| These images represent a small part of 59 years work; just one of the worlds I have stepped into through my photography. In general, my photography falls into four general groups- children and family, people who have contributed to the cultural enrichment of the northwest, architecture, and nature, my great love. From the very beginning of my career in photography, one experience has led to another as if it were meant to be. My photography is the outcome of the way my life formed and has been lived. My life is my work, my work is my life. When photographing, I look for the greatest beauty I can find in my subject---- My subjects become forms in space, forms moving through space especially in nature where they become illuminated and molded by the light and shadow of the moment. Taking photographs is taking chances, entering unknown worlds where the results are not know, that quick intuitive sensing of how it can be, how I want it to be, and now and then getting more than I imagined possible. It is this gift that makes it all worthwhile. One must have a total respect for one’s work and always the subject at hand. My photographs reflect these concepts. The following quotations have inspired me and given direction to my work: “Zen artists understand better than any others the value of empty spaces and in a certain sense what they left out was more important than what they put in---- They lifted just a corner of the veil to excite people to find out for themselves what lay beyond.”—Alan Watts “Zen means grasping the whole when looking at the part, and equally never forgetting the part when looking at a whole.”--- R. H. Blyth “Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.”--- Theodore Roethke Notes taken by Erik Sandgren 12 March 2007 during informal talks to Grays Harbor College art students by Mary Randlett By the late fifties I had already taken pictures of Graves, Tobey and Meitzler. Of course, I’d started with Henry Miller in California. My mother knew him. After I got married my husband and I bought my grandparent’s house; two and a half acres in Seattle with a garden and a view of the Olympics across the sound. The darkroom that Jenson had built for me was already there – in Woodway Park. After the kids were in school I could work. As women, especially, you have to separate your work. What you had to have then was a lot of energy. The minute my husband and kids were out the door I went out and took pictures. I wasn’t one of those people who just had to go downtown for lunch or go to parties. I’d work at night. It’s just a lot of work. It takes discipline. You give up going places and do your work instead – at the expense of seeing your friends. It isn’t easy. You have to have a real love, a real drive, and a real respect for the work. Back then, my husband didn’t, so I had to get a divorce. It’s a choice – you have to slough off one thing to do something else. Anchor Jensen built the Slow Mo IV. He used an Allison engine out of a P38 warplane and she went one hundred sixty miles per hour on her trial run. We were out there on Lake Washington the last of October 1949; no wind. I didn’t even have to pan the camera; she was far enough away even traveling that fast - fastest boat in the world, then. They won the gold cup with her back east and that brought SeaFair to Seattle. The pictures I took were published all over. I went to Whitman – I had the needed thirty credits in High school, but I was bored and my mother sent me. I never graduated from high school. I wouldn’t have gotten in today. With all the tests you have to take, I wouldn’t have gotten in through a broken window in the basement. I had a good time in school. I was a Poly Sci. major; I got out1947 and had to face up; I went to Seattle and got a job. I worked in sales at a sporting goods store. I noticed that the guys were making more money than I was, but they weren’t selling as much. So I went to the boss and asked for a raise, and he said, “You’re fired!” that was the best day of my life. I decided to be a photographer. I apprenticed to Hans Jorgensen. He couldn’t pay me but he helped. He never told me how to crop a picture or how to take a picture. He just told me to go out and shoot. Then he showed me darkroom techniques. That went until 1950 when I got married. I had four kids in six years. My art is my life and my life is my art. When I say that they ask me, “Where do we come in, Mom?” In the darkroom I don’t touch anything except to add light or hold light back in printing with the dodgers I made as an apprentice to Hans Jorgensen. I still have them - cardboard and spring wire. The only wire I can find now that works is bonsai wire. Hans had come out to Seattle after being assistant to Louise Dahl-Woli, the great fashion photographer in New York. Hans showed me the twin lens Rolleflex in 1947. I scrounged the three hundred and fifty dollars to buy the last one I could find in Seattle. That was a lot of money back then. I’ve turned almost totally toward the Orient. You guys are lucky down here. You’ve got the sea. Seattle galleries - most of the stuff is junk. On the other hand, in the Asian Art Museum I can go in for fifteen minutes and come out inspired and refreshed. Besides, there’s parking. There’s no point in my flying when I travel, because I can’t take pictures. I’m a ground person. I’ve been across the country and back five times and I’ve seen a lot, but there’s always more to see. My visual inspiration has been oriented toward Asia, but I don’t have to visit there to get that. Being on the East Coast for three years, I just about died! The heat in summer! I like the Pacific Northwest and the rain. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Some people paint detail. Others paint the essence of detail. In your painting you start something and you don’t know how it will go. With luck, as an artist you get more than you imagined possible. Even if you can’t paint, it’s a gift to be able to look at paintings. The businessmen I’ve known who have art collections and an interest in the arts are all mellowed out. When I’m taking a picture there’s a lot of stuff going through my head. I’m watching all the time for a picture. It’s nice to have someone with you when you travel, but then you miss stuff. It’s best to be alone. It’s so quick when you see something - I’d like to do a whole book on clouds. If I see something, like moving clouds, I know now that I have one shot at it. In that instant it changes. Either it changes, or something in your head changes. Everything you photograph is really like a documentary. I realized this when I spoke top a class on documentary photography at Evergreen. It really is a documentary process. I hate working in a studio where everything is controlled. You gotta be kind’a scatterbrainy. And you gotta be lucky. I take a lot of pictures from my car. I keep my cameras on the front seat. I throw a cloth over them so they are not seen - I don’t want to be ripped off, but I travel with them handy. My mother ran the Henry Gallery at the U., and then she was curator at the San Francisco Museum of Art, and then acting asst. director and a curator at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco. She went to Japan before 1960 to collect folk art there and knew Yanagi and all those people. She contracted malaria on her travels in Srinagar and never really recovered, but she lived until one hundred and three – about five years too long. ‘Til then she was as sharp as a tack. I see people as an intrusion in my nature work. It’s a great complement to me when you can’t identify the scale right away. One woman asked me once if all my work wasn’t taken from a helicopter. That was great. We have here what John Muir described as “liquid light” - from coastal Columbia River into Alaska, but only as far as to top of Snoqualmie Pass. You have to understand it. Our range of tones here is extended. We have a long grey scale. We’re coastal out here in Aberdeen. Olympia too. Here it gets tempered. Tri-X is so sensitive to this. The light is filtered by water in the atmosphere. California photography has a shorter range of grays. Ansel Adams has pure white and pure black and short range in between. Also technique came first with almost al of those them – except for Imogene (Cunningham) and Dorothea (Lange). Technique can be learned - but not gift of an eye! Dark against light gives tension. And the muted, subtle tones are hard to get. You need to understand our light here. I was out rowing one night with mother and she pointed to the island shape at night and said, “That’s Haida black.” At Ohanepecosh I photographed the sun on rocks in 1986. I exposed for the sun light, rather than the dark, and that was the beginning of something big. That changed everything. Every once in a while in a water picture you get these little black lines. Where do they come from? I didn’t see them at the time, but they’re wonderful. That’s the gift. I learned so much as I went along. I followed Jacob Lawrence through the development and process of his work for the Kingdome. It was a big enamel piece on steel in sections. I learned all about these processes. The enrichment in your life – that’s the most important thing. But you have to sift and sort. The writers were harder to photograph. They didn’t have a lot of visible work around or tools in their hands. I was always scared to death at the beginning. I always tried to keep the artists in their working spaces, and to find a place they would be comfortable. I learned poetry from Roethke’s students; David Waggoner, Robert Sund, and Carolyn Kaiser. Each artist that I’ve met has given me an eye to see something I would have missed otherwise. That documentary movie about Roethke is called In a Dark Time. I didn’t know Tacoma from beans, back in those days. I was photographing Murray and I saw that big clock tower and I asked him if we could get out onto that roof. So we went up four flights and out a window onto a four foot wide ledge above the street and got over to a flat part by the base of the clock. Later, five years before he died he started telling people about the day Mary Randlett tried to kill him. I’ve got a lot of great stories. When I was shooting people I was always a wreck to start but once I got going it was great. I see a lot of places like those depicted in the Stumps and Clearcuts show here. All my pictures for it relate to Emily Carr. I took those pictures thinking of her. No matter what you do and who you know, you can stay receptive to these things and through them add richness to your life. With the Carr connection you just can’t miss. For this show I did work I wouldn’t have done otherwise. I have two black and white cameras and one Fn color (with slides) with me all the time. I have 2 Nikons along with a 28-105 lens, a 70-210 lens (telephoto) and a 17-35mm wide angle that I use for architecture. Those are the mainstays. I use Tri-X with its wide latitude, and print using filters on one paper. I use zoom lenses now, mainly, in my nature pictures. I hate tripods. I can hand-hold at a thirtieth of a second. With zoom lenses it’s amazing what you can do, but you have to see something in the first place. Taking pictures is taking chances. You have to leave some space for the viewer, for the mystery. The artist gives beauty to people. There is no beauty without mystery. If you see things that you don’t like and other people do, ask them why. That’s how you expand. Nature is my great love because I don’t owe anything to anybody. Nature has it all, if you really look. All you have to do is drive out to the ocean. In this photograph I just zoomed down into the water at Ivar’s in Seattle. I got all these geometric forms. Leo Kenney, a painter, gave me the eyes to see that. Now this photograph has more in it than I saw at the time I took it. Now that’s the gift. I wouldn’t trade my life for anything, but I’d like to see more of my friends. Everything you do goes into something – it enriches your life in some way. If Mother Nature still holds the trump card with the tsunami and all that, why doesn’t she just get rid of Bush and Cheney? Denise Levertov came out here in 1989 and we became friends right away. She chose seven pictures of mine and wrote seven poems about them and an essay on my work. I am so honored. Actually, I’m more sensitive to color than a lot of people. Levertov asked me how I translate color into Black and white. I don’t know. I never figured it out. I see color, but my real love in photography is black and white because I can’t enlarge color from slides or get good color prints from slides. Black and white slides are also hard to get. I can use my MP4 color copier with tungsten Extachrome and the cc110 filter and I get a good black and white slide, thanks to Rod Slemmons. Everyone has to find their own way of making a living. Philip McCracken is up there on Guemes Island – his wife taught school. That’s how you do it. I never made any money. After I got divorced I was always broke – until I sold my negatives to the UW library, then I spent all that and I’m broke again. I had to buy back my nature negatives so I can keep on doing what I want with them. The computer and I don’t get along. I wrote a letter on it once with help from my son Robert. After they bought me one and it sat there for a year I called them up and they walked me through it. First you press this button, and then press that button, and so on. When I was done, I printed it and it came out perfect. My handwritten letters are all scratched out and corrected and messy. I held up the letter and looked at it and there was a big space between me and that letter and I never wrote another one on the computer. I was never any good with things that have many buttons to push. |