“One life shaped by photography.”

​John Holliger
 
 
Westerville Photography Club Westerville Senior Center February 25, 1-3 p.2020 Program Design
1.      Getting started from my Dad. 

1. Exploring geographies with framed photographs and poems that challenge.
2. What is “popular” photography and what have “classic photographers”

 
said about their work.

1. How is” beauty” described by a poet, John O’Donohue, with music and a mix of photography.
2. Handouts of poems, my stories, notes from classic, thoughtful photographers to mull over.
3. Principles of Classic Photography, the foundation for creating a manner of life
   1. Follow the leadings that come many times every day.

 

1. Bad weather makes good photographs--opportunities.

 

1. When a leading brings you to a certain place, get everything ready, stay put, then wait wait, wait to see what unfolds.

 

1. Get up early before anyone else in the house, make coffee, sink into the uninterrupted stillness/silence, and write whatever comes out of your journal.

 

1. Photograph low with the sun on the left or right; look from angles that are not the usual and customary; for example, go 360 degree around a flower; use every lens in the bag to practice looking from every possible angle.
2. Cause no harm. Put everything back.

 

1. Ask permission of a person. Do not sneak a photograph. Do not steal.

 

1. Stay connected to the kind, thoughtful, gentle ones who laugh at themselves with ease; human and other than human.

 

1. Create a simple, focused photograph; create a simple, focused manner of living.
2. Portraits: ask gentle questions, answer any question. You have nothing you have to defend about yourself. Nurse a glass of water for an hour or more— Dorothea Lange. You will catch glimpses of the best in the other person, and yourself as well. Expect to see those glimpses of the best. That's your portrait you are after; and that pour portrait too.

 

1. Practice Photography every day. Practice your best gratitude and generosity of spirit every day.

 
 
A graduate of Oberlin College and Yale Divinity School, John is an Episcopal priest who served parishes in Connecticut and Ohio. Laying down that work at 58, John is a life-long self-taught nature photographer with an animated curiosity for how potters, painters, poets, musicians, craftsmen like farriers and wood bowl makers, and classic photographers approach their art—always on the creative edge, taking risks, asking “What’s next?”
 
This following list of projects can fill in my background: business interiors and exteriors, professional portraits, corporate products and their
installation, construction and architecture, restorations and renovations, portfolios for contractors, photography of model homes, macro photography for scientific and poetic books, university events, retail and restaurant photography.
 
My portfolio includes Ohio Wesleyan University, distinctiveartsource.com of
Virginia, greatamericanart.com, Marion General Hospital, Rivers Edge Conference Center, Cleveland, Green Dental Offices, Grady Memorial Hospital, Button Up Gallery, Sunbear Studio, Culver International Molding Company of Lewis Center, Delaware City Hall, Spirituality
Network, St. Martin de Porres Center of Columbus, Christ Church Cathedral Episcopal, Lexington,

KY, Pendle Hill Quaker Conference Center, Main Street Delaware, published work for Dr. Juan Armando Rojas Joo, Holmes County Wood Fired Functional Ceramics, and Farming Magazine of Mt. Hope, Ohio, Tremco Roofing and Building Maintenance
 
 
John Holliger
70 Welshire Court
Delaware, Ohio 43015 www.photographybyjohnholliger.net johnholliger@columbus.rr.com
cell: 740-360-0741
​

​Why Do We photograph?
 
Fine Art Photographer, John Holliger, explores with humor and fun, twelve “Principles of Classic Photography.”  Starting with amusing images of a gang of pushing-shoving sports and political photographers, John moves quickly into practical suggestions for photographers with cell phones to professionals who have forgotten how many lenses and camera bodies they have and where they’ve put them.
John’s video of Scottish music, funny lines, with photographs of photographers, illustrate the principles of classic photography.  John has gathered the principles into one printed page handout for each person.
Bring a jpeg photograph on a flash drive to get John’s reflections to spur a time of light discussion.  Pointy fingers are not allowed.  You are safe.   .  That’s my one rule:  Smile, Enjoy, laugh.
 
Let me know of your interest.  This will take place at the Westerville Senior Center's photographic club meeting, the 2nd Sunday in February, 1-3pm
 
John Holliger
70 Welshire Court
Delaware, Ohio 43015
www.photographybyjohnholliger.net   johnholliger@columbus.rr.com            Cell:  740-360-0741

 These are my notes from Why People Photograph by Robert Adams. 
I hope you find thoughts to ponder, I have.
​
Why People Photograph by Robert Adams

Reflections on Classic Photographers

If I like photographers, and I do, I account for this by noting a quality they share—animation.  They may or may not make a living by photography, but they are alive by it.
I think for example of a friend who when he was a young man, sometimes took pictures along country roads while sitting half up out of the sun roof of his moving, car, steering with his feet.
Apparently, he was meant to do this because over the years he went on to assemble a vast photographic celebration of Colorado life.  When I hear his voice on the phone now, full of avidity even in old age, I promise myself that I will take grand, unsafe pictures.
 
Photography, like the others art, has that kind of intoxication.  There is also a quieter pleasure.  Occasionally photographers discover tears in their eyes for the joy of seeing.  I think it is because they’ve experienced a miracle.  They’ve been given this gift of tears which they did not earn, and as with many unexpected gifts, the surprise carries this emotional blessing.
Photographers do not know where in the world they will find pictures.  Nobody does.  Each photograph that works is a revelation to its supposed creator.  Yes, photographers do position themselves to take advantage of good fortune, sensing for instance when to stop the car and walk, but this is only the beginning.  As William Stafford wrote, calculation gets you just so far—"smart is Okay, but lucky is better. “
Days of searching can go by without any need to reload film holders, and then abruptly, sometimes back in their yards, photographers use up every sheet of film.
 
There is another reason I like fine art photographers—they don’t tempt me to envy.  The profession is short on dignity.  Nearly everyone has fallen, been the target of condescension.  The stereotypical image of a photographer is a mildly contemptible, self-indulgent dilettante.  They’ve  been harassed by security guards, and dropped expensive equipment.  Almost all fine art photographers have incurred large expenses in the pursuit of tiny audiences, finding that the wonder they’d hoped to share is something few want to receive.  Nothing is so clarifying as to stand through the opening of an exhibition and only the paid staff have come.
Experiences like that could encourage defiance and resentment.  Why be quiet while you’re losing? But the best move forward.  Support from this who love them helps enormously.
I respect many photographers for their courage.  Sometimes this quality is undramatic and private.  It’s the grit to fight bad odds with discipline.  One writes in good-humored self-mockery, “I feel like I have been living in a small hole somewhere  with problems of nest management.”
 
 
Photographers must also withstand, with the help of their families and friends, the psychic battering that comes from what they see; sadness, grief, sorrow.  In order to make pictures that no one has made before, they must be attentive and imaginative. When Robert Frank put down his camera after photographing The Americans, he could not escape the sadness of the world he had recorded as could we when we closed the book.
 
Paradoxically photographers must face the threat that their vision may one day be denied them.   Their capacity to find their way to art, which is their consolation, to  see things whole, may fail for an hour or a month or forever because of fatigue or misjudgment or some other shift in spirit that cannot be predicted or understood or even recognized, until it has happened past correction.  For every Stieglitz or Weston who remained visionary to the end, there is an Ansel Adams who after a period of extraordinary creativity, lapsed into formulas.
 
 
Writing
 
Art is by nature self-explanatory.  We call it art precisely because it is self-sufficient.  Its vivid detail and overall cohesion give it a clarity not ordinarily apparent in the rest of life.  And so, if the audience lives in the same time and culture as does the artist, there is no need to add to their art a preface or other secondary explanations. 
 
I did not have to read photographers’ statements in order to love their pictures.  Almost nothing they say about specific pictures enriched my experience of those pictures.  Photographers seemed so strikingly unable to write at length about what they had made. 
Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, “You want me to say it worse?”
Photographers never fully know how they got the good pictures that they have.
Words are proof that the vision they had is not fully there in the picture. 
 
The best way to know what photographers think about their work, beyond gazing at their photographs as we study profound books, is to read or listen to what they say about other pictures made by colleagues or precursors whom they admire.  It is as close as photographers usually want to come to talking about their own intentions.
For photographers, the ideal book of photographs would contain just pictures—no text at all.
C. S. Lewis admitted, when he asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them.   Photographers know this frailty.  To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters.  Their gift is to see and bring back to us this miracle of sight.

​­­­­
 
 
 
The Fish House



No sign out front
Where my Dad and I stopped and
Gazed in wonder during the day.
We came after the pre-dawn chaos of men and boats
Chugging into the darkness,
Of a shallow great lake with more frightening,
Fast-forming  storms than any of the other great lakes.
The men drove their boats in that lake,
Fears well hidden
 
We stood silently, as did the Fish House
Remembering the men and boats
Already on the waters beyond our sight.
 
The village knew the grey peeling squat building
Flirtatious Hollyhocks beneath small muddy windows
That was the Fish House
And its swaying dock on the river.
 
Hand hewn timbers
Generations old built to last
For their children’s children.
All that the fathers created with care for their cherished children mattered.
 
 
Long before dawn
In night’s darkness
Low humming, sputtering diesels
Departed the Fish House
Into the darkness of the River,
Entering the lake beyond the lighthouse
Scattering apart to “their” place on the lake,
As their fathers’ fathers had agreed.
 
Unrolling their long nets with respectful love
Nets repaired by their fathers’ fathers,
Each knot,
 a signature
and stories of joy and loss
And loss.
 
The schools of fish in those years, so abundant,
Hard to imagine.
The men of old could haul in their nets
Quickly filled with fish.
 
When the village was closing, going home,
The boats were returning
Smoking diesels rolled a deep wake
To the Fish House.
 
Now everything changed.
 
No longer a quiet place of head nods
Hand gestured directives
For departing into the dark waters.
 
On their return
Deep in the water from the weight of the fish
Chaos reigned in the Fish House
as tasks were barked and hollered
Wise-cracks and guffaws
Pelting laughter and raucous back slaps
As if a dam of pent up testosterone
Had broken free.  Hearts were full.
This too was the Fish House.
 
Beautiful pike, pickerel, perch,
white fish and walleye,
scooped up and tossed by the shovel load
into crates,
others threw loads of ice
as the fish wiggled and flopped.
 
 
 
 
My Dad and I loved to enter the Fish House at dusk,
A place of well-ordered chaos and joy
Generations old
From the father’s fathers.
 
When the village dentist arrived
With his beaming son,
One booming voice
Called out
“Hey Doc, got a beaut set aside for just you, Doc.”
My Dad would set aside his life, day or night,
When the phone rang from a fisherman or dock
Worker to pull a tooth.
To the question, “How much Doc?”  He shy smiled
And opened the door, meaning, “I glad you called
And I could help you.”
 
That same Fish House
Now locked up for years
Remains,
a witness
to generations of men in ordered chaos and joy and loss,
Contented hearts.
 
Flying ice and the beauty of fish now live in our hearts.
 
 
 
 
©2019 John Holliger