The last installment of the Personal History Series (#4) ended in 2012. We'll pick up the narrative in 2013.

My life had reached a level of stability that was a real pleasure and that was good for my work. No financial worries and the freedom to travel. My daughter was in a good place too. No longer newly retired, I was photographing, processing, printing and showing work often. I was also still teaching and doing residencies. In fact, in the spring I taught at Penland in North Carolina and in the summer traveled to Iceland for the first time for a five-week residency at the Baer Art Centre in Hofsos. That experience rocked my world, for it was so different and such a very vast place, open and minimal, that it changed my work too. I remember in the early days of being there feeling as though there was nothing I could do that would possibly hold up to the place itself. Eventually, I came around to an understanding that I could make good work there.

That's the Baer Art Centre where we stayed in the lower right

I was showing my work by this time at 555 Gallery in Boston, working with Susan Nalband, the director. She brought to the conversation a sense of adventure and experimentation that was really wonderful. Her inaugural show highlighted my work from Iceland and Alaska fishing pictures by David Mattox.  

Digital photography had been improved once again. By this time I was working with the Nikon D800E, a problematic camera in many respects, but capable of truly wonderful files. 

By this time, I was comfortable with making my work of a wide array of diverse subjects and content, with ideas that embraced relatively straightforward photographs (such as landscape) but also included conceptual work, photographs that deconstructed and challenged conventions, particularly by looking at time (photo time) and shifting perspectives to inform and question the norm. 

I sought to redefine landscape photography or perhaps to bring it into the present day by photographing the same place from the air and on the ground (in the case of Toms Neck , from a kayak).

This work and two other series challenged preconceptions about what is there with evidence that much of landscape photography presents a facade and is two dimensional.

By 2014 I shook things up again.

Monster Moo Cards 

by photographing at a Costume World store in Fitchburg over most of the winter.This work was shown at 555 Gallery the following fall and at the Fitchburg Art Museum the next year.

Along with Monsters there was a great deal of other work, in series and also in single images from this time. Check the Gallery page of the site to see more.