Harold Davis's Blog, page 12

My Work Since the Pandemic (Live Event in NYC)

Please consider joining me at B&H NYC for a live event on Thursday January 25, 2024 at 1pm ET. The presentation is My Work Since the Pandemic: A Special In-Store Event with Harold Davis. Click here for more information, and to register for the event (seating is limited so preregistration is recommended). The presentation description follows below.

Morning Comes Softly © Harold Davis

In this presentation, artist, photographer, writer, and educator Harold Davis will show the trajectory of his stunning work in the past few years since the annus horibillus in 2020.

Harold states: “In 2020, the global pandemic changed the world forever. For me, as for many of us, the impact was both professional and personal. As the world closed down with lock-downs, many of my professional options curtailed.

“But despite the troubled times, the years since 2020 have been creatively productive for me, with professional accomplishments including the publication of my books Creative Garden Photography and Composition & Photography, adaption of my work as postage stamps by the USPS and being awarded the coveted Progress Award by the Photographic Society of America in 2022 largely for my high-key light box techniques. In 2021, I started traveling with my camera again, bringing groups to Iceland and France, and working both close to home and around the world.”

Harold will show his work and discuss his pandemic experience with the benefit of hindsight. In addition, participants will gain insight for their own creative process:

Opportunities in difficulties, and how to turn limitations aroundStaying creative in tough timesEnriching one’s work, with Harold’s Photographing Flowers for Transparency as a case in pointGenerating creative photography, and staying creativeHow to stay happy and enthusiastic about one’s work even when the world doesn’t seem ready for itMoving on: Where do we go from here?

New U.S. Postage Stamps

I am proud to have five of my images reproduced in 2024 as United States postage stamps. As you can see, these are “miscellaneous” low denomination stamps, with values of one cent, two cents, three cents, five cents, and ten cents. Thanks to the USPS art director Ethel Kessler, the number of blossoms in each stamp image very cleverly matches the value of each stamp. The text of the announcement follows below.

A new series of low denomination stamps will debut in 2024. Each stamp will showcase a different flower design: 1-cent fringed tulip, 2-cent daffodils, 3-cent peonies, 5-cent red tulips and 10-cent poppies and coneflowers. Photographer Harold Davis combines innovative technology with digital painting and photographic techniques to arrive at his unique floral designs. These stamps will be available in panes of 20 and coils of 10,000. Ethel Kessler, an art director for USPS, designed the stamps.

Cup Noodles Museum

When I first heard about the museum in Yokohama honoring Cup of Noodles instant soup, Nissin Food Products, and Momofuku Ando, the company’s founder and the inventor of instant ramen my assumption was that this was a rinky-dinky, dusty, and somewhat laughable enterprise. Nothing could be further from the truth: the museum is a well organized, slick, and entertaining world-class operation. The Cup Noodles Museum is well worth a spot on anyone’s Japan itinerary, particularly if you are traveling with kids.

Never Give Up © Harold Davis

The museum’s website opines that “here you will gather the knowledge that inspires invention and discovery and find the creativity within you by seeing, touching, playing, eating, and having fun.”

Cup Noodles Museum © Harold Davis

The challenge that Momofuku-san embraced was to feed a hungry nation in the impoverished post-war years (he started tinkering with the prepation and packaging in the late 1940s). As I remember well from my graduate school and long-distance backpacking days, its hard to beat the cost or ease of preparation of an instant cup of chicken noodles, and it is also hard to imagine a world without chicken ramen in a cup. 

Oodles © Harold Davis

Again from the museum website: “Momofuku Ando dedicated his entire life to thinking about food in new and creative ways. Throughout his 96 years, his [sic] practiced creative thinking and never quit until he achieved his goal.” Here’s to you Momfuku-san, a toast in chicken noodle ramen, and here’s to creativity!

Noodle Hero © Harold Davis

Cup Noodles Museum

When I first heard about the museum in Yokohama honoring Cup of Noodles instant soup, Nissin Food Products, and Momofuku Ando, the company’s founder and the inventor of instant ramen my assumption was that this was a rinky-dinky, dusty, and somewhat laughable enterprise. Nothing could be further from the truth: the museum is a well organized, slick, and entertaining world-class operation. The Cup Noodles Museum is well worth a spot on anyone’s Japan itinerary, particularly if you are traveling with kids.

Never Give Up © Harold Davis

The museum’s website opines that “here you will gather the knowledge that inspires invention and discovery and find the creativity within you by seeing, touching, playing, eating, and having fun.”

Cup Noodles Museum © Harold Davis

The challenge that Momofuku-san embraced was to feed a hungry nation in the impoverished post-war years (he started tinkering with the prepation and packaging in the late 1940s). As I remember well from my graduate school and long-distance backpacking days, its hard to beat the cost or ease of preparation of an instant cup of chicken noodles, and it is also hard to imagine a world without chicken ramen in a cup. 

Oodles © Harold Davis

Again from the museum website: “Momofuku Ando dedicated his entire life to thinking about food in new and creative ways. Throughout his 96 years, his [sic] practiced creative thinking and never quit until he achieved his goal.” Here’s to you Momfuku-san, a toast in chicken noodle ramen, and here’s to creativity!

Noodle Hero © Harold Davis

Yokohama Night and a tale of laundry

I made both these images of Yokohama at night from the balcony of my 50th story hotel room.  The hotel lobby is on the 46th floor; you take a special elevator to get there. I think there are regular apartments up to the 46th floor in this tower. The view from the balcony is stunning and a little vertigo inducing. The photo (far below) of the boat is in the Yokohoma Maritime Museum.

Obviously, there are things to be said about the contrast in Japan between the many places redolent of the past (like Miyajima, for example, although less touristic locations also abound) and bustling cities like Yokohama with apparently endless construction as far and as high as the eye can see. I mean to opine on this topic at some point, but for now I want to shift gears and tell you about my adventure with the clothes washer.

Yokohama Night 1 © Harold Davis

One reason I picked this hotel was that my “suite” was advertised as having a clothes washer, something that after a week of fairly hard travel I was sorely in need of. There was indeed a hyper-modern washer in a closet in the bathroom, with instructions in Japanese. I was able to get it open and dump my clothes into the tumbler, and even that seemed like an accomplishment, but that was as far as my deductive abilities went since pushing random buttons did nothing.

Yokohama Night 2 © Harold Davis

So I called the front desk, and they sent up the housekeeper, who showed up right away. I explained that I wanted to wash on cold, which is the right thing to do with most of my travel clothes (merino wool deserves to be hung dry!). Well, it couldn’t be done: this unit only washed and dried! You could just dry, or wash and dry, but you couldn’t just wash.

I had been wondering about hanging my wet laundry, as a balcony on the 50th floor seemed perilous, and there was no obvious drying rack in the room. Furthermore, the housekeeper told me, it would take two or three hours once the cycle started.

Yokohama Nippon Maru © Harold Davis

All well and good. Proceeding seemed to be the best I could do, and the housekeeper showed me how to get started. But I was concerned for my hiking socks and other delicates. So at about the two-hour mark I decided that things had been in there long enough. The nice house keeper lady had showed me where the Stop button lived, and I pressed it. At first, the machine, which gave off waves of heat, kept on spinning. Not one to give up, I kept on pressing Stop, and finally the machine gave in.

The next challenge was to get the door open. This did not prove to be trivial, but after a few minutes of button pushing, both random and otherwise, and futilely trying brute force, I was at last reunited with my clean laundry, in as good shape as can be expected when you run stuff that should be hung to dry through the washer.

I’m not sure what the moral of all this is. I keep running into machines in Japan, from toilets to places where you buy train tickets, and now this washer-drier thing, that think they know better what I want than I do (the toilet story is one for the ages, but another time). Their time is coming, and I guess I better be nice to our future overlords now. If the machines think that my clothes should be laundered in a certain way, or that I should be cleaned in unmentionable locations, who am I to say anything other than “Domo arigato”?

5-Story Pagoda

I spent the day on Miyajima Island, which is a pretty wonderful place. I told Phyllis it was like Sausalito with a bit of religion, tame deer, and 300,000 oysters added into the mix. One could also point to Mont Saint-Michel or Coney Island, for that matter. This is the island that is home to the famous Torii gate that is often used in the iconography that is shorthand for Japan (see photo below).

5-Story Pagoda © Harold Davis

The ancient 5-Story Pagoda sits on a small hill behind the famous Torii. I got under the eaves of the pagoda, and with my camera on tripod, and the camera set for maximum depth-of-field, photographed up towards the sky, capturing the eaves of all five floors.

O-Torii © Harold Davis

Pretty Train

At Kanazawa Station, on my way to Hiroshima, I saw this pretty train on a local track. I don’t really know what it was about, but it seemed to be families boarding the train. Each time a family approached the boarding area they were welcoming, and a photo was made.

Pretty Train © Harold Davis

Atomic Bomb Dome, Hiroshima

The atomic bomb dome is the only structure left even partially standing after the detonation of the first atom bomb over Hiroshima. This structure, built in 1915 with a gorgeous green dome, was an event space used for expositions. Its partial survival, while 140,000 people around it and their dwellings were reduced to ash, was due to the physics of being at the epicenter under the bomb drop.

Today the atomic bomb dome is a Unesco World Heritage site and part of Hiroshima Peace Park. It is preserved in a state of arrested decay as a reminder of the horror of the deed, and of the horror of war.

I have to wonder: the world is such a marvelous place, and people can be so giving and kind. Why, then, do we do this to ourselves, almost set in a loop on repeat, and create a hell in heaven’s despite?

Atomic Bomb Dome, Hiroshima © Harold Davis

Sushi Made by Harold

I had a lesson in making Temari sushi at In Kenazawa House. This kind of sushi is a specialty of the Kenazawa region, and based on small, round balls that were the playthings of Geishas. It was great fun making these; but, I think, even more fun eating them!

Sushi I Made © Harold Davis

Related story: Noriko tries to poison me.

Coming into Kanazawa

Following a long “day” of travel I am now in Kanazawa, Japan. I use the term “day” somewhat notionally: I started early Wednesday morning California time and arrived at my hotel in Kanazawa after dark on Thursday. For me, this was all one long day (thanks International Dateline!).

Kenrokuen Garden, Kanazawa © Harold Davis

My trip involved many vehicles: car to the airport, airplane to Seattle, flight to Tokyo’s Haneda airport (if you are wondering, I changed planes to make frequent flier miles work), airport shuttle bus at Haneda from Terminal 3 to Terminal 2, bus to the plane on the tarmac, domestic flight from Haneda airport to Komatsu airport, bus from Komatsu to Kanazawa Station, taxi to my hotel.

Speaking of my hotel, which is really very nice, the room has four remote controls (not counting the television): Air conditioning, Bathroom air conditioner, Humidifier, and (of course) the multifunction toilet. The controls for these remotes are (again of course) in Japanese; the hotel very kindly gave me a sheet with the English translations. Thanks to the not-lost-in-translation cheat sheet, I can work all of these devices, but I must say the toilet has a mind of its own. Perhaps it has been infected with artificial intelligence or something, but that is a story for another day.

Today (Friday in Japan) I wandered with my camera in the grounds of Kanazawa Castle, and the famous Kenrokuen Garden, altogether superb.