I spent five nights last week taking a class at our local fire arts education facility, The Crucible. It’s a great resource in the Bay Area if you want to learn glass blowing, welding, casting, forging or in my case, Neon. I’ve been mildly obsessed with Neon art for a long time. Neon signs have a deep and rich art and science that can’t be met by the abundance of today’s LED dominance. The history and discovery of Neon feels a little like that of tintype. Somehow, someone figured out that if you evacuated the air from a glass tube, introduced an amount of inert Neon gas and hit it with very high voltage, you can get it to glow. To create the fourth state of matter, plasma. And light. I’ve always thought it was beautiful. Lightening in a bottle. Quite literally. Learning how to bend glass to make something tangible, was a humbling experience. Heating a ten millimeter tube to near glowing, to the point where it bends and sags, nearly out of your control, and then coaxing it into something intentional. Eighteen hours of instruction and at the end of the week, I felt like I had just barely had an understanding of what was possible and how to achieve it. I can’t imagine how many hours someone competent in this skill must practice. How many broken and discarded glass tubes must be sacrificed to the learning.
Having an appreciation of the difficulty combined with the knowledge that it’s a fundamentally dying art doesn’t give me a ton of hope for the future of Neon. There are definitely pockets of people keeping it alive, but man, it must take a ton of dedication and sacrifice. To rage against the dying of the light.
And now, on to this month’s photo set.
Cute little story…
A while back, I had a fan reach out and ask if I had any more images of Jasmine in the archives. Realizing I’d never put together a comprehensive set of our work together, I did just that. Jasmine saw my posts about it on Instagram and was was tickled that someone was seeking her out. Coincidentally, she says, she has a trip planned to San Francisco to meet up with a friend from L.A. in a couple weeks. And would I be interested in shooting with the two of them. And the rest is history, seen below. Shot a hand full of tintypes, but it was a pretty gray day. I rarely shoot people together, it was a really fun experience. Probably helps that they know each other so well. Tilly was a blast. I’d happily photograph these women any day.
As a reminder, there is now a print of the month club available, link up top in the menu. Every month, a physical, signed, hand made print sent to your door. Support physical art!
Thank you!!