In Search of Treasure Island
“The beauty that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, who could ever clutch it?” Ralph Waldo Emerson
I found the Emerson quote in the new National Geographic book Life in Color. I bought the book a few days before this year’s Treasure Island Musical Festival. I photographed the two previous festivals and I was looking for inspiration. TIMF is a colorful festival and I needed expert photographers to explain color.
I attend this event with one of the vendors, so I do not shoot many of the musicians. When I attended the first time, I was disappointed, but I quickly realized that I was able to see the event better. This year, I took more than 700 pictures each day, which is not many considering how many musicians performed. You can see my edited pictures from 2014 day 1.
I spend most of my day with the artists at the Painted Wonderland body paint booth. These are not your ordinary face painters. Each artist creates an individual design for each person who enters the booth. The designs vary in shape, location and color.
Every year I think that I can edit photos and create a blog post before the second day starts. This year I tried again, but my blog post looked like this. I even edited the blog post on my smartphone the second morning from Treasure Island. While I am learning how to use Smartphones from the festival folks, perhaps I need time to synthesize ideas and images.
In the days that followed TIMF, two influential photographers died. Magnum photographer Rene Burri died at 81 and Elvis Presley’s photographer Alfred Wertheimer died at 86. Burri photographed many artists and other iconic leaders. Wertheimer fled Hitler’s Germany when he was a child and met Elvis twenty years later.
Burri’s early work was in black and white, but he later shot in color. He assembled the book Impossible Reminiscences with 136 photographs and stories about each color (or colour) image. Burri died days after I took this image and it reminds me of a picture of him with his own picture of revolutionary Che Guevara. Burri would probably enjoy how this image interacts with the picture of him with Che.
Alfred Wertheimer was best known for an image called “The Kiss.” While I captured a few images of people kissing, I thought this image with shimmering beauty of a yellow October would be a fitting tribute to Wertheimer. Elvis would probably approve too.
If you want to view more images from 2014 and beyond, you can click on any photo and the gallery will launch. You can also click on this link here to see the picture that was the “feature image from Day 1.” It was extremely yellow. Day 2 photos here.
I have added galleries from the previous two years also. Some people appear in multiple galleries across multiple years.
Treasure Island Music Festival 2013 Day 2
Treasure Island Music Festival 2013 Day 1