Shirley 3
This post follows Shirley 2, about a series of photographs I made this past winter 2023.
Sometimes people criticize my series work for some of the pictures in the series not sustaining the overall tone or intensity of others in the group. I get that, but believe they are not seeing the whole picture, pun intended. Just as in musical composition, there needs to be rhythm and pacing. This picture is one of those, a breather and a setup for what is to follow. As it turns out our frontal empty house had more behind it. We can see that now on the left of the frame. With empty space in the middle, we can see where we are headed on the right, there is the hint of a fuel tank of sorts and a fenced-in propane tank too. Not a stand-alone picture but necessary to link what precedes with what is to come.
Bang! What an insult of a photograph! Very little subtlety, two trucks in your face. Nothing refined, so far from any apparent artistry. Clearly we are no longer up the street at the house Daddy made for Mama. We are in front of a family business with two oil trucks. There is nothing here that looks at all prosperous and this is born out by what comes next.
I've done this before, working to take us out of our comfort zone and into a more mundane and practical world.
Cambridge, 1994
Hershey, PA 1996
We'll finish this post here, with only two more pictures to finish the series. Of note again, after working on the files for a bit, starting to make some prints, wrestling with how they should look, I went back to Shirley thinking I could maybe fill the series out, that perhaps I'd find something to deepen it and extend it. Not to be found, as it turned out. Actually, it was plain wrong. I struggled with that, wanting more but having to realize that what I'd had that first day was it and there was nothing more. My favorite quote from Kurt Vonnegut,"And so it goes."
On to Shirley 4.
Related series
Shirley, Massachusetts
See page 1 for a description of this work. Prints are 25 x 17 inches on Red River Polar Matte.
Printed in an edition of five.
Nantucket, Massachusetts 1980
The Nantucket pictures are the first “series” I did. Made, over 30 years ago, it is amazing that making this one modest group of pictures began a whole career.
I was teaching a summer photography workshop on the island of Martha’s Vineyard and took the students on a field trip to Nantucket for the day for a change of pace. When the ferry landed, I told the students to go make pictures and I would see them late in the afternoon to head back to Martha’s Vineyard. Off they went and so did I.
I had no real idea that something major was going to happen but it was one of those times when much of the work I had done until then was preparing me for how I would photograph that day. It was right: the light, the scale, the camera, my seeing, my effort to try to make a group of pictures that would connect to each other in a specific sequence to make a whole that was larger than its individual parts. After a few hours and several rolls of film I knew I’d had a breakthrough and broke down in tears when telling my experience to a friend on the ferry ride back home. Several months later the prints were finished and the next year they were shown in a summer group show at Light Gallery in NYC and in a one-man show at the RI School of Design Museum in Providence, RI. But more important to me was that I had found a way to make pictures that still serves me well today.
