If you've been following this blog you know I have been headed to Penland in North Carolina to teach for two weeks. I arrived yesterday and after unpacking, settling in and having dinner went to a local rodeo in a Burnesville nearby with friends. 

Mercedes was there with us:

This morning we headed to Spruce Pine, which is the nearest town of any size, down in the valley where the the freight trains rumble through. For the past two years I've photographed in town every morning before teaching, sometimes bringing a few students with me and sometimes not. Those series are here: Spruce Pine 2012 and Spruce Pine 2013.

Mercedes and I photographed in the most industrial and commercial part of the town,

where, on the one hand you could say that it was a visual desert, devoid of value or aesthetic. On the other: that it was an honest place devoid of anything but function and necessity, where beauty snuck in and prevailed despite the best intentions.

 I was able to get above the one or two story shops and buildings to point down.

Structurally, I am going to try to post a blog a day while here, counter to what I said before I left home. The effort is to try to bring you into the class a little and to share with Penland students this process of combining pictures with words as description. We'll see how I do, as it will get very busy as soon as students arrive.

Stay tuned.

I don't know about you but this time of year (May) feels like being shot from a canon.

I wasn't even here in New England for much of the winter but the part that I was here seemed long, cold, gray and snowy. I know good pictures can be made outdoors in that kind of weather but I may be becoming a fair weather photographer because I don't have much stomach for it anymore.

I just got back from a few days on Martha's Vineyard last week and shot daily. I also had friends visit from the mainland, saw MV friends, made a presentation to a gallery, discussed a new digital book with the publisher and worked on another book project due to be published this fall. I was able to tour my off island friends around the island that one of them had never seen before. This was something my dad loved to do, to show visitors his favorite parts of the island and I love this too. I also dealt with flat tires, dead mice in the basement, broken water lines and the exciting topic of hiring someone to dig a drywell for drainage from one of the scuppers on the roof.

Early May is pretty spectacular on the island. As it is surrounded by water and in the spring the water is cold, it keeps the island wet, foggy and colder than the mainland. It also means that spring doesn't happen on the same schedule as it does in the continental USA. That's cool on its own. The light can be bright and blue, if the sun is out:

This is the same tree I was shooting last fall

which has turned into one of those projects where you see the same thing, over and over again, in different seasons. Can be relentless. We'll see if I overdo it. I like pictures that are about the differences between things.

I also am making more long lens pictures, probably because I worked that way in California in February.

These textural pictures must be a little hard to understand at your screen size... a few inches across. But try thinking of them as 30 inches across and you might begin to get it.

I know, pretty much a cliche´, this vertical. So sue me. That's No Man's Land out there on the horizon, an unpopulated island I photographed from the air a couple of years ago.

This is down in Oak Bluffs at the new fish pier. 

The other thing that's really nice about Martha's Vineyard now is that it isn't crazy yet. Before school gets out and midweek, the Vineyard is very relaxed and not  crowded in May. The tradeoff is that it can be very cold. But get a few days of warm weather and beaches are empty, there are no lines and traffic is sparse. A month from now things will be very different.

My daughter was there last weekend, with her family, and as the weekend went on I was getting texts asking if the house was available this coming weekend as they wanted to come right back. That's the Vineyard: you can't wait to get there and you hate to leave.

Ah, the Vineyard. You must have a place you hold dear in your heart. Mine is the Vineyard.

Subscribers to my blog have been missing out for the past week or so as the blog had a short hiatus while I worked to populate the website with work made over the past several months. I am happy to report that job is done and there is much to see.

Some of the work was discussed while I was making it, mainly in California this past February, but you soon learn when keeping both a site and a blog, that blogs come and then are gone quickly, while work on the gallery page stays and people can refer to it now or in the future. So, there are new thumbnails on the gallery page you can click on to see all the work from the new series. Take a look and you'll see:

Mt Tamalpais, CA:

Central Valley, CA Aerials:

Before and After Aerials CA

Skate Park CA

Salt Point Park CA:

Monsters MA:

There are still a few more to add but I will work to keep the blog going while I include other series.

By the way, if you're new to reading this blog you may subscribe (and unsubscribe at any time). Just add your email address on the right side of any post. I will not pester you, sell the list or share it with anyone. 

Finally, as I have been posting blogs on this site for over two years now, there are a great many to read.  They are also searchable by categories but also by name.

Quilts? What? You thought this was a photo blog, didn't you? Well it is but when something remarkable happens it's important that I bring it to your attention.

I've learned from past experience that when my friend Peter Vanderwarker says to go see a show, he means it and I should follow his recommendation. In his recent email he was very excited about the show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts called  "Quilts and Color" up now through July 27. These are quilts from the Pilgrim/Roy Collection, by the way.

So I went. It is downstairs in the new wing, under the cafe'.  This is where they tend to put contemporary shows as the galleries are new and very state of the art. The Quilts show reminded me right off why the MFA is a world class museum. 

Because these magnificent creations are displayed with wonderful light in dark rooms that are quiet, meditative spaces, perfect for looking and really seeing the quilts. No  glass over them, no frames, just hung on the walls, mostly with black around them but sometimes with a complimentary color:

Like color? This show is color. Like design? Ditto. Like form? Same. Like texture? Yes. Complexity and simplicity, crucial and soothing, loving and warm, these are descriptions that come to my mind. Think about how these were made, what the quilt's function is, what it means to its maker and the family that owned it. Then think about how this art form comes from every day people and where these quilts hang now. Most of the quilts were made in the 19th century but let's be clear this is an American art form and these incredible quilts were made by women.

The collector, Gerald Roy, quotes one of the quilt makers. She says, "I make my quilts as fast as I can so my children won't freeze and as beautiful as I can so my heart won't break".

"You will not see a more beautiful show anywhere in New England. What a bliss-out."—The Boston Globe

I got very bad news yesterday just before going to see this show. My application for a Guggenheim Fellowship was denied, once again. The application is a great deal of work and it requires four recommendations from top people in your field. There were 3000 applications and 178 winners. My application was as good as I could make it and the people who wrote on my behalf were very important people in photography. I was bummed. I went to the  "Quilts and Color" show and things were okay again, they really were.

Go see this show.

I'm calling a new body of work "Before and After Aerials" as it is a portfolio of work from before I shot aerials one day in February in the Sacramento River Valley in California as well as pictures made after we landed. This was a marathon day and significant for me personally. It was an affirmation of worth and ability, that I was still able to make pictures of viability, substance and beauty and that I was continuing to move forward; important, if you think about it. Don't stay where you've been. Yes, it is safe there, but it is death artistically and creatively.

At any rate, on the way to the airport for my flight with pilot Stan in Yuba City, the light was beautiful. I was early, as I always seem to be, and stopped along the way to shoot in town.

And at the airstrip before we took off:

When we landed about an hour or so later, I headed back to town but saw this from the highway and got off at the next exit:

I'd never seen one of these before but the company website describes them as being  like a BJ's or Costco without having to pay to join.

The store was huge:

If you look closely you can see there is a flock of pigeons circling in the sky above the store. Along the front were 8 Italian Cyprus trees, looking neglected and sad. The store was closed and it was midday during the week. Not good for Food Maxx.

The massive parking lot free of cars gave me a unique opportunity to put my Mallchitecture hat on once again:

After lunch I was headed back west across the valley towards the coast where I was living in Santa Rosa. But once again, the area was so good I had to stop.

Where there was a barn, derelict and on its way out for sure, looking used and possibly unsafe, standing there proud and beautiful in its purity of form:

About as elegant as anything I'd ever seen.

So, what I've shown you here are the bookends of the day. I wrote about the aerials I made that day here and here. It was a major day. The last thing I made a picture of on my way out of the valley and headed into the mountains to drive back to Santa Rosa was this:

of the fruit trees in bloom. These were the same trees I'd photographed from the air a few hours earlier: