Inception Points- John Reiff Williams

I entered life as a severely bilateral clubfooted baby. Within 2 weeks both legs were being wedged and by the time I was 7, I had had leg braces and 18 osteotomies. So, for the first 7 years, I was preoccupied with being broken and reset 18 times, relearning to walk and navigate the world, constantly adapting to the new me. With these physical limitations on my lower limbs, I gained extraordinary hand, eye and ear coordination. This gave me access to my great love of playing music, the clarinet at 8 years old, and guitar at 10. That was my normal.

 

My first interest in photography began when I was 15 years old. On Jan. 5th 1969, while riding my bicycle to rehabilitate my knee after another surgery, I was struck by a car. Speed of impact: 55 mph. The impact resulted in a 5” splintered femur, broken tibia, fibula, and ankle. I lost

100 oz. of blood internally, and was placed in the hospital for 2 months, trapped like a butterfly to a web, pinned together with weights and pulleys. I was unable to move. My father, a pathologist at the hospital, would visit me during his lunch hour and read Darwin’s The Voyage Of The Beagle aloud to me. That was a great escape from my fixed position; my body was still but my mind was sailing with Charles and seeing the natural world afresh. The next stage was lying on a gurney encased in a body cast for another two months at home. During this period, my mother would wheel me outside to the bird feeder and I asked to use my father’s Exakta camera to photograph the local finches- finches! Being still, the birds would come very close to me without feeling disturbed. So, I observed closely with my camera in hand, and found the backyard bird world around me opening up.

 

Healed but still hurting, I traveled solo that summer with an SLR in hand. First stop, Indiana and working beside my great-aunt on her self-sustaining farm. The journey continued cross country by bus to Montreal, then across Canada by rail and finally down the Pacific coast back to Oakland. All the while, the SLR was by my side. From that adventure I made a photograph (strangely enough, of a bird) that won the grand prize for 2 and 3-dimensional art during my senior year of high school.

 

I began college in the summer of 1972. I entered the Cal State University system with an undecided direction and undeclared major. My father was a pathologist and my mother was a stay-at-home mom with a DDS degree, so there was a lot of parental push towards the medical field. I tracked the pre-med curriculum and worked as hard as I could to keep up. While I could do the coursework, I felt little joy in it. Missing photography, I created my first photographic project, an Independent Study on Mushrooms of the Bay Area. Searching the local urban forests, I found, photographed in situ, and then collected specimen mushrooms for the Botany Department at CSU Hayward. The fieldwork was meaningful and I found I was capable of being self-directed. I set up my first home darkroom, worked towards a methodology for processing and printing the images, gave myself permission to crawl on the forest floor, felt the pleasures of self-reliance and independence, knew both success and failure. I loved the work and the images I made, and my professors did too. This fieldwork showed me I could undertake a project and bring it to fulfillment with my chosen tool, a camera. It also showed me that I had found my calling.

 

In my 46 years as a photographer, I’ve had the pleasure of a formal West Coast art school training: BA (SFSU), MA (CSULA), MFA (USC), two apprenticeships with photographers Ruth Bernhard and Al Weber, and too many photographic workshops and individuals to mention, with the exception of Robbert Flick at USC, who gave me the opportunity to step into the hothouse, learn what questions I should ask and exercise my self-confidence to develop my own solutions.

I was a self-employed, full-time photographer for 26 years until my body broke down and ended all the heavy lifting. In case you were wondering, I would say that the most challenging object to photograph is a golf club; just try to render on film those ebony surfaces and bright metallic highlights at the same time!

Museum Collections:

Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento Ca.

Princeton University Art Museum. Princeton, NJ.

 

Publications:

Peter Gwillim Kreitler, FLATIRON, THE WORLD'S FIRST STEEL FRAME SKYSCRAPER.

IL PRIMO GRATTACIELO IN ACCIAIO AL MONDO (2007)

pp. 219

ISBN: 978-88-88828-63-3

 

Yahr, Jayme (Ed.): TWINKA THIEBAUD and the ART OF THE POSE, Hirmer Publishers, Munich, 2022,

p.30-39, pp.92-102, 109-112, 142-143.

ISBN 978-3-7774-3949-5

 

EXHBITIONS:

 

The North Hollywood Walks Show, Victory Plaza, North Hollywood, CA. 2009. www.flickr.com/photos/johnreiff/albums/72157614699334485

 

The Edge of Collapse-A Photographic Opus by John Reiff Williams

Los Angeles, CA- February 4, 2012 thru March 17, 2012- Thomas Paul Fine Art

 

NO ES BASURA (This is not Trash) Photographs by John Reiff Williams. The eARTHWe Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, CA. 2014.

Video: No Es Basura, by Wolf Burowski, vimeo.com/159849824

 

EXTINCTION (This is not Trash) Photographs by John Reiff Williams. The eARTHWe Gallery at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, CA. 2015-17.

 

WASHASHORES, (This is not Trash) Photographs by John Reiff Williams. The Cultural Center of Cape Cod, MA. 2015.

 

TIME: AN OCEAN, Photographs John Reiff Williams, LeicaLA Gallery, West Hollywood, CA. 2016.

 

TWINKA THIEBAUD and the ART OF THE POSE

JUNE 19, 2022 — SEPTEMBER 11, 2022, CROCKER ART MUSEUM, SACRAMENTO, CA.

  

My wife, Anarda, and I have been married for 43 years. She is my muse, and someday I will publish a book of images of her.

Wherever you are in this world, let us continue to work for peace and enlarge our perception of life.

Thank you for visiting.

 

All photographs and writings under full copyright protection.

© John Reiff Williams, All Rights Reserved

contact info: johnanarda@earthlink.net

 

" "impossible" is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it.

Impossible is not a fact. it's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing. " Mohammad Ali

P.S. 11/9/2024

Poetry metaphor and myth strike (manifest) in mysterious ways. You know that. You don't know where nor why...

In all of my work, and perhaps some of the most ponderous images, like the inversions I make, they come into being because they feel like the most visually articulate way of revealing a narrative. Seeing within things embraces and reveals an otherness, the part that is felt, but not seen. We hold a mirror up to the light and the shadow. What appears solid really isn't. Imperceptible change is everywhere and in everything. The spectrum of what is visible is only a fraction of what lies below, beyond and above it. The origin story is beginning to be revealed...images from the Webb telescope that reach back into spacetime billions of light years (go to the NASA site to see those magnificent images), then there is biological time, genetics and mutation and so on. Sometimes what I see and feel in an objects outward face/ appearance just doesn't marry up with behavior and shape. This idea has such broad application, from mythology to what we inherit from our parents and family to inner personal relationships to psychology... really, to any kind of "reality" influence or story you can imagine.

I feel free and vulnerable to just let the beast tell its own story.

No hammer. Why John? Because we are arranged the way we are, for only a fraction of the millisecond in spacetime that we are given here, this moment. What and how we read and how we interpret things in the future maybe buried forever and not recognized as a pattern of any kind of understanding, And sometimes they do.

In pursuit of stewardship, being responsible and prepared to pass it on.

Love to all

Stardust

John

 

PS

www.flickr.com/photos/johnreiff/54415642977

John Williams

L1020452v.5

 

Dw: Beautiful, painterly rendering.

John Reiff Williams

I don't know about that.. really? Yea but... The means are all photographic and just involve the process of saying something beyond my grasp. Exploring the feeling part, the self expression of things is a main preoccupation. I looked at this base image many ways.. color. black and white, inversion and sometimes a combination of those renderings reorders and bring to the surface something I never expected. So surprise, change, driving over a cliff, these are always options. I am just trying to follow. Some undetermined flow just for fun. In the long run, I hope to make images that are durable.. visually curious and as a window to your heart, mind and life.

I just want to keep growing and challenging my own precepts.

Dw, we are both in this for the long game.

Play on

John

Pt 2 Sleeping on it...

I think what I have written, so far, addresses the means or the tools I might employ to reveal some unapparent character that is felt but not much about what is seen. So perhaps what I am thinking now is about an intersection of painting and photography.

Painting has the capacity to reconsider pretty much every thing that is pictured, optics, scaling, sizings, relationships, inclusions, exclusions, hue, value, chroma, orientation,... et al. In photography, what I outlined above as imaging techniques are a way of comparing, contrasting, revealing, and expressing an order of character and behavior not seen in a single capture. I think this is what investigating and mapping an idea, exploring an image, ( or in analog days... exploring the negative) involves. I think I just do this by nature, but why? I am not looking for pretty. I am looking for a reveal and visualizing traces of that influence in a piece. I just don't know what manifestation or form that will be...and what makes the process part of image making fun and important. Many of my pieces involve including the evidence of foot steps leading in and out of an image, components of life and death, or the "state" of things (a residue or tracery aspects (manifestations) of TIME in a capture. This "state" may be evidenced or referenced to a condition of development or the age of something ( an object or some aspect of Time itself). To make that "state" more prescient I might bring into play some of this tracery evidence of "from where" and "to where" things are going and where they came from. SO, I am intent on sticking a pin in things but not putting a bow on it. There must be: Mystery. Surprise. The unexpected. The unresolved and somewhere... a reveal of some visceral tensions.

Perhaps what I have written is a glance of what painting and photography share, but the tools and language are as different as the resolves (limited by pallet or skill level) but the fundamentals are all visual idea based...

Painting is not bound nor dependent on TIME. This is an elective of painting. And so to choose time as a component opens painting into the same palette as photography, sort of... at least ideomatically and not necessarily bound to expressing it linearly or literally the way photography is just nailed down to it.

So "Time" becomes an enormous "sorting hat" as to what is capable of being expressed within painting and photography medium. We share length and width and the rest is optional.

 

I wonder if creativity is really bound to degrees of being blindfolded to our subconscious. I hope so. I am thinking of some marvelous art from children. They just let it flow and ride that wave.

 

I have a friend whom one day said "Johnny, you live in pictures" This is a rather hauntingly deft observation.

I am naked

John