Several years ago I wrote a piece about sitting in my home in Cambridge in early December working on picture files as the season's first snow began.

The essay formed the foundation for a book we made called: Trees, Sand and Snow

Well, it is now early December and the forecast is predicting a rapid drop from the upper 50's tonight to big wind and freezing temperatures with the possibility of flurries tonight.

In the book, each of the three chapters is preceded by a one-page piece that is my effort to tie these three separate bodies of work together using time as the overriding principle. This is my essay for the third chapter called Snow:

I was a little shaken by the power of the two groups of pictures I’d made on Martha’s Vineyard that day. When back home in Cambridge, a few hours away from the island, I did what I have done so many times before. I worked the files. This simply means getting the pictures I made into the computer, working on them with a few types of software and printing them. The room I do this on at my home looks out on my condo’s tiny back yard and over a fence into my neighbor‘s, which is larger. One afternoon a few days before Christmas, as I was working on the photographs I’d shot from Squibnocket, I looked up from the computer monitor to see that it was snowing. This was the first snow of the season and, as it was cold, it was coming down in small light flakes.

I always love the first snow in New England, the clean smell of the air, the quiet it brings. As the snow started to stick and accumulate I started thinking about where I might go photograph that afternoon. I am still in a place where I am so appreciative of having this freedom to just get the camera and go whenever I want. I’ve been retired from teaching for 5 years. At any rate, I headed just a mile or so away to the City of Cambridge’s skate park, a new park for the city and built under the elevated Rt 93 as it comes down into Boston, across the river. I’d been photographing the park for some time, both with people using it and not. I knew this day with the snow sticking no one would be there.
I arrived and the snow was slowly building up to cover everything and make the form, steps, ramps and curves disappear under its blanket. But not yet.
I started to work, much in the way I had photographed the laid bare sand at Squibnocket two weeks before. Just as I did then, I photographed the overall and then moved in to look at the small. Here I had to be careful and plan my approach so as to not find my footprints in my pictures. Pristine and pure, the skate park was becoming increasingly obscured by the snow falling. Time again played a part in the making of these pictures, the contrast of the exposed beach being covered over by the rising sea and the skate park disappearing under the blanket of snow. Just as the ocean had receded to show the sand below the snow was drifting down from above to cover the skate park that afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Time is a big concept in photography because often we freeze it in a fraction of a second to stop time and motion or spread it over a period of seconds or minutes to blur or make our pictures spread through time.
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In conclusion, these three chapters called Trees, Sand & Snow exist due to time’s prevailing place in all things we do in this life on this planet. Reaching 70 years old, looking back at my career as a teacher, an artist and a father, the pictures I made on Martha’s Vineyard and Cambridge stand for me as symbols of, quite simply, the character of time through life.

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