Sherman by White: Portrait of the Artist as a Young(ish) Man.

 

Great minds think alike, I don’t remember whether you said it first or I did, “That’s a photo!”

I’d seen artist Howard Sherman in his working duds. Frank White the Photographer, whose studio is next to Sherman’s at the Docks here, has seen Howard paint-covered as well. Still, when Howard walked out onto the loading dock with us, I guess we had to be together for the idea to pop.

We both knew it. White went on to take the photo:

There are many different approaches to capturing expressions of people. When I shoot people for myself, I go for the toe-in-the-water shot. I have found that if I am ready when the person comes in the studio, and can immediately capture an image, the first shot is usually the best…the cutting edge expression has to be quick.

This was the first image that I took of Howard. I probably shot about 30 images, but after this one, none of the others had this cocky, “Aren't I hot” look. They all looked too nice. We had fun, but those subsequent captures could not compete with the first one.

Photo: Copyright © 2009, Frank White Photography. All rights reserved.

Frank White: “Did you hear about the forklift that slipped on a banana?”

Frank White the Photographer has spent the past 20 years shooting CAT® Lift Trucks for company marketing and advertising. And having fun at the same time. “You’d be surprised at how creative you can get with them.”

To show off the fun, and as a tribute to a great client, White created this year’s Art Crawl series, “Ten Things Run Over by a Forklift.” Eyeball them this coming Saturday, November 21, at Frank White Studio, The Docks, 1109 East Freeway, Houston 77002. I’m looking forward to seeing them – I gotta believe a banana is one of the things. Will I see you there too?

“Smushed Matte Board,” © 2009. The Houston Art Crawl is the annual tour of downtown’s warehouse district art studios, 10:00AM – 9:00 PM.

…and Indians!

A number of recent vacation photos that Frank White the Photographer shared with me enter the realm of that quote by Milton Glaser, “I am still astonished.” (I don’t ever want to be blasé about Indians.) Frank wrote:

Jo-Anne and I are back from our road trip. It was great! We went to Corinth on our way to Shiloh, and of course we had to stop at Elvis’s birthplace in Tupelo. The highlight of the trip was the reenactment at Fort Niagara. This was the largest to date. There were over four thousand re-enactors; soldiers plus wives and children.

J and I had never been to one of these before and were amazed at the attention to detail. They lived in tents for three days, all furnished as in 1759.

There were six phases to the siege, the first being the Wilderness Battle, where the French came out of the fort to fight the British in the open field. Labelle Famille was an ambush by the British when they discovered that French re-enforcements were on their way to the fort. This battle occurred about two miles south of the fort, lasted approximately twenty minutes and was a massacre.

White’s photos are here – excellent to see them. This photo of an Indian re-enactor, particularly, stopped me.

Copyright © 2009, Frank White Photography. All rights reserved. See also Niagara's 4th.

Niagara’s 4th

Happy Independence Day.

Twenty years before the American Revolution, Britain and France fought for control of North America in a conflict known as the French and Indian War.

In July 1759 a British army, accompanied by almost 1,000 Iroquois allies, laid siege to French-held Fort Niagara. After 19 days, the fort’s walls had been breached by artillery fire, and a French and Indian relief column was defeated just a mile from the fort in a bloody morning battle. On July 25, the French surrendered the fort, ushering in an era of British control of the Great Lakes.

Today Old Fort Niagara is a National Historic Landmark and New York State Historic Site that welcomes more than 100,000 visitors every year. It offers a unique collection of original military architecture and fortifications from the 18th Century and the 19th Century, as well as living history events and programs, historical exhibits and collections, archaeology, and education.

Six years after Fort Niagara fell some citizens of Boston created the first Liberty Tree. Farmers going to market discovered that an effigy had been hung a big elm tree in Deacon Elliott’s grove. The hanged figure represented Boston merchant Andrew Oliver who’d agreed to collect a new “Stamp Tax” levied on the colonists by Parliament to pay for that war.

American colonists really, really resented having to pay the Mother Country for warring on their behalf (this kind of thing probably sounds familiar to you). That Liberty Tree was the first sign there was going to be trouble between America and Britain. It was one of the earliest conceptual expressions of liberty itself.

Thinking liberty led to independence and the document with the word in its title. As soon as it appeared in 1776, the talking heads of the day started arguing about what liberty, freedom and equality really meant. But the writer of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, was typically ambiguous – he wrote that the text was intended “to be an expression of the American mind, and to give that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.”

Now it’s two-and-a-half centuries since the siege in upstate New York. Jo-Anne and Frank White the Photographer are in Youngstown celebrating the 4th of July and the 250th anniversary of the Fort Niagara battle. Frank has promised to send holiday snaps. Meantime I’ll sponge the ones you see here. And Barbara and I will be celebrating with Sam and Georgia Akers in the Heights.

Whether you’re in Houston or Youngstown or Paris or Baghdad, let’s join in observing the 4th. Listen to the Declaration of Independence, that “expression of the American mind,” right here. Let it stir you up.

We have the liberty to enjoy the widest range of freedoms in the world. Today, we commemorate the independence that gave us that liberty.

Happy 4th of July.

Vacation photography by “Klare and John” Shober posted on Panoramio, from whence I borrowed them.

“Fellow Citizens”

June must be the month for Frank White the Photographer and history. Yesterday, White and I visited the Museum of Southern History (whose existence we didn’t suspect, so much for advertising!) for a traveling exhibition about Generals Robert E Lee and Ulysses S Grant (which neither of us had ever heard of). No pictures were taken.

But we did see a well-executed traveling exhibition, of quite high quality, in an unlikely place.

The campus of Houston Baptist University is, on the one hand, not exactly the spot for a museum of any kind. It turns out to have…three, the “University Museums.” I wonder, though, if HBU’s Dunham Bible Museum (a pearl of a presentation, BTW) will get the play that this exhibit will generate. Houston doesn’t get much Civil War action, exhibit-wise. It looked to me as though there’ll be steady traffic by people who have done a lot of ACW reading and touring.

HBU Curator Erin Price and her team have done good work fitting the Virginia Historical Society-New York Historical Society exhibit into the Uni’s space. There are some great artifacts: General Grant's handwritten terms of surrender to Lee on April 9, 1865 best of all. (You can read about these here.)

Extra enjoyment: Take advantage of The University Museums docents’ pleasant tour. It’ll give you an excellent overview – even though it’s asking a lot of a 30-minute oral presentation to cover decades of issues and history. Then you can wander the compact exhibition at your leisure.

There’s enough before-and-after the actual battles of the Civil War about each man so you get a sense of the two men as humans, not simply heroes. And there’s a bit of a goal overall. This first exhibition to present Grant and Lee together intends for us to consider how they “became” American ideals. They became fellow citizens and they worked at it.

That 1900 cigar label nails it: A great attempt at marketing a solution to the sectional differences that, 30+ years after the War, were hardly at rest. Look, July 4th is just around the corner of the calendar. See if you can squeeze in a visit to “Lee and Grant.”

“Fellow Citizens,” inner cigar box label with full-color profile portraits of Confederate and Union Civil War generals Lee and Grant; chromolithographed and embossed on coated stock. By Calvert Lithographic Company. Considered one of the icons of Civil War cigar box label sets for its subject matter, artistic beauty and technical merit. From PBA Galleries with thanks.

Wright Stop

You won’t find advertising for the Dana-Thomas House in Springfield – the wonderful restoration of a Frank Lloyd Wright home now owned and operated by the State of Illinois itself.

Two reasons for no ads. One. All of the state, and particularly its capital, is celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abe Lincoln. Newspapers, travel guides and the Illinois Tourism website are chock-a-block with Bicentennial events. That’s proper. That’s damned exciting. If you have any feeling for President Lincoln, you’ll visit Springfield this summer.

Two. The marvelous Wright-designed and built attraction was closed by ousted Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, whom even the Associated Press credits as being greedy, tactless and hair-obsessed. Our docent, without quite saying so, indicated that Blagojevich hates Springfield…he went out of his way to make closing the beautifully restored Dana-Thomas house part of his budget-cutting program. So Illinois temporarily closed the Dana-Thomas House to the public as of December 1, 2008.

The joke is on Blagojevich. He’s been shut down; the Dana-Thomas House reopened on April 23, 2009.

Here’s a terrific architechtural masterpiece – really does warrant that term – that hasn’t yet been re-listed on the “Enjoy Illinois” website. We found a listing of the house in the AAA Illinois Guidebook as we were driving south from Chicago.

Pre-vacation, when Frank White the Photographer found out we were driving to Chicago, and then home to Houston through Springfield, he kindly (and forcefully) suggested that we stop at the Lincoln house, or the cemetery where Father Abraham is buried.

He was horrified when I told him, after we got back, that we’d toured the classic Dana-Thomas House instead. But for people who love Wright’s architectural elegance (Barbara) or marketers that think a large part of Wright’s creativity is in his attention to detail (Richard), it was natural to pull off the Interstate, drive down the gridded streets of Springfield and find the home. Those red tickets let us into a bygone world.

Tourism advertising is not an established practice area for me. Say that America has 50 retail “stores” (states), each one with dozens or hundreds of “products” (events, attractions, historical sites, reenactments, state and regional parks) – the noise level is intense. With so many demands on our attention, I’m glad we spotted the Dana-Thomas House listing. We made the Wright stop, advertising or not.

PS: See far better photos of the House here.