Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2019

This photograph is an homage to the famous painting by Edvard Munk. The boy was completely candid, not blinking for a second as he bellowed “DAD!” across the quiet late winter afternoon. He wasn’t upset so much as driven by ambition to skate home by himself while his father and younger brother trailed behind. As part of the fun I slipped a couple of ghost images of the famous painting into the photograph. However, they are buried so deep you’d have to have the original to detect them. I’m not saying where they are…that’s your puzzle and my fun.

This is the first image of a collection I submitted to the Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2019 The entire submission is here.

The Scream, Tacoma (2019) ©2019 Christopher Petrich

Leica Oskar Barnack Award 2019 is open to professional photographers annually. It is enormously prestigious, paying a huge sum of twenty five thousand euros. Photographers world-wide submit up to twelve thematically consistent images, of which only twelve are chosen from all submissions.

My feelings notwithstanding, I expect this work isn’t groundbreaking. Yet, the act of assembling a collection to compete at the top level distills the best of my efforts. Along with the photographs a very short statement of no more than 900 characters is required.

This is the statement I submitted: “The world is in a shooting war and the armies wear no uniforms. On every continent, the threat of annihilation is either implied or explicit, by bullet or by bomb, even in my home town, and everyone is suspect. For more than 40 years I have walked the streets peering into faces, seeing those masked to hide the fear of death. But there is something else that comes unguarded too. Hope and courage emerge as a thread and if you watch for it, it will come out straight and true. These are some of these images from the last couple of years.”

Cry For Pizza, New York ©2019 Christopher Petrich

Oskar Barnack (1879–1936) invented the Leica camera. This is the legendary instrument used to great effect by the world’s renowned photographers since it was invented in the first part of the twentieth century. The Leica is built tough and small enough to fit your hands, and has the finest optics by far for any camera system now or then.

I have two of them, both digital M models, which I have used exclusively for ten years.

From the awards website: “Entry submissions must be a self-contained series of images in which the photographer perceives and documents the interaction between man and the environment with acute vision and contemporary visual style – creative, groundbreaking and innovative.”

A Fair Weather Gale In The Channel Islands; A Ship Saling East To China.

There was a big system forecast, and we woke to 45 mile per hour winds with bright, clear blue skies and temperatures in the 40’s. The waves rolled in before the wind, six foot swells that churned up the beach and washed it away.

Across to the horizon great ocean cargo ships, loaded deep and stacked high with containers, headed east out of LA and past Santa Catalina, with a straight shot to China across the central Pacific.

This ship is a member of the NYK Line, the name painted on the hull in enormous letters and visible in the picture below. I’m sure I could find out where it was headed that day, and what it carried. I’d rather just let it go.

NYK Line container ship headed east out of Los Angeles through the Channel Islands in a fair weather gale ©2019 Christopher Petrich

Super Snow Moon Coming Into SeaTac Over Rainier

On Monday this week flying home from Los Angeles, we saw from our window the moon at it's closest orbit. Its size was a shock, flying with us mile after mile smiling a celestial welcome. We lost it when we dropped below the clouds, but the sight of our wings brushing the top of the great mountain at sunset, with the goddess of the night sky smiling down was a vision of grace.

“In other words, it’s a full moon near perigee, or closest to Earth for this month. This February 2019 full moon reaches its exact full phase closer to the time of perigee than any other full moon this year. Hence the year’s closest supermoon.“

The Super Snow Moon of February over Mt Rainier from the seat of a Horizon Air Embraer 175 ©2019 Christopher Petrich

The Last Day It Snowed

It was coming down in a torrent of frying pan flakes. The air was heating up even as the earth was on its way to the dark side. We were fixed at the window watching it pile up on the back deck. I put out a fancy blue T square ruler which metered the rising drift edging to thirteen inches. This was the fifth day of cold and snow, and it turned out that the fifth was the last. Five days was enough. I had to get out.

Even though it was warming up, the snow was still cold and dry. People wandered the streets in a general state of marvel. A tiny parade of two marched down the middle of 29th street a few blocks from home. A young woman in a bright red hat under a Seattle Times golf umbrella, holding a bright blue insulated mug was shouting, “This hasn’t happened since nineteen thirty two!” She led a young man step for step while he formed a snowball behind her. He was silent, but amused, and he glanced toward me with a smile.

It’s true this sort of weather is rare enough around here to warrant such a startled cry of amazement. To them, young and probably new to the city, this really was news.

The story of snow in the Pacific Northwest made headlines around the world, but it is melting away. But now the story is of mud and the threat of landslides across the whole of Puget Sound, and that has not happened here, at that scale, since nineteen thirty two.

Making A Snowball With A Wry Glance, Tacoma, On The Last Day It Snowed, February 2019

An Early Winter Afternoon and Girls At The Spar Cafe

On an early winter afternoon a low sun lit the window of the Spar Cafe and the long table next to it. Three school girls were at the table in constant motion. One waved hello, the others too noticed me.

It was a look at the next generation coming to the plate, full of life, and happy about it. Let’s hope they remain free to do good, treasuring one another as the great prize, the exceedingly rare true friend.

I was happy they felt free to say hello, on that fine early winter afternoon.

The Young Woman and the Question Remained.

We traversed stairs, turnstiles and hallways to arrive here, and we stood on the platform for the F train to Brooklyn.

Those tunnels are a deep dark hole, but the light and the tiles on the platform held back the darkness. I saw a tableau playing out in the greasy noise across the open tracks down there.

Four squares of light were framed by steel columns holding up the tunnel, and under those four proscenium arches people hesitated or stopped, or moved on quickly.

One person stayed and engaged men somehow, getting them to stop while she listened, and then they would move away, seeming to go about their business without a second thought.

And the question remained, what did she ask them?

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

Call for Entry: Self Portrait

Some photographers can’t resist the temptation to turn the camera on themselves. I’ve photographed myself many times over the years. I like a plain, straight photograph generally, and this holds true for pictures I take of me just as well as for pictures I take of others.

Here is my current response to the call for Self Portraits from PhotoPlace Gallery in Vermont.

Shadow In and Shadow Out, 2018 ©Christopher Petrich

Photographer Before The Lights, 1973

White HaIr; Black Rims, 2018

Towelled Male Torso, Late Afternoon, 1996

We photographers long for an audience for our photographs, and across the imaging landscape there are hundreds of Calls For Entry, I look for calls from the PhotoPlace Gallery. They understand photography and a photographer’s desire to publish, and they are particularly good at choosing curators who know a good picture when they see one. I’ve had success showing there; they make it fun.

Care for ICE with your drink?

Just east of downtown Tacoma, over the famed black steel bridge above the Thea Foss Waterway, the streets fan out past warehouses, abandoned industrial sites, petroleum staging plants, and the Northwest Detention Center.

©2018 Christopher Petrich

The NWDC holds undocumented people rounded up by ICE for deportation. It is a private prison on port land keeping the sorrows and disappointments of the imprisoned hidden there. But feelings about this clearly show on a junk rail car close by the prison.

Dozens of pallets with their payloads wrapped in plastic lay next to the car. These bundles together look like ice flows jammed up against a frozen shore.

Y asi se va

And so it goes.

The New Face Of Liberty

Last week I was touring the Statue of Liberty. The statue is a true colossus, sculpted with a cry of monumental compassion for poor souls who come upon our shore. The Statue proclaims that no one is free is even one is enslaved and we all stood enthralled beneath this symbol of Liberty and Equality.

While we looked at the gilded torch, the travesty of non-consequential sexual predation against women was revealed to the world in its naked ugliness at the Senate Hearing to fill the vacant Supreme Court seat. And above the chaos at the hearing, I imagined Lady Liberty shining the light of freedom on women finally.

A Woman is the face of Liberty. Pay attention everyone. She has something important to say.

Coopers Hawk Over Sunrise, Mt Rainier National Park

Walking the trail above the lodge at Sunrise, on the way to Mt Fremont Fire Lookout, and even before that on the trail, the hillside is loose rock, each about the size of your fist and so solid it rings like a bell.

The trail is a snaking terrace and protected from a slide by a retaining wall piled high against the natural slope, piled high with the volcanic basalt of the hillside. Gazing up you see trees that have found a hold in the blazing sun, themselves ablaze with a solid, bright green flame.

And the hawk, for it is only one hawk, soars in stop-motion against the blue blue sky. But it’s a Cooper’s Hawk! It’s a bird that never gets so high in the mountains. It likes to be near the rivers and forests where it can get those tasty birds, those jays and pheasants and chickens, and mammals, those chipmunks, hares, mice, squirrels, and bats.

Still, it looks fine with it.

This is a new work, quite large on canvas, with archival pigment ink.

$1500.

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Coopers_Hawk/lifehistory