We've moved up to the Alps, way up. My hosts have a place in a region called Stroppo in a tiny village called Morinesio about 5000 feet up in the Italian Alps close to the French border.

We drove for 1 1/2 hours from Alba, stopping along the way for the best bread, the best meat, the best cheeses, the best dessert and drove up and up to a hamlet on the side of the mountain that has a population of about 30, when they're all here, as many come here just for vacation. This below taken from the balcony of the house:

I don't know about you but the view from my condo in Cambridge isn't quite like that.

John and I went out to photograph and drove up the valley until we couldn't go anymore. As we headed north there was snow on the ground and in the late fall the trees were golden.

The region is popular for hiking, cross country skiing and mountain biking. The locals grow potatoes, wild boar is hunted and, of course, it is visually stunning. 

The valley has an untouched quality to it. The locals have worked hard to preserve it and keep snowmobiliers out and are actively resisting a developer who wants to bring in a downhill ski area. 

Actually, John and Donna's house is for sale. This site will give you details: Stroppo.  Right now, I am sitting at the large dining room table as I write this.  This is quite simply a wonderful home and an extraordinary place to live.

John and I are headed off to Noli today, along the coast of the Mediterranean, to spend a couple of days. From there we'll take an overnight to get back up to Paris for Paris Photo.

Stay tuned.

Of course, there are different kinds of risk. There is jump off the bridge attached to a bungee cord type of risk. There is being on the front line in a war type of risk. Then there is career risk, the kind that makes you jump ahead, stick your neck out, taking a chance on an idea you've had or sticking up for yourself among colleagues. The cliché "nothing ventured nothing gained comes to mind."

Last week I took a risk and yes, it feels good to have done it. Each session at Penland, where I was teaching, the faculty present their work in evening slide shows. Each has 10 minutes to show whatever they like in front of the community of artists and craftspeople present in that particular session of classes. I chose to show the work of mine from the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia (Mutter) and the pictures from Reggio Emilia in Italy (Spallanzani Collection) to, what turned out to be, a stunned audience. The two times I'd presented before when teaching there I had shown landscape work and work from older series so there was some shock at seeing pictures of medical specimens up on the screen in the auditorium that when projected were about 16 feet across.

Finally, for the last work I showed I put up slides of the new "Monsters" work. Notice that there's no link to the work on the site? That's because I am withholding posting them for a bit, but stay tuned as some will go up soon. "Monsters" will be shown at 555 Gallery sometime in the next year, dates to be determined, meaning we haven't figured that part out yet. Want to see this work? Let Susan Nalband at the gallery know your feelings: 555 Gallery. BTW: I am pleased to announce here that I will be showing in Boston with 555 Gallery from now on. What's that mean? Want to see works of mine? Contact the gallery. Easy.

It was wonderful to surprise the crowd with this work. Before mine, Mercedes Jelinek showed hew work along with her killer video of her making pictures using photo booth (Mercedes) and then Chris Benfey went, standing in front of the audience, reading a poem he wrote and some wonderful phrases that were observational, personal, quirky and marvelous. 

Ah Penland: so much, always powerful and positive and as though two weeks there can sustain an energy level throughout the following year. 

In my last post(Same But Different) I wrote about photographing the same tree again and again where I am this month in Santa Rosa, CA.

In this post I will describe the way I applied that approach to a vastly different topography while a resident in northern Iceland last summer.

In Iceland in July not far from the Arctic Circle it doesn't ever really get dark. Combine that with the fact that, forgive the digression, old guys like me get up in the middle of the night to take a leak with where I was staying the bathroom had a window that looked out to the horizon and you have an opportunity not to be missed.

What I had was a situation that made it very difficult to just flush and go back to bed. So, most nights I would stagger out to the patio in front of our studios in bare feet, camera on a tripod, position the legs of the tripod on the three taped marks I'd made on the stone so I could repeat the shot, point the camera at the same thing every night, and bang off a frame or two. 

Way out there was a peninsula with water below and Iceland's big sky above. Each night, something wonderful and different was happening to this scene. Iceland's weather changes all the time, clouds come in and then clear out, it will rain or the wind will come up and then die down, and each time I would stumble out there to position the camera in the same place each night, whatever was in front of me was never the same as it had been the night before and yet, of course, it was. 

Photography isn't only about a single frame, or a single moment in time or a single photograph that contains all the visual elements to make a complete picture. It can be about time and freezing time and smearing time's distinctions to connect the differences between moments or days. My whole career I have been fascinated by the difference between two images of the same thing, either taken one right after the other or with significant time between the two.

Part of the appeal of Iceland for me was its absence of trees, something they are trying to rectify by planting more trees. But for the time being this hugely glaciated place is scrubbed clean of interfering trees that obscure one's sense of the actual landscape which is the foundation upon which we stand.  Combine this with no pollution as Iceland's energy is thermally sourced and you have exceptional clarity and an ability to see forever. 

Are you local to Boston? There are four of these Iceland pictures on view at 555 Gallery in South Boston. 

The gallery's website is: 555 Gallery