Twenty years ago I made a series of photographs in Portland, Maine. The series is on my site here. It might be helpful if you looked at those first, as they are the frame of reference this new work is based upon.

When I wrote several blogs about the work I discussed the photographs and their timing, the pictures made as the last snow was melting in March and the fact that it was the first group like this I'd made in several years. The posts start here.

Last weekend I drove to Portland from Cambridge on the twentieth anniversary of when I made the first pictures, stayed in a motel and photographed in about the same neighborhood I had in 1996 on a cold, bright and cloudless March morning to see what was different and what was the same. Not only different and the same about the neighborhood but different and the same about me too.

March 1996 Portland Maine

March 2016 Portland Maine

It was a humbling lesson.  I did not try to duplicate pictures or try to survey exactly where I'd been two decades ago. That would be dull, predictable and too much like a survey, for I am an artist not a  documentarian. But I did want to be in the same area, with similar light and then see what happened.

It was very cold and very early, the light as sharp, clean and crystalline as any I've ever seen with strong sunlight and deep shadows filtered and channeled by the buildings.

2016

Why would I presume that I could be as "sharp and clean" as I was twenty years ago? Was I trying to regain my more youthful self? Presuming that I could perceive and render with decisiveness? No. I was there to see if I could muster the forces inside to make relevant statements, to see if I had wit, perception, clarity and design in hand, to measure the level of my game. But I was also there to see if my perception of what a picture was had changed in the context of this familiar territory. We all agree we are the same person we were twenty years ago and yet we are not as well. There is so much that happens to us that changes us. Would this be perceptible in the pictures I made?

2016

2016

2016

I don't know that I can answer that, yet. 

Funny to have pictures you made twenty years ago rattling around in your head when you are making pictures now in the same place. Certainly I could work to repeat myself but that is something I have no interest in. Have you gone back to something you did in the past to re-realize it, to re-aproach it? Maybe its my being 69 years old at work here, I don't know. But this thing I am trying certainly has its challenges built in.

What did I find? I found that I learned that re-obtaining the feeling of exhilaration and magic of those pictures I made twenty years ago did not come so easily. Just because a veteran like myself points a camera at something with intent and purpose doesn't make it any better than pictures made by someone completely inexperienced and clueless. In fact, the very nature of having made pictures in the past that were good carries the weight of presumption and makes photographing now more difficult. Call it baggage. I did make one or two that day that sing but will clearly have to work longer and harder than just one March morning to make a new series that will be truly good. Scratch the idea that I can bring a high level of insight to reality at the flick of a switch, on call. I never could and I certainly can't now. As I said, humbling, but exactly as it should be. 

What a truly odd thing to be doing! To be standing out there on the sidewalk in 20 degree freezing sunlight on an early Saturday morning in March, pointing the camera at the side of a house and banking on the premise that I am perceptive, endowed with ability and discernment, able to speak of larger issues in this very small sphere of place and time. No wonder artists are so misunderstood!

2016

1996

A footnote about the tools I used: I found myself obsessing less about what I used. I did use a camera with a wider lens than I did in 1996 and a 5:4 rectangle for shape  to contain the width and exposure settings to try to favor the highlights so as to keep them from overexposing as they were very bright. This meant I lost some detail at times in the shadows. So be it. I was also framing looser as if what was on the edges needed less overt control or that I felt it was okay not to overthink it. 

Now that I am feeling better since hip surgery 5 weeks ago I've been shooting a little (but I still can't get through a full day as my endurance isn't up to where it needs to be), printing and I find myself in a few meetings as well.

I met this past week with the new-since-last-September curator of photography Sarah Kennel at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. Sarah came to my studio to look at my work. This was the first time we'd met. Sarah comes to the PEM from nine years at the National Gallery in Washington, DC.

We had a great time. I used to dread these presentations, feeling nervous and insecure and probably wanting too much from one meeting. But I realized over the past few years that I really enjoy them now. What a great opportunity to have a one on one with someone who has invested in spending the time to look at your work, to discuss it and to fit it into a larger sphere historically, culturally and aesthetically.

Sarah was terrific; telling stories, looking with real concentration at the work and sharing from her own experiences both in Washington but also in her new position. 

When someone has had a long career such as myself it is challenging to know what to show a curator for the first time. What I do now is ask them to choose a few portfolios from the gallery page on my site. That's just what Sarah did and she listed them in an email before we met so that I could make sure the portfolios were ready to view when she arrived. We started that morning with the Oakesdale Cemetery series from the mid 90's (here). This was a good choice as it brought Sarah into an approach to making photographs that spans over forty years of making series work. While Oakesdale is certainly not the first of the series work it is as close to seminal as anything I've done.

(When we laid out the book the designer and I used four from Oakesdale Cemetery for the cover of  my monograph published in 2006.)

From there Sarah and I moved on through a few portfolios she had mentioned she wanted to look at. After those I had pulled two more I hoped she'd be willing to see. This can be tricky as people get fatigued by looking at too much work. Invariably they say that they can look at more but one can only absorb so much. So what we did was too look at one series that were lighter, simpler, perhaps prettier or less substantive. These gave us a chance to simply enjoy pictures without needing to do any heavy lifting. The pictures were the aerials from Martha's Vineyard known as "Waves" (here). They are simply a visual and sensual delight and gave us a nice break. This led us to a discussion of Sarah's move from D.C. to the North Shore of Boston late last summer and how she has yet to explore the area with her family. She is from California. Can you imagine being new to this area? So beautiful here. She has much to discover.

For the last series, as we were well into our second hour and we both had commitments coming up that same day, I chose to show her the Benson Gristmill Series I made last fall (here). Why those? Because they show the way I am working in series now as opposed to the Oakesdale work from 1996 made twenty years ago. Hopefully, the refinement shows. They are very much "the same but different". The same: black and white, high print quality, tightly sequenced and describing a walk through a given and defined space. Different: digital, rectangles instead of squares, a wider lens, bigger prints and a different sensibility informed by what photography is now and my perception of it that has been altered by the past twenty years. The Gristmill series is also very dense and takes real concentration. Sarah gave it her full attention.

BTW: I wrote a couple of posts about the series after I printed them:

Benson Grist Mill

Benson Grist Mill Part ll

This was one Sarah liked very much.

Unusual for me to admit this but as we were looking over the last few prints in the series I shared my lack of resolution about how to end the body of work. Sarah had an idea that made a whole lot of sense, why the series should end a certain way. Now the last image in the series is this one:

The reasoning is hard to appreciate on a small monitor on line but the print drives the point home. The prints in this series are made on 22 x 17 inch paper. Only the center branch and leaves are sharp in this image, as though the intent is to hone in on one small part. This is something photography can do so very well. Notice the way the photograph is laid out, the out of focus building in the back serving as the backdrop for the small leaves in the foreground, the two trees there to frame the image. It's a fitting end to the series for the whole body of work is about this, this hyper way of looking at things, something so many of us do as we really photograph, as we turn our attention to the ordinary with a heightened sense of awareness.

I have Sarah to thank for this revelation. She found a strong conclusion rather than something that read like a run-on sentence. That's it right there. What good curating is like. You know how an author really needs a good editor? Well, that's it. Often artists need good curation. 

Thanks to Sarah Kennel for a wonderful and insightful meeting. I look forward to more.

Ever dribble sand at the beach to make a sand castle? 

That's what I think of with these photographs of Pudding Rocks.

I just put these on the site: here

These photographs fit into the category of "series made but not added to the site yet." Now they are.

These were made on a sabbatical leave-based trip to Las Vegas for a Society for Photographic Education(SPE) conference in the winter of 2001. I flew out a week early, rented a Jeep and headed east to places like Escalante, Hite and Hanskville, Utah to photograph. I was working in 8 x 10 and 120mm formats, in black and white.  I was photographing mostly along the edges of Lake Powell, but did spend a couple of days in Moab, the first of many trips to shoot there.

These are a sequenced series, as most of my projects are.

The Pudding Rocks pictures came at a time when I was still working serially in this format. This is the same camera and the same fixed focal length lens I used to make numerous other series: Nantucket, Yountville, Oakesdale Cemetery, Summerhill, GA, Portland, ME and so on. I believe what I thought when I discovered these amazing rocks was that there was an inherent challenge in working with something very different within the given discipline that I established and defined a good twenty years earlier. Plus they were so fluid and organic compared to the others which were man made, rigorous and fixed.

I think as I grew older and more secure in my position as an artist I also was stretching out some, secure enough to take risks more. After all, at this point I had no shows, no gallery, no curators clamoring to see work, no publishing coming down the line, so why not? What I did was to simply make pictures of things I wanted to, with no real thought of consequences, the politics of photographing this or that, the implications of, in this case, photographing something as cliche'd and over done as weird rock formations out in the dessert. So, I made these out of  genuine interest in these incredible forms, not through some calculated, pre-thought out rating as to their place in my life's work. Thank goodness I had the freedom to do just that.

This is an aside but be careful what you wish for. Because of almost a complete lack of notoriety I was completely free to follow any and all ideas I had about making pictures. Of course, I had shows, did present work to people in decision making capacities and so on, but had I been more successful I would have had a harder time making the pictures I wanted to. Gallery and museum exhibitions past and future can impose a certain mind set that is different, a certain pressure to think through pictures you made and are making with a biased view. We all seek approval, someone's nod that this is really good or beautiful or significant. But watch out for this, this seeking of praise for your work. It really shouldn't have anything to do with the work, should it?

Friend and colleague Alison Nordstrom has written about this  in terms of my work but it is relevant here: I wanted to see what these would look like as photographs, more specifically as photographs made by me. These whites, these grays, these blacks, these forms, these marks, this weight, this sky, this depth, this juxtaposition, these textures. This is a sheer pleasure thing, based upon a love of my chosen medium, the extraordinary thing it can do in the hands of someone who knows what he/she is doing.

Again, the full series is on the site. 

Cliche'd, insipid, stale, boring, trite and done to death?

Or rich and full, redolent with meaning and beauty, elegant and significant?

Light. There was light here, in the flare from the sun trying to break out to the right. As it turned out this was a failed attempt as it went back behind the clouds.

This is the third post I am writing to analyze the series called Hershey, PA, a group of pictures I made in 1997. 

I use lens flare sometimes to connote something surreal or to draw attention to the act of making a picture using a camera, as opposed to this being a literal rendition of a place. It is not. It is an artist's interpretation of a place.  Flare is stoppable usually, by throwing a shadow in front of the  lens. It is what a lens shade is for. Sometimes I'll make two, one with flare and one without and then decide later which one to use.

This is a "hinge" picture in that it is the last time we'll refer to the pictures in the series that are the ones of the barns that were black in any kind of substance.  The barn on the left is the same one we've seen before twice, cut in half. The tobacco shed is over on the far left of the frame, there as a token only, not to play any major role in the photograph.

Once again this picture seems to hint at a way out in that way back there in the haze of the flare is the horizon and it is clearly open country. And, even though there is this big pole in the foreground, it is there to split the picture, not so much to act as a barrier to our progress through to the background.

Last, the building on the right is certainly the same barn we saw bowed out in the previous frame, seen here from the side and the object over there on the wall is closer and perhaps a little better defined but still not front and center. That happens next.

Ribbit. Yes, it was a green froggy. I remember thinking as I made this picture that I probably wouldn't use it. It was too ridiculous in a series like this, where the theme had been sobering and severe, that I couldn't get away with being flippant or light in this context. It would be like farting or belching in church, irreverent. But I did end up using it and it remained in all the ensuing almost 20 years, through shows and presentations and lectures. I like the contrast of it, the sense that we shouldn't take ourselves all too seriously. Why include it? Because it is so incongruous. To me, it tells me that there has been humanity here. Someone had to have placed it there. And I love that. The picture is not without portent, however, as the three windows open to a space that is about as black as black can be. Do you want to open the door to that barn on the left and walk into that space? Not me. Finally, the picture is one that has given us a break from the others that are the main content of the series, a breather, in effect. If you look at the series Nantucket or Portland or Yountville I didn't really do that with those.

Let's move on, as there are three more in the series.

Back to the barn, shown a few frames before. This time rendered straight and not converged as well as showing real integrity in the structure, its function prescribing an elegance. Besides not being willing to leave it so distorted, it is now lighter, not here to just present a bowed out form but to display its texture and surface. The hose reappears for the third time, although it is playing a less critical role and the concrete walkway is here less to divide the frame and more to lead us into the space. Finally, no green froggy on the left as I've moved on and am trying to bring us back into the series, and yes, it's true, it's somber tone.

Next to last. I have brought us back around to our two black forms as an homage to where we were earlier, but now on their back side, as thought we can leave them behind. I like to think of this as a partial completion of walking along the edges of a cube and here we are on the third edge, with the cube on our left. We also have a whole lot of open frame: field, trees and sky in this picture. In some sense we are already out, no longer having to deal with all the heavy stuff contained on our left. For much of the series, we've been on the inside just getting  glances out to the horizon. Here, we're on the outside.To my way of thinking this is a strong statement of being out, of escaping the more difficult and challenging place we've just left. 

Did you have recurring dreams as a kid? I did and the one that this picture refers to was me, riding around the circle of my friend CP's driveway on my tricycle by myself, happy and ignorant of what's going to happen, when the right rear wheel of the trike comes off and flies off over the bushes behind the stone wall.  As I get off my trike and walk over to the wall to retrieve my wheel from the very black bushes behind them I hear a really terrifying growl back there. Each night in each dream as I gather up my courage to get my wheel back, as I get closer the growl gets louder. And each night, of course, I wake up, knowing that this will go on night after night. I'm only about 6 years old but I am trapped in a kind of loop. The barns on the left are definitely someplace I don't want to go and, to my mind, the open field represents freedom and yes, even light as in giving life.

I have to butt in here, close to the end of three posts about this 13 print series, to make a key point. The way I've been writing about this series and many many others of mine is to share with you my sense that these pictures are so highly connected with each other as to be inseparable. Over time, that's how this process has evolved for me. Another way to explain this is to approach it from the aspect of training over a whole career. Although I certainly make pictures that do not directly connect to each other in a sequenced series, working in the manner of the Hershey pictures is where I live as an artist, simple enough. Harry Callahan said that he believed we really only made one picture in our life time.By that I presume he meant that we could only speak as artists with our own voice, that, at its most foundational level, we simply need to be true to ourselves. Easy to say, hard to do, but working in series is, fundamentally, my one picture.

This last one sits in a strange place for me, simultaneously containing but also allowing a visual look at what lies behind the gated fence. Why is it here instead of the previous one being the ending photograph? I think of this photograph as being enigmatic in that it presents a choice, with no answer apparent. To walk up and open the gate to freedom or to remain held in, knowing that there is a whole lot of stuff back there over my shoulder to deal with. Simple enough, really:  go forward or go backward?

That's it, the Hershey, PA series. Prints? Yes, they are about 12 inches square, made in darkroom days, pre-digital, although the negatives are scanned now and the work has been shown as inkjet prints as well as gelatin silver. The originals are priceless, at least to me, but may be seen through 555 Gallery in a response to your request, although I don't know that we will permit your handling them.Vintage series like this do not get split up. Purchase requests must be for the whole series. However, I  allow individual prints to be sold as inkjet prints made from scanned negatives.

I hope you've enjoyed these three posts. I know they take time and study, as I refer to other work and link those to the one I am discussing. Hopefully, you're willing to do that and that you find relevance in the process.

In the previous post (here) I introduced a new series of my photographs called the Benson Grist Mill north of Salt Lake City in Utah. I made these in September 2015. This post will continue to look at these new pictures.

We left off having just made a picture of the log cabin and we were clearly heading someplace new. I walked down a slight incline and across a foot bridge that crossed the stream and up the other side.

This is the only vertical in the project and now you'll see the connection from the power cord in the previous frame to this one, I am sure. Usually I don't move things in my pictures and this was true here. I have no idea why the rope was spread out along the gravel like this. In pointing down with this lens I've made another picture that is not neutral or "straight" but it was necessary to follow the rope from its start to its end. To me it is pointing us somewhere and the next picture puts us in place to see that.

By repeating part of what was in the vertical we have no choice but to pay attention to this part as, in effect, this is a crop. Minor White was known for finding the picture in the picture. It was his way of telling students to move in and "essentialize" the picture.  I learned to do this in my own work with a fixed lens camera photographing a series in Newtown, CT (take a look at frames 19-24 here). I like the plane created from the side of the building on the right and then sliding along the back of the truck. The wide lens, held level here, makes for what I call a "fast "picture when taken out of being parallel to the subject. All that convergence on the right and then extending to the back of the truck sweeps you through the picture in an almost accelerating nature. Finally, you can't see what else is on the truck unless you move in very close and if you're reading this blog on your smart phone you can hardly see anything, so I'll show you:

and enlarged more:

I like the "Power of Pride" on the truck. Presumably it indicates pride in the USA. I searched for it and found it comes from a bumper sticker that looked like this: 

This photograph also hints at the greater world outside of this small park as, screened by a row of trees, you can see a mountain range off in the distance with clouds hovering over it all like an umbrella.

So here we are, back in "pairs" again and we are also now in the center and core of the series. 

Next up is another pairing and I used a device familiar to many of you, shooting and then turning 180 degrees to shoot again.

With first the sun at my back and then turning to photograph directly into it.

I recognize that among those of you that are purists there is no way you'd allow your  hand to be in the picture but let's be clear about who made those rules. Among  more conservative artists there are rules, I know, but really, in this day and age doesn't that sound a little ridiculous that you can't do something? These rules are more like long standing traditions. I think of Ansel Adams standing next to his 8 x 10 view camera making one of his iconic photographs. He might throw his hand up there to shield the lens from the sun so it wouldn't flare but he would make damn sure it was never seen in the photograph.  And that's fine, for photography was in a very different place then, in the 1930's and 40's, but that isn't far from being a 100 years ago, a very long time in this medium.

And let's be clear, I am in no way a documentarian. And this was an essential picture in the series.Why? Because of the path through to the world at large way back there in the frame. This is the only frame in the series where I allow you to see out with clarity and it is remarkable back there:

with layered content in the field to work your way through and mountains in the very background that give you a sense of the scale of the place. This is the land, after all, where this is: Great Salt Lake,

which was literally less than a mile from where I was standing at the Benson Grist Mill.

By the way, look at the shadowed barns on either side. See how they aren't totally black? This is simply amazing and attributable to something called "dynamic range" which is the ability to hold detail at each end of the tonal scale in something so very contrasty as this. This degree of dynamic range is new to photography in the past several years and yes, it is a digital thing. It is next to impossible for film to do this.

So, where are we going from here? To this pair:

 which moves us around to the side of one of the small buildings we've just seen as alleys and that is obscuring the others, and to here:

which brings us back very fast across the bridge and leaves those previous pictures behind. We are now placed to turn another 180 degrees to see what lies ahead of us, the final chapter in this little novella.  Forgive me, but this is a way of paying respect to where we've just been and saying goodbye to those pictures I just made. I don't do this often but felt it was warranted here, for the previous two pairs were the core of the series, the primary reason we are spending so much time on these pictures and why I worked on them and printed them over a two week period.

Now that we've moved on and are away from those, where do you suppose we're headed?

To something quite different and that looks, at first glance, hugely insignificant. But let's go closer:

to this which was, quite simply, so exquisite it stopped me right in its tracks, these leaves, a little back lit and floating from a branch above that it took me right out of the pattern of working in one vein that was well established in the 15 pictures preceding this. To add to the exceptional nature of this picture, note how it is virtually all out of focus except for the the plane of the leaves floating in the foreground. There are times when I feel very lucky when I make pictures and this one seems to be thrown in there as a sort of bonus. Well, whatever power (the good luck god?) that may be at work here, it has my everlasting gratitude.

So we are wrapping up now and I must admit we are going to do it in an anticlimactic manner. First here, the second to the last:

which returns us to our second and third frames hinting at something on one edge and then leading us to that subject, this time sliding to the right verses the left as before:

which is this last one and ending with the concept of coming around full circle prevailing as you can see the small cel tower or antenna poking through above the roof on the left. That's the same one we saw first in number four. Also this brings us back to the present due to its roof being modern and the sliding doors looking newer as well. Time has been been skewed a little in this series as there have been very few references or keys to where we are in time and that was intentional. Very often I'll include a present day car or something else to base a series in the "now" but that kind of device didn't seem appropriate here. The photographs being black and white adds to that as well, I think.

I do believe the last three function as an addendum, rather than going out with a  bang, but "it is what it is", that infuriating phrase that indicates that there is no more to work with.  I do find myself wondering if my physical condition (this was a few weeks before I had hip replacement surgery and I was working while in pain the whole time in Utah) played a part here, in that I was tired and sore after making the previous pictures.  When working to make a series I shoot about three or four times more frames than I end up using so I'd been at work a few hours already. Did I lose concentration ? Was I thinking about where I could get a beer, something to eat or just sitting down? I don't know, but it's possible. 

So what's the point with these pictures? What is all this work saying? The answer is locked in each individual photograph and also in how they relate to each other. I would think there could be 17 different answers, one for each picture, or maybe more if you began to address and answer what happens in the spaces between prints in the sequence. I for one wouldn't begin to presume that I could tell you what the pictures are about or say. I feel it is for you to unlock their meaning for you personally. Using this vehicle of the blog I can share with you some of my intentions and write about some of the work I did to make them but I can't tell you what to take from the pictures.

My next to last point: I wrote in the first post about the grist mill pictures that I was working within norms.There is so much trickery and gimmicks used in picture making these days. And I am not averse to using technical aids when I feel it adds to pictures. Take a look at South Woods Farms (which are HDR's) and Baldwinville as examples. But it isn't always necessary, or perhaps even seldom needed. A group of photographs such as these should rely upon the seeing, not technical wizardry used to make them. And my very last point. Earlier I used the concept of playing against a chord or a given key to make when arriving at the harmony more meaningful. That is called counterpoint. That's true here even though photographs aren't music. I would caution you against trying to find the "pictures that work" or that are keepers when looking at my series photographs and to think about the body of work as a whole. Of course, you and I both will have a favorite or two but we shouldn't think of those as standing on their own because they need the ones that precede it and follow it as well.

Once again, you may see these unusual, remarkable, exceptional and beautiful prints (not very modest, but I believe they are) at 555 Gallery practically on demand.  Just ask. For a sense of how they work together without all these words you may see them on the gallery page of this site as well here.

Thank you for looking and reading.