Circles Within Circles: A Red Hook Photography Show

Eleven of my bicycle commute photos will be on display at 305 Van Brunt Street in Red Hook through January. I'm going to be writing about the pictures and the show throughout the course of the month. Come on by and check it out.

The Background
For much of the past three years, I have been documenting my daily bicycle commute in digital photos taken from the handlebar of my bicycle. The commute is approximately 19.5 miles round trip and I ride pretty much year round. I tend to capture an average of 120 images per day. Since October of 2008, I've taken over 33,000 pictures of this 20 mile route. An obsession, this.

The photos were taken with two different point and click digital cameras —  a Canon Powershot A560 and more recently, a Panasonic Lumix dmc-ts1. I got the waterproof and shockproof Panasonic after an incident one day on the Manhattan Bridge left the Canon shattered. The Panasonic has been going strong since March of 2010.

Me with the bike and camera. I mount the camera to the handlebar with the Pedco Ultraclamp

Every day, I upload that day's commute to Flickr and both enjoy and cringe. See, I'm taking photos while biking. Since I'm biking, I'm moving, and since I'm moving I can't take time to really focus or arrange the shot. Thus,  about 99% are pure garbage — out of focus,  uninteresting, or repetitive.  Most of the time I'm disappointed with the results, but there are instances of happenstance where everything comes together. Out of those 33,000 pictures I've taken, I've labeled over 450 as "favorites." You can see them all here. I tend to share these favorites across several social media platforms and harass friends and family with them. The photographs have taken on a life of their own. I've written a short chapbook of poems inspired by them and I've often thought about printing large versions of some fo my very favorites. That's where my friends Jen and Jim come in.

Jim is a neighbor of mine who also happens to commute on a regular basis by bicycle. His wife, Jen, runs a storefront gallery in the building they own. The've hosted about 8 shows this past year - one a month. One day this past November, over a pint at our local bar, Jim and I are talking about biking and the pictures I've been taking and Jim suggests that I do a January show in the storefront. I quickly agreed and here we are.

Epicycles
Here's a poem by Wallace Stevens called "The Pleasures of Merely Circulating"

The garden flew round with the angel,
The angel flew round with the clouds,
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.

Is there any secret in skulls,
The cattle skulls in the woods?
Do the drummers in black hoods
Rumble anything out of their drums?

Mrs. Anderson's Swedish baby
Might well have been German or Spanish,
Yet that things go round and again go round
Has a rather classical sound.

When it came closer to the time I would put up my pretty pictures, I started to panic a little. I know nothing about photography. I understand the ekphrastic pleasure of a picture that tells me a story, but with regards to the technical aspect, I'm a less than a lump on a log. I turned to Jen, a visual artist in her own right, with a selection of photographs for her to choose from or give me advice about. Instead, she gave me some pretty good perspective on the entire project — good photos as well as bad photos. She said to me "I think its interesting because rather than choosing a particular group of people to photograph, your project is sort of all the people, but within the parameter of your route.  It also captures the idea of how we all weave in and out of each others lives, all on our own routes." Her insight has helped me crystalize and idea about this (okay I'll go ahead and call it a project) project and led me to be less concerned about the the photography aspect of it all.
I want to talk about epicycles.

From Ardhi_M's photobucket stream

The Astronomer, Ptolmey, proposed a geocentric model of the solar system way back in the 2nd century. His system accounted for the retrograde motion of observable planets in the night sky by putting the planets on invisible tracks in the sky with each planet circling planet earth. Each planet travelled on two tracks. The large track is the deferent and the smaller one (orbiting the deferent) is the epicycle. His model allowed ancient astronemers a modicum of accuracy with their heavenly predictions.

The deferent is a constant, fixed circle — or, in other words, my commute. The epicycle moves around the deferent on it's own axis while orbiting that axis. The people and objects I encounter on my commute are part of the epicycle. Wheels within wheels within wheels, or the pleasures of merely circulating and encountering and passing through.

It all does have a rather classical sound, I'll grant, but at the same time, the movement of the bicycle and the element of chance lends a bit of edge to the whole thing as well. I'm still working the whole epicycle thing out (what, for instance, replaces the Earth in my analogy) and it may be that there isn't anything to work out, that the conceit is merely a conceit.

The Show

In the end, I chose 11 images to display in Jen and Jim's storefront. Four of them have been printed 16 X 20 and seven are 11 X 14. Come on down and check them out and send me feedback. Over the course of the next month, I'll devote an entry to each piece.