Tranquil Sea

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It has been over a week since I've posted to this blog in which time I've been traveling in Maine and sharing with photographer friends some of my favorite places. This was my seventh photographic visit to Mt. Dessert Isle. While I was gone Jane filled some walls which, due to my current exhibit, have been temporarily blank. She used whatever framed images she found, and I came home to find this image from my first photo visit hanging in the hall. I took it with my first DSLR on May 30, 2006, and have never posted it, had completely forgotten it. For whatever it's worth I've reedited it and am posting it belatedly.

As I review the photos from my most recent trip I will try to post a few photos from previous trips. This will give me time to prepare new ones to follow these. Meanwhile, other photos from this summer in Connecticut are ready to appear, but they must wait. How do I keep a balance between photographing, processing and posting so that I'm not constantly behind in all three? When will TODAY'S really be TODAY'S? How do I find time amid these tasks to reach for words that go beyond my daily photo processes?

These are questions best not answered. I must take things patiently, follow inner cues. In any case, with my camera out for repair, I will not be creating new exposures this week.

Bounty No. 2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: It is often my goal to try to catch the roll of the New England hills. Out West the landscape itself provides numerous features, but in New England I usually must rely on man-made objects to help organize and provide focus to a composition.

The fields behind Smithfield Guernsey Farm offer one of the best spots from which to appreciate these hills and the labyrinth of creases that divide them and through which many of the roads are threaded. The old farm road reaches an elevation of almost 1100 feet, but the slope is gentle in every direction and once at the top I'm always surprised at how far I can see. Connecticut's hills are no higher but more tightly packed.

Smithfield Guernsey is one of the few, large dairy farms remaining in the area, and as their web site points out, they thrive by innovating. No other farm in the area has such a castle of aluminum bins, hoppers, and sheds for equipment and feed. In addition to grazing land, they have over 2000 acres under cultivation. Once one is up top behind Smithfield Guernsey the view is cropland in every direction.

Special thanks to Arlene Petterson for introducing me to this place.

Aubade

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Once again I can feel the season turning. We have passed the cusp of summer when it felt as if a sunset shoot must always keep me shooting past 9 PM and a sunrise shoot meant living with 4 or 5 hours of sleep. Already it's getting easier to shoot at sunrise.

Today I saw a pond filled with Canada Geese all as still as stones and facing the sun at midday, but even they must be getting anxious and having martial thoughts; soon it will be time to begin autumn maneuvers, staggered squadrons launched at intervals, barking from pond to pond the goose nation's sky command.

Looking back over where I've been it's clear much of the summer I spent threading the labyrinth of Hudson Hills discovering new territory among disorganized valleys. Too often my wanderings led through abandoned barns and barns whose owners couldn't afford to fix the rotting roof. Empty dairy barns sit beside un-grazed pastures that may one day sprout rows of boxy homes or giant hanger-like barns for colossal horse farms or farms of prize cattle. Tomorrow I'll wake early and hope for morning fog.

Lethe Waters No. 2

JILL ENFIELD: "Every setting conveys a thousand realities and the joy of photography comes with emphasizing the dimensions that bring personal choice to bear. A still scene w/o apparent action can reflect anything between tranquility and horror. Leaving it's capturer the choice."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Several friends wrote in to say the previous image was one of their favorites. Several others wrote to say they would have liked it better if, "the processing had been more conventional." or as another put it, "more photographic." In fact, the image above and the previous image were rendered simultaneously. Each time I adjusted one so it became my preferred version, I'd work on the other until I liked it better. Working on this version I always tried to maintain the look of photographic reality. Within that world alone there are an infinite number of choices. In the other version I gave free play to possibilities outside that expected photo reality though without changing the forms of the image.

In the end I wonder if the two images may not show the same place viewed from opposite shores. In any case, I'm interested in knowing if viewers have clear preferences for one or the other. Or better yet, I'd love to know how the two images feel different, suggest different kinds of reality, perhaps.

Be sure to click on both images to view them large.

I should add that there are a few elements in the images that were not treated the same. Most noticeably, in the previous image I took a tiny delight, perhaps perverse, in leaving the power lines that tell of a road just behind the cemetery. Of course, there was no question that they had to be removed from this, photo-realistic version.

REMINDERS: 

The exhibit of my photos at the Sharon Historical Society continues through September 17. 

Farm: Personal Wanderings through the Berkshire, Hudson, and Taconic Hills remains on view at the exhibit and online at my blog site and at these links: LARGE VERSION, REGULAR VERSION

Lethe Waters

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Sometimes they are cared for, nestled beside a church or on a hillside on the edge of town or even when they appear unexpectedly along a wooded stretch of dirt road or in the middle of a farmer's field. I also find them abandoned, overgrown in the middle of the woods or beside an auto dealership or next to a strip mall. Outposts of time where even the blank stones whisper - stand there like the men and women and children too who once they were when they animated this place, and I marvel at Earth's relentless spin.

Garden of Earthly Delights No. 5

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: My father always had a garden. He loved making things grow, and even when we were living in New York City, he had an area of the dining room crowded with potted plants, and a bit of the window sill beside the fish tanks lined with stem-filled bottles of rank water and roots, and glasses where old pits sat unmoving, suspended by tooth picks. Each summer we rented a house with a garden where I quickly learned to walk carefully to avoid stepping on tiny things I couldn't see. I can still remember watching him in awe and terror, in that garden where the tomatoes were a jungle canopy high over my head, petting a bumble bee for me on his finger.

It was a trick, of course, and I'm not sure where he learned it. I don't think he thought it was something the bee enjoyed, just something it permitted. That's what it was to me, anyhow, a scary trick, and I never had the courage to learn it.

Many years later, when my parents were no longer renters but owned their own garden, my father had plants wherever he could. They were in the living room and on the porch. A small greenhouse was tucked against an outside wall where living room windows looked into it, and the work room we called, "the tool house," was so filled with plants that one could barely use the rusting tools, and he had vegetable garden too.

There was an ethical note to his gardening then that I had not noticed when I was younger. Perhaps it had not been there; perhaps I was too young to understand. If a plant died because he or a "sitter" had missed a watering it was a failure of responsibility in a way that was very different than if he had accidentally run out of gasoline on the highway. He was a down to earth, practical man, and I was surprised once when I may have accidentally abused a cutting, "It's a living thing," he admonished.

Garden of Earthly Delights No. 4

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Whenever I post a series as dark as this, I'm aware that some readers may wish to turn away. I suspect some may skip these posts completely. I understand and respect that choice; my intent is not to creep out subscribers, and I appreciate those who have read this far. 

Bug photos are probably not for the dining room wall, and my brother is running out of guttural exclamations each time he receives one. However, in a guest bathroom they might inspire interesting contemplations and questions later.  I've received all sorts of reactions, only about a third in the form of a cringe. Most of us have a natural aversion to insects. I know I do. They are creepy, and they are even more repulsive when dead. However, after I really look at the images, I also find the insects strangely tender, these tiny sentient animals at the completion of their journey, returning to earth. For those who only get the creeps, my apologies; tomorrow's is the last.

Garden of Earthly Delights No. 3

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE:

"Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Metamorphosis No. 2 "The Photographer"

Life percolates in places once dead.

A finger clicks the shutter

That freezes the

Shell's cracking,

Web's spinning,

Tunnel's buzzing and

Hopes by freezing to make things thrive?

Wonders if his still animation

Reflects only the narrow casement where

Decay piles high,

Or if it is singed by the genial heat

Of dreams and regrets

And loves and hates burning still in

Some eternal angst.

Garden of Earthly Delights No. 2

OSCAR WILDE: "The very landscape Corot looked at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own mind."

REMINDERS:
My new book, Farm: Personal Wanderings among the Berkshire, Hudson, and Taconic Hills is now available at the Blurb Bookstore, and you can thumb though some of the pages at either of these links: Farm: Personal Wanderings 13 x 11 or Farm: Personal Wanderings 11 x 8. There are buttons for viewing full screen and for purchasing.

Farm II, an exhibition of my photographs at the Sharon Historical Society, in Sharon, CT, continues through September 17th.

Garden of Earthly Delights No. 1

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:


Metamorphosis

Life percolates in places once dead.
What sets it all in motion?
What finger gives the nudge -
Makes the buzz in the wasp's tunnels of mud,
Sets the spider to her spinning,
Makes the larva crack its chrysalid shell
And stretch moist limbs in a new-made world?

Was it a breath of spring
Preordained
Pollinating, blossoming, soaring eternally?
Or was this genial hotness
A March mistake,
In a moment of space
between the casement and the storm pane?



REMINDERS:

My new book, Farm: Personal Wanderings among the Berkshire, Hudson, and Taconic Hills is now available at the Blurb Bookstore, and you can thumb though some of the pages at either of these links: Farm: PersonalWanderings 13 x 11 or Farm: Personal Wanderings 11 x 8. There are buttons for viewing full screen and for purchasing.

Farm II, an exhibition of my photographs at the Sharon Historical Society, in Sharon, CT, continues through September 17th.

Falls Village Farmstead

ANNOUNCEMENT: My new book, Farm: Personal Wanderings among the Berkshire, Hudson, and Taconic Hills is now available at the Blurb Bookstore. The book is available in 3 formats. You can thumb through pages by clicking on either of these links to the Blurb Bookstore.

Farm (13 x 11) by Emery Roth II | Make Your Own Book

Farm (11 x 8) by Emery Roth II | Make Your Own Book

I wish they could be sold for less, but all three contain the same 120 pages of pictures and writing. For those wishing a signed copy, you can send a check for the cost plus $5 to cover additional postage, and I will order it and send it on.

It has been a major effort to pull together the work and thoughts of 5 years of wandering. I designed and edited it in conjunction with this summer's two exhibitions of my farm photographs. I'm pleased with the result and hope that readers will find a meaningful experience in following pictures and text through the journey.

The Sharon Historical Society exhibition continues through September 17th.


PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: What do I love about farmsteads? Part of it is the play of shapes: Tall haybarns and vertical silos like the turrets of castles; bankbarns tucked to the hillside; corn cribs with slats or wire mesh; stone fences and wood fences, door yards and barn yards and backhouses and outhouses; and further out rows of corn seedlings or soy that plot the swells and dips of hills; and fat Holsteins peppering the pasture when the sun is low in the sky. As the photographer moves, the farmscape dances. In its do-si-do are dynamic moments, moments of balance, edges, corners to be found and a thousand collisions to be avoided or harvested.

Falls Village Farm

REMINDER: Reception tonight, 5-7 PM at the Sharon Historical Society, 18 Main Street, Sharon, CT, 860 364-5688.  A new book by Emery Roth will be available in limited quantities.

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Some barns are sentinels guarding history. The old Schaghticoke trail from New Milford, CT, to Great Barrington, MA, passes by these barns. It's an important thoroughfare even today. Before they were built Waramaug, the powerful, Wyantenock Chief probably passed this way to share news with the tribes up north of the white men settling by his summer lake. It's hard to believe that between those quiet times and these this was a place where heavy industry rutted the old road.

They called it Falls Village and dreamed of the power that would flow from the falls, miles of it, but it was iron that fueled the economy and a hunger for charcoal devoured the forests, to fuel iron furnaces that lit the night sky. And the air was thick and the streams foul. Beside the old road they put down railroad tracks to handle the added load. And then the railroad put yards here with a large turntable and sheds employing the mechanics that kept the cars rolling. Cannons and cannon balls were shipped from here and guns and tools, and in town they built important looking buildings. In 1914, when they built a hydroelectric plant here, the water wheels were gone and most of the old iron industry too, and things have mostly gotten quieter since. The traffic is heaviest on Sundays when fun in the Berkshires spills back south to city and suburbs, and most of those who drive this route from the Berkshires travel to enjoy rural New England.

The current owner of these barns doesn't know when they were built. He thinks the barns were built by Quakers. The jerkinhead roof is generally considered Dutch. It's likely these barns witnessed most of the commotion and drama that once took place here. Many travelers passing this way have noted these barns which appeared in a NY Times article. They have a friendly way of turning toward the road and making space for passersby. Few of those travelers can imagine the secrets they hold.

Winchell Mountain Sunburst

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: A half spin of the planet backward, and here are the same fields from a different angle, and somewhere between the two images lies this percolation on Making Hay:


Baled hay
from windrows mowed
and sunshine dried
while stem
and leaf
were swollen with sweet juice
sucked from sunshine,
cut!

Windrows at Sunrise on Winchell Mountain

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: How differently the hay farmer lives with the weather! He watches the mix of warm and cold and wet and dry and knows what will make the grasses lush and what will make them rot. He's ready as they ripen to cut at the moment the leaf is sweetest, yet mindful of the dangers of changing skies. When the hay is cut and cured in the field, the farmer hopes for long, clear days and the sun's benedictions. Rain is ruinous. He knows about sunshine and planetary motion and making hay.


REMINDER: Opening Reception for Farm II, at the Sharon Historical Society is this Saturday (Aug.7) from 5-7 PM. For information call 860 364- 5688 or email sharonhistoricalsociety@yahoo.com.

HIddenhurst Triumphant

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: What was that Wallace Stevens said about the jar in Tennessee? North of Millerton there is the Nameless Valley, the subject of my most recent explorations; south of Millerton there is Hiddenhurst. I've been photographing and exploring the area for several years, and since I pass it on my way to the Nameless Valley, if my efforts are out of sync with the weather I can sometimes be distracted here. I stopped to photograph a storm and stayed for these trailing remains.

North of Millerton, no matter where I stand, it is the walls east and west that delineate space, a north-south corridor. Exploring south of Millerton the space ripples, forms plateaus, many with hilltop farms, but, like Stevens' jar, the space is organized by Hiddenhurst on a central hilltop. It's unavoidable. How many pictures I've taken here include Hiddenhurst in the background, a cameo role!

In the vicinity of Hiddenhurst the same Hudson Hills block the way west, and the decayed remains of the Taconic chain are perforated but still significant in the east. In one spot the power company's skeletal giants march across dangling high voltage cables on their fingertips. Webatuck Spring sneaks through almost invisible in a narrow canyon, hidden from the roads. Its cool, rushing waters are the source of amazing fog events many mornings. There's much to photograph here, farms dot the hillsides but all pay respects to this silent farm, source of stories and rumors, on the top of the hill, trailing cornrows on all sides.

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."