Tent-Camera Image: View of Monet's Garden #1, Giverny, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: View of Monet's Garden #2, Giverny, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: View of Monet's Garden #3, Giverny, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: Yew Tree in Monet's Garden, Giverny, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: Water Lilies in Monet's Water Garden, Giverny, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: Water Lilies in Monet's Water Garden #2, Giverny, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: View of Monet's Water Garden #1, Giverny, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: View of Monet's Water Garden #2, Giverny, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: View of Monet's Water Garden #3, Giverny, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: View of Monet's Water Garden #4, Giverny, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: View of the Epte River #1, Near Giverny, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: View of the Epte River #2, Near Giverny, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: View of the Seine River, Near Vetheuil, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: View of the Seine River #2, Near Vetheuil, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: Poppy Field #1, Near Vetheuil, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: Poppy Field #2, Near Vetheuil, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: Poppy Field #3, Near Vetheuil, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: Field and Clouds, Giverny, France, 2023

Tent-Camera Image: Apple Tree, Vetheuil, France, 2023

Field of Flowers, Near Vetheuil, France, 2023

Pictures on the Ground: In the Terrain of Monet

After Monet is a project I began in France during the summers of 2015 and 2016 in Monet’s Gardens in Giverny, Rouen and other regions along the Normandy coast where he painted. In an effort to continue this project, I went to the south of France in July of 2022 with my Tent/Camera to walk and photograph in the fields of Arles, St Remy and other parts of Provence where van Gogh painted. I designed my Tent device to allow me to project, via a periscope, an image of the nearby landscape onto the ground inside the tent. I then use a digital camera to photograph this “sandwich” of ground and view together in one picture. With these optical tools and visual ideas in mind I wanted to be inspired and soak up something of what van Gogh may have seen and felt in his walks.

In June 2023, in order to pursue my project further, I went back to Giverny and Vetheuil where Monet lived and painted. His landscape work interests me a lot because of his emphasis in linking seeing and painting. In his work these two things are inseparable!

While I don’t intend my pictures to be replicas of these painter’s work, I did want to wander in their terrain and incorporate part of what they saw into my own pictures. Undoubtedly, my photographs also suggest the look of many other painters and photographers who worked in France during the mid-19th century. Painters such as Corot, Millet, Courbet, Diaz de la Peña and early photographers like Gustave LeGray, Eugene Cuvelier, John Beasley Greene show up in my pictures too. Knowing full well how hard it is to escape the influence and the temptations of these artists, I am grateful to have found a slice of freedom to make my own kinds of pictures. It’s satisfying to see that what I have come up with contains some interesting new versions of the light and the land, now so familiar, in paintings and photographs so newly and beautifully rendered by artists from the past. The feeling of sharing a common ground with them thrills me.

TENT/CAMERA Technical Notes

My Tent/Camera is made of a simple light-proof material that wraps around a large adapted tripod that has a plate on top which holds two devices:

1: A 90-degree prism with a lens attached (diopter) This prism acts like a periscope projecting an image of the nearby landscape on the ground below. The focus of the projected image can be adjusted by raising or lowering the height of the tent-Technically this has the effect of changing the focal length of my lens attached to the prism. This makes it possible to achieve discrete focused areas of the image.

2: Next to the prism on top is a digital camera looking straight down and focused on the ground. A picture made this way shows, both the granular details of the ground -stones, grass, dirt cement, etc. plus an added projected vista of the landscape giving the overall result an illusion of a painterly patina that I like. The camera is connected to a laptop computer outside the tent which allows me to compose, see and focus an image with precision.

While I know that technical explanations alone do not fully convey my deeper artistic reasons for exploring reality this way, I think that it is important to outline clearly how this device works and, in a sense, express what I am after. The evolution of photographic technology, since its invention in 1839, has always been tied to the artistic vision and ambition of its practitioners. My aim in this work is to ground myself in new realities.

On the recent trip to the north of France in June 2023 my assistant, Max LaBelle and I experimented to find new ways to use our device. At times we got very close to some things in the landscape such as flowers in Monet’s garden which lets us render them very out of focus (almost like abstract explosions) against the more focused background where plants are more readable further in the garden. In every one of these pictures there is always the presence of a tightly focused ground under the tent with its pebbles, grass. stony paths, dirt and multiple other things. It is this sort of visual polyphony that excites me,

My pictures show what was there in front and under me. Nothing that was not there has been added. I do believe that the reality of the world seen through various lenses and temperaments surpasses anything that I might want to invent.

Process video of the making of Tent-Camera Image: Poppy Field #1, Near Vetheuil, France, 2023. Video by Dante Baies.