

I bought panniers for the bike. Now I don’t have to wear a day-pack anymore. This was making me top-heavy. The center of gravity has been lowered and I am finding them convenient and efficient. Below are four incarnations of my current mode of transport. There is enough room for all kinds of gear.

Beach Bike

Mountain bike

Hiking bike

Shopping bike

JDCM

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