Watchtowers 2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I often find it interesting to view the same scene under different conditions. I returned this week to Forsaken Acres especially to see what the perspective from the previous Winter posting looked like now that spring is here, and to see if I could make a shot of it. Little things make a big difference. I tried to stand where I had stood in December. The stone base of the silo that was clear then is hidden by grass and weed now, and the old barn windows and red siding clear in that winter shot are covered where the vines have leafed out.

The stone of the silo base and the bit of barn ruins were important events in the December image. Without them there is nothing to hold the foreground and not enough to make an image. I stepped back to catch a bit more of the barn and to let the weed texture express itself. Spring has fully unfolded now, and the green everywhere takes the edge of menace and gloom from the wrecked towers. Had two vultures not decided to fly down to find out if I was ripe pickings, there still would have been no picture.

Watchtowers

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Poised on the west edge above a long, broad valley, these tile silos preside over the ruins of an old dairy farm and acres of cultivated fields. TODAY'S has been here before. "In Blazing Soy" and "Forsaken Acres" were made last fall just after the first frost when the fields of soy had been shocked to yellow. Yesterday's image, taken on the same December shoot as this one showed the farmer's abandoned home.

Travel in the valley moves north-south. Steep walls to the east and west isolate a ten-mile corridor of unhurried hills. In winter it becomes a hall where flocks of snowdrifts loiter and romp, but the snow is long gone. For the past week it's been part of my regular beat. There are half a dozen farmsteads of interest along the edges, and cows graze in pastures bordered by brown fields of newly planted corn or long grass ready to be mowed; the patchwork hills roll gently now like a body waking from sweet dreams.

Mulberry House

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Once a home,
a place,
wet dishrags, heavy traffic.

Now a house,
Just space.
Rooms and doors, windows and walls, cellar, attic.

White Silence No.3

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Empty

A silence
so hollow and heavy
even the mice tiptoe
while a herd of flying horses
stampede soundlessly
through the parlor door,
palpable vacuum.

Forgotten Secrets

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Furious whispers
scratch and sibilate
their voiceless terrors.

One can almost hear them in rooms such as this.
My feeble ears lean to listen
even as my feet itch to leave.

What forgotten secrets
lie in the cubbies
where the silverware still spoons;

and there in the sink,
what mute shards of conversation
stain the dishes from the last supper?

Morning Movement

PAUL STRAND: "I go and get the camera and do it. Photography is a medium in which if you don’t do it then, very often you don’t do it at all, because it doesn’t happen twice. A rock will probably always be more or less there just the way you saw it yesterday. But other things change, they’re not always there the day after or the week after. Either you do it or you don’t. Certainly with things as changeable as sky and landscape with moving clouds and so on, if they look wonderful to you on a certain day and if you don’t do it then, you may never see them again for the rest of your life. So as a photographer you become very conscious – at least I do – that everything is in movement."

Milk of Contentment

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: "We seldom take great pictures. You have to milk the cow a lot and get lots of milk to make a little piece of cheese."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The Dream of Carnation Farm

E. A. Stuart found added butterfat in contentment and founded Carnation. He sold us a life style with our morning coffee, and many followed to the Pacific Northwest where happy cows grazed lush meadows, but who are these ungulates whose contentment we emulate before we hurry off to work, and whose milk we now powder and can and send over the moon? We have lived with them since the dawn of civilization, and I'm not sure we've learned a thing. What do they think about when I pass with my tripod on my shoulder or when I follow their worn path and set it in their pasture? They turn their heads and watch, and some walk over, and I'm not privy to their secret glances or to the politics of the herd. When the weather is brisk and they're charged on cowgetations one, wise, old Jersey may moo horsely and then so many faces turn and hundreds of eyes track my every step.

It's a bit unnerving because I know it's important, that bovine knowledge they are sharing, but I know they mean no harm to a lone photographer with a feather in his hat, retreating up the hill. They're wise to the ways of the pasture. When I look back many have put their heads back down and returned to ruminating herd hearsay: the poor quality of clover this spring, the disgracefully low price of Grade A Prime, the best way to instruct young calves about the electric fence, and why Elsie's stopped grazing with Bess.

It was 1907 when E. A. Stuart proclaimed the virtue of contentment. When asked how he came up with the name, "Carnation," he said he got it from a cigar he used to smoke.

Times Revenge

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - Where do our ancestors go when the past has been vandalized, disfigured and spoiled? At the end of the landing I pushed open a door and looked hesitantly into another room. From here to the river is farmland. The same families farmed here in the 18th century. Most of them rest in a cemetery nearby.

Amid the hall's gloom I stood on a pile of something, I wasn't sure what, preferred not to look, stuff. Stuff and clutter made it hard to stabilize the tripod. If I was careful not to move, the tripod would be still. I focused into the room toward a rusty box spring piled with soiled clothing and farther on into an empty closet. An old television lay on its side and a window fan. I bet it got hot in there on summer nights. But the picture wouldn't resolve.

I pivoted to look around the room. Still standing on the uneven mess, I reset the tripod, poking the leg deep to get to solid floor. Once it was absolutely solid I exposed the series of nine photographs that make up this image. Whoever lived here last left in a hurry. Now it's abandoned and left to fall. Is this the image of the present overrunning the past? Is this how it always looks when the new wave rolls over the old? I was pleased at the thought of the image my exposures would make. I reached down to fold my tripod and noticed among the trash I'd been standing on a hugely oversized, manila envelope, "PHOTOGRAPHIC IMAGES HANDLE WITH CARE"; the return address included the name of a saint and the word, "Hospital." It's the kind of envelope one doesn't want to have. In it were the answers to questions long moot, and I dared not look inside. I shouldered my tripod and hurried down the stairs. I was suddenly uncertain who really was doing the haunting. Then I saw another shot and redeployed the tripod legs.

Sunday Best

Unplugged Revisited

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Three friends, all photographers whose work and judgement I deeply respect, wrote to question my preserving the color in the window area of this photo. I've been reminded that my wife was probably the first to raise the issue. Keeping color there had seemed like the right way to put a bit of spotlight on the flag or at least make sure it would be clear to those who looked. Two of my friends thought that the flag was not what the image was about. True, it's a detail that adds mystery and ambiguity, but what is the subject? The stove? The secret behind the wall? A dialogue of interior and exterior?. Experts' advice, even Jane's, is of limited value to me until I understand and feel the truth of it myself, but how could I refuse a little help from such friends?.

You never know what it looks like from another part of the hill until you stand there. To my surprise and delight, when I made the whole image b&w the stars of the flag became much clearer. More importantly, I realized how cluttered that section of the image had been. Because I took pleasure in the detail of the window lock and the round, cotton shade pull (Which of us doesn't have the feel in our forearm and our finger tips of pulling on that?) I had overlooked the clutter in the area of the image on which I was focusing such attention. The switch to b&w reduces both clutter and attraction, but the effect of the shot still seems to me to rest on the balance between inside and outside. For me it is important that the brightness of the outside be pressing against the dim of the interior. One of my critics cautions, "A whisper, not a shout." In fact, shouting about such a detail no feels gimmicky.

Unplugged

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Beef Stew, A Recipe

The recipe begins
in the garden
with the planting of the carrots
and peas
and tomatoes.

It includes silage and a slaughter, and
the felling of some trees
and the sorcery
of the spice garden
and a pot.

Add family and
let it simmer till it's done.

Steeple's Ascent

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: On the outside the white spires of New England's Congregational Churches are sedate, classic profiles; emblems of order. Only inside does one find where furies prowled and hand-hewn heft that endured their rage. What echoes resonate still in this ancient chamber?

EXHIBITION OPENING SATURDAY, 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM, Gunn Memorial Library: Click here for info.
HOUSATONIC TIMES ARTICLE: Click here.

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The road that crossed Main Street at the crossroads in the woods outside Walpack was just a narrow, cinder, forest road. I followed it in both directions later in my visit. It parallels the main valley road but on the east side of the valley. Along it are occasional farmsteads, homesteads and isolated houses, all abandoned. Many of the barns were large with hand-hewn beams and pegged bracing, the careful work of early, local craftsmen. The roofs were gone in all and hay loft floors were often rotting. The previous two images were of a farmstead along this road. The barns in this photo were on a different road but similarly fated.

Most of the abandoned houses were old. One fine homestead of stone dated to the 18th century, but there was also a yellow wreck of a raised ranch right out of 1950s suburbia. One wall had fallen away so I could look in, but one look at the outside, and I knew how the rooms lay. Beyond the fallen wall was a row of white, metal, enameled kitchen counters and cabinets, and I could see through a door into the living room where the floor had decayed, and there was a hole into the garage below, and the ceiling above was similarly compromised. Behind the wreckage I could see the mahogony stair railing and a staircase still ascending to the second floor, balusters and banisters still polished.

In the front of the house I could make out the rebellious remains of what had once been formal shrubbery. I climbed a bit of the hill behind the house to see if there was shot back down. To my surprise, nestled in the brush and hugging the vanished yard was an in-ground swimming pool filled with a dark, soupy brew; the pool was about to be swallowed by encroaching forest. What young family had abandoned this woodland paradise?

From time to time throughout the day I did see other people, mostly fishermen, but they didn't allay my sense that I had strayed from my proper century and was haunting someone else's. The fisherman were, after all, visitors like me, but unlike me, they stayed close to Flatbrook and never conversed with the natives. Near the end of the day it was a relief when my friend, Gary, joined me shooting at this abandoned barn not far from the crafts center. When visiting another century, it's safer to go with friends.

Spring Comes to Peters Valley

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Yes, live people! That would not be the case further down the valley as I began my explorations. The valley runs north-south. I followed the road south. The main street of Walpack crosses the valley at its midpoint. My road was elevated, so I saw Walpack on the valley floor before I reached it. It was gleaming in what was left of morning light, a steeple and a bell cupola at the end of a tree-lined row of tidy buildings. The setting was beautiful. To the north and south of the town there are fields and swampland, and with the rolling eastern slope of the valley as a background and everything dressed in early spring color, I tried several times to make a picture, but the town never quite showed up in the images.

The post office was at the intersection of the valley road and Main Street, and I turned to explore Walpack. Main Street is lined with old trees and houses. Many have big front porches that mediate private and public space. Lawns are all mowed as if the the whole town shared a common lawn, and there are curtains and shades on many windows but no cars in front of the houses or furniture on the porches. Walpack is a ghost town. A historical marker in front of the old meeting house tells me that the township was formed in 1731. It tells me that once there were ferries operating between "Walpack Bend" and Pennsylvania. It also tells me that Anna Symmes, the mother-in-law of President William Henry Harrison, "is buried in the old Shapanack Cemetery."

I found that cemetery later on. It was not so much a cemetery as a spot in the woods with three surviving, readable stones and the stumps of perhaps twenty others buried under leaves, the markers long gone. The amazing thing is that although the residents of Walpack had been gone for decades, the town cemetery remains fully manicured and tended. I came on it a minute or two after leaving Walpack Center where Main Street dives back into the woods, zigs, zags, and crosses a one-lane iron bridge. There, in the middle of nowhere is a crossroad, and the town cemetery is on one corner. It's residents once filled the seats at the empty town meeting house I'd just passed. The cemetery has easily several hundred graves with the names of families who lived in Walpack from 1700's on to the present, only nobody lives in Walpack now.

...to be continued

Brigadoon Farm

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: They called it Peters Valley, but it felt more like entering Brigadoon, the town in the Scottish Highlands that comes to life just one day every hundred years. Only I was visiting on an off year, it hadn't come to life, and the vacant buildings were crumbling from neglect. In fact, time did stop in Peters Valley sometime in the 1950s when the Federal Government bought the valley, started closing down farms and businesses, boarding up houses, and planning to put it all under water. Those who know the area know its history is richer still going back thousands of years, and distinguished by its physical isolation in the Poconos north of the Delaware River Water Gap. They also know that once the towns had been closed down by the Federal Government, and much of the population had moved on, the water project remained only a plan which was abandoned 30 years later. The dam was never built and the flooding never occurred, but the culture that had thrived in the valley since the 1700s was gone. Abandoned farms and houses lingered on.

Entry to my Brigadoon was over an old, privately owned, iron, one lane, toll bridge at Dingman's Ferry. No Easy Pass here. I had no idea that passage over the bridge was, in fact, entry into another century. I was meeting up with a group of photographers at the Peters Valley Crafts Center for a weekend of adventures, but I had arrived early, and I wouldn't see the others for 5 or 6 hours. There was an eerie silence as I drove into the little town clustered about what was once the McKeeby Store. I was struck by the quaintness of the place and that it lacked the tidied up look of so many places in Connecticut where the garden club is the custodian of Colonial appearances. This spot had escaped the world of vinyl siding and pastel. I was delighted to find people here; administrators of the crafts center signed me in and directed me to the house where I was to stay - live people!

Clouds Skimming the Hilltop

NOTE: Follow this link to an excellent article on my upcoming opening and exhibition at the Gunn Library in Washington, Connecticut.

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This image could only be resolved through post-processing. It is made from two shots taken shortly before I abandoned Rabbit Hill for the light I thought I would find at the lake overlook nearby, While ambient light made the cornfield and barns plain to see, the bright sky meant an exposure too short to record the cornfield, hillside and barns cleanly. The sky is the result of HDR. However, the cornfield is a single exposure. I'd rather catch theater lights than resort to such processing.

3. PROPORTIONALITY: It only occurred to me this week that in choosing a location to shoot theater lights one must consider the relationship between the scale of the landscape and the scale of the potential light beams that travel across it. Of course we notice such issues when we see them, but my imagination missed this issue as I considered relocating.

I had been shooting from a location I'd never tried on Rabbit Hill (a spot down behind one of those wood piles). The location allowed me to frame two receding paths in my barn composition. To the left I wanted to lead the viewer down the small town road as it passed through the farmstead between opposing barns. The arrangement of buildings left a weak visible cleft where the road jogged oddly and disappeared, but well targeted beam of light might lead the eye and make the slot read. If it spilled softly into the foreground but left my lens in shadow, it would be perfect.

On the right side of the image one looked beyond the farmstead, across a valley at a narrow slice of ranged hills. Almost any beam that came through would give definition between the receding ridges on the other side of the valley.

When I took my position, this was not an especially unlikely alignment to occur, and almost occurred once, but the longer I waited, the more I became convinced that I had slid into one of those never-ending troughs of darkness mentioned previously, and that it might be that the good light was a minute's drive west where the road overlooked the lake. The overlook is quite dramatic and a famous spot for photos. Once there I suddenly understood the issue of proportionality. The openings through which the beams were shining were just as large as they had been earlier on the hilltop, but my panorama was so deep that when they fell on the hills on the far side of the lake they just looked like tiny, weird details, maybe stains. When choosing a location, the sky must fit the scape.

Waiting for the Clouds 8:24:16 AM, April 27, 2010

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This afternoon the lighting guy in the sky had the evening off and left the house lights on full, but I'm still thinking about "theater lights." Another element worth considering:

2. FLUX: Sometimes the cloud patches are randomly scattered, an equal oportunity sky, but at other times the clouds will configure themselves into crests and troughs. I learned long ago that clouds' motion can be deceptive, and I've wasted much time standing with sunshine falling somewhere to the left and right of me and sure the clouds were shifting one of those beams my way. It's much easier to tell how the clouds are moving by following a beam of light cast against the hillside than by trying to follow the gaps in the clouds, but when the sky is arranged in long rows of cloud, chances are the clouds are moving in the direction the rows point. The currents that carry the clouds move up and move down and are affected by land contours as they move. As the air lifts it may even form new clouds. One may think the cloud mass is moving on when it is actually forming overhead. As a general rule it's fruitless to chase the sunshine, but in the conditions just described one must eventually cut ones losses and try another hillside.

Waiting for the Clouds 8:20:03 AM, April 27, 2010

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I'm still following the weather. I continued shooting through yesterday and part of today as well. Both afternoons produced "theater lights," the condition in which the spaces between the clouds beam sunlight onto features of the landscape. In its way, photographing under theater lights can be a bit like chasing twisters only considerably safer. The results can make it all worthwhile. I'm still learning how they work, but I'm trying to identify some things I've found worth considering.

1. CLOUD COVERAGE: How much white and how much blue is there? It's easy when big, discrete, cotton-ball clouds float by, but it often gets more interesting when clouds are layered and of varying tonalities and colors. Often under such conditions the beams that come through are few and far between. These two days tried my patience, and the resulting photos were not worth the effort, but the tender spring leaves of the oaks have started to open which means the Monet leaf moment will soon be gone. That, and the beauty of the cloudscape, convinced me that there was rare potential now. All things being equal, which they seldom are, as the angle of the sun declines, the gaps get tighter, less frequent, and infinitely more beautiful to photograph. Never-the less, it became clear the odds of such a miracle happening on my watch were declining quickly, and I went home early.

Waiting for the Clouds 8:18:57 AM, April 27, 2010

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: My kind of photography generally follows the weather. One of the joys of photographing along the Maine coast is that the weather often changes hourly. In sharp contrast, the weather in these Connecticut hills abides. Good photographic opportunities often come with the weather front, and I watch for them. It may bring mist and fog or clouds in gymnastics tumbles, puffy or glowering. There may be searchlights bigger than hills moving across the treetops and shadows swelling underfoot. And there is always waiting, today plenty of it, as here, timeless, beside a still pond a couple of hours after sunrise as my camera time-stamps the moment.

Starberry Farm Constellations, April, 30, 2009

WILLIAM BLAKE: "Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead."

Misty Morning Farm

ANNOUNCEMENT: The Gunn Memorial Library's Stairwell Gallery will be presenting an exhibition of my photographs beginning on May 8th and running through June 19th.  The Exhibition entitled "Farm," will include new prints of farms in and around the Berkshire, Taconic, and Hudson hills.  I'm in the process of preparing new prints, many from images that have appeared on this blog. 

There will be an opening reception from 11 AM to 1 PM.  All are invited.  The Gunn Library is at 5 Wykeham Road (at Route 47) in Washington, Connecticut.

For additional information, directions, and hours visit the Gunn Library web page: http://www.gunnlibrary. org or call (860) 868-7586

Trail to Meeker Swamp, April 14, 2010

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This is the season when nature imitates Monet. She works quickly, and before I know it, blushes have become fully saturated and mostly green. But this is still the very beginning; Monet is still mostly confined to the valleys.

Down the trail at the swamp I can hear the chatter of the black birds. When I emerge from the forest at the end of the trail they will be all around me, their flights reflecting in the glassy surface of the beaver pond. Out here in the hay field the sun is low and I'm amazed at how painterly nature unmanipulated by Photoshop can sometimes be. Even the ubiquitous unsharp filter seemed too much manipulation.

Masonry

LEWIS THOMAS: “Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labor, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.”

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It's not clear that the law-givers of the universe care how the energy in these super-charged kernels gets transformed. One way or another, however, the fault lines appear, and it's on its way to becoming somebody else.

Corn Nudging

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - Contrary to usual practice, I'm posting this image and the next despite technical flaws. They are, at best, trifles, but the corn search is ongoing, and the journal of travel would seem incomplete to me without these at least as place holders. Oh, to have a stronger back while shooting close to the ground in the wet field! In the process of trying to learn about mushrooms, I came across this wonderful poem by Sylvia Plath called "Mushrooms"

Corn Parable

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The corn photos that began with the previous TODAY'S were taken last June. The field had been cut late, and there was an unusually high number of full ears turned under with the stalks. Some, the crows fed on, but many were left and rained on through spring. Some rotted in the mud; mysterious transformations, all.

Winter Harvest

HENRY DAVID THOREAU: “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our head.”

Blacksmith: The Sequel

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Sometimes I'm diving off a cliff into unknown. I don't know why I decided to render this image as I did or exactly what I was expecting. It was already interesting in full color. However, the minute I had done it I realized I had magnified my control over the meaning of the image. Even playing with only the color-to-B&W conversion of the house I had new power to shape, not only the nature but more importantly the relation of the two characters. Surprisingly, either could be made the protagonist. In the balance lay the intensity of the conflict. Anyone who wishes is invited to write the script.

The Blacksmith's Shop II

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: When I first entered this shop, I had been told it was a blacksmith's shop, but I was barely aware of the anvil and hearth amid the clutter. I read about smithing, made repeated trips and educated my eye. One by one, all of the blacksmith's essential tools revealed themselves to me as if out of thin air. Now when I enter it feels as if the blacksmith had just stepped outside before I entered. Was he out by the barn replacing a hinge and puffing on his Edgeworth? Would he return momentarily and fire up the hearth? The tools he needed would be around him and ready as they were a few moments back.

Long after his essentials had reappeared, one item remained plainly invisible to the blind man. A note in an old blacksmith's text I found online pointed the way. It said a blacksmith always had a bucket of water by his work to cool or temper the iron. Was there a bucket? My images to that point revealed none. I got back to the shop as quickly as I could. Of course it was there, right where it should be. It's visible here between the blower and the anvil. Someone has let it run dry.

Some readers will look at this and remember an earlier image posted here, not too dissimilar but from slightly further back and a bit to the left. I posted it twice, first as a monochrome and then, "in technicolor." It was the first shot of the shop interior I posted. It was a month or more before I began the series. Several people commented that they liked the splash of light which peppered the room and fell over part of the anvil, but the overall sense of the image was the chaos. At that point, that's all I could see. Now it's clear that had I changed position and angle slightly the order could have been clear, but everything was still invisible to me then.

The earlier shots: (1), (2)

Fading Light

ROBERT DOISNEAU: "I don't usually give out advice or recipes, but you must let the person looking at the photograph go some of the way to finishing it. You should offer them a seed that will grow and open up their minds."

Handle and Latch

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I note the blacksmith who made this took time to shape the handle to fit a hand and to add a bit of flair in the arrowhead latch. I puzzled over the awkward position of the large ring should one want to add a lock. Could it be that at a later time the ring was turned ninety degrees, perhaps when the old wood cracked?

Idle Latch

SALLY MANN: ".....I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanance, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me: my love for the place, for the one man left, for my children and friends and the great green pulse of spring."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Spring is in readiness - I've never had that sensation so strongly as this year. We had a week of unusually warm, sunny weather. I walked every day, and I wrote of peeping shoots in the dark forest and of the first leaf bulbs surging. And afterward, Jane nudged me to turn up my ears and enjoy the song of the first pond peepers. But the weather grew suddenly cold and crisp, and I used the clear light to shoot the blacksmith's latches on the old farm. There was a bit of snow, and some of it on Winchell Mountain in shadows lasted to last weekend, and all that pent up exuberance waited and grew stronger. Now, temperatures have begun to rise again, and we've had three days of rain. Even if I can't yet see any green, I can feel it rising. The rivers are flowing full and the ground is saturated, and the weekend prediction is for temperatures to climb to the mid-seventies. Though all is still dark and colorless, the swollen earth seems ready to loosen and spring forth as never before.

Latch

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Still

What is it blacksmiths forged?
They seemed like rugged farriers,
Nose to the grindstone,
Plough to the seed row,
But they were magic men
Who tempered steel,
Made swords invincible,
Charmed compasses to spin
With the flux of the heavens.
From the steady beat of their hammer
Came music that made molecules dance,
Reverberating in the city's hum,
Resonating in the rumbling of continents,
Resounding in the silence of galaxies.
The doors of empty barns swing on their great, strap hinges still.
The straps still knit the crumbling doors.
Graceful hooks slide smoothly still to secure the hasp against the creep of tendrils and stalks,
Though the barns are cold, too cold for the mice.
Is the squeak of the hinges, the creak of the doors, the clink of the hook behind the hasp still the blacksmith's song?

Anvil at Sunset

MACK M. JONES, from "War Department Education Manual, EM 862," 1944 quoting text of 1898:
306. Hardening and Tempering a Cold Chisel.-After a cold chisel is forged and annealed, it may be hardened and tempered as follows:

1. Heat the end to a dark red, back 2 or 3 in. from the cutting edge.
2. Cool about half of this heated part by dipping in clean water and moving it about quickly up and down and sideways, until the end is cold enough to hold in the hands.
3. Quickly polish one side of the cutting end by rubbing with emery cloth, a piece of an old grinding wheel, a piece of brick, or an old file.
4. Carefully watch the colors pass toward the cutting end. The first color to pass down will be yellow, followed in turn by straw, brown, purple, dark blue, and light blue.
5. When the dark blue reaches the cutting edge, dip the end quickly into water and move it about rapidly. If much heat is left in the shank above the cutting edge, cool this part slowlyso as not to harden the shank and make it brittle. This is done by simply dipping only the cutting end and keeping it cool -while the heat in the shank above slowly dissipates into the air.
6. When all redness has left the shank drop the tool into the bucket or tub until it is entirely cool.


PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: After following the beam of sunlight across the shop it was inevitable and just that the last sunshine fell where the smith sent sparks flying. Beside the anvil is the crank he turned to make the coals glow white hot until he deemed the iron ready to be worked. That knowledge, I'm told, was passed down through generations in a ceaseless regimen of repairs and improvements and occasional bits of virtuoso display all of which pressed on like the seasons. Since blacksmithing can easily be a two-person task, one can only imagine much was said in words and deeds around this anvil.

Normally I go to old places to look for traces of the past. Here the scene was nearly intact, the past was all around me, and what was striking was how it had remained so long. The men who worked here did not do so haphazardly. They were resourceful and hard-working. And then they put down their work and stopped, and the place is very quiet now and drafty, too cold for the mice.

Bits

SIMON WATNEY: "No picture has a single meaning."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Yesterday I wondered about the place of the blacksmith shop in the finished photo. Can a photo, in fact, forget its origin in a specific time, place, or subject and take on a language more often found in a painting. Though taken in the blacksmith's shop, this might have been anywhere and whatever feelings or thoughts it conveys have little to do with smithing or farming or even drill bits. I have no idea what it's about, can't put it into words, but in it I find mysteries which continue to resonate softly.

The Blacksmith's Hand

JOHN ROSENTHAL: "As a fledgling street photographer strolling up and down the streets of cities, I quickly became aware of Time and its erosive power. My early photographs focused almost exclusively on the signs of an older culture that was holding on for dear life. I'd photograph seltzer bottles in old wooden crates piled high in a truck, or the dusty windows of Jewish bread shops, or old men building February fires on the beaches of Coney Island. My interest was more than documentary, for it seemed to me that what was about to vanish was important and irreplaceable, and frankly, I wanted my photographs to offer, in some manner, the power of resuscitation. Actually, I still do, though I no longer believe that photographs can prevent the homely past from being plowed under; rather, I believe that photographs - especially good photographs that compel our interest - help us to remember; and even more importantly, they help us to decide what is worth remembering."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: What makes a picture? Is it this old Buffalo Forge blower, No. 625. I found one like it in a 1908 Buffalo Forge catalogue on the internet. Before hand blowers like this became available in the 1880s the blacksmith would have needed a large bellows and an assistant to work the iron.

Or is it about where the blower was in the room, the arrangement of hearth, blower, anvil that let the blacksmith's work flow?

Or should the photo rather be about where it was in the rectangle of the picture - not really about the blower or the blacksmith at all but a pleasing and harmonious composition of forms, colors, textures, light?

 If the photo can transcend the place, can it conjure the absent hand that turned the crank to deliver the blast of air that made the coals glow and superheated the metal in the forge until the blacksmith saw it turn the right color, lifted it from the forge, and turned to the anvil to begin his hammering?

And can it capture at the same time that absent hand and the quiet that dwells in the shop now and haunts this old farm?

Spare Parts

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: These aging broken wheels can yet transport. Let us roll them round, finger the dry wood and imagine who last rode them into town when the roads were still dirt, and stones jostled the farmer's way. Even today between the ancient, genteel houses and shops, survivals of that carriage age, the snarling autos slow. They whine and throb but pause for families crossing Main Street munching pastries bought in shops where the farmer or his wife bought a new pair of overalls or a tin bucket or had a harness mended.

By the time the farm ceased operations in the 1960s, wagon wheels were a front yard cliché, but in this blacksmith's shop they've been saved, spare parts, carefully stored above the blacksmith's bench. Did they hang there for 50 years, a quaint souvenir becoming ever more obsolete before the farm stopped, and did they then hang another 50 years forgotten and gathering dust?

Why were they initially saved? How might they have been reused? Where are the steel hoop tyres, or were these straked? (http://www.kismeta.com/diGrasse/this_old_wheel.htm). Were the tyres unrepairable and too valuable to save; traded as scrap for new metal the way horse shoes were recycled? Old carriage and wagon wheels roll us into an economy with very different dynamics from our own but not so bucolic as we might think.

Through much of the 19th century this farm operated in the midst of a thriving iron industry. The traces remain in place names: "Ore Hill," "Iron Mountain." This silent farm lies fifteen minutes by car from the ruins of charcoal ovens, lime kilns, iron furnaces, a major commercial forge. Western Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont were known for their high quality iron. How many layers of middlemen did it take to get the raw iron into the hands of the farmer-blacksmiths of Scarf Mountain Farm? The farmer had neighbors who made their livings in the iron industry. If the farmer didn't make his own ax, it was because he could buy a Collins Ax that kept its edge longer and cost him less. And the ax may have rolled into town along rails that ran across Main Street and somehow connected to the Collins Company a days carriage away in Collinsville, Connecticut. More and more, the world was riding on iron.

But everything was local: mines, lime kilns, charcoal ovens, blast furnaces, foundries, fabrictors, blacksmiths, ferriers, wheelwrights, harness makers. Today iron and steel are exotic; they come from places as far away as China and Russia, and when the steel breaks or rusts to uselessness it will journey as far before it can be reused. A piece of steel may travel through many countries before it is a wrench in my hand. It's sobering to consider a time of such local self-suficiency.

Suspended Animation

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Yesterday, I followed a brook down to the old ice pond. At the bottom of the valley the first skunk cabbages were poking their bulbs out of the mud. Inside the wine-colored bulb the yellow "clown ball" was in waiting.

This morning I spotted a tree with tight leaf buds swelling, and beside it was a tiny pond peppered with frogs all croaking for mates. They were so eager they didn't dive for safety when I passed.

If they still farmed here, the silos would be nearly empty and cows would be gazing longingly toward still brown fields. And the farmer too would be changing his routines. The forge is a fine place to spend the winter, but this is the time when the plows must be sharp and ready to cut the earth. If they still farmed here.

Grindstone

Mack M. Jones, from "War Department Education Manual, EM 862," 1944 quoting text of 1898: "Different grades of iron and steel may be distinguished by the sparks produced when ground on a grinding wheel. The higher the carbon content of the steel, the brighter and more explosive are the sparks."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: After being forged and tempered, plough blades and other farm tools needed to be sharpened, but a good grindstone was also needed to sharpen many of the tools the smith used to work the iron. No blacksmith could be without a good grindstone. In an age before electricity a farm blacksmith needed a large stone that could develop significant centrifugal momentum.

Of Swages, Fullers, and Peens

FRED HOLDER (http://www.fholder.com/Blacksmithing/article4.htm): "All work that a blacksmith does consists of a number of basic processes, which when taken together allow him or her to produce very complex forgings. In this article, we begin to explore these processes. Once each of them is mastered, the beginning smith is ready to begin applying them in more complex situations. The processes that I am talking about are:

• Squaring
• Rounding
• Pointing
• Drawing
• Bending
• Joining

I consider these to be the basis of virtually all blacksmithing tasks. Once a smith has mastered these, only the imagination is the limit of what he or she can do."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: So much of creativity is putting the same basic elements into new patterns. The trick is in finding the combinations that make the whole so much greater than the sum of its parts. Whether forging a hinge, programming a computer, painting the Sistine ceiling, or discovering the trick to make red earth into iron, it's rarely conscious logic that makes the essential leap, more often it's some secret syzygy deep in the inner cosmos of the mind, an alignment of orbs. How does one populate this creative space with the right raw material to feed creativity? What calisthenic limbers its muscles? When the leap is made, how does one spot it as genuine? From whence comes this voice of the mind?

The sun's late day beam continued to point my way. One by one it crept across a row of hammer-like tools carefully stored near the forge. Blacksmiths are tool makers, and their shops are often filled with unique hammers, tongs, swages, fullers, peens and widgets. The blacksmith crafts the tools he needs to carry out the six processes of his art. Can one find in those tools the kind of work he did? The special projects he undertook? Anything of the shape of his life? Something of his attitudes, temperament, thought processes even? Might it go deeper still?

I recently visited a working blacksmith, a young man with a growing business. I had lots of questions and when I asked how I might spot a handmade tool, he showed me forge marks and signatures, and how cast tools might have a casting ridge and how a set of handmade tongs was slightly irregular or the look of a handmade rivet. Finally, he reached in a different spot and brought down a handmade hammer. It was tucked away apart from other hammers at the bench. He said it was the first tool he had made. He spoke with an authority that came from knowing its curves by heart.

Swages in Sunlight

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Once again I'm reminded that, because I always photograph under available light, it always starts with light. The blacksmith's shop is a difficult place to shoot. In the previous entry I described it as, "little disturbed for sixty years." It might have been more appropriate to say, "unused." The place itself looks like it has been shaken by an earthquake. As a result, it's hard enough to find places to stand, let alone walk. Debris lies everywhere in and around the orderly work patterns left by the last blacksmith. How to bring aesthetic order to chaos when it is hard simply getting the tripod in place?

And it can be a crazy lightbox too, especially when the ground outside was covered with snow. Much of the shop's siding is cracked, and light enters in shards from a thousand points perforating almost every usable background. All that light blinds sight while offering little useful illumination. Eight, irregularly placed windows along the east, south, and west walls have lost glass and mullions and recently even some frames have fallen apart. On sunny days, especially in winter when the sun is low, sunlight enters through these windows in tight beams; it might be fun to spend a full day there as the earth turns.

On my previous visit I'd taken a good photograph of the smith's large grindstone spotlighted in one of these beams. Then the sky had become overcast. This time the sky was clear, and I was returning expressly to follow the late day beams through the west-facing windows. Where would they lead me before the sun passed behind the nearby house and some minutes later, below the horizon? It was not the first time I'd followed the sun.

There is a large, free-standing bench or table outfitted with slots for holding the smith's, largest, hammers and long-handled sledges. It can be seen in the first picture I posted of the blacksmith's shop (http://rothphotos.blogspot.com/2010/01/blacksmith-in-technicolor.html). Just as I was entering the shop, sunlight touched the corner of this table for the first time.

I've worked as a carpenter, electrician; I've laid tile, and developed and printed film. I've even tried unsuccessfully to throw a few pots. I worked for an architectural model maker and learned to turn plexiglass and brillo into a miniature, city landscape. I can find my way around most of the traditional tools of these trades, but the tools of the blacksmith are foreign to me. Does one need incantations to work them? I believe two of the tools in this photograph are swages that might be used to help pound a rod to roundness. They are the size of a man's fist, and the first implies a cylindrical shape of considerable heft. What is the third tool? Does it have a special name or is it simply a customized, flathead hammer (a flatter) perhaps used for smoothing iron after drawing it out?

I could almost see the sun moving across the tools, and by its trajectory, the afternoon's shoot looked promising.

Blacksmith's Cornucopia

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Of course the alchemists are real. We live amid their transformation. The difference between the way the native Americans processed maple sugar and the productivity of colonial methods was metal. Among the alchemists of that earlier time were the farm blacksmiths. When we think of blacksmiths today, we commonly think of horse shoes and sweaty men in the image of Longfellow's smithy. In fact the farm blacksmith did far more than shoe horses. He made hinges and door hardware, repaired wagon wheels and kept his plows and saws sharp. If he did not make his own chains, he knew how to add a link to repair them. He made a variety of tools for his daily work from drill bits to most or all of the tools he used at the forge. He could make a sturdy whiffletree and a smoothly operating clevis.

Since we live remotely from the magic by which raw earth is transformed to hardened metal of superior strength, we may think his task not too different from the potter's, but the potter's artistry is of another dimension from the blacksmith's alchemy. At his forge he transformed molecules by many different recipes. He could improve the metal's hardness, it's tensile strength; he could make it pliant or springy, and if he was highly skilled he could put a spirit in the metal giving it magnetic power. In fact, the very first electric motor was created by a blacksmith, Thomas Davenport, in Vermont. Whether a blacksmith could create a magnet or not, he was always arranging the invisible field lines of the molecules in the iron to flow like currents of water in a stream or like air flow around the wing of an airplane. He had to be precise in the temperature and the chemical make-up of his fire. Too much sulphur, the wrong amount of carbon and his efforts would fail. He had to know just when to pull his work from the forge and beat it on his anvil and when to turn and put it back in the white heat.

Of course he also shoed horses as is evident in this image from an abandoned blacksmith's shop little disturbed for 60 years; and he kept the hay wagons rolling when the ruts savaged another wheel. It was the practiced skill of the farmer-blacksmith that kept things moving.

Spring

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It was here before I knew it. My son-in-law, Darrell, told me it's the succession of warm days and cold nights that gets the sap moving, pulsing nutrients stored in the roots up to where the leaves will form. And my grandson, Aiden, took me around Poppy Cherniske's farm so we could peek under the lids of the tin buckets to see how fast the drops fell, and we climbed the mountain, and Oppa flew Aiden over the rocks where the springs had washed out the trail, and we never found the top, but the forest was so open we we could see across the valley. Not a green sprout to be seen, but spring was surging.

Back at the bottom of the mountain everyone was gathered around the sugaring house where they were boiling down the sap. We learned that 40 gallons of sap makes 1 gallon of syrup, and that the buckets must be emptied every day or the sap ferments and has to be thrown away. Making syrup takes real work.

This row of trees is not on the Cherniske farm but along the road by Beardsley Farm in the Great Hollow. The previous photograph of roadside trees in the snow was taken less than half a mile from here and 6 days earlier. What a change! In a blog response to that photo Jane suggested that perhaps the early farmers who planted roadside maple trees also harvested them for maple syrup. I'm sure she's right. The early farmers learned to make maple syrup from the native tribes. Cane sugar was an expensive commodity in colonial times and had to be transported long distances, so maple sugar was the preferred sweetener.

Spring has arrived with startling speed. Now a crew rides up this road every day in a truck with a large plastic tank to collect the flowing sap. The trees in this stretch of road are fairly new in maple-tree-years and planted much closer together than was customary among 18th and 19th century farmers. In some places I can still find the mostly decayed stumps of the earlier generation of maples, like giant footprints across this new age, but the sap is still flowing.

The Idea of Farmhouse: Roadside Trees

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It was an early Colonial tradition for a farmer to plant trees along the road that passed through his farm. I'm amazed that so many people fail to notice when the trees begin to march in even steps on both sides of the road, or if they notice they think that the thinning forest fell that way naturally or through a bit of pruning. Jane and I always look forward to finding these in our travels, and it has become one of our games to comment about the farmer who perhaps 200 years earlier had put them there knowing that he would be an old man before they provided much shade.

The tradition was not confined to gentleman farmers but was common among country farmers who lived off the land. It began before there were front yards, when the front yard emulating town was nothing more than a hill of bush beans, but the dirt road beside those bush beans was lined with saplings, most often maples, in evenly measured spaces. They would be nurtured so that some day when the farmer or his children drove their buggy back from town or returned from church on Sunday, long before he reached the door of the house he entered an arched, shadowed space like a cathedral nave where in spring and summer nesting birds sang and welcomed him.

The farmer planted these trees not just for himself but for his children. Was he also thinking about his relationship to that piece of earth and its importance as a legacy and as a stake in a new land? As Jane and I discover and pass such roadside rows, we always look for the farmhouse and to see what is left of the barns. There were always barns. We also notice how the power lines have cut their channel to bring light and heat and television and email. We count how many trees are split fragments, how many are carcasses rotting, how many are just double-width gaps.

This is what time does. Today most of us drive by at thirty miles an hour with windows shut tight, but it's a privilege sometimes to walk beneath the boughs and think about where the road has taken us and where it seems to lead.

The Idea of Farmhouse: Front Yard

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Originally New England farmers had no front yards. The front yard was an idea born in town. When a farmer tore up the bush beans, perhaps exchanged a stone wall for a picket fence, and planted two trees either side of the front door, he was turning his face to the road and providing formal welcome to the community. He was probably also making a statement about his social and economic aspirations or achievement.

The Idea of Farmhouse: Of the Land

JOHN ALVIN:"The proverbial blank canvas is the very mirror of stark raving terror. Many think that a profession in the arts is not very risky or dangerous. They are profoundly wrong. Gambling your very reputation and the full measure of your profession every time you stare into the empty void of a unused canvas, you are taking an emotional and psychological risk that is easily equivalent to the world's most dangerous and demanding professions. Anyone thinking the contrary should try to subsist on their own artistic skills and survive. Not so easy or casual. It is dangerous to the soul. It is risky to the heart. It is an extraordinary demand and challenge and yet it is the very core of what we aspire to as artists."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: David Pogue's question (Personal Tech: Photoshop and Photography: When Is It Real?): What is photography, "if you don’t have to worry about composition and timing, because you can always combine several photos or move things around later in Photoshop?" suggests another question: Is photography in some sense a performance medium, like playing the violin or ice skating; we admire the photographer's virtuosity with her camera?

Of course David Pogue's most important point was not about how technology changed pictures but how it has changed reality. Fortunately, I don't have to worry about objective reality. My aim is to try and portray subjective reality. The news photographer quickly worries, "How much manipulation is too much manipulation?" For me there's a different challenge: Because technology enables me to do anything, I must be sure I choose to do something. Technology has made the canvas completely blank.

The Idea of Farmhouse: Roots

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This photograph doesn't look like a watercolor painting or a pencil sketch, but it doesn't quite look like a photograph either. The elements of the image that impressed me when I shot it are much the same as those that move the image now: the tree, the vines, the extremely tight cropping. In its original, unprocessed state I also found something surreal. Do these facts make it more of a photograph than if I had invented those qualities entirely in the computer? Is it less of a photograph now that I've used photoshop to cast a bit of unearthly light?

Wendy Costa sends along a link to this David Pogue article in the NYTimes:

Personal Tech: Photoshop and Photography: When Is It Real?

Pogue's list of "things that may not be photography," challenge thinking and were, for me, alone worth the read.

Winter Logs

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE:

Winter

When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marion’s nose looks red and raw,
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-whit;
Tu-who, a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The winter never passes without scenes that remind me of Shakespeare's poem. I know I've quoted it before, but Blogger no longer lets me search the full text of my blog at once. That means it's time to quote it again. It probably helps to know that the hissing "crabs" are crab apples. To make an image that captures even a small part of what Shakespeare ignites is a noble accomplishment. I keep trying.

Classic IV

ALEC SOTH: "This is the same problem I have with digital photography. The potential is always remarkable. But the medium never settles. Each year there is a better camera to buy and new software to download. The user never has time to become comfortable with the tool. Consequently too much of the work is merely about the technology. The HDR and QTVR fads are good examples. Instead of focusing on the subject, users obsess over RAW conversion, Photoshop plug-ins, and on and on. For good work to develop the technology needs to become as stable and functional as a typewriter."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Return to a typewriter? Never! Though I understand the complaint. No matter how much keeping on top of technology may resemble riding a bucking bronco, the images being produced using HDR and various Photoshop plug-ins are changing expectations about visual representation and what a photograph may be.

When a photograph winds up looking like a watercolor painting, or a pencil sketch, is it still a photograph? Are there essential qualities that distinguish photography as an art form? At what point does one no longer say, "I am a photographer," and say instead, "I am an image maker"? Or conversely, where and why does one draw the line and say emphatically, "I am a photographer"? For the moment I can only answer this question an image at a time.

Since upgrading my computer system I've been exploring some of the newest plug-in releases for Photoshop. Some small enhancements were made to this image using Topaz Adjust 3.2.5, mostly to give a bit more substance to the clumpy snow on the foreground tree. It also helped me add a bit more character to the sky and distinction between the distant mountains, but in shots like this the urge to clarify forms is in direct opposition to my frequent wish to represent whiteout. Here the veils of falling snow are used mostly to space out the distant hills, and I've sacrificed a bit of foreground snowiness to clearly define the foreground players. The software is designed for accomplishing far more radical photo renderings.

Blackout in Hidden Valley

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: HDR is a hot topic among photographers, but little is written on Low Dynamic Range photography. However, whenever one shoots through fog or in a snowstorm, what one gets is an LDR image. The thicker the weather, the narrower the dynamic range to the point where form disappears completely. A typical histogram of a scene in snow or fog might be a cluster of peaks all lying well within the top half of the histogram. In many photographs it's desirable to spread that spectrum out across all 255 levels thus mapping the misty, darkest tone as if it were black and the creamiest white as if it were bright white. Doing this to a fog or snow image usually has the effect of dissolving the atmospheric effect one was trying to capture. However, LDR images offer more tonal option before the image clots up than normal photography. I find they are also more sensitive to tiny changes, and moving an image from camera to screen to print is more taxing.

In any case, the work of photography isn't done until the light captured has been rendered into a finished image. How one chooses to render the image depends on what one wishes to convey. Here is a different rendition of yesterday's exposure. The only important change made was to dynamic range. I'm eager to hear what viewers think.

Whiteout in HIdden Valley

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It has finally snowed. Should I feel guilty for wishing for the thing that is bedeviling lives further south?

Blizzard

Falling white from ear to ear,
So thick one could get lost,
A noisy stillness,
An agitated silence,
Tracks that fill as if they were never there,
Fingers numb,
Feet heavy,
Wrapped in solitude,
Opaque and awake,
Snowflakes on flesh melt like holy water.