I finally got out with the camera this past weekend.  I stopped on Canning Road where I have found so many pictures I really like that the place seems never to disappoint me.  It runs parallel to, and just a few yards from a section of the Wallkill River that offers endlessly interesting and different subjects, or different light on the same subjects I've photographed before.  I would have used the 4x5, but of late I've gotten so sick of dust on the film that become laborious to remove spots on the negative, that I almost always now use the P67, and did so here.  Still, the view camera would have been more satisfying to use.  It always slows me down...makes me look, and think,.and contemplate, and only then make the photograph that has ripened in my imagination.  Nonetheless, the lesson is learned and I insist to myself that there's no hurry, no need to burn meaningless, ill considered frames of film. 

I am often amused at the photographers who travel all over the world, but consistently return with the same photographs they could have made much closer to home because that's their "style".  I'm so sure I'd do exactly the same thing that I no longer feel any temptation to wander away for the sole purpose of making photographs.  Rather, I'd just love to visit the wonderful places that are currently so popular like Iceland (now with its' volcano), Antarctica, Greenland, and so on.  I'd probably look for the kind of photograph I am drawn to make, but I'd be thrilled to make it in one of those fascinating places. 

It's important to remember that "old" work isn't obsolete, nor less worthy than new work.  In fact, old work, unless it's utterly incompetent, is evidence of  one's evolving vision, and may be instinctively even better because it is a testament to that moment in which it is newly discovered.  That aside, here's a photograph I made at least four or more years ago that I've not printed nor published on this blog before.  I'm posting it because I like it...nothing more or less that that. 

There hasn't been much time for photography of late, but there's just been no way I could go on indefinitely without burning some film.  So, last week, I took myself to the part of Harriman Park that I enjoy walking in, and photographing.  Most of the images from this place have been one's I've not kept in my portfolio.  They've not passed the test of months or years as being worth keeping.  But, they've been very, very important as lessons learned.  Perhaps I go there with the unquenchable hope that I'll find the right conjunction of light, subject, mood and satisfying composition eventually...like a challenge one makes for oneself.  So...below is just such a photograph.  I've no idea whether I'll still like it a month from now, or be sorry I posted it here, but at the moment I like it.  It literally reached out to me (and that's the name of the negative scan of it: "reaching out").  It's fun to find a subject that will photograph with inherent contrast and dynamic form without having to do anything more than discover it, examine it, walk around it a lot, frame it to suit your sensibility, and make the photograph. 

Our show is now up on the walls at the Wallkill River Gallery in Montgomery, NY.  It took a lot of time to hang, but it looks really good.  There are a few more than 30 works to view...about an equal number of paintings and photographs.  All are invited to our opening on Saturday, April 10th from 5 to 7PM at the gallery.  There will be food and wine, but no dancing girls, or ritual sacrifices...sorry! ;-)   We're going to relax for a little while and get some chores done that went begging while preparing for the show, but we will be back making more artwork soon.  As rewarding as a show can be, it's really more satisfying to create the next piece. 

Here's one more photograph from this past February.  It was made after the storm that hit the week before THE STORM that clobbered us on the 26th.  There is a tiny little plot of man made land that extends maybe 25 feet or so into Walton Lake. It's fenced off, and used during warm weather by the several families that built it.  In its' season there is lush grass kept in finely manicured condition, but in winter there's not much to see except for the fence.  This image also is intended to bid a not so fond adieu to what's been a pretty nasty winter.  At least I did manage to get some photographs I like out of the season. 

The past week has been another wet one, but this time with copious rain and wind.  At least I didn't have to shovel any of it, and it did a wonderful job of melting the shoulder high snow I cleared that we were visited with just the previous week.  I don't know what's next...maybe locusts?

The nor'easter rain and wind storm was much more devastating to Westchester County where I work, than to Orange County where I live, so much so that my workplace was closed from Monday 'til today (we're back tomorrow), so I had the last two beautiful days to get out with the camera, and record some of the wonderful and unusual effects of the high water where the Wallkill River had crested many feet over it's usual high water mark.  For those for whom this was NOT a beautiful event, I'm sympathetic, but I'm also glad I could make these photographs that will last far longer than the errant flood.   The waters are receding, the fallen trees are being cleared, and we are quickly returning to whatever passes for normal around here.

The photographs below were made during this very welcome hiatus from the usual grind. 

Here's one more from last week's storm.  We live at the top of a hill that, now that I've gotten to drive around a week later to see where else got what, is clearly more heavily burdened with snow than anywhere else in this vicinity.  So many other places not that far away have returned to wintertime drab, their snowy coat melted and evaporated away, but we here on the hill still have over a foot of the stuff.  The next few days are predicted to be very mild and sunny, so I look forward to seeing dirt and grass in the near future.  Till then this post adds one more scene from behind our house that will probably look reaaaaalllly appealing sometime this summer when it's baking outside. 

We've just gone through a helluva week with snow.  It's been almost intimidating in its depth (about 3 feet) in terms of the difficulty involved in clearing enough of it to be able to use a car, or even walk up the driveway to the street.  Still, when not worrying about when the electric will come back on, or the plow will stop building a wall at the top of the driveway, it has been a really a beautiful event.  The two pictures below were made after a few hours of work trying to deal with it.  I was happy to see the snow, then, in a very different way.

 

 

Today is the 108th anniversary of Ansel Adams' birth, and I shall absolutely (though not with Absolut) hoist a glass to this towering and troubling icon of 20th century photography.  Why troubling?... because, during decades of cataclysmic world turmoil and disaster, Adams chose to primarily  record and interpret the majestic, the grand, the intimate, and the serene. (although his Myanmar series of the lives or interred Japanese Americans is a significant exception). So what?  Well, there are many who feel that that was an abdication of a photographer's  perceived responsibility to record the depth of the world's abyss.  I disagree.  There were  wonderful photographers who did that wonderfully. All are not called to do the same thing.  To offer what Adams offered was to expand beyond the tragic reality of the moment and invite the viewer into a more uplifting, tranquil and peaceful world.  Bringing those now iconic scenes to  the people's attention was significantly instrumental in furthering the public and governmental will to preserve and protect them.  Over the course of decades, that contribution has becaome as important as that of any of the American photographers who recorded the depths of the 20th century's tragedies from its wars to the FSA's record of the depression and its aftermath.

Adams is also responsible for nudging photography into the mainstream of  "art". Others, like Stieglitz, Steichen, and the Westons did that as well, but without the mass appeal that Adams was able to command.  Adams wrote articles in mainstream photo magazines, and proffered suggestions for better photography to a public eager to be informed.  Other 20th century icons did far less beyond production of  their work.  Hence, Adams' work has become a touchstone for what most people think of as a black and white photograph.  (Try passing a poster and frame shop in any mall and not see AA's work prominently displayed.)  Many still place their tripods on Ansel's marks, but very, very few reinvent what he had the marvelous vision to "see".!

Just south of the city of Newburgh, New York is a park interestingly called "Unique Area".  It is a rather small riverside tract that sits on the western edge of the Hudson, but also includes a wide swath from the highway to the shore.  We stopped by there yesterday (February 13th) to explore it again as we'd not visited it in the dead of winter before.  The river was engulfed in a significant amount of ice with only a center channel completely open to shipping.  The ice we encountered was noisy!  I'd be engrossed with the camera and be startled to hear what sounded like someone loudly approaching me, but I'd immediately realize it was just the ice groaning and cracking from the eternally active river water forcing it to yield. 

It's also amusing to me that I've railed a bit at the cliche minimalist photographs of "sticks in the water" on several internet sites, and here I am posting one of mine.  But, in my defense, it's different enough to not be a clone of another person's image.  There probably isn't anything one can find in the real world that hasn't been successfully photographed, but it's important to be certain that one's take on each subject is genuinely one's own. 

  

 

The Orange County Land Trust is a local organization that is determined to save our beautiful woodlands and open spaces from the ravages of developers.  It has raised the necessary funds to purchase tracts of unspoiled land for our enjoyment and that of future generations.  Some of it may be minimally developed for athletic recreation (an inevitable consequence of bending to the common weal), but it will nonetheless be public and undeveloped in any significant way.  This tree and rent in the land is a feature of a very prominent piece of one of these tracts near Sugarloaf, the "Village of Craftsmen" (as they bill themselves). It has always appealed to me in countless drive-bys, and I finally succumbed to a chance to park and photograph it.  I used the Shen-Hao for this with, I think, the 250mm Fujinon. 

I've been overwhelmed of late by a greatly expanded circle of Facebook photographer "friends".  Some of these folk are wonderfully creative makers of original images, but a large number of them are utterly lame "Kennabes" who don't seem to have an original idea for an image in their shrunken little heads.  BUT, who can resist the zeitgeist!  Here's a photograph I posted a few years ago that I've rethought and remade.  It's now an obligatory square (that I really do prefer), and toned a bit.  Ansel Adams, Edward, and Brettt Weston, and a host of other icons of the 20th century influenced a multitude of photographers who emulated these masters to a faretheewell.  Michael Kenna has inherited that mantle, as has the aesthetic of minimalism. I'm not a fearless, and "damn the torpedoes" kind of "artist", so I won't be blazing any new trails, but I'll be damned if I'll post a "sticks in the long exposure water" photograph even if I'm eventually senile.  (I'm grinning here...don't get upset!)

Here is another photograph from January 31st's drive through our rural Orange County countryside.  It used to be really difficult to just stop somewhere and make a photograph, but over the years I've come to enjoy "deep looking" that can result in something worthwhile from even the most unlikely place.  We were in bright sunlight and open territory, but after a while I thought this image was interesting.  There's a wonderful "buzz" that accompanies the recognition of something I want to photograph that makes it exciting.  Without that sensation, it would be a tedious chore to make art of any kind.  It needn't be "gold", but it has to be vital.

It has been a while, hasn't it?  Well, there've been some big time winter illnesses, and a raft of other commitments that have hijacked my time from photography, so...those are the excuses/reasons/explanations for a month's interval between posts.  Going forward, I'll be spending most of my photography time printing for our April show at the Wallkill River Gallery, so there probably will not be too much new stuff.  

However, here are a couple of images I took yesterday (January 31st) during an afternoon's car ride in our Orange County countryside with my wife.  She used her digicam for painting reference photographs, while I used the P67 for these and the rest of one roll of Delta 100.  These two were made in the little memorial park in Craigsville that I've referred to elsewhere on this blog..  I never tire of visiting this gem of a place of solitude. Its' dedicatee is very well served!

 

 

Well, now it is REALLY the time of year when I'd rather be in the darkroom than outside with the camera.  Out there the windchill is in the teens, the light is dull, and the old snow is visually boring.  However, the darkroom is warm, and snug, and it's time to make prints that I can hold in my hand instead of looking at on a computer screen.  Actually, I've been in the darkroom a lot during the last two weeks printing for a group show at the Wallkill River Gallery, but now that work is done, and it's been fun to look through old negatives to see what I may have overlooked in the past, or decided I now like better than I did when they were made.  Below is a scan of one of those negatives that I've never printed, but often remembered as being worth some time working with, so I'll probably print it tomorrow.  It may go well with some of the Cape Cod photographs I've been printing even though it's from Fernandina, Florida eight years ago.  One more reason I love film is that I might have long since either lost, deleted, or corrupted this if it were a digital file due to my own carelessness. Again, to those of you who accumulate pixels, be diligent with your data...back it up, and keep the storage medium current. 

This photograph taken last June at Natirar (Raritan backwards) in New Jersey is particularly important to  me.  It has a very wabi-sabi affect...the bridge's decay, and the spring's floral renewal...has a powerful resonance of my father's world of the Philadelphia of his youth.  So many places we visited in Fairmount Park, Germantown, and along the Schulkyl River in my early childhood had this 19th century ethos about them, that it has become an indelible emotional chord.  I am not a student of Asian or Japanese culture, but some of the few elements I have come to understand are remarkable and valuable additions to my linear and "contemporary" American world view. It's good to go slowly, and savor the moment. 

Behind our house is a secret treasure of great beauty.  The secret gets out when the fog rolls in, or the snow covers every branch and twig, or a wonderful light suffuses the woods.   It's almost embarassing to relate how easy it is to throw open a window and point the camera where the eye rests, or carry the camera out on the deck with not much more than a robe and slippers to confront the weather.   As it says over on the right, it just isn't necessary to travel very far to find film worthy subjects...they're in our own backyard.

 

This past weekend was so springlike that, if you closed your eyes to the fallen leaves and November light, you would have thought you were enjoying a late April day. I decided to visit GPMSP* with the 4x5 (which I've not used for quite a while) to photograph these particular trees in this particular way. I've thought of both of them as an homage to Michael Kenna's Retrospective Two, but with a sardonic poke at the contemporary photofashionistas who seem to decry unalloyed beauty, and demand irony in the only work they insist is currently worthy.









*Goose Pond Mountain State Park

Last week's walk in Goosepond Mountain State Park couldn't be repeated this weekend because of the rain, mud, and general dreariness, but here are a couple more from then. I think the more one is familiar with a place it becomes both harder to photograph because of that familiarity, and yet more rewarding to photograph when you can break through, and see it freshly. The variables that contribute to this are time of day, season, weather, and light. At least one of these will nearly always be different. The discipline is to be there often, and with openness to each.