Picking Flowers

I was once sitting with some friends in their back yard having a glass of wine and watching their little girl of about two as she played. She had just learned to walk and was still a bit unsteady as she moved around.. Why I remember this incident was because, as I watched she suddenly changed direction and, as resolutely as she could, went straight to some wild flowers growing in a patch of forest very close by. Smiling and with a determined hand, she singled out just those flowers and picked them. It was those flowers and only those flowers she wanted that day.

Flowers are sensual, colorful and often have a pleasant smell.

Women pick wild flowers, we all know this. The child was acting spontaneously and on impulse, guided as she was by an age-old intuition, an intuition, which I am certain most women are born with. It is kind of funny when you think about it though, because flowers are, in fact, the plants sex organs.
So: women just love to decorate their homes with colorful, smelly sex organs!

When I was a young boy, about eleven or twelve I got seriously interested photography, but the camera I had gotten for my birthday, a Brownie Hawkeye from Kodak, just didn´t do the job.
I was always disappointed in the results; un-sharp, fogged and gray little squares. Just where and how I got my film processed is lost in the fog of time - in my head, but I do remember when I got my first darkroom, I was fourteen.
It was in the garage, a little room on the side where I could blacken the window and put a large black cloth over the door. It was a great place to bring the girls – but then it got very hot in there in the summer when the outside temperature in the desert sun was often close to 40C.Dark and very hot!
Before that I had practiced training my eye to see pictures, a “dry run” as it was, playing like I had a camera. Yet it did train my eye, my brain anyway, and I did learn to see.
Then, when I finally did get me first real camera I could start taking real pictures. This was the early 1950´s and I was living on a remote Indian reservation in Arizona, so my access to any kind of real education in photography was not only severely limited but was non existent!
But I did work one summer at my uncle Bills trading post on the Navajo reservation to earn enough money to by a camera, a 6 x 9 cm Century Graphic, which was a miniature version of the famous “Speed Graphic” made famous by the New York photographer Weegee. So, I did get serious with photography early in my life.

Now, when I look back, I realize that I actually was fine-tuning my own version of flower picking! I say this now because I have understood that the way I photograph is, like the little girl who plucked the flowers, based on a sensual, intuitive feeling, an impulse. I seldom think my pictures, but I always feel them. I love to just to wandering around in the world, the world as I see it, a magical place filled with the most wonderful stories and adventures. “I see what I am, I am what I see”. It´s as if a premonition wakens me, alerts me to a situation, I feel something, something is about to present itself to my curious camera. It´s almost uncanny how I feel things falling into place and there I am, about to pick another flower.


Very few of my images have been planned, directed or arranged. Its more like I arrange my self, waiting for that moment when it all comes together. Of course I don´t always get a picture immediately; it does happen of course, but more often then not I have to work my way into the core of the situation. Sometimes I only take three or four frames, other times I could fire off a couple of rolls – yeah – rolls of film before I was happy. I can show you a couple of examples from my new book, Precious Times.

Here on page we see a picture that I took in New York in 2002. I was walking through Times Square when I came across a group of people standing outside a theater. They were lined up to buy tickets, when my intuition, my instinct, got fired up and I put the camera to my eye and without loosing a step or pausing in any way, I took one frame and walked away. Yet I knew I had picked an especially interesting flower, one I call “The next big thing is here”.

So, here is another picture, this one from Pietrasanta in Italy, taken in 2003, which I call “Walking in Color”. I was sitting in the window of my hotel room watching and photographing a very interesting “set” on the street below. The shadow was very dark and the sun very bright, the colored stripe of paint on the wall was half in the sun and half in the shadow. It felt this situation developing into something special, so I set there for quite some time – at least to be me - probably 15 minutes or so, or, to put it in another way, time to use up two rolls of film.
What I was waiting for was one of those funny little Italian moped car-pickups to pass, but instead this young man walked pass, just towards the end of the second roll of film. The result was well worth the wait.


 

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All photos copyright Dan Young 2003 and can not be used without permission
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