I've been to Moab several times, the most recent in 2010 when on sabbatical leave. I rented a small apartment for five weeks and made pictures. 

The series I'm showing here comes from 1998 and fits into the ones I am adding to the site for the first time, which means most likely few have seen them before.

The first one was Chaco Canyon (here).

Moab and the region around it is very special. Desert, rock, river; it is brutally hot in the summer, quite cold in the winter. Surrounding parks are Arches and Canyonlands. This is mountain bikes and off road trails, 4 wheel drive vehicles scrabbling tough rock falls and up cliffs, ATV's for rent and buttes galore.

How does one make his/her own pictures when confronted with such an incredible landscape? VERY carefully.

I came across some railroad tracks down near the Colorado River that worked their way through the rock canyon to the mines to the south. It was an overcast afternoon when I first found the area. I scouted the location then and thought that a sunny morning would be better, so came back in a few days. Turns out I was right.

I liked the rawness of the place and its stillness, a path for the tracks blasted out of the solid rock.  No trains came through while I was there. This is a sequenced body of work, meaning that the prints are arranged in an order. This is always done as I make the pictures and then in editing but in this case, as this is prints I made in the darkroom from film, by printing almost everything then arranging the prints over a period of days or even weeks to edit images out and to set a final sequence.

Also there are often pairings or subsequences within the overall series, as in here where I paired two together, both in the two above and also in the two below. I made the prints in my darkroom at Northeastern University where I taught. Most times I would go in early in the morning before my classes and print for a couple of hours. 

I remember using these two dark photographs as examples in my classes, trying to drive the point home about how exposure in the camera affects the final outcome. Photography is a little slippery in that what may look like some representation of reality, in fact, isn't. It is the medium's interpretation of the real. Knowing that we can bend the medium to our our desired outcome. In this case, you could either underexpose the film to make a thinner, more transparent negative with the final result being a darker print. Or, you could expose the negative normally (shot at Zone V, middle gray) and then push the print darker by exposing it in the enlarger longer. I wonder if you can tell which system I used here?

The Moab prints are true to form in that they are about 12 inches square, printed conventionally on Kodak 14 x 17 inch Polyfiber paper and toned with selenium,  for increased permanence but also to shift the basic black and whites into a slight color change, from an olive cast to  something a little warmer. 

For this last one I simply placed the camera right on the track.

The full Moab portfolio is now up on the site: here.

For a look at another series I made on the same trip go: here

Note: the blog is going to take a look at several series works I made in the late 90's and early 2000's that haven't been on the site before.  I stopped working this way in 1984 and then took it up again in 1996. 

Chaco Canyon. Ever been? Know where and what it is? Chaco Canyon is Anasazi Indian ruins about a 3 1/2 hours drive due west from Santa Fe, NM. It is is what is left of a large complex of dwellings abandoned by the Anasazi Indians as they retreated for unknown reasons in about the twelfth century. They were thriving, building, farming and then they were gone by the end of the twelfth century. A real mystery. Theories abound with the most plausible being a drought that forced the tribe to head north, to become nomadic after more than 500 years in this one valley. 

I've been many times and have even spent the night there, sleeping under the stars. Made pictures there too. 

My series starts off with this one of the large great house called Chetro Ketl, but quickly leaves it as I headed up a trail that carves through the cliff face to arrive at the top looking out on the canyon below and the plateau above it.

Petroglyphs are common here.

Chaco Canyon is strikingly beatuful, accessed by traveling on a dirt road that closes when it rains, hidden away in a valley on a plateau in the desert. It's a mysterious place, filled with ghosts of a time long  gone, of a vibrant community and highly civilized society that simply left and vanished.

Let me provide some context. I made the Chaco Canyon series in 1998. This series came a couple of years after I made the Portland, Maine series (here) and a year after the Oakeksdale Cemetery one in 1997 (here). I was back in the business of making series work after a spell of 12 years or so. I'd concentrated during those years on working in 8 x 10.  That work was far more incidental (individual photographs intended to stand on their own as opposed to sequenced and ordered bodies of work). This was a very prolific time for me as the Oakesdale Cemetery series introduced me to many new ways of making pictures in sequence. My idea behind what the narrative form was also changed during this time. I was seeking now to expand an understanding of a place into many pictures but also to be more directorial as well. Chaco Canyon conforms both to earlier ways of putting pictures next to pictures but also extends it by being a highly specific and intentional journey that was mine alone.

The full Chaco Canyon series is on the site: here

The series concludes with this picture above, carved into the rock floor of the cliff  above the Anasazi dwellings. I was photographing here on a far more subliminal level, trying to convey a sense of a past civilization and a collective intelligence that was staggering. Imagine leaving the home you grew up in but also the whole city around you leaving too.

For me the concept is to imbue my pictures with something of, yes, the place where we are, but also of our perception and emotional reaction to where we are. This is what is missing from so very much of the landscape work we see on line these days. I've written before about "special places", where we find some visceral and personal connection to some place where we are, whether it is something like Chaco Canyon, or something closer and more privately held.

I urge you, if interested, to come to  555 Gallery in Boston to see the prints.

As always, I am very appreciative of your taking the time to look at my work and to read my thoughts about it.

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?

This is the second post I am writing about recovering from surgery and thinking about pictures. The first, 11 Days Out is here.

In 2012 and 2013 I extensively photographed  the forty miles of sand dunes in the southern California dessert called the Imperial Sand Dunes, nearby Yuma, Arizona. I hiked them, drove over them in a jeep, photographed them from the perimeter road, shot them from the air several times and even rented an ATV one day to be able to get further in to these massive dunes that can be as high as 300 feet.

As is my practice, I made prints into portfolios from the two trips I made to photograph the dunes. They sit in my studio now printed on 22 x 17 inch Canson Baryta Photographique paper. Each portfolio combines aerials with ground based work.They look good and present the extended shoots well. But there is a major flaw in this work and one I am guilty of in other bodies of work where I make pictures over years and several trips (my Wheat work comes to mind). Working this way, printing in response to new work made lends no perspective or focus to the work, it is just a compiling of what I think are the best pictures made. Making separate portfolios from different years becomes an artificial construct and succeeds in only separating and diminishing the work. So, I've decided to change that.

I've been working to consolidate, edit tightly and make one new portfolio of finished work from both years. Note the added benefit of now being at least 3 years from it. MUCH better to have some distance. Here are a few that will be included

It's shame that I need this forced down time to concentrate on this work. But I know once I get back on my feet I'm going to be shot from a cannon, on to new projects and never looking back. Perhaps this is what advanced years in a field gives you: the knowledge of how bad you're going to be at something based upon having been there so many times before. At any rate, still being on crutches forces me to slow down and focus on the Dunes work and I am thankful for that, for it is good work.

A little on the technical side here. In earlier digital days, now 10 years ago or so, the cameras weren't good enough for what I wanted my pictures to do. The file size was too small to allow larger prints of high quality. I would step the file size up using Genuine Fractals but is was a poor substitute for the larger file sizes of today. Since about when I made the Dunes pictures the first year in 2012, all that has changed. I can go back to these confident in their inherent quality and can make large prints that hold well, keep sharp, have excellent dynamic range, superb color rendition and don't get noisy. This is the maturing of the medium and it is a very good thing.

BTW: these pictures are simply remarkable (you've heard such modesty from me before, no doubt), rich and subtle and bold and refined. Notice how the color is different in each one? That's because of different days, times of days and years that I made them in. At 1.5 inches across on your smart phone you are not doing them justice. It is the print here that really counts. Over the next few days I will start production, making them on 30 x 24 inch Epson Exhibition Fiber paper. When done they will reside in a custom case with a title page and artist statement. It will be a limited edition portfolio of approximately 20 prints.They will be available for viewing at 555 Gallery in Boston. Passionate about good prints? Me too. Come see these. I mean it. Knock your socks off.

Note ( as of mid February 2016): I've just finished printing these and they are viewable on my site at: Dunes 2012 & 2013.