First Blush

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Another time, early this spring; another valley, on a hill overlooking Stillwater, New Jersey. It was my last day in Peters Valley. I had been exploring and photographing old farmsteads the whole weekend, and a dead-end road provocatively named, "Skyline Drive," suggested an adventure in a different direction. After winding and climbing for awhile the road straightened out and followed what seemed to be a ridge behind a curtain of forest. When I saw a place to stop and a possible trail into the forest, I took it. A short distance in, my trail crossed the AT which, I discovered, follows the ridge parallel to Skyline Drive. A short distance further I stood at the edge of a steep bluff 500 feet above the floor of a vast valley. Spring has rarely looked so fresh, and I imagined riding the wooded canopy the way a surfer rides ocean waves. This is the moment in spring photographers wait for, and my wandering had brought me to a spot where I could feel the wave of new foliage cloak the hills.

After the Storm

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The Nameless Valley is a long, rolling, roomy corridor bounded on the east by the ridge of Taconic peaks, an unbroken obstacle that no roads cross and on the west by a parallel wall that reaches north from WInchell Mountain and ends where the valley narrows to a pass. Though lower by 400 feet than the Taconic Ridge, crossing this western barrier requires winding over dirt roads and the world farther west is a labyrinth of hills and valleys until one reaches the Hudson River.

I like the sense of isolation I find in the Nameless Valley. It is a corridor through haphazard hills. Whether one drives the roads or walks cross-country through the fields and pastures one feels its linear nature between the two mountain walls. Most people pass through the corridor along route 22 without even knowing they've been some place. Most of the time I can't see the beginning or the end, nor has my roaming yet shown me where they are, but I feel the unity of the Nameless Valley, and that the corridor has both a beginning and an end. I like that too as I come to know its contours.

Between these walls lie rolling pastures and cornfields and a meager digestive system beginning at Webatuck Spring and broadening occasionally into swampy bottom until it disappears into other valleys, other spaces farther south. Eventually the Webatuck flow gathers force as Ten Mile River, slips through a narrow valley near Dogtail Corners to join the Housatonic River and flows south through a series of power generating projects into Long Island Sound near Sikorsky headquarters in Stratford, CT, many worlds away.

An artist who lives south of Boston Corner showed me where Webatick spring tumbles out of the Taconic mountains beside his home. He told me that north of his property the valley tips the other way. Water flows north and leaves the valley through the narrow pass at that end. From there it flows west between the low hills to eventually join with the mighty Hudson in order to flow south to spill into New York Harbor. Passing clouds drop their rain as they pass, and it is a matter of chance how each rain drop reaches the sea.

However, it's not this unlikely divide that impresses me so much as my sense of the unity and expansiveness of the space that is isolated here. A row of three farms that lie along the western edge of the valley help me give definition to the expanse. One can just see a bit of the third farm here.

I've been scouting angles for some time, but the task of portraying this space seems to lie beyond the power of photography. Although I feel the unity of the valley, capturing it in an image may be impossible.

Rolling No. 3

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It is probably the largest physical space I've tried to photograph, at least on land. I believe it is a single physical space, a valley with clearly defined walls to the east and west, though its northern and southern boundaries remain vague to me. To the best of my knowledge, it has no special name by which it is known. It is part of a territory that was long disputed by Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts. As a photographer I also note, it contains no single dominant subject, save itself. The act of trying to shoot it has both enlarged and narrowed my concept of what it means to me to be a landscape photographer, photographing land and space.

The question of labels is a nuisance and needlessly confining. There are many ways to be a photographer, but at times I'm in need of one to address people's assumptions; I don't do weddings. However, I do enjoy walking the hills. Until this month I would have described all that I photograph there as landscape, save an occasional floral or insect macro or a bird shot, so landscape photographer is a useful label among many, though I now put as much emphasis on the "scape." Taking my wanderings to this nameless valley has, for better or worse, reminded me that my muse is guided not only by interest in the old buildings and their histories but by a desire to know the land, to experience it as spaces, and draw on that for images.

Exploration here feels a bit different than at other sites I've shot.

Stitching

HOWARD RUSSELL, The Long Deep Furrow: "How readily the apple took to its new environment is revealed by an observation from the Berkshire Hills just before the Revolution. By 1770 the whole length of the Indian path between the settlement of the Stockbridge tribe in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and the Scaticoke village at Kent, Connecticut, nearly 40 miles along the Housatonic, was said to be lined with apple trees. They stood at irregular intervals, sprung from apple cores thrown away by traveling natives who had promptly learned to enjoy the Englishman's fruit."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Hardy colonial farmers came to New England and traded European apples for the native's gift of maize, but what they wanted after work was beer. The soil of New England preferred apples to English grains, and eventually hard cider became the alcoholic beverage of choice and Johnny Appleseed, a legend in his own time and a Swedenborgian, spread the news.

I've been to some hard cider "taste-offs." They tend to be partisan affairs and there can be much heady arguing over the right mix of apple varieties, the effects of weather, harvest time and, of course, the esotericisms of brewing all fueled by freely-flowing research. Perhaps there are similar discussions on the brewing of corn whiskey or Kentucky bourbon, but my hunch is they all pale beside the abstruse distinctions regarding shades of flavor, high notes and low notes and the micro-tuning of soil and sun and water and pruning and staking required to produce the perfect grape.

Such has been the evolution of the American taste bud. New Englanders still love local fruit. It's as Amercan as apple pie, but farmers are selling out to viticulturalists and the libation of choice today is cradled in stemware and served in red, white, or rosé. Where (oh, where) are our national taste buds leading our national character?

Stitched

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The stony earth and hilly terrain of New England have never been ideal for farming, and for a long time New England farmers have adapted to meet specialized markets in order to survive.

This vineyard has already been the subject of a TODAY'S entry but from a very different angle and under very different conditions: "White Silence"

Rolling No. 2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Haying is underway, and I'm following the clouds. Where I wander I see hillsides dotted with shining hay bales or lined with furrows that catch shadows when the sun is low. I used to think it was a simple thing, haying. Most farmers where I live get two hayings a season and watch the weather closely when cutting time arrives. The hay must be baled dry. If it rains after cutting the hay can be ruined. I watch and try to move with their rhythm.

My efforts are crossed by new routines. Farmers making silage to feed their livestock can get three or four hayings because they cut it wet. Farmers who cut late ask me to sample and compare the lightness and softness of their hay, and I will never settle for coarse hay again. I've heard the arguments for square bales vs. round bales and for kinds of wrappers or none at all, and I remain decidedly unconvinced. I heard of a man who, "in pure kindness to his horse, buttered his hay." (see footnote 12 in the appendix)

Painted skies like this are rare. The clouds say come follow us to the hay bales that can only sit and watch and season in the field as the farmer bids.

Rolling

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I've spent much of this spring wandering in a valley north of Millerton. I'm not sure what it is I'm looking for. Between the wall of Taconic Mountains on the east and the wall of Hudson HIlls on the west lie rolling farmland, pasture and bottomland swamp. Last season this field was planted with soy.

When I took this shot two-and-a-half weeks ago, I could still walk between the corn rows. Soon I won't be able to see over them. Rolling farmland is an abstraction until one walks between the corn rows. Photography is a way of exploring.

Stranded among Purlins

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Two sleighs were uncovered when this old, barn complex was undergoing repair. It was cleared for inspection and remediation, and light reflects from the barnyard and opens a space where clutter had previously made photography impossible. For the first time I can see the delicate construction. The hewn timbers and careful mortising seem too fragile to survive but have endured seasons of neglect. Was the roofing also efficient and light? Getting it all up there seems trickier than standing up a city of cards.

Sleigh Forgotten

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: We sometimes imagine sleigh bells, but few of us have heard the sleigh jingling past; fewer still have been pulled along the ice track behind a Cleveland Bay or a Morgan horse in jingling bells. Like the song of the organ grinder and the whoop of the steam locamotive we seem to remember that sound as if we had actually heard it, while we assemble its memory as if in dream.

Once, long ago I thought I heard a real sleigh with bells. I was walking through the narrow streets of Greenwich Village in Manhattan, flakes dropping slowly through the windless heart of a severe winter storm. The city felt unusually quiet and personal, streets hushed in white; the sleigh bells approaching were clean and friendly, and it didn't matter that when I turned to look it was the tire chains on the city bus trundling by with a few accountants and city desk editors who had worked too late.

Two winters ago I took a photograph in the field outside this hay barn that led Jane into a reverie about Paul Gage the harness maker and the way he made sleigh bells. It was included in an earlier TODAY'S. When I took that photograph I had no idea the sleigh from Jane's dream was fifty feet away in the hayloft of Misty Morning Farm.

The Flown Coop (alternate)

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In summer the days are longer and there's less time to review and process images and write for this blog. Work on another project also keeps me preoccupied and will continue to slow my TODAY'S output. However, I'm very curious if anyone has thoughts on this image.

It is the same photograph as I sent in the last TODAY'S but with very different processing. After putting both images aside for several weeks, I think I have made my own decision, but I'm curious if others have a specific preference and, if possible, why.

The Flown Coop

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In my last hours in Peter's Valley I headed south for the Delaware Water Gap. It was a slow turkey walk with lots of diversions. My intent was to drive back north on the west side of the Delaware River and then home. This was the last site I photographed, and I was already feeling rushed. My attention had been grabbed by one of the most unusual buildings I had seen, not this chicken coop, but a small drying shed. With nothing within it to dry, it had just gone on drying. Indeed, never before have I seen a building quite as shriveled and dessicated as this one was. The slats of the roof, spaced to allow air to circulate, hung like the parched hide of some long-dead animal sagging between the joists. In places they had rotted away and beneath was revealed some cartilaginous layer. Through the sagging mass of roof I could read the skeletal outline of the joists. However, it was the siding that was most remarkable. It had been made of vertical slats of lumber. Each slat was about 2 inches wide and ten or twelve feet long. They were attached at the base to the floor structure and at the top to the roof structure, and in the middle they were fastened to some sort of rail. As they dried, some of them warped, but as they were pinned in three spots they wriggled in all directions and sometimes sprung loose. It all looked as if a small breeze might send it flying apart. It was a slow-motion explosion, but it had outlasted most of the other buildings. I tried to photograph it, but I couldn't make anything of it.

I decided to take a gander at the hen house. It had a corrigated tin roof stained in shades of rust and grime. The roof was topped with a small vent pipe that rose from a rusty, sheetmetal base at a jaunty angle, and was capped with a pointed beanie. However, the light glared, and there was nothing to set with it. I moved in close, attracted by these textures. The nesting hay looked fresh, but it seems the chickens ducked out long ago.

The main house (As I recall it was something cozy in asbestos.) was solidly boarded against intruders coming to roost. It must have been a tiny subsistence farm that never provided subsistence. Although I came away with only a single usable image, I won't grouse.

Broken Mill Wheel, Peters Valley

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Trundling Song

The wheel turns with the river.
It never turns back,
and one day it stops,
but the river keeps flowing,
always,
always,
always.


Jane and I are back from trundling through Maine, but this photograph was taken earlier this year in Peters Valley. I'm not certain how the mill wheel worked, but the stream passing here is small as was the wheel. The millrace is actually made of pipe which branches from the stream much further upstream. The stream follows a narrow stone channel through the middle of the farm. Shops lie along the side.

Broken

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - This was the first abandoned farmstead I found when I got to Peter's Valley last month. It's a short distance from the craft center where we all stayed, and I found it on my first drive up the road after I arrived.

It is often the details that speak most clearly to me. The suggestion of modern, overhead, garage doors usually make a barn unsuitable for photographs, and so I questioned my own attraction to this one. I didn't bother photographing it that first morning, but when I returned the next day the clouds were perfect. Unfortunately, another photographer with a medium format camera was set up in front of it for a long shoot. He had no interest in the clouds and was set up ten or fifteen feet in front and just left of the barn door. I struggled to find angles to cut him out or that placed him so that I could delete him in Photoshop, but such compromises rarely work. I knew where I wanted to stand. Fortunately 30 minutes later when the photographer moved, the clouds were still good, and finally I was able to stand exactly where my instincts told me to. Others may find the battered barn door incongruous. For me, it is the voice in conversation with the sky. I wonder what the other photographer got.

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.