Going back. Way way back. 1978 grant application. One of two key grants back then: The Guggenheim and the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts).

As American citizens and individual artists, we could apply for the NEA using our  photographs as an application. This was a granting program initiated and signed into law by President Johnson in 1965. The individual grants are long gone now, as they went down a path of controversy to elimination. Look up Jesse Helm, Piss Christ and Robert Maplethorpe for more info. In 2017 President Trump tried to deep six all federally funded grants in the arts.

At any rate, I applied. We all did.. I'd started teaching at Harvard by that year and was pretty pumped about it. Were we presumptuous? Absolutely!  I was five years out of graduate school.

I'd spent the previous summer traveling in Europe so included a couple of those in the application. I was working in 35mm black and white infrared in those days, hand holding a Leica M4 with 21 mm Summicron and 35 mm Zeiss lenses. I toned the prints. I bulk-loaded the film and changed the film in a changing bag as the felt trap in the film cassettes was not infrared proof.

I was trying to promote the different way the film saw the world and my abilities with it.

My application was 10 disparate photographs, meaning not from one series or body of work.

Part of the reason for being in Europe the previous summer was to go to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, Germany where thousands had been put to death in WW II.

I didn't get the grant. That year, photographer's grants were $7500 or $10000

Please leave comments below. The full series is now on the site towards the bottom of the Gallery page.

In From the Archives and From the Archives 2 we looked at some work that I felt might have been missed or passed over. Being prolific has its downsides.

In From the Archives 3 we're going to look at work made over the winter of 2012. Having just retired the year before I was free to make new work. The year before I had been invited to present at the Yuma (AZ) Art Symposium, a remarkable meeting of all kinds of artists, including pin makers and jewelry artists. 

After that brief exposure. to Yuma, I decided to spend most of the next winter living there. This turned out to be a very productive time. Here are a few:

Lake Martinez

Castle Dome Mine Museum

As is often true for many of my series, Salton Sea had concurrent ideas going on at the same time. The dystopian view of a wasteland fecund and irredeemable, and an experiment of color and black and white coexisting. I could feel my teachers rolling over in their graves as I worked on the files back in Cambridge.

And last, the first year of making the Dunes pictures started that winter. The next year I spent time in San Diego with much less photographic success but did drive back to Yuma for ten days to complete the Dunes project, aerial and ground-based imagery from the Imperial Sand Dunes in California, just over the border from Yuma.

Dunes

 Just like Iceland would be for me two years later, I found the dunes a revelation; abstract, otherworldly, and very beautiful. Being freed from teaching and no longer having the duties of a full professor at a large urban university not only made going away possible but also allowed freedom of thought and immersion in what it is that I do, which is photograph.

Comments welcome.

This continues a series of posts in the blog that examine earlier essays.

This one gets us looking at "The Field" made in 2016. There are two posts: The Field and The Field 2.

Photographs made at the Medfield State Hospital in Medfield MA.

Quiet and unassuming, the pictures are of a field behind the hospital that was used to grow produce for the patients for many years.

I made the photographs the summer after having both hips replaced and so, was pleased to be getting back to work. They are in black and white, while the last one is in color. 

The Hospital has been closed since 2003.

This one is close to my heart. The series is: here

I feel as though I've had two separate careers, both bound together by a love of photography. One being in analog: darkrooms, negatives, chemicals, film holders, light-sensitive emulsions, handheld light meters, and mostly big cameras. The other starting in early digital days on up to my present practice of high-end capture, memory cards, Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, an extraordinarily broad array of materials to print on, and inkjet prints of unsurpassed quality.

Ah, those analog days! I am often asked if I miss it all. Not one bit. Almost 40 years of it, long hours in the darkroom processing and printing, trying to eke out the best possible print. 

Yes, I have them all, boxes and boxes of negatives; 35mm, 120mm, 4 x 5, and 8 x 10. Probably 99% black and white as I didn't work in color most of those years.

I've written this before but will repeat it again. You've got nothing if you don't scan your analog work. No way for the world to see it, no way to talk about it, cite examples, or document your own photographic history.  Just negatives sitting in a box probably headed for the dumpster when you're gone.  Another way to look at it is to ask yourself how much effort, thought, and love did you put into making those photographs back then? Isn't that work worthy of seeing the light of day?

For some of us, of course, this is a massive undertaking and I do not pretend my job is finished. I would say I am about half done. It is an easier task to scan roll film formats than sheet film, for it can be automated to some degree. A few scan their prints and I have seen good results doing this although it is not for me. There are a few places that you can hire to scan your work and I would cite Digital Silver Imaging in Belmont, MA. They even have a (scan) van that can come to you! Highly recommended.

If you are of a certain age and a career photographer you most likely have some real work ahead of you. No time is better than now.

Incredible. 48 years! You hear old folks saying all the time: "Where'd all the years go?" but seriously, where did all the years go?

As a grad student at the RI School of Design, where I graduated in the spring of 1973, I was meant to produce two copies of my thesis, one for the school's library and one for the Photography Department. Some did, others didn't. 

I did.

My thesis was photographs I made in auto junkyards. 

Did I have it in my head that I was making these pictures to speak to issues of our wasteful society, of consumerism run amok, or of protecting our environment? I did not. I liked the forms and shapes of the wrecked cars and trucks, the shiny     chrome, the rusted panels.  In our class, critiquing this work as I made it, no one brought up any of the above issues. The politics of the work was not apparent for this was a far more innocent time. We were demonstrating against the war in Vietnam but not against the lack of awareness in our work.

Photographs were made then for their aesthetic, perhaps technique was discussed, or print size, the paper they were printed on or our use of the camera. The mechanics of photography was a much bigger deal then for good craft was harder. It took skill to make a great print.

But where does 48 years come in?

Last week while out visiting my high school (Darrow School, New Lebanon, NY) I went back to Adler's Antique Auto in Stephentown to photograph in much the same way I did in 1973 in Rhode Island, 48 years ago.

The same but hugely different too. Then: the Rollei SL66 21/4 camera on a tripod with the 80mm Carl Zeiss f2.8 Planar lens and Kodak Plus X film. (I still have this camera) Now: the Sony A7R MK lV camera hand held with the 70-200mm f2.8 G-Master lens.

Then: black and white, printed by me in my basement darkroom on Agfa Portriga Rapid 11 x 14 inch paper.

Now: color, printed by me in my studio using the Epson P9000 inkjet printer with Red River Polar Matte 17 x 25 inch paper.

Of course, this wasn't the same junkyard as in 1973, but over the years I had photographed at Adler's a few times, most notably with the 8 x 10 camera, for Adler's is quite special, a tribute to rust with its emphasis on 40s and 50s cars and trucks.

Adler's Antique Auto, Stephentown, NY

Like going back in time, photographing in an auto junkyard again after 48 freaking years!