THE ARCANE MACHINE – new book of photographs by L. Russ

What follows is the preface of a book that I’ve just had printed, featuring a fifteen-image photographic poem of mine, The Arcane Machine.  The book is 10×10″, 34-pages long, including this preface, the photographs (with their titles on facing pages), and bio notes.  It has a matte hard cover, and it can be ordered through my photography website, http://www.lawrenceruss.com , by “ordering” the last image (which is of the book’s covers) in the Portfolio named (you guessed it) The Arcane Machine.  (The portfolio on the website contains only a selection from the images in the book.)

ABOUT THE ARCANE MACHINE

I’d be lying if I said that I came up with some idea for this portfolio. The machine in the title of this book was once used for hauling boats out of the water at a tiny boatyard with a single dock.  I’d photographed the machine before and seen it many times.  But until this summer, most of the machine, including its motor, had been covered with a large sheet of canvas.  One day in July, I went to the boatyard with no artistic purpose in mind.  Still, when I saw the whole machine uncovered for the first time, with its intricate, archaic motor, I was intrigued.  Before I had any conscious thought of it, this series had begun, almost of its own accord.

I didn’t spend much time at the yard that day, but before I left I snapped a few full-length and side-view shots of the machine in daylight. When I viewed the digital files that night, the images were dull, but I thought, Hmmm, let’s see what might come if I light the machine with flashes.  I returned with more gear:  a Canon 5d Mark II with a 17-40mm lens, a Canon 5d Mark III with a 70-200mm lens, five Speedlite flashes with PocketWizard radio triggers, a few short light stands, some flash modifiers.  My interest in the subject grew as I saw, moment-by-moment, what resulted and what might be possible, as I stood, sat, lay, or crouched (getting a bit nauseated from my cramped contortions), taking photos a few inches or feet from the machine.

What you see in this book isn’t what you could have seen with just the human eye in natural light. For example: without a wide-angle lens and the upward angle at which I aimed it, only a foot from the subject, the cover photo of this book would not have had the sense of space and size, of an expanding “universe,” that I believe it evokes.  Without using flashes to light the machine, you’d see only a small fraction of the color and texture that the flashes revealed.  The flashes also made minuscule specular highlights, which I’ve mostly left, like little stars.

What matters most, though, is the end result — the experience that these photographs create in you.

Too often, we say things like “just a machine” or “just a dumb animal” or “just an ordinary man.” Too often, we think only “beautiful things” are beautiful.  In thinking such things, we can make ourselves bored, disappointed, prideful, even dangerous.  For me, this broken-down, corroded, obsolescent machine proved an inspiration.  The images that grew from it partake of the machine’s components, the components of my past and my psyche, an array of texture and color and shapes, an atmosphere of shadow and silence, and who knows what else from art history, outer space, or the spirit — and now, from whatever gifts you bring to these images, whatever they give back to you.