PhotoLA was hectic, the first of three art/photography fairs in Los Angeles in January. From the Thursday night opening, working LACMA's Photographic Art Council booth on Friday morning. Viewing fellow photographers' work at the CENTER/ReviewLA Open Portfolio Night on Friday and dinner after with some awesome photographers. Saturday back to the fair to see some of the work and then the Photographer's Party, organized by my friend Aline Smithson. Then Sunday over to Hancock Park to the Michael Dawson Gallery where about 10 dealers exhibited some amazing classical photography images. It is indeed heaven to share the passion with others.

And today, recuperating as we all probably need to do before the next art event (!). The rains sorely needed here have come. In the break between storms there is light, incredible light.

First: venturing out into the eucalyptus grove where raindrops still hung tenuously from the leaves and strong, intense, WET light illuminated the dramatic trunks.


Then, a friend drove me near dusk out to her house in Malibu to check the sandbags against the dunes. The end of the day. No tripod. But light, as always, conquers all.

Next up: the Los Angeles Art Show, this next weekend. Downtown at the Convention Center. As part of Helen K. Garber's GroupSC2009, I will have some of my work photographing the Santa Monica Airport included in her preview multimedial presentation there. The full show will be this coming April. You can download the press release here.


And best, best: friends who have today won the prestigious and critical writing/design awards from the American Library Association at their annual mid-winter event. While concentrating these past few years on my photography, my career in editing and writing books for youth is never far from my thoughts and I celebrate those whom I am so lucky to know who have risen to the top of this field through hard work, curiosity and incredible talent. Among them: Carmen Bernier Grand, Grace Lin, Tanya Lee Stone.

PhotoLA was hectic, the first of three art/photography fairs in Los Angeles in January.

Light of the Year

The New Year has dawned, emerging from the Blue Moon eve, a light that at midnight on the 31st illuminated the dark spaces outside with a theatrical light, setting the stage for the transition from the year and decade passed to the new beginning. To start us off with words and images:

The words come from famous quotations about years and about time, for is that not what today's reflections are about? They come as well from my own ramble as, during these years of greater concentration on my photographic career, the words I write are more about the process than about a new book. This blog takes the place for now.

As we think about New Year's Resolutions, from JKF: "In its [knowledge's] light, we must think and act not only for the moment but for our time. I am reminded of the great French Marshal Lyautey, who once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow-growing and would not reach maturity for 100 years. The Marshall replied, 'In that case, there is no time to lose. Plant it this afternoon.' "

From Ralph Waldo Emerson: "This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it."

And from Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (I, showing my own "seasoning," remember it from the Byrds):" To every thing there is a season.... "

The season seems tumultuous as has been this last decade. Yet without being simplistic, there is room for us, globally and individually, to change. Let us resolve this now.

On the photography side from Aline Smithson: her blog musings on December 31, speaking about her own work - the value of the single image, not necessarily part of a series, and reflecting upon her own work - are inspiration for me and probably today's blog. Aline's Lenscratch blog in general is a gift to us all. The December 31 blog: http://lenscratch.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-personal-favorites-of-2009.html.

Aline's second gift: in today's blog, evocative, emotional pictures culled by Aline from various photographers (I am one) of their "personal favorite" photo of the year.


My own favorite images come from a spurt of activity, on top of a year of activity, during these incredible Southern California pre-winter months when the light is the clearest and most evocative of each year.

One of the most delightful of the latter: a long afternoon into evening spent on the last Saturday of December right here at Santa Monica Beach as Tyrus Wong, 99 and famed Disney illustrator and amazing artist, once again brings his hand-painted/constructed kites to the beach. The wind was incredibly still and the day started out with a heavy wet marine layer. Not auspicious. However, as we wait and Tyrus brings his handkerchief up again and again to test the wind, at Sunset all changes. The light shimmers. The wind comes up and the remarkable centipede kite is shifted to a new wind direction and... suddenly, it lifts!

A documentary on Tyrus Wong has been made here in Los Angeles and donations are welcome for it to be completed. To help bring the story of this national treasure to the screen, visit http://www.brushstrokesinhollywood.com/. In the interim, Lisa See has written an informative brochure that accompanied Tyrus' retrospective in 2004 at the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles. More photos from the day:



Yesterday afternoon, finishing a photographic project on the Santa Monica Airport for Helen K. Garber's Group SC 2009, (this is from a view at Clover Park)
I feel the need to end the year on a photographic note. Thus I wander over at day's end to the eucalyptus grove in my canyon, historic as the first forestry research station in the US, established in the late 1800's. The rapidly changing light on the eucalyptus trunks offers a poetry of its own. My copyright notice: the first of 2010.




The new year brings us hope always. From resolutions to family to working out the vagaries of inspiration and career, the best is wished for us all.

Light above Palos Verdes at the end of the First New Day.

A wonderful holiday season

The holidays are upon us, bringing joy, reflection and hope to us all. For even as we scramble to complete our personal projects, make our lists for the next year, we have those moments to pause, surround ourselves with the lights and music of the season and comfort ourselves not only with good food and drink, but with our communities of friends and family.

My wishes for everyone are for as productive a year as I have had. Hard working but filled with delights and the satisfaction that, most importantly, those around us are well. And that the New Year will bring us peace, THE goal in this difficult time and one which, if we all participate for greater understanding of each other, is there to be attained.

Sara Jane Boyers

BTW, this image was captured under the Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles Harbor. Taken while participating in an urban "Painting with Light" shoot, created and guided by my friends, Mark Indig & Ken Haber, as part of their Urban Photo Adventures operation.

After a while.

Wow. Nothing since 25 September, almost two months.

Two months of intensive work with both my terrific photo editor, Paula Gillen of Gillen Edits and, best of all, working with my new gallerist (Announcement soon. A good one in Los Angeles and I am honored to have the representation by someone whose eye I trust so much!), to define my work and create several new promotions for it, both for the gallery and for fine art publication as well as museum and other exhibition.

Hard. Revealing. Understanding collaboration - not just an edit but working and adjusting for goals and allowing views I respect to incorporate and change my own work. Again, not unlike the world of publishing BUT, a different art form and I should have expected a different emotion and artistic approach. Thus, lessons thought to be learned needed to be taken in again.

What this is presently all about? MagCloud. Discussed before but being worked seriously now. A magazine, built from "cloud" computing, i.e. totally via the internet where design is uploaded but a real "hands-on" magazine is published in a POD (print-on-demand) format, available by subscription or just an individual online order. Many are creating their own issues here. And I as well, although not so much for subscription but as a series of promotional tools, helping others to better understand, especially with the Chinatowns, the large body of prints from this 9 year+project.

The work was intensive enough to create an entire book, both from edit and design. However for my purposes, the magazine format is better. It can remain current, capable of change in an ongoing project such as this. It provides the capability to informally "publish" the work at different stages of photography and sequencing, permitting others to take a peek into the process as well as making my own formatting and choice of powerful images all the tighter. There is opportunity to have others "guest edit" the same body of work, a concept most intriguing for the Chinatowns.

Here's the cover image of the first issue, brilliantly suggested by Paula:



And then in the midst, as always, other projects. What fun for a photographer to use another photographer! In this case, I asked Martin Cox, both a commercial and fine art photographer, and a fellow member of the Los Angeles League of Photographers (LALOP. See the LALOPBLOGSPOT I write there!) to do a commercial photo shoot for me: To photograph the interiors of a small co-op owned by my family for purposes of marketing it as a rental.

I had fun being the assistant for the day and, while Martin's work is absolutely wonderful and showed this basically unfurnished unit to its greatest advantage - the realtor loves the pics! - the day of the shoot was incredibly overcast. Even though the gray days by the beach are filled with romance and emotion, for a marketing brochure, blue is better. So I worked in post-production to drop in some sky, pics taken by me from that same unit on sunnier days.

Having done so, I loved this YOUTube video from Tim Grey whose daily photographic tips are quite wonderful to receive each morning. Wish I had seen it BEFORE I did my work!

Here's one of Martin's nice clean shots with a little more blue and clarity from another day:

Light of the Day

Down at Venice Beach several times in the last week to photograph for a non-fiction children's book being released in Canada. My friend, Lizann Flatt is the writer. The publisher is in Canada. The editor/packager is in England. They want a family scene, perhaps with surfers.

Different than what I usually do. The first pics sent were too "edgy." The latter fine.

What this has done: on an assignment rather than on my own, I see the beach a different way. Filled with families, I have to curb my tendency to isolate the loneliness of the landscape.

Rather than outside, I am forced to be "in," to speak with my subjects or their parents in order to obtain the requested image. To ask for a release for here, when taking pics of children today, everyone with a zoom lens is looked upon with suspicion. Swallowing my fears, I again am surprised how warmly received is my request. Those who will not appear in the book will get emailed pics from me as thanks. One good deed does indeed deserve another.

At the same time, at the beach in the early am (before school to catch the diehard pre-teen surfers) and in the later afternoon after school on a 100 degree day in LA, I who live within hearing/walking distance to the beach and know well it's marine layer, am yet again caught by the distinct landscapes of only a few hours apart. Here are two of them: albeit different days but characteristic of them both. The first of course: 8am when the layer still is loosely hemmed to the sand and mysterious hidden objects abound. The second: 5pm, the layer burned off all day but returning to warm the night, the waning sun starting to create shadow, and the beach releases the people to their homes and landscape and the birds take over.

New York color

From the spare, quiet vistas of New England to the gloriously intense color of Times Square viewed from the careening taxicab from Grand Central. A couple of hours makes all of the difference.

Two prints, the first a comp of the taxicab ride. The second - a seemingly vintage Clark Kent view of Gotham - from a friend's window downtown and with the high speed, very grainy Leica D-Lux3.

After all this, a full day in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, photographing NYC's third Chinatown followed by a terrific opening in Nolita at Jen Bekman Gallery of her "Hey HotShot! 2009 First Edition."

From there, without my main camera system, I walked back past Little Italy through the Manhattan Chinatown and caught some evocative images with the Leica - no large or even "table" tripod.