One of the few remnants of Manzanar's World War II relocation camp is a small monument, built by Japanese-Americans who were forcibly removed from their homes and interned here. It stands over the camp's tiny cemetery, and the inscription refers to it as a “soul-consoling tower.” I use my frame to abstract the monument, and contrast its verticality to the horizontal thrust of the frame and the horizontal flow of Mt. Williamson in the background. This is an extreme example of counter-framing – forcing vertical subjects into horizontal contexts. This counter-framing both creates tension, and implies meaning. To me, this monument now speaks of the lives and dreams that were never realized because of death.

This was my second visit to this poignant monument. You can see my previous interpretation by clicking on the thumbnail below.

Yellowstone Lake is the largest high altitude lake in North America. It covers 136 square miles, and is more than 400 feet deep. In the summer, its water temperature is a chilly 45 degrees (F) and in the winter it freezes three feet deep. Instead of making a panoramic picture of the lake, which pretty much looks like any other lake, I frame it from the grounds of the old Lake Hotel through the backlit window of a restored vintage bus that has carried Yellowstone visitors on tours for more than 75 years. Using this frame within a frame, I lead the viewer’s eye to the window with the chrome railing on the back of one of its seats. It begins in the lower right hand corner of the image, and runs diagonally towards the lake. I waited for a distant figure to enter my frame in order to give it scale. When a man reached the space between the first two boats along the shore, he completed a series of verticals receding into space – beginning with the left hand edge of the bus window, continuing with the tree, and concluding with the man himself. These verticals, plus the window frame, bus seat, and the distant man as a focal point, energize my frame within a frame to bring the lake to life in this image.

I use my wideangle lens here to create a frame that places several elements into opposition. The lower edge of my frame supports the top of a wall of a house, making it into the base of my image. A single cactus plant climbs the wall as a pointer, its tip barely clearing its top. This cactus appears as a long finger, gesturing to a dazzling sweep of clouds that tie the bottom of the image to the top. The top edge of my frame is a launching pad for the branches of a tree that seem to reach for both the clouds and the cactus. Taken together, we have a layered image that suggests growth, and the time it takes for things to grow.

Once called the National Trails Road, old Route 66 carried travelers in automobiles such as this one from Chicago to Santa Monica. Today this old car stands in front of Barstow’s Mother Road Museum, which houses a vast array of highway memorabilia. Instead of showing what the museum looks like in my picture, I symbolize the nature of the museum by abstracting the old car parked in a symbolic rectangular frame bounded by a power wire and two flags. The car itself is made up of a series of rectangular frames, and so, of course is the frame of the image itself. I’ve created a series of nested frames that relegate this vintage car, as well as the highway it used, to their niche in history.

I began working on this image as a framing exercise, using the left hand edge of the image to slice the red pick-up truck in two in order to create a more incongruously abstract color clash between the red steel truck bed and the lavender building behind it. As I worked on the framing, I saw a woman and girl moving up the street towards me. I wanted until they were squeezed between the back of the truck and the right hand edge of the image and then released the shutter. The resulting photo is charged with tension, created largely by what I left out. The missing cab of the pickup truck forces our minds to imagine it. The people seem to be lunging out of the image – they are so close to the edge that we are moved to wonder what might await them beyond the right hand edge of the frame. The doorway to the lavender building is also a frame of sorts, left stunningly incomplete. It seems as if the top of that frame has been turned into a fragment of what it once had been. The image is a series of abrasions – the stucco in the upper left corner of the frame is peeling away, the front half of the parked truck is gone, its rear part needs repair, and the door frame of the house has been chopped apart. In contrast, the people seem incongruously intact. The little girl wears her best dress, presumably for school. Her book bag is even a near match for the color of the building.

This image is all about framing. The horses incongruously peering out of an antique shop’s display window are framed in a series of squares, with a row of rectangular frames carrying the eye across the top, and a panel of colorful tiles sweeping across the bottom. A separate set of tiles is incorporated in still another frame just to the right of the window. All of these frames were already in place when I arrived, but I arranged them within my own frame, including a bit of the sidewalk and building façade, to lend context to the photograph – with the windows bleeding off the right hand edge of the frame, implying continuation. All of this careful framing draws attention to the horses, gazing at the street and wishing they could come out to play. One begins to wonder if we are looking at a store or a stable here?