So, now that it is really cold out (I am writing this in December in New England) and photographing outside is not so appealing I am printing work shot but unseen from the past year or so, including mining the five week residency in Iceland last summer for more work. You hope a residency will open some creative floodgates and the time in Iceland was major for me. But I also have been going back into my own deep past as a young artist when I was a student  in the early 70's. 

The result will be a few posts over the next month or so but this first one will key on something I noticed as I've been going through this earlier work. It looks different. Not better, but just different. This, of course is due to it being made with film and printed in a darkroom.

I want to reference this with one photograph, a print I found in a stack of my own work, unseen for years. In the midst of a group of 120mm square format mounted prints was a smaller 11 x 14 inch print by Susie Hacker, now Susan Hacker Stang. I don't know about if or when you were a student but we traded a lot in those days. Like someone's work you saw while printing in the lab? Wish you owned something pinned up in the crit session last week? Trade for it. A print for a print. We did it all the time.

We used to do that with Aaron (Siskind) too, one of the teachers in the grad program at RISD. "Hey, Aaron, can we trade prints?" Unbelievably, he'd say yes. This was early enough in his career that he wasn't that famous or sought after yet. That would come later. I would trade too over the years as a teacher. I felt that if a student had the stones to ask me I would usually trade with them. 

At any rate, I came across this print by Susan:

made in 1970 when we were both seniors at RISD. It's clearly 35mm and, if I knew the photographer back then, and where she was shooting I'd be willing to bet it was shot with a SLR,maybe a Nikon, a Canon or a Pentax K1000, or maybe even a range finder Leica as a few of us used them, with Kodak's Tri-X film which was rated at asa 400, and developed in D-76 for about 9 minutes, printed on Dupont Varigam or maybe Agfa's Brovira. It's a very good print, open in the  shadows with that lovely flat-yet-full look good printers get, with deep blacks where they belong below the counter and whites that are luminous without being harsh. We had good teachers in Paul Krot and Harry Callahan and Bert Beaver (yes, his real name) and we learned to print well. The picture pays clear homage to the work of Danny Lyon and Robert Frank in many ways, although Susan's is perhaps a little more empathetic in mood. 

I was able to reach Susan and asked her for permission to publish her photograph. She said yes and sent this along as well:

The story is that this past September I was in New York and found myself photographing on Times Square, where this photograph had been taken back in 1970. It was, I think, a Hebrew National Deli or Diner, something like that, full of chrome stools and tile walls, really classic. Because Times Square is now so built up and built upon, it is hard to picture what among the cluster of new buildings were the actual boundaries of old Times Square. I was trying to locate where this diner had once been and asked two policeman (who had grown up in New York) if they could pinpoint the spot. They remembered the establishment, but couldn't figure out exactly where the location would have been. I then noticed a bit of sidewalk 'architecture', a certain curvature, and realized that I had found the location. Funny thing, it was a building that currently, for whatever reason, had a Marilyn Monroe poster on the outside. Different, but still classic.

The print struck me as a strong advocate of all that is film. Funny that this was the look then as we had no way to compare it to anything else and knew nothing of the impending and momentous change that would be digital. For my own work I was never much of a fan of 35mm. It seemed too small, too restricting in print size, too grainy and too soft. But in the hands of someone like Susan, miracles were made. 

Sitting or standing at a counter, eating lunch in isolation from others doing the same thing, facing a dull stainless steel wall that failed to even reflect you back at yourself but looked like water with small waves rippling above the standing man's left hand. So cool.

Love photography and this use of it. 

Susan has had, and continues to have, a rich career as an artist and educator. You may see her work at: http: Susan Hacker Stang.

Thanks, Susan. I have no idea what you got from me in trade but I can only hope it was this good.

I made Yountville, CA in 1981, less than a year after I made the Nantucket series. This was still a new way for me to work, connecting pictures to pictures, and I was very excited to have found a system that would allow me to make bodies of work, rather than unconnected single pictures.

With these I followed the same model as with the Nantucket pictures. Flat light and walking around an area. In this case it was early morning in March and there was fog that wasn't burning off yet. It kept things flat, good for the pictures I was making in those years. Yountville is one of the towns north of San Francisco in wine country. I have been back to visit the same streets several times since, and have even tried to make new series from the same place, with little success. Yountville is much more built up now. 

I was interested in forming linkages from picture to picture:

I had no training in this way of working. Graduate school had been mostly about single pictures, not groups or series of pictures and I don't believe we ever talked about sequencing. I don't think I had anyone to talk with about these pictures either. Working in isolation has its rewards, of course, as there's no one there to tell you how wrong you are. On the other hand, working that way makes for work that is perhaps too much a singular view or that has an emotional tone that is unsupportive of the work.

I remember sweating bullets over the prints. With the Nantucket series I'd established a precedent for flat prints but ones that were full, meaning that the prints could go into deep blacks but still stay predominantly in the grays without strong highlights. With Yountville I worked to do the same.  

What was printing like then? I had a darkroom carved out of a 1/2 bath in my apartment, with the enlarger mounted above the toilet. Turn 180 degrees from the enlarger and bang you were right in front of the developer, sitting in a sink that I'd made that was about 8 feet long. Two to three minutes and then the stop bath to the left and then into the fixer, agitated, then white light on after 45 seconds or so. Look at the print, decide what could be improved, turn off the light, go back to the enlarger, pull out another piece of paper and repeat. And so on, often for several prints. After fixing, the print went into a holding tray of water. When it was time to final wash the prints I would put them one at a time into a Zone VI plexiglass washer for 10 minutes or so, then into fixer remover which also had rapid selenium toner in it, then back for a final wash of 20 to 30 minutes, then the prints were squeegeed and placed face down on a plastic screen drying rack. The prints would dry over night.

Yountville has been shown numerous times and is included as the first series in the monograph "American Series", published in 2006.

Those of you that know me know I studied at RISD (Rhode Island School of Design) with Harry Callahan. I also spent my two graduate years studying with Aaron Siskind as well. I transferred into RISD as a junior, finished with a BFA in Photography in 1971 and then continued on in graduate work graduating in Photography in 1973 with an MFA. My longest running friendship from those days has been with Henry Horenstein, who also came to RISD as a junior and stayed through graduate studies. Henry teaches at RISD and is a fantastic photographer and author of many many books: Henry Horenstein

Harry Callahan was a complex and wonderful person, difficult to fathom for someone as young as I was but a strong influence for a student so excited by making pictures and a powerful example and mentor. There are many stories and remembrances about Harry, both during the time I was a student and after as well. But I will restrict myself to two. This post will share one of them.

The first story about Harry is when I was about six years out of school. He and his wife Eleanor still lived in Providence in 1979 and occasionally I would go down from Cambridge, MA where I lived to see them. In the summer of 1979 I had traveled to Europe, not for the first time, but for the first time to make pictures. I started in Germany, drove through Paris to southern France, flew to London, drove up through England to the highlands of Scotland north and west of Edinburgh. I was working in black and white, shooting with a single lens Rollei SL66 with Kodak's Plus- X film and in infrared using a 35mm Leica M3. I had a wonderful time, no big surprise. I shot a lot and came back to begin processing the film. That fall I was teaching both at New England School of Photography in Boston and Harvard University so was pretty busy but when I had time I would go into the darkroom in my apartment, develop some film and begin making 11 x 14 work prints of some of the things I'd shot in the summer.

I remember I couldn't make much sense out of what I'd shot. There didn't seem to be any logic or cohesion to what I'd done that I could see. But I carried on and by Christmas break I had now amassed several boxes of prints all with the same problem: no substance. Now I was concerned. What did I do? I called Harry and asked him if he'd mind me coming to Providence to see him and could I show him some work? He said, sure, come on down.

When I met with him at his house along Benefit Street we covered some pleasantries and did a little catching up and then I told him what my problem was. He looked through the box of prints that I had brought.  I told him I couldn't make any sense of what I had. He seemed to understand this right away and then told me he'd had the same thing happen to him. In 1957 Harry had traveled to France for several months with Eleanor to photograph. When returning he had the same problem. Too overwhelmed by the new, too out of sorts compared to where he'd come from, the place too foreign to assimilate, not there long enough to get in it and understand what he could do with it. I certainly didn't have a clue I was making such a scattered group of pictures in Europe in 1979. I thought I was just continuing to photograph as I knew how to. Wrong. I went home that day severely humbled as I knew Harry was right. I  hadn't made anything worthwhile except to succeed at making pictures of things I hadn't seen before through first impression. Substance? No. Was I saying anything in the pictures, telling a story? No. Thank goodness I learned this lesson early in my career. I never did anything with all that work, never final printed them, never made portfolios, or took them around to museums and galleries to get them shown. Hard pill to swallow but a very good lesson.  I see this very often today in other's work when I review portfolios: making pictures from trips is very dangerous.

This picture of Eleanor and Harry Callahan was made in the 90's in Atlanta.

So thank you, Harry. He had a way of setting you straight in a very understated and non-condemning way.

Are all the series that I've made since from travels wonderful? No. It has been a career-long struggle to make pictures that count from new places I visit. To make pictures that raise the bar on the genré,  that contain some continuity, cohesion, thought and emotion, that say something. The point is, as my friend Patrick Philips says (he publishes the magazine "Martha's Vineyard Arts and Ideas": MV Arts & Ideas) to make pictures that "tell a story".  

Harry said: "Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure. If man wishes to express himself photographically, he must understand, surely to a certain extent, his relationship to life."

Travel can be a very large part of that. Stay tuned for the second story about the photographer Harry Callahan.

I don't know if this is inevitable or not for a photographic artist who gets older but I have been rephotographing projects made earlier. To date, I have shot in Nelson, BC again, the island of Nantucket and Oakesdale, WA(the cemetery series from the mid 90's).

This is work very much in process, as I am not showing it yet or loading it into the site but I thought it might warrant a look at here. I wonder how many others do this: photograph the same thing over again.

First up. Nelson, BC where I first made pictures in a very short series in 1993. I went back this past summer and worked at finding where I had shot earlier. I was staying with friends and sent along in advance contact sheets of my 1993 film. Driving around the small town, contact sheets in hand, trying to find a corner or a street where I had photographed almost 20 years earlier proved challenging, but we had several successes:

First the 1993 image:

and then the one I made last summer:

The one made in 1993:

and, with no greenhouse, in 2012:

and finally, 1993:

and 2012

What does it all mean? Well, it does fit within the idea of  "the same but different" that I have alluded to in other posts. And it does address issues of time and that peculiar thing we call "photo time" which is its own special category of stopping time but also smearing time.

Here's the full set from 1993 on the site: Nelson, BC 1993

I want to thank Ted and his son Chris for their warm hospitality but also their willingness to drive this odd person around last summer to help him find these sites.

(reminder: you may see these images larger by clicking on an image)