Twin Elm Farm, October, 2009

THOMAS DE QUINCEY: "Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures; none show more passionate tenderness to their young when deprived of them; and, in short, I am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these quiet creatures."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: What is the patience of a cow? And what might a photographer do to try it? Yesterday I had a lesson in the nature of cow patience. When among the dairy ladies I move in bovine time. I want them to stay settled - maybe even forget I'm there. Too much movement, and they may come over to inspect. Move suddenly, and they spook. Yesterday one of them wanted her picture taken. She followed me down to the lower yard and stood and waited, and she'd actually found some rather nice light. The problem is, every time I started clicking the shutter, she'd turn away. When I put my lens down and looked at her, she'd turn back to where I wanted her, but as soon as I started clicking, the head would turn away. I couldn't quite get it framed as I wanted, and so we played this game over and over. She continued posing and turning and posing and turning until I exceeded her speed limit, exceeded her rpm's. All at once, she stepped back, turned around, and walked back to the first yard. Not only that, but a few moments later another cow who had been watching us followed her leaving me alone the yard. I was being snubbed by cows. I could almost feel disgust in their departing footsteps.

I followed them into the other yard, but they were by then in the far corner, and they clearly wanted nothing to do with me. For awhile I photographed other things. Three of them left the yard completely and moved into the muddy interior yard down between the buildings by the honey wagon. It was a place I was reluctant to go without my rubber boots, but finally I followed them there. I stood amid the muck just on the other side of deep puddles. The cows knew I could go no further. I watched as they began grooming each other and nuzzling. I was surprised at how affectionate the ladies were to each other. Much later in the afternoon I circled round the barns and photographed a bit from the other side of the puddles. I think at that point they forgave me, because they came over to the fence where I was standing. I wonder how they'll receive me when I go back today. It will be a test of cow memory.

How Now Brown Swiss?

GRANT WOOD: "All the really good ideas I ever had came to me while I was milking a cow."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I confess it. Sometimes I talk to the cows. I do it in English because I'd be ashamed to utter my treble moo in front of a cow with a basso profondo that makes my toenails curl. If only I could open my mouth and have that sound come out! Then I'd have a real conversation, and the cows would pay attention. And back in the city, think how useful the talent to moo could be in clearing a path on a crowded subway platform.

Mostly, the cows show no reaction to my chatter. Those who think cows to be sluggards who mind nothing but hay and grass are mistaken. While most of their lives are spent standing and chewing, if you get anywhere near them you will discover inquiring minds meditating on the meaning of your presence. They are not like dogs who mostly want your attention and love. Nor are they like cats who require your obeisance. Mostly, cows just want to know.

I often try to get near and snap a candid shot of the herd, but usually they spot me coming and follow every move. Then my photos look like posed family portraits, all eyes on the lens. Cheese! And after I've crossed the pasture and am moving on, they are usually still watching until I'm out of sight.

Of course, occasionally they do talk to me, and then my toenails curl.

Brown Swiss

WIKIPEDIA: Famous Brown Swiss:
Hoosier Knoll Jade Monay Set a new bench mark for udder quality when she won Supreme Champion in 1994. When she was classified, the udder was scored E-96 which is still one of the highest scores ever obtained for udder quality by a Brown Swiss. Recently Monay was awarded the distinction of being the All Time All-American 3 Year Old for the Swiss Breed.
Old Mill E Snickerdoodle is considered by many as one of the best Brown Swiss to ever walk across the show ring. She was undefeated from her first show in 2003 up until the World Dairy Expo in 2007. She currently sets a record across all breeds for most consecutively won classes at Harrisburg and the World Dairy Expo.
Jane of Vernon "Almost all Brown Swiss today trace to this magnificent cow who lived from 1929 to 1945. She garnered Grand Champion honors at national Brown Swiss shows in 1932, 1933, 1934, and 1936. Jane of Vernon was bred by the late Orbec Sherry of Viroqua, Wisconsin."[1]

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Though the title of this photograph nods toward Kuener Farm and Andrew Wyeth's painting of the same name, the scene has shifted from Chadds Ford to Twin Elm Farm in the Oblong. Beyond sharing a common title, this image has nothing in common with Wyeth's painting.

The main herd at Twin Elm are beef cattle. They roam most of the hillside above the barns and cover considerable territory. They are a mix of breeds including some Brown Swiss. When I'm in the fields with them they are a curious bunch who will watch me closely and then walk over to see who's trespassing in their pastures, and sometimes when I'm out there taking pictures, they'll sneak up on me, and I won't know they're there until I feel one breathing behind me. When I turn, however, they jump away. I take comfort in knowing they are more afraid of me than I of them... not too much comfort.

This photo, however, is of one of the dairy ladies. There's only a handful of them (What a concept! They can easily weigh a ton each.) They are all Brown Swiss, and their personalities are entirely different. They'll stand and watch me with their sad, brown eyes and their large, furry ears, and when I walk toward them, they'll let me pat their necks. They are slow, gentle giants. Brown Swiss have a reputation for their sweet disposition and docile nature. It is well earned. Even among the beef herd, the Brown Swiss steers, although the largest animals in the herd, are the least threatening.

Then again, all cows spend 6 hours a day eating and eight hours a day chewing cud, but I was warned that some of the bulls may not have been properly castrated.

For more on these cows visit: Autumn Cow in Retrospect

Pretty Lily

JOHN LOENGARD: "A Ming vase can be well-designed and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone. I don't think this can be true for photography. Unless there is something a little incomplete and a little strange, it will simply look like a copy of something pretty. We won't take an interest in it."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I plead, guilty as charged, but I couldn't resist. More adventurous efforts coming soon.

Orbits

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Before leaving Chadds Ford, let's make a brief stop at Longwood Gardens as Gary and I did on both visits. It has greatly enlarged my concept of water lilies. These are not the innocent lilies of Connecticut woodland ponds that are from birth beset by lilivores of all shapes and sizes. They are invadors from another universe, armored and armed. What horny beetle or sucking slug challenges their ramparts? What evanescent visitor sips their honeyed nectar? What are his stingers like?

I wish I'd had a moment to reset my aperture to sharpen the foreground thorns, but by the time I made the adjustment, the rings had disappeared from the back. I must investigate if similar displays are at the Bronx Botanical Gardens or anywhere in my orbit.

Barncat (Sophie) with Spring House & Kuerner Hill

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - Thoughts while watching Sophie:

I leave it to others to advise me if this photo was worth the effort it took to bring it to fruition. It is another case of light that entices the eye but defies the lens with extremes of bright and dark. One sign of the stress is the extreme graininess of some sections.

Making it, required an HDR composite of four different exposures. However, the center of the HDR lacked clarity. It is a picture within a picture and needs a level of realism beyond Sophie's grainy, barn world. In order to preserve the clarity in the center picture I inlaid a segment from one of the original exposures. If one zooms in very close one may spot some of the Frankenstein-like sutures. That's a lot of touch-up work, and I'm not sure the whole thing is worth it, but I do love it when light starts playing with windows and windows start playing with light. I should have photographed more in that corner and at the shed just across the farmyard.

I know some will object to the intrusion of Rubbermaid. Oh, and the spring house! I had passed here on my way out 40 minutes earlier when the sun fell beautifully on its end gable. I didn't shoot it then as I was heading to another possible shot. The other shot was worthless, but now I'd like to know what images might have been prompted by that other lighting. Have I missed a better moment? One never likes to admit such things. Choices!

American Gothic

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Cobweb

Tightrope of time
Transforming idle barns.
Who is it that strung them there?
Who patrolled those wires
Before they got soiled and gray with age?
Before new lines were strung.

They age and gray
Until they grow plush
And the rafters are webbed,
And the joists cocooned.
Time's tightropes
Layer to downy forgetfulness.

Belly of the Beast, No.2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This was taken earlier in the morning looking down from the third floor. I had just returned from a tour with Karl, our host. He wanted to take us into a section of the barn we had not yet entered. An addition to the barn along the southern wall includes the famous room that is the subject of "Spring Fed." It is the bottom floor dug into the bank to which Karl Sr. cleverly diverted a natural spring.  It had been the first section of the barn Gary and I had entered, and both of us had tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to photograph our own "Spring Fed."  Now Karl led us to a storage space above the spring room, a shed addition leaning against the south wall of the great barn.

Even with the doors to this space open it was too dark to photograph. To make matters worse, the siding was rustic and had large gaps between the boards. The bright sun projected black stripes everywhere. The south wall was alternate shadow and glare. The light, such as it was, blinded rather than illuminated. Karl led us through the space with pride as, one by one, he pulled back covers on beautiful, old, horse-drawn sleds and explained how each had been carefully restored. Winter sleigh rides! I've always thought it must have been wonderful to glide through the snow, pulled along by a strong horse as in Welles' Magnificent Ambersons.

When I asked about sleigh rides, Karl showed us a photo of himself and Andy riding in such a sleigh.  It was an event he seemed to take in stride except for the presence of Andy. A sleigh ride with Andrew Wyeth!

Sleigh rides are gone, and hay rides aren't really hay rides as they must have been once. If both lasted longer here, that may not be bad. I recall that there was little modernization while Karl Sr. was alive. Long after tractors and balers were common everywhere producing hard, little rectangles of crushed hay, Kuerner Farm still processed hay loose from the field, forking it onto the hay wagons in a heap. It was significantly more work haying that way, but back then the hay rides must have been a lot more fun.

Oh Hayloft Where the Cobwebs Cling

ANDREW WYETH: "My aim is to escape from the medium with which I work. To leave no residue of technical mannerisms to stand between my expression and the observer. To seek freedom of so-called free and accidental brushwork . . . Not to exhibit craft but rather to submerge it; and make it rightfully the hand-maiden of beauty, power and emotional content."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Later in the afternoon I'm following the light beam from the gable window into a new quadrant of the barn where it is lighting some webs. Karl the host is working there. I watch. He is excavating bales from the back of a shaft that leads through the hay to near where my beam is falling. He has a small hand cart and is calmly loading bales and shuttling them to a new location in the shadows at the other side of the barn. He works slowly but steadily. There is no way for both of us to work in the shaftway at the same time. I watch some more. Can I get in as he leaves, make my three exposures, and get out before he's back for more bales?

I watch him leave - he has a half dozen bales precariously balanced - and then slip into the shaft where there is scant room for me and my tripod. To get my angle I'm squeezed against the hay bales, and I feel the dust and grit slipping into my shirt collar. The shaft has the feel of a catacomb, and I understand why Karl wears a face mask as he works. I set my tripod as I listen for Karl's approaching footsteps and the grumble of his cart. I must make three exposures without moving the camera. The composition is fussy and I struggle with the tripod to get the lens into position. I hurry. Haste makes waste. I do the longest exposure first, two long minutes. Two minutes of grit down my collar. Two minutes through which I keep listening and doing my best not to move. Then exposure two, thirty seconds. If I can get this one done, the last is only 8 seconds, and I'm at it, and it's done.

I'm already gathering my tripod and camera before I hear the grumbling wheels and the reply of the floor boards in the next room, and I hurry out of the shaft. In three more intervals, while Karl ferries hay, I complete two more sets, compositional variations.

Hayloft

ANDREW WYETH: "I played alone, and wandered a great deal over the hills, painting watercolors that literally exploded, slapdash over my pages, and drew in pencil or pen and ink in a wild and undisciplined manner."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Karl Kuerner, known as Karl J. Kuerner III, met us Monday morning at the barn. I was glad to see him again. He is the grandson of Karl Kuerner, Sr., Andrew Wyeth's first, and arguably most important, muse.  Karl J., was there to feed animals and take care of morning chores. The barn was dark inside, and he helped us open whatever could be opened to let in light, and sometime early mid-morning was gone. He is an artist, and we'd hoped to stop by his studio to see what he was at work on, but a bad cold kept me away. 

Sometime later in the morning another man arrived and began shutting up the doors. He was somewhere in his eighties, a bit unsteady yet fit. It took awhile to explain that I was photographing the barns and needed to keep the doors open for the light. I explained we might be shooting for awhile, and tried to make clear "awhile" might be measured in multiple hours, not minutes. He was as hard of hearing as I am but had no aids; it took awhile to find the right wave length for communication, and I wasn't sure if we ever completely found it. When he left he said he'd be back later to close up; he was worried about children falling through the open hatches where hay was tossed.  So was I and also worried about me falling through a hatch or Gary, and the man's concern doubled my caution. 

He moved further into the barn and had a similar conversation with Gary, and I returned to shooting, a bit guilty that I might have rushed him on to get back to my image. It was perhaps a half hour later when he appeared with a book to show me, and I instantly realized my mistake.  The book was the book I'd bought at the Brandywine Museum on my last visit, the book of Karl J. Kuerner's paintings. This man was Karl Jr., the proud father of the artist and the proud son of the muse, here for his chores. Do I recall Karl the grandson saying his dad still ran the farm, did the haying? We were pleased to discover he would pose for us.  This was Karl Jr., our host.

The Belly of the Beast

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In mid-October I met my friend Gary in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, for a repeat visit to the Kuerner Farm, made famous in the paintings of Andrew Wyeth. This visit I was not so focused on Wyeth's example as on this great space. In the spring, when we were here last, Karl Kuerner's hay barn was nearly empty. Although far from full now, at the end of the season, this much hay changes everything. Passages that were open are now blocked with hay, and it took a while to orient myself, but it also made the spaces more interesting.

The barn is divided into thirds. The thirds on the two ends are for hay storage. The center third is a core for access to the hay. One enters the barn along the broad side at the back. Hay wagons can be pulled or pushed up the ramp and into the barn on the third floor, adjacent to the hay storage bays on either side that are clear space from bottom to top. From the center section of the third floor hay bales can be tossed to the floor of those bays below and eventually stacked to the top of the gable. That's three "flights" of hay. At the back of the barn, beneath the ramp one can enter the the second floor of the barn through a kind of loading dock. The second floor is the bottom of the hay storage. Chutes allow hay and grain to be passed down to the first floor where animals were kept in the winter. Alternately, hay can be taken to the loading dock, loaded on wagons, and delivered to field or dropped through doors at the front of the barn to the farmyard below. At one time the barn would have been full of hay in October, but now the season's hay doesn't quite fill to the top of the second floor.

At 10:20 AM, when I took this, the light coming through the gable window on the southeast side of the barn reached almost to the front of the barn. Gary and I spent a good part of the day following that beam of light as it moved east across walls, floor, and hay while the sun moved west.

Yellow Tree

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: All that glitters is not reflection. There is no beaten path through this valley which runs for about 5 miles to the Housatonic. The busiest residents are the beavers who continually re-engineer the water's flow.

The prevailing grain of hills in northwest Connecticut and nearby New York state is north-south in row after row, but here and for about ten miles around, by some freak of nature, the hills are skewed more east-west,; this valley bends along the path of the sun allowing me to catch this revealing side light.

Even so, finding places to photograph the resulting ponds and swamps is not always easy. A road passes on the south of this swamp, but even there the shrubs at the perimeter constrict shooting angles. I'd circled this area unsuccessfully several times looking for a place to shoot, but found this angle unexpectedly while walking the pastures around White Farm. It's a spot worth remembering.

The Old Lake Road

E. H. GOMBRICH: "The photographic enthusiast likes to lure us into a darkened room in order to display his slides on a silver screen. Aided by the adaptability of the eye and by the borrowed light from the intense projector bulb, he can achieve those relationships in brightness that will make us dutifully admire the wonderful autumn tints he photographed on his latest trip. As soon as we look at a print of these photographs by day, the light seems to go out of them. It is one of the miracles of art that the same does not happen there. The paintings in our galleries are seen one day in bright sunshine and another day in the dim light of a rainy afternoon, yet they remain the same paintings, ever faithful, ever convincing. To a marvelous extent they carry their own light within. For their truth is not that of a perfect replica, it is the truth of art."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: A few year's back, in the 1700s, this was Waramaug's Lake, the place where he and his Wyantenock tribe lived and hunted and fished in the summer and from which he ruled much of this part of Connecticut. When the trees were like this he was already thinking of his winter hunting grounds south of here, near a gorge and a waterfall in the Housatonic River. Here, where we find rustic beauty and the vitality of nature, he might despair at how beaten down and limp all nature seems. There, in the broad valley below the gorge, Waramaug's winter hunting grounds, where the Housatonic River once rushed, he would be surprised to find a long, deep lake with steep walls and a hydro-electric plant where eagles nest.

Waramaug sold his summer hunting grounds, including the lake in 1703. The first Yankee's built farms and their children built guest houses and inns, and today real estate developers, water conservationists and land preservationists debate the future.

In spite of that, this image asks us to linger. The fall here is at its perfect peak and under perfect light and perfect wind; a coincidence to delight a photographer's heart? In fact, not so. Again the eye is not like the camera lens and it took three images to get detail in both sky and road. Without a computer even Ansel Adams, I think, could not have coaxed clean detail from this old road.

A previous generation of photographers found their expression in the very limits of the technology they used. Today, the power of the home computer asks every photographer to decide where to set limits and may render moot Mr. Gombrich's comments. Although I needed technology to get the road to read more as my eye saw it, the color on the opposite shore needed no help from me. Yet any knowledgeable Photoshop user might wonder if I pushed the saturation. No, that's exactly as I and the camera saw it.

In Search of Edvard Munch

TERRY FENTON: "Modern painters have inclined to an art that appeals directly to feeling apart from representation with its inevitable overtones, distractions, and prejudice. Of course, representation couldn't be abandoned overnight and much of value stood to be lost in the process. It was abandoned in stages and often with reluctance and regret. Artists didn't pursue abstraction for the sake of the abstruse. Far from it. They were driven to it as a kind of last resort. It was a kind of necessary purging for the sake of a deep and fundamental universality, one that was part and parcel of painting itself."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The primary aim of the photojournalist or the portrait photographer or the naturalist is usually representation, often artfully done, but getting the representation right is the essential thing. Art, however, lies in the realm of expression. Without wanting to get any further into the question of what is art, the photographer who chooses expression as his or her primary aim is immediately confronted by a medium that clings to representation and in which representation often comes to dominate. The spectator who asks, "What's that?" of an abstract painting fears he's being tricked. The one who asks it of an abstract photo feels cheated.

I'm recently back from the Kuerner Farm in Chadds Ford, PA, the farm Andrew Wyeth made famous. Wyeth was interested in this issue, and I can never follow his footsteps without thinking about it. Seeing the way he treated real nature is instructive, but there is an essential difference between photographer and painter. Whether the painter is Wyeth, Vermeer or Fragonard seeking to represent some physical reality in the external world, or Turner or Kandinsky or Pollock working in a realm where representation is obscured, they all begin with distinctive ways of laying color onto a surface. A painter with any degree of facility begins expression the moment s/he applies paint to the art surface or draws a line. It's right there in the medium. A finely controlled physical act driven by the coordinated effort of mind and muscle is a primary element of the painter's expression. There need not even be a real scene. Similarly the manner in which a violinist touches bow to string asserts the violinist's expression. It is highly relevant to the art of both that muscles and emotions are so deeply linked. To whatever degree artist or violinist is facile, expression emerges naturally from the physical act of creation.

In contrast, a photographer begins with the things that lie in front of his lens. Where is the point of combustion between the expressive photographer and the lines and forms photographed? Where does physical engagement take place? Is it in the dance I do to juxtapose elements and set boundaries? Is it in that corner of my eye where sometimes something clicks? Or is there nothing analogous to brush and bow to connect my expression to the forms I use?

Furthermore, without the painter's brush the canvas is blank. If there is no violin there is no music, but the landscape I photograph often makes its own music without me, expressive in itself; a swooping heron, a bank of lilies, a rock formation in the desert, a Grecian urn all sing their own songs. While the thing I photograph must be central to what I express, how is its expression related to mine?

And what alteration is it that transforms a postcard image into expressive statement? On the back of the postcard one often writes, "Wish you were here." The postcard is a second-hand and second-best experience. To be expressive, a photograph must become a thing in itself apart from what it represents, independent though reliant on the moment that triggered it. It must catch something specific yet universal, maybe just a quiver of sensation or perhaps a deep resonant chord, and it must isolate it. Is this the goal that the photographer seeking expression should strive for?

This image was photographed late on Monday. The sun was slipping below the hill, and the filtered light and lonely shadows added a note of disquiet to the quickly changing scene. That note is caught also in the rock jetty that juts violently across this finger at the end of the lake.

Autumn Detonation

RALPH WALDO EMERSON: "Do not be caught by the sensational in nature, as a coarse red-faced sunset, a garrulous waterfall, or a fifteen thousand foot mountain... avoid prettiness - the word looks much like pettiness - and there is but little difference between them."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It is not just that large, still lakes are hard to find, but that their seductive prettiness poses photographic challenges. As one correspondent wrote recently, "...usually the bilateral mirroring effect is corny...." The problems: Opportunities for cliché are everywhere. How does one avoid it? Composition is also difficult. Where does one put the edges of the image, especially with a long, recumbent shoreline that defies punctuation? Finally, there is that prettiness itself that expresses omnipresent stillness with visceral clarity. Motionless air, air at its most impalpable, is made palpable. It is a phenomenon so expressive that any photograph must be a runner-up to the real event. The photographer trembles at the responsibility of somehow giving that stillness a point of view, an angle, a barb - to find in the scene, not Emersonian profundity, but something of moment.

In this photograph I've zoomed my longest lens to 400mm (600mm full-frame equiv.) and pointed it at a stretch of shore visible also in the previous image. Alas, I fear this image fails the criteria described in the paragraph above. (this is a far greater fault than the imperfection of the reflection which I secretly prefer to clarity.) ...but how could I resist it?

This week autumn climaxed. The colors are richer than any fall in memory, like a fireworks finale but silent; no booms, and extended over days. Sunday and Monday were a serendipity; a 48-hour window of clear, dry air has lit the hillsides just at the most magic moment. Prettiness has run rampant. The situation begs the aesthetic question I've posed more narrowly above and is the subject of a future journal entry.

Smooth Sailing

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Mirror calm on a large lake is an elusive event unless one lives on the lake. For at least four years my photo explorations have regularly taken me by Lake Waramaug, and from time to time a portion of the lake has been nearly still. Complete stillness is most often found at dawn and occasionally at dusk. One stops and waits for a large lake to calm to mirror stillness at the risk of wasting an entire shoot, and so as I've passed the nearly calm lake I have usually driven on.

It was therefore a complete surprise to find the lake like this twice in the past week, and a special bonus that this gift has come at the peak of fall colors and on this occasion with a clouds like feathers.

I had returned from a three-day shoot in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania just the night before. I had slept in and let sunrise pass, and I had small hopes for a midday shoot except for a particular image that might still work before fall colors dimmed. I was headed for Kent Hollow, but as I passed this spot I knew I had to stop. Stopping is nearly impossible on the road around the lake, but I found a place to turn around, drove back to the only spot where I could safely park, and began shooting. I photographed for just 15 minutes before I decided I'd gotten all I could from the location and decided to return to my car and drive to the state park at the end of the lake, where parking was easy. However, by the time I was back in my car the calm had ended.

Photographers seize the moment or lose it. I continued with my initial plan and continued on to Kent Hollow and the photograph posted previously.

Click the image to view it large.

Waller Woods, Winds of Change

GALEN ROWELL: "One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it...If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The previous photos were from March of 2008. Here is the same hillside a week ago in the very late afternoon. The hilltop above was still green. By this week autumn color had reached the hilltop and the tree behind the house was nearly bare. The clouds roll on.

Waller Wood, Passing Clouds Two

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

In stealth the shadow moves upon the meadow,
becomes a stain on the hillside
before spilling into the next hollow.
A ceaseless, silent trespass no hand can alter;
No will but the wind to usher its motion.

Waller Wood, Passing Clouds One

GALEN ROWELL: "At the heart of all photography is an urge to express our deepest personal feelings - to reveal our inner, hidden selves, to unlock the artist. Those of us who become photographers are never satisfied with just looking at someone else's expression of something that is dear to us. We must produce our own images, instead of buying postcards and photo books. We seek to make our own statements of individuality."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This is another of the overlooked Waller photographs from Winter, 2008. (See also Great Hollow Rhymes).

Cloudy Afternoon at Peakéd Mountain Farm, No. 3

SUSAN SONTAG: "photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs - especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past - are incitements to reverie."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Larger than the Clouds

And so in one afternoon
the clouds moved
through many moods,
and I danced to
the southwest corner of the field.

As the sun neared the horizon
the spaces between the clouds became
larger than the clouds,
bales tumbling in the layered troposphere
on over Washington Depot and into darkness.

****************
Earlier photographs of Peakéd Mountain Farm:
Cartwheeling Rumble
Making Hay
Above the Bog before the Storm
In Fog at Sunrise
Etude in Diagonals

Cloudy Afternoon at Peakéd Mountain Farm, No. 2

AARON SISKIND: "We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect.... But as photographers we must learn to relax our beliefs. Move on objects with your eye straight on, to the left, around on the right. Watch them grow large as you approach, group and regroup as you shift your position. Relationships gradually emerge and sometimes assert themselves with finality. And that's your picture."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Continuing my shoot it became clear that the cloudscape I'd been photographing was made of two cloud layers. The bottom layer, the evaporating remains of the morning cloud blanket, seemed to hover barely higher than the hills until it became thin enough to reveal the great white monster in the background.

A big sky shot taken shortly after yesterday's image shows both cloud layers clearly. It's one of those "not quite," images. The diagonal of the cloudscape is not quite defined enough to make the image move. The dominant effect is linear and static. This image is even more linear than the one rejected. There's nothing wrong with a linear image if it's integral to the meaning of the shot.

What might Church or Cole have done here? Of course a painting is a fantasy, and a photograph is reality. Is it possible to photograph this landscape long and not find their ghosts lingering in spite of all that has changed?

Cloudy Afternoon at Peakéd Mountain Farm, No. 1

• What do I learn from returning to the same sites that makes results improve over time?
• How do I approach familiar sites differently than sites which are new?
• How familiar is familiar?

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The next series of images were captured on a single afternoon in early July from the field to the west of Peakéd Mountain Farm. Even though this is the most interesting side of the farmstead; even though as one moves around the field the forms of the buildings seem almost contrapuntal; and even though on clear afternoons everything is bathed in light almost until sunset, in spite of all that, until now I have never captured an image from this field worth sharing.

Timing is everything. When the weather changes skies are often most interesting. So it was natural that when the clouds began to break apart on the afternoon of July 2nd, I hoped that music would be playing over Peakéd Mountain. Clouds are fickle things (so Joni Mitchell tells us), and as I passed through Bog Hollow I worried that what I'd seen developing back in Tanner Valley was already evaporating here. There's always a tension - take the clouds where you are and make the most of them, or go somewhere special and hope that they're as good there & then as they are here & now.

Coming out of Bog Hollow I discovered that, if nothing else, fate had arranged a hay rake, a hay wagon and a dozen hay bales tastefully about the field. In this region farmers generally do two hayings a season. This year June rains that continued into July hampered farmers' efforts to cut and store hay from the first haying. They worried that the hay would rot before they could deal with it, while I was glad the bales and the equipment were still in the field when the clouds blew through. Timing is everything.

Since I knew the patterns in which the buildings danced I suppose I was more comfortable moving with them than I might otherwise have been, but finding where to stand in the counterpoint takes full and spontaneous engagement as the whole dance unfolds. Once the image is found I work quickly to correct so that the top of the pine has separation from the edge of the hill and so that telephone poles and other details do not get cluttered up together - work quickly before the light or the cloud moves on.

Timing is everything. I entered the field at the southeast corner because the sky. though constantly moving, is unmovable, and it told me to. The clouds felt tentative, quickly shifting. Would a few rays of sun break through? I watched the shifting cloud shapes watching for openings, and grabbed the few brief moments provided. In this exposure a bit of sun has just reached the first building, with the dark roof. Moments later the light reached the gable of the main barn and brightened slightly, enhancing the shadow under the roof line and causing the front walls to glow softly. It was a calm moment except that the clouds were no longer right. No matter; the tentative light of this first exposure also characterizes the moment. I call that, "catching the falling leaf," or at least whatever piece of it you can get hold of. When shooting landscapes I find the farther back one pulls the camera's eye, the harder it is to capture that falling leaf, but sometimes my pleasure comes in standing back.

I'm glad to have this shot as the small building with the light gray roof is precarious. It may not last the next winter. The loss of the building means little to the owner of the property, but to me it is an important dancer gone. Timing is everything.

Sun Spots

HARRY CALLAHAN: "I feel a little bit like a painter. A painter applies brush stroke after brush stroke, working toward something. It's just a matter of knowing when to quit. You know it's in there somewhere."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Back at Beardsley Farmstead this September I saw this late summer whirl, and I remembered images I made right here in 2008 (1), (2), (3), in the middle of winter in a snow storm. The painter, "applies brush stroke after brush stroke." The photographer shoots image after image, experimenting and refining, reaching after the potential that made him stop and shoot in the first place.

The recent series of blog entries was an attempt to sample some of the new farmsteads visited and photographed this summer. Reviewing those shoots and looking closely at some for the first time was overdue. As expected there are many photos I hoped for that proved to be, "not quite," even after I tugged at them in Photoshop in every way I could think of. As always, there were also days that yielded several images worth "developing." However, it was the old sites, farmsteads I'd shot last year and some the year before, that produced the majority of the best shots. New farm sites like Blueberry Hill, Smithfield Guernsey, Salmon Kill Hollow, Hammertown Road, Cream Hill, Sedgwick Hollow and others have potential not yet realized.

•What do I learn from returning to the same sites that makes results improve with time?
•How do I approach familiar sites differently than sites which are new?
•How familiar is familiar?

I came here because I knew the field would be "ripe," and the afternoon sun would make it glisten. I knew that even with my ladder the angles from the top of the field, between the rowed trees, would be tough. When I failed, I knew to check the garden. I noted one of the outbuildings had fallen down. I would have stayed longer, but I wanted to get to one of the new sites.

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This is one of those images that needs to be seen large. Click the image above to enlarge.

Quonset Barn & Swamp Foliage

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: "The Road from Sedgewick Hollow," Part 2

I knew I was heading toward a dead end. Not finding an outlet ahead and forbidden to make a u-turn, Gidget was near to having a nervous breakdown. She kept plotting the course over and over again, continually repeating, "Recalculating!" Moments later the road ended in a farmyard and I found my car surrounded by howling hounds. This was not the way I had hoped to introduce myself to Aunt Josephine. As they often do, the public road had turned private without warning, and I struggled to turn my car without squashing any of the pooch pack. Then Aunt Josephine appeared, running from the house and waving her arms. No. running is the wrong word. She moved as if her hips were frozen across, and the waving arms might have been unsteadiness, but she was moving fast, and I was surprised at how quickly she was beside the car. She was shouting something, and as I was backing to leave I simultaneously did my best to lower the window and the radio so I could hear what she was saying.

"Stop, he'll run right under the wheels." She was already bent over and snatching a long and low brown dust mop of a dog from the ground and restraining him forcibly in her arms as he tried to sniff at me. The barking continued through my introduction and apology. The commotion had not kept me from noticing that, "the mother farm," was even more photogenic than the buildings across from the quonset barn.

She was a trim octogenarian. Her hair was long and straight, her cheeks hollow and pale. Her eyes were straight slits. If there were any curves on her they had long ago been lost in the baggy overalls she wore, but she finally smiled and seemed happy to chat. My repeated apologies eventually put her at ease, and half the dogs had stopped barking so I could almost hear what Aunt Josephine was saying. I got a bit of farm history before I put my question to her, "May I photograph these barns?"

There was a long pause and a breath, and she looked right at me and the pupils of her eyes narrowed. It was as if she was trying to look inside me and a century suddenly had flown between us. "No." It was a strange "no," - full of forced determination. Then she added, "but if you talk to my niece she can give you permission. She's away now but she'll be back tomorrow.

She seemed quite unaware that I might not know who her niece was or where to find her. I had to ask repeatedly until she finally said, "Well, she's just over the hill," and she pointed vaguely somewhere behind the barns. There was no road that way, nothing but woods. I think she quite expected me to set off into the woods on foot, but I finally made clear to her that I needed directions my car could follow. As it turns out, the niece lived back where I started, at the house across from quonset farm.

I puzzled over the meaning of her, "No," and the subsequent half retraction. I took a few days before I went to see the niece. I wanted to be sure aunt and niece had time to deliberate. When I drove into the niece's yard, there were no dogs, but immediately the niece came running from the barns in overalls looking like a slightly younger version of Aunt Josephine. Before I could fully get my question out she interrupted me, "No." Clearly the two had met and the issue had been decided. "No photographs," she repeated. I tried to make conversation and barely got out that I'd photographed the swamp, but she was already heading into the house. Her voice trailed as she went inside, "You can photograph the swamp all you want."

All the photos I've made of Great Hill Farm have been from the public road.

Farm Fence & Quonset Barn

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:
"The Road from Sedgewick Hollow," Part I

The road back from Sedgewick Hollow leads through another century. When I point my GPS toward home it plots a course from the Hollow, not always the same course, through a warren of old country roads. Some are crumbling pavement, some have never been paved. The way is always sparsely settled and with more than its share of 18th century buildings and a few ruins. Without the soothing voice of Gidget, my GPS, I'd quickly be lost in time. After leaving Sedgewick Hollow she doesn't reach a road with a route number until I'm a few minutes from home.

I've been photographing in Sedgewick Hollow frequently over the past three weeks. Along one of the common routes, half way to the hollow the road forks. Both roads lead to Sedgewick Hollow, but I hadn't noticed that along this route Gidget took the left fork through the valley on the way out, but she brought me home over Great Hill and through the right fork. As a result, when I returned home from Sedgewick Hollow two weeks ago, I didn't know quite where I was when I stopped. I stopped in the futile hope of photographing a scene which had ended moments earlier. I'd have to find my way back here, wherever here is, at the next sunset when the sky was clear, and it would have to be soon.

At the top of Great Hill is a level area which may have been pasture once but which had become swamp. Leaves turn earlier around swamps, and here they had recently burst into color. As I reached the top of the hill, and came out of the woodland into the open swamp, the last few minutes of sunlight were being filtered by low haze. There was just enough light to make me realize the spectacle the sun's clear backlighting had made moments earlier.

It wasn't until I returned a day or two later and began photographing that I realized the cleared area was part of a farm or what's left of a farm. Warped boards and rotting roofs, rusted machinery, and across from this structure a farmhouse and a ragged collection of wooden out buildings. Nobody was around, but the house was inhabited, and I didn't want to trespass. I learned later that there had originally been many more buildings, but the farm was badly damaged in the tornado that blew through a decade ago.

As I was shooting beside the road, a guy in a pickup stopped to chat, and I asked him if he knew who might give me permission to shoot the farmstead here. He had the whole family story. Uncle Frank and Uncle Martin had died recently. Frank kept "the mother farm" going to the end, and Stephen ran this place and Martin had another place.... His explanations included names of roads I didn't know and, when I pressed him, directions I couldn't follow. I learned of marriages and divorces and who had done what and how they had or hadn't cared for each other as ends neared. He spoke to me as if everyone knew these people and where they lived. Clearly, this was an intimate community where everyone knew everyone. Still, I wanted permission to photograph here. Before he drove off I learned that the only one left was Aunt Josephine, and she was living on the "mother farm," to which I made sure I had good directions. She would certainly give me permission.

I would find Josephine before returning home.

Farmtique

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The yellow farmhouse on Route 202 was in disrepair even in 1974 when we first moved to Connecticut, but the yellow stood out and the various signs that directed non-existent traffic. We lived a few miles away and shopped at the old general store a bit further up the road. Back then one could still read the sign, and when I needed props for an "Old West" play I stopped here and bought an "antique," wooden box. The old guy who sold it to me emerged from somewhere deep within the house, said little, and happily took my five dollars. We keep kindling in it now.

When we moved in 1979 they were beginning to pave some of the old dirt roads from which spurs sprouted leading to cul-de-sacs lined with pastel dream houses. A new school was just opening. Nobody lives here anymore, and the roof is failing. A few weeks after I photographed here a sign appeared on the roadside, "Lot for Sale."

In Blazing Soy

ANSEL ADAMS: "You don't take a photograph, you make it."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In the landscape the first decision is always where to stand. Yesterday's image of this ruin was taken seventeen minutes and forty seconds after this one. The light was similar yet they are almost opposite in their effect. The making of these two images seems typical of the way I approach shooting. Compare the two and you may be tempted to ask, "Who moved the mountain?" My mantra is always, "You don't know what it looks like until you get there."Standing by the silo, you might not guess that by walking further down the soy hill, away from the farmstead, the tops of all three silos would be below the top of the background hillside.

When I shot this near the top of the hill I hoped that might happen. A slightly different grade and it would not have, but I'd already previsualized at the top the two shots I thought I'd get on this shoot, one with sky and one without; one in which the farm curled up at the base of the hill like a cat snuggling into an old blanket and one in which the crumbling silos raged against their demise. Move left, right, backward, forward, and relationships change; things are lost and things gained. I spent time studying how the top of the background silo might best intersect with the hilltop, and ways of strategically cutting the tops of the two silos, and the effects of compressing/expanding the cluster of buildings by moving laterally. I watched the balance of tonalities and how they met the margins and corners of the image. Sometimes I lost my light, and when it came back I considered how to utilize creeping shadows.

I moved slowly through the soy field trying to find the most committed version of each idea, but since I could only guess what things might look like from untried positions, I carefully composed both possibilities each time I stopped. I did this even though I suspected I'd already passed the most committed angle for this shot early on. I never want to have to go back and re-find a position.

In the end I had many exposures to look through. In this image I was up close with my lens zoomed wide and tipped steeply downward. In yesterday's I am standing back with my lens zoomed in tight. While I may have a good idea what I want the image to look like when it's done and that the essentials have been captured in terms of focus and exposure, it's not until I see it large that I know what I have and if it will work. When I finished that afternoon, a third of the "making" of the image was done. If there is a quicker way, I wish someone would tell me.

Forsaken Acres

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It will be harder to unseal the time capsule on this old ruin. It has no name nor clear signs of what went on here or when. It is further north on route 22, not far from Boston Corners, NY, a town with a lot of history. Jane and I spotted the tall silo from the road, glowing bone white in the afternoon sun. We had been exploring and were on our way home, but I made a note to return and investigate. Was it here when Boston Corners was the meeting place of three railroad lines?

When I got back a week or two later it was also late afternoon. From the roadside I could see all three silos on what appeared to be an island rising out of a sea of soy. I made some images of the silos and the soy rows and learned from a neighbor that nobody cared who went here. He'd explored himself, but he had been afraid to go into the house.

House? By the time I said goodbye photo light was gone. Before heading for home I explored enough to see the house. It was in the grip of a jungle, and getting to it would not be easy. Photographing may be impossible.

When I got back the third time it was the end of September, and the soy had just turned yellow. Where there are silos there were usually dairy barns once. Silos came in to common use between 1880 and 1900 (The tall, cylindrical form was invented in 1891). They made it possible to store enough feed to sustain milk production through the winter and capture the high prices paid for winter milk. Alas, it's common to find old masonry and metal silos standing beside a concrete slab or stone foundation. These silos were in terrible condition, and I never expected anything was left of the barns. Life is fluid. They were in the final stages of being swallowed.

I spent nearly an hour making images of the barn ruins from different points in this field before exploring the rest of the site. A newer, metal work shed, also abandoned, is to the left. Beyond the field the ground drops off steeply, and from below I could look up and see the house. From directly below the second story barely reached over the goldenrod that covered the embankment.

Grand Cowshed

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - The Harlem Valley in New York State is an important corridor running north-south from Brewster to the start of the Taconic Mountains near the Connecticut-Massachusetts border. Through it run the The Harlem Valley Railroad and New York Route 22. What's left of the train remains one of the principal commuter lines to New York City, and the road is New York State's longest and oldest north-south route, stretching from the Bronx through Albany to Canada.

The Harlem Valley is not only long but also relatively broad, a series of gently rolling hills between, on the east, the steep ridge that divides Connecticut from New York, and on the west, the Hudson Hills that roll toward the Hudson River. In the Harlem Valley dairy farmers had easy access to transportation and flat open land for growing corn and grazing large herds of cattle. The farms that once were thriving here have left vast and hollow behemoths with giant silos that loom over the pastures. This is a small portion of one of these ruins.

I've been trying unsuccessfully to capture the hulking immensity of this farmstead for three years. The main shed is actually three times as long as the part shown in the back of this image. It has four more dormers like the two in the image, and throughout the sheds length it sprouts other buildings of various sizes. The patchwork nature of the whole suggests success-fueled expansion. Imagine the amount of hay that was stored over the dairy stalls on the first level! Four large silos stand at the back of the main shed. The metal roof gone on one and on another, rusted to a smokey bronze. The old farm house is in ruins as are many of the outbuildings.

No trespassing is strictly enforced, and most of my pictures have been shot from neighboring property. It is a matter of considerable frustration to me that I've been unable to make full use of this palette of forms and textures and insinuations. In any case, for me windows are always eyes, and I couldn't resist this grouping.

The Road through Fox Hollow

FREDERICK CHURCH: "Imagine this fairy like Temple blazing like sunlight among those savage black rocks.”

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: North of Pleasant View Farm my explorations took me through Fox Hollow, and several Fox Hollow farms are now regular photo stops.

What if Jane and I could follow the old road right through Fox Hollow and into the past. Somewhere beyond Ancramdale the road would turn to dirt, and then the power lines would stop, and we'd be in an open carriage, rattling behind a horse at a pretty good clip. If we were lucky, we'd have an invitation for dinner at Olana, Frederick Church's Persian, fantasy house on the Hudson. I shot this photo on August 31 at 5:45 PM in my own century. With another 45 minutes and 130 years to sunset, our carriage will still only be half way to Olana, but If we hurry we can get there just as twilight gives way to a nearly full moon.

When we get to Olana torches will be blazing on the terrace high above the Hudson River, and there might be a tiny glow from behind the shadowy Catskills. Church will show us his studio and his latest work which will look like our journey turned to a romantic adventure. We'll talk about his travels in Europe, the Middle East and South America, and he'll complain about his rheumatism and pass on a few wise words from Thomas Cole. Then we'll look at some of the rare plants in his conservatory and sit down with his family to an elegant meal, and plan a long walk for the first of September.

Fox Hollow didn't look much different then, fewer trees and more fields under cultivation or given to pasture. Some of the same families are still farming here. When we get back to the twenty-first century I will send copies of my images over the "new" power lines to their grandchildren's computers.

A Pleasant View

GALEN ROWELL: "You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn't waste either."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: To call the view from Pleasant View Farm, atop Winchell Mountain, "pleasant," is to commit a felonious litotes. Much of this summer's explorations have taken me north, up the area known as, "The Oblong," on the border of New York and Connecticut. With the rising sun shining across Connecticut at my back, the view on this morning extends at least 40 miles. The most distant mountain in this image are in the southern Catskills on the far side of the Hudson River. Had I walked a few hundred feet south I could have looked east almost as far into Connecticut, but that's not where the view was on this morning.

As a breed, landscape photographers tend to be scavengers, combing the hills to rescue moments of sunlight, fog or cloud from the dissipations of time. Planned shots rarely are what one anticipates, but at Pleasant View I can count on finding rising valley fog on most mornings. I will return here often.

This panorama was made from three distinct images stitched in Photoshop. The original file has enough resolution to produce an image at least eight feet long.

Gereg Farm in Summer

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Neither hip nor gambrel, the unusual, many-hued roofs of Gereg Farm are wonderfully sculptural. Although I photographed here early in 2008, I photographed from the road. As I've expanded my territory northward this summer, I made an effort to meet the owner who was happy to give me a tour of the barns and permission to shoot from the pasture and yards.

If Misty Morning Farm (1), (2) is among the most difficult to photograph, Gereg Farm may be the easiest. At Misty Morning the hillside and large trees block the sun on all sides but the north, so light is almost always wrong. Morning light is best at Misty Morning, but often it is too misty and the metal roof is silver and glares blindingly under morning sun. Then there's the hill descending to the east; it is so steep that the barns almost disappear behind the crest until one is a long way off.

In contrast, sun washes the Gereg barn throughout the day, and out in the flat pasture there are clear views from east, south and west. At the perimeter of the field on the south is a rusted. rustic fence that gets tangled with weeds and wildflowers in summer, a delicious foreground screen to shoot through. Three Belted Galloway, "Oreo," cows pasture here. though in the summer they hide from the sun in a shaded alcove. I've caught them grazing in front of the barns in late afternoon, but I don't yet have the picture I'm after. In fact, everything is so photogenic here, that I'm having difficulty casting antique gloom across the barnscape. Everything comes out completely sane. Perhaps in fog I can make them loom.

While the view from the north is just as interesting, there has been a dumpster blocking it through most of the summer. Even from the north, once the dumpster is gone, I expect no problems shooting the intimate spaces there. The barns have some interesting features not visible in this image including the sheltered exterior passage tunneled under the barn where the cows like to huddle. It should be interesting to shoot there in the first half of the day. The barns are being sensitively restored, and as soon as some new wood weathers, they will be as good as old.

Misty Morning

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Misty Morning Farm has been an ongoing photo project throughout the last year. Few sites offer so much potential and pose such difficult dilemmas. Mist and fog are the least of the difficulties. On this morning 8 days ago I woke at 5:15 in order to catch some mix of sunrise light and pond mist.

Misty Morning Farm sits on the north side of a hill and does its best to face east. Down the hill from the farmstead and its fields and before the hillside disappears into woodland there is a broad pond. If mist will form anywhere, it will form here. Sometimes it is just a small plume that drifts with the prevailing breeze. Sometimes it is a rising mist that draws a delicate veil up the pasture and over the bushes and barns. On the particular morning it was a fog like a head cold that blotted out everything. I waited at the bottom of the pasture to see what the fog would do, but nothing moved.

I finally decided to drive a 4 mile circuit of the hilltop to see what things were like elsewhere. As I completed my loop, coming down the hill toward Misty Morning from the other side, the sun was just penetrating and dissolving the head of pond brew, and as I quickly parked and rushed around the yard, the sun through the fog sent rays through the trees and magnified the landscape. One can never plan such shots and must take gratefully whatever is given.

I'm developing Misty Morning Farm as a seasonal portrait. Preparing presentation images of Misty Morning from the last year has been keeping me from TODAY'S for at least a week. This was not the shot I had intended to follow next, but I'm happy for the excuse to process this image as a stand-in so as not to divert my concentration from Misty Morning Farm.

This one needs to be seen large. Be sure to click the image.

Great Hollow Rhymes

EDWARD WESTON: "Clouds, torsos, shells, peppers, trees, rocks, smoke stacks, are but interdependent, interrelated parts of a whole, which is life."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I wonder what viewers will make of this image. I'm not even quite sure what to make of it myself, but I'm drawn to its abstract simplicity and the suggestion that all things are in dialogue.

I set out to post photographs from the past summer and have been momentarily distracted by a commissioned project that requires my attention. While working on that project I came on this overlooked photograph taken at Waller Farm in late winter, 2008. The rhyme of its forms seem a natural sequel to "Bolland Farm and Hills," and so it becomes part of this new sequence on farms and farmland.

Bolland Farm and Hills - May 1, 2009

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: "There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: There are few farms I find as aesthetically pleasing as this one, the way the barns ride the hills, flowing with their contours, digging in to the earth. I've been driving by here for two years seeking to get permission to shoot. Although there are usually cars outside and clothes on the line, I've never seen a person here, and I have not yet been moved to knock on the door of the nearby house.

On this lazy spring afternoon, under a soft, sprinkling rain and swept by a bit of spring mist, I stopped the car on the side of the road and composed this image. I struggled to keep raindrops off my lens. Greening had just begun.

Dairy Barn & Cow Stalls, Elliott Farm

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: There's always been farming on this hill. I took this a week ago after a morning of photographing the barns from the fields below. The farmer who dug this barn deep into the hillside and near its top, knew that on chilly mornings he'd have the early sun on his back and on the backs of his cows, and that he'd catch the sun again in the afternoon as he loaded hay directly into the hay loft from the street side.

The 1853 map shows no barns, but the house is there, right where the road from town turns just as it does today as if it were to lead from town right up the front steps onto porch, only turning sharply left at the last moment to climb the hill rather than the stairs. Was it the Elliotts, who lived in the house in 1853, who built this barn?

The porch is gone from the vacant house. When did they stop farming here? Was it in 1928 when the creamery closed or in 1930 when the railroad stopped running, or were there dairy cows in the fields when I first passed by? Last year some of the barn boards were stripped away and the cupola tipped a bit more this year, and the roof won't survive another winter. One day I will come by and find the cupola fallen through the roof and smashed on the floor, the weather vane and it's four miniature gables shattered.

But it's impossible to know when. Perhaps it is miraculous that farming continues on this hill at all, more miraculous that some of the original families are farming here still.

Spring on Skarf Mountain

VERLYN KLINKENBORG (from "Goldenrod Time," NY Times):
"Somehow my internal timekeeper failed this summer - broken down, perhaps during the utterly sodden month of June. Time passed, and all the natural events that happen on this farm happened in order. But when the goldenrod began to bloom a few weeks ago, I failed to make the connection between the two.

"The Goldenrod ripens with nearly the same power as the leaves turning. It's one of the strongest temporal cues I know, and I usually respond to it the way I respond to most signs of shifting season: with an inward emotional tug.

"This year I seem to be absent, or perhaps I'm just resting in the lull of late summer. Or perhaps I've become just another of the creatures on this farm."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This has not been like other summers. For some time now I've been feeling what Verlyn Klinkenborg describes, a sense of having somehow come loose from the constant unwinding of the season, and now as the trees are suddenly starting to turn I feel unexpectedly reengaged with the ever-turning wheel. What happened to summer? Wrenched into autumn, can I find my stride before nature's pace quickens?

I exposed this image on May 18th, in the time between skunk cabbage and flox, exactly four months ago today. The fragile spring leaves had recently darkened. Six days later I would be driving in Nova Scotia and delighted to find a second spring just unfurling there. What timing! It was after that I became uncoupled.

Jane feels it too. She says it is not only the endless rain which extended well beyond June but also that the thermometer barely sweltered. That may be true, but it strikes me that before I began my photo and hiking regimen the gears of my life were not so tightly engaged to nature's clock, and a disjointed season like the one suddenly completed would not leave me feeling a bit unhinged.

Was there summer? I hiked almost every day back to favorite farms and into to much new territory, to Massachusetts and the Hudson, but I wonder if this year I didn't lean a little too comfortably on the feeling that summer was a lazy time, that its pleasures would last, that shots missed today would be much the same tomorrow. Would I have dug more deeply if summer had the urgency of spring or fall? Tomorrow begins today.

And yet I'm reassured when I look at the summer's farm images that I shot while processing and posting lilies. It seems I didn't miss it all. The next photo series explores some of the farms visited this summer.

I've been on top of Skarf Mountain before, but on the afternoon of May 18th the clouds put on a remarkable show. Because the fields surrounding these barns are open and vast, and because the sky that afternoon was dancing everywhere, I kept moving, taking in new angles. I didn't want to miss anything, but I didn't rush, and the clouds kept on dancing as I made a complete, great circuit around the fields around the farmstead.

Bugged

IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM: "If you don't like it, that's your problem, not mine."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Life is fluid. Even before the bee has probed the water lily's nectar, the transformers are at work on the grand, procreative, digestive economy of things.

Lotus Wind

ZHOU DUNYI: "I love the lotus because while growing from mud, it is unstained."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This is the Sacred Lotus or Bean of India, worshipped among Hindus as a thing of purity. It does indeed strike the eye as something divine. Most people would know it immediately by the iconic, flat-topped seed cup, like a watering can, that is left after the petals fall away. Lotus roots in the pond bottom and spreads broad, round pads on the surface of the water while sending a stem 3 to 5 feet into the air where it produces a large bud that blossoms hugely and gets tossed by the wind in shades of pink and white.

The Sacred Bean of India Lotus is not to be confused with the Egyptian Sacred Blue Lily which is sometimes called the Blue Lotus.

From Wiki I learn that the Sacred Lotus of India can regulate the temperature of the flower as warm-blooded animals do. That distinction places it in the rare plant company of Philodendron and Skunk Cabbage. Certainly no water lily can do that. It is not yet known if it can read minds, but all parts of the plant are entirely edible.