support my favorite photographer
my favorite photographer ashley gates just received a liver transplant. if you're able to donate to support her recovery, you can do so here. her work is beautiful and has enriched my life and the lives of many others—it encodes so much color and light, gesture and form, aura and heart. every photograph helps us to hold onto a bit of the world that is otherwise lost and here are three of my favorites of her many masterpieces:
1. october 31, 2020
this is a picture of a man dressed up as the joker from batman approaching the driver's side of a pickup truck at sunset. there are lots of things to love: the balanced composition (even spacing on either side of the truck, the foreground power lines and palm fronds framing the composition), the play of light and color (the purple suit of the joker against the black truck, the dappled sunlight on the brick that adumbrates the distinction between foreground and background, but i think most of all it's the instant of the position that she's captured the joker in—joyfully bustling forward.
2. february 15, 2020
this is another occasional photo, of an aisle at the drug store the day after valentine's day. ashley is a magician of natural light at the edges of its intensity (a world where colors like this is exist is one worth living in despite everything else) and in this one, she doesn't have that superpower, but its absence becomes a presence—the bland gray fluorescence of the store is adumbrated by the brilliance of the red three ways (in the boxes emptied of love candy, the triangular array of spent rose petals, the pants of the subject we only see from below the knee but who still feels palpably like a person because of how the photo captures them with one foot rocked back on its heel, a shoe about to drop)
3. undated
ashley has several photos of this tree (i think over a period of time, in the mode of monet and the rouen cathedral) and this is my favorite one. i think an easy reaction to a photo of a tree is the classic "my kid could paint that" but the specific angle that's chosen here (of the 360 degrees around the tree and the many extra degrees of verticality in pan and tilt) is so crucial—the way it melds together the horizon of the sloping plain and the water in the background, the way it reveals an almost symmetry in the structure of the tree branches. beyond the angle, part of photography is finding the right moment where the light and air are just so and this photo does this (the gradients of the sunrise and its reflection on the water)—i imagine her standing there and waiting for the moment to come and then it does and now we have it forever.
support an artist
1. october 31, 2020
this is a picture of a man dressed up as the joker from batman approaching the driver's side of a pickup truck at sunset. there are lots of things to love: the balanced composition (even spacing on either side of the truck, the foreground power lines and palm fronds framing the composition), the play of light and color (the purple suit of the joker against the black truck, the dappled sunlight on the brick that adumbrates the distinction between foreground and background, but i think most of all it's the instant of the position that she's captured the joker in—joyfully bustling forward.
2. february 15, 2020
this is another occasional photo, of an aisle at the drug store the day after valentine's day. ashley is a magician of natural light at the edges of its intensity (a world where colors like this is exist is one worth living in despite everything else) and in this one, she doesn't have that superpower, but its absence becomes a presence—the bland gray fluorescence of the store is adumbrated by the brilliance of the red three ways (in the boxes emptied of love candy, the triangular array of spent rose petals, the pants of the subject we only see from below the knee but who still feels palpably like a person because of how the photo captures them with one foot rocked back on its heel, a shoe about to drop)
3. undated
ashley has several photos of this tree (i think over a period of time, in the mode of monet and the rouen cathedral) and this is my favorite one. i think an easy reaction to a photo of a tree is the classic "my kid could paint that" but the specific angle that's chosen here (of the 360 degrees around the tree and the many extra degrees of verticality in pan and tilt) is so crucial—the way it melds together the horizon of the sloping plain and the water in the background, the way it reveals an almost symmetry in the structure of the tree branches. beyond the angle, part of photography is finding the right moment where the light and air are just so and this photo does this (the gradients of the sunrise and its reflection on the water)—i imagine her standing there and waiting for the moment to come and then it does and now we have it forever.
support an artist
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