Penland One 2014
If you've been following this blog you know I have been headed to Penland in North Carolina to teach for two weeks. I arrived yesterday and after unpacking, settling in and having dinner went to a local rodeo in a Burnesville nearby with friends.
Mercedes was there with us:
This morning we headed to Spruce Pine, which is the nearest town of any size, down in the valley where the the freight trains rumble through. For the past two years I've photographed in town every morning before teaching, sometimes bringing a few students with me and sometimes not. Those series are here: Spruce Pine 2012 and Spruce Pine 2013.
Mercedes and I photographed in the most industrial and commercial part of the town,
where, on the one hand you could say that it was a visual desert, devoid of value or aesthetic. On the other: that it was an honest place devoid of anything but function and necessity, where beauty snuck in and prevailed despite the best intentions.
I was able to get above the one or two story shops and buildings to point down.
Structurally, I am going to try to post a blog a day while here, counter to what I said before I left home. The effort is to try to bring you into the class a little and to share with Penland students this process of combining pictures with words as description. We'll see how I do, as it will get very busy as soon as students arrive.
Stay tuned.
Related series
Penland, North Carolina 2012
These photographs were made in late June and early July 2012 on a trip from Boston, where I live, to teach at Penland School of Crafts near Spruce Pine in North Carolina. I drove down there and back, photographing some along the way, but mostly photographed in the small town of Spruce Pine and near to Penland. Each morning at 6:30, often with two or three students along, we would spend a couple of hours photographing in Spruce Pine. The idea of coming back to someplace to photograph, to study it and one’s results from the previous day seemed to resonate with the students and it certainly did for me. Spruce Pine is small, bifurcated into older and newer parts and reflects present day US economics and hard times. It has a railroad that goes right through it, sits in a valley alongside a river and is lush in late June with dark green foliage.
Working this way in North Carolina brought me back to days in my deeper past. There were many road trips spent photographing, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, sometimes with students, pulling over in some little town, walking and shooting what I saw and what seemed worth trying to make into a picture.
Of note here to other photographers is that this is the first group of pictures I have made with a new camera, a Nikon D800E. This is always a love/hate relationship for me, getting used to how a new camera works, how it sees and imposes itself on what I want it to do. No one wants to be stumbling with buttons and controls while taking pictures and, as cameras are now very complex, it takes me a while to feel comfortable with its newness and being unfamiliar.
Spruce Pine, NC 2013
The Spruce Pine, North Carolina pictures come from when I was teaching at Penland School of Crafts in April, 2013. Most mornings I would head out early to town, a few miles away, before class to first have a coffee then walk the town.
This is the same town I made a group of pictures in last year called Penland, North Carolina 2012:
http://nealrantoul.com/projects/penland-north-carolina-2012
