California Dreaming on Such a Winter's Day
By RANDY KENNEDY
Winter, to put it politely, is not kind to Rochester. How many other
cities, after all, are regularly in the running for the Golden Snowball,
an annual award presented to the upstate city with the most snowfall?
(Rochester, at 113 inches, was bested last winter only by Syracuse at
137.)
"It can be pretty bleak, let's be honest," said Anthony Bannon,
director of George Eastman House, the renowned photography museum founded
in the city in 1947. "There are times when it feels like you don't
see the sun for months."
This was one of the reasons that a light bulb - actually more like a
tanning lamp - went off over Mr. Bannon's head more than a year ago
when he became familiar with an odd, obsessive experiment being conducted
by a photographer named Robert Weingarten.
Mr. Weingarten, a former executive who took up a camera professionally
at 54, travels around the world in search of images, and his work is
now in the collections of several major museums. But in 2002, at the
urging of Weston Naef, the photography curator at the J. Paul Getty
Museum in Los Angeles, Mr. Weingarten decided to train his lens on his
own backyard in Malibu, Calif., following Alfred Stieglitz's advice
that photographers should first look for pictures at home before traveling
to find them.
The results of Mr. Weingarten's experiment went on view this week at
Eastman House, beaming a little bit of Southern California to Rochester,
at least photographically. His idea was to take pictures with a medium-format
film camera every day that he was home, at exactly the same time, 6:30
in the morning, the camera pointed southeastward from his bedroom porch
toward the same spot over Santa Monica Bay.
Mr. Weingarten worked with an almost scientific rigor to ensure that
the way he took each photograph was identical: he bought all the film
from the same production batch and even stored it at the same temperature
and humidity for a year as he took the pictures from January through
December of 2003. The aperture was always set at f/22, and the lens
always focused at infinity. His only intervention was to change the
shutter speed depending on the amount of natural light available each
morning.
In a recent interview, he said that when he first started to look at
the transparencies and see on film what he thought he could see with
his eyes every morning, he was astonished at how artificial, almost
painted, the images looked.
"The depth of the color is either something you can't see or just
don't concentrate hard enough to see in the sky and water," he
said, adding that he was glad he had chosen film instead of digital
photography. ("People would have said, 'Oh, you just played with
Photoshop and manipulated that,' " he said.)
Depending on what time of year the photographs were taken, they sometimes
resemble striated Rothko paintings, the ominous light-rimmed clouds
of El Greco or the candy-colored California skies of Ed Ruscha. In some
pictures, the control tower of the Los Angeles International Airport
is visible across the bay, but in most the water, horizon and sky blend
together in fluid, fuzzy, gradations of color and sunlight.
For the sun-starved of Rochester, Mr. Bannon thought, the pictures would
be especially striking. But instead of showing them in an exhibition
inside the museum, he proposed something that the institution had never
done, placing enlarged photographs in front of the museum, like billboards
from the land of perpetual summer.
"It's our way of trying to turn lemons into lemonade," he
said. "The winter is forbidding so you use it, try to turn it to
your advantage."
The exhibition, which remains up through Feb. 12, includes 19 enlargements
of Mr. Weingarten's prints, blown up to 40 inches square and arrayed
in Plexiglas cases on the front lawn of the Colonial Revival mansion
that houses the museum, originally the home of Eastman, founder of the
Eastman Kodak Company.
Mr. Weingarten, who was born in Brooklyn but decamped for California
when he was young and never came back, said the show was a particularly
personal one for him because of his gray early winter memories. "When
I moved here," he said of California, "I told my friends that
I was color-deprived from having grown up in New York, and they laughed
at me. But it was true."
He added that he had only one further hope for the show, one that Rochesterians
in January probably don't want to hear: "I really hope it snows."