Latch

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Still

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

Anvil at Sunset

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

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


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

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

Bits

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

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

The Blacksmith's Hand

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spare Parts

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

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

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

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

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

Suspended Animation

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

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

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

Grindstone

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

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

Of Swages, Fullers, and Peens

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swages in Sunlight

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blacksmith's Cornucopia

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

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

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

Spring

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

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

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

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

The Idea of Farmhouse: Roadside Trees

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

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

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

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

The Idea of Farmhouse: Front Yard

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

The Idea of Farmhouse: Of the Land

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

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

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

The Idea of Farmhouse: Roots

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

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

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

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

Winter Logs

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE:

Winter

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

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

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

Classic IV

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

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

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

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

Blackout in Hidden Valley

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

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

Whiteout in HIdden Valley

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

Blizzard

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

Classic III

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I visited Olana again this weekend, this time with several photographer friends. Again I found myself with little interest in shooting, and the experience leaves me again thinking about my goals as a photographer. My companions had no trouble, and when I asked one of them about my problem, I understood him to say he looks to play up the natural drama of the building, its towering height, its setting, its exotic style.

Of course, he's right. If I were creating a postcard or a flier that's what I'd do. Olana is far less beautiful and less well known than the Taj Mahal, but I'd face a similar problem there. Each of these buildings is such a distinct presence, a thing in itself, a finished work that it is hard to make something entirely new from it or find a universal in it or extend the thought beyond the thing itself. Is that my problem?

• What is it that characterizes such sites?
• Why didn't I face similar problems at the Wyeth sites? Could it be because Wyeth's painting of those sites initiates a dialogue and one can try to join in?
• Is the situation the same in the middle of Times Square, or the Grand Canal in Venice? Perhaps if I stand where Turner stood and watch what passes today?
• Would it help if there were a famous painting of Olana?

I guess the best course to follow at such sites as in Times Square is to photograph the visitors (Alas, few visitors usually at Olana.) In any case, the more exciting approach for me is to find angles as Steve McCurry did when he captured the Taj Mahal from behind a steam locomotive.

I've looked for an angle at Olana. In spite of having the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains as props, I haven't yet found it. I'll probably try in the spring to find a nearby hill and some favorable light. Or will I have to arrive at the crack of dawn when fog rising from the river makes Olana into a cloud-wrapped, Kubla Khan dream? Or do I have to cross the river to find my angle from the other side as the sun behind my shoulder kisses Olana's roofs at dusk. Or is it best to just move on?

Forest Fringe

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: File under the heading, My Eyes are Not a Camera. Spring, summer and fall the forest offers many beauties that defy photography. Sometimes walking or even driving beside or through a forest the passing trees flicker or wink, and where there is not too much underbrush, the eye is led deep, and the forest becomes spatial. Stand still and look at the same scene, and the lively, eye-catching texture is gone and part of the three-dimensionality with it. Close one eye to see more like a camera, and the depth disappears entirely; the forest becomes a wall; the elusive beauty has vanished. Photographing in the woods through most of the year I look hard to find things to lead the eye, a beam of light, a splash of flowers, a trail winding. In winter a layer of snow will reveal the contour of the land beneath and behind the forest and make a space there where the photo eye can wander.

During the next snowfall can I photograph a cathedral there?

From the Ridge in Snow

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The snow continued well into the afternoon sometimes heavy, sometimes light, sometimes windblown and sometimes falling gently. The day was more variety show than high drama, but this scene out on the open part of the ridge is pure opera.

The view is back toward the same farmstead. To the left you can see the ancient farmhouse among the trees and, further to the left, the spot on the road where I stood to capture yesterday's image. Zoom in and look around.

I've been out here many times and at many different seasons. Because sky and fields provided a continuous background of white, the two trees are able to command the stage and sing their duet as never before.

Classic II

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Every snowstorm is unique, though there is usually a dramatic arc from first flakes' onset to gentle calm as the storm moves out, or perhaps it ends as rain. I make my guesses and meet this with a plan. On January 28th I wasn't convinced the storm would pan out, so I stayed close to home.

What is it that makes the terraine around Hidden Valley Farm especially fun to shoot? Certainly this farmstead, projecting out over the valley on its acropolis, is as picturesque as any. In addition, the valley is narrow and many angles are accessible. The land is open but retains many features: Buildings, trees, walls, fences are all potential actors in the drama. Of course snow transforms everything, and I wasn't sure who the characters would be with the land spread white.

I parked over the ridge beyond the farmstead so when I walked back, my first view was from above. My plan was to walk down the town road to the farmstead. If the snow stopped I'd still have good shooting close up. If it continued I'd either follow the road into the valley, or walk back up the hill, but I'd turn off the town road and follow the old farm road out along the ridge. Way out the ridge is exposed. Out there a moderate snow might make the hills very interesting, and the brush is wild, and there is a second farmstead that comes into view, and one gets to look back at this farmstead along the whole length of the walk out as various characters move between and beyond. There's nothing I like batter than wrestling with a broad landscape to extract painterly compositions, and I am a sucker for spots that preserve the look of another time.

Descending to the farmstead, potential characters were changing places frequently and I made a number of panoramas on the way down, but I stopped longer here at the switchback where the road comes off the slope and turns toward the barns. Right at this bend I am at the head of the valley. It is an ideal place to lead the eye deep, and the snow had conspired with the hills and trees to make the back field distinct. It's the first time I've been able to include the ancient farmhouse nestled in the hillside. That hillside is the backstop where the valley is finally fully played out and where the tiny spring that carved it begins. The original panorama included more area to the right where the view is framed by another tree cluster, but cropping it this way makes a stronger statement and gives importance to the cluster of trees at the first stone wall, like a family standing to admire the view.

Many of the features of this image are very much like Classic I. As a composition, it is entirely different and testimony to the power of moving a few feet. While I miss the simple statement of the horses here, they would be too indistinct to be meaningfull. In pulling back (both lens and position), the simple intimacy of the farmstead and horses, the cluster of trees set against the gray band of the hillside is exchanged for grandeur. Few locations provide a leading line as strong as this of road, retaining wall, fence, and distant hill. Hidden in the back valley, snow settles on the river. This is a view that wouldn't have looked too different 200 years ago.

I hope you can view it large because there's plenty of detail to zoom into. It is a stitched panorama of high resolution, and it is quite possible to make a sharp print that would be five feet by two feet. My computer screen is too small to show it properly.

White Silence No. 2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: A snow storm is a very private place where the landscape is made new; the trees stand out from the hillside, the ground is as bright as the sky, the falling snow is a skrim that sets the receding rows of hills apart, and every tuft of grass on the hillside that pokes above the snow makes its mark to reveal the torso of the land. And even as the veil of snow sculpts space, it fills it. It muffles sound and sets me apart, and as it settles over everything it almost seems to stop time or to enter a new dimension entirely.

My pleasure is wandering there as the hills and trees shift around me until the parts converge and something makes me stop and shoot, some sudden harmony or balance or snow flowers, newly blossoming. They grab the foreground and my tripod. As I wander, the snow is often changing, all at once pellets become large flakes, then they are sand crystals, the wind blows or it is still or the snow stops briefly and the color of the distant hills is suddenly more saturated. Then, in the distance I may see the next assault, the veils of snow closing in again. Being there in the solitude of snow is its own reward, seeing with new eyes and wondering at it all.

White Silence

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL - Just as white light is the combination of all colors of the light spectrum, so white noise is the combination of all pitches of a sound spectrum, but what is white silence? Each of us may look at this picture and try to give an answer, and many of us will never mention snow or winter or refer directly to this spot on a hillside where someone has planted a vineyard.

What I enjoy in the image is its simplicity, it's odd balance, and that with just a hint of color and shading the substance of a hillside can be suggested, and that at the same time it's less about hillside than about two areas of softly textured color and how they move my eye and about the whiteness of the paper or screen on which I view them. White silence is the feeling they convey to me. For all its realistic detail, for me it is almost abstract and analogous to the silence I felt while standing in the snow storm.

How different from yesterday's photo of classic New England winter, suitable for a Christmas card or to represent the month of December on a calendar. My pleasure in shooting it was about using these wonderfully evocative barns and landscape to retell a bit of Amercian mythology. In the real world such places are rare and never free of modern intrusions. So with the horses posing, how could I resist this one? Although not truly out of the past, the success of that image depends on making the barns, fence and horses as tangible and convincingly quaint as possible.

The two images were taken five minutes apart. In fact the very next subject I turned to study after the barns and horses was the subject above. Photography can be many things, even in the same snow storm.

Classic

Thank you to all who were able to visit the Blurb bookstore to check out my book and for the many encouraging notes in emails and in postings at Blurb, Facebook, here, etc., and to those who decided they wanted to own it.

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Photography is many things.

When I was a child my father was always, snapping, pictures. He referred to prints as, "snaps," but he mostly took slides. Some were of family, and I recall that for a long time I was puzzled; when everyone called, "Look at the camera." what was it we were all supposed to look at there in the lens? What didn't I see? Probably I was a slow learner. Eventually I figured out that there was a connection between that tiny box with the lens and the images my father projected on a screen some weeks later. The projector with its assortment of slide format adapters and a loud fan that blasted warm air, the rectangular, plastic trays that periodically jambed, and the leggy, screen contraption... these are still tactile memories even more than watching the latest box of family slides.

When I was five or six, I recall having a small kit. It may have been a prize in a box of cracker jacks, or a trifle from the barber shop for not making a fuss about having my hair trimmed. (Somewhere there must be pictures of me with my head recently buzzed.) In any case, the kit contained several clipped negatives showing animals, and school buses, and clowns. It also contained several negative-size cards of light sensitive paper; when we put the negatives and cards together and took them out to the light of 86th Street, the paper slowly darkened according to the negatives shades. That I remember the incident at all speaks to how impressed I was.

I'd like to think that it was then that an observant adult gave me my first camera, a Brownie Hawkeye, and showed me how to go into a dark room and load the film rolls which were sensitive to light like the paper cards. I have no idea how I got the camera or learned about loading film. I was already doing it before I got to summer camp and began spending hours in the darkroom there. What I do recall is my father, shirtless among rose bushes. He's down on one knee and the lens of his 35mm (Was it a Leica) camera is a few inches from an open rose. Somewhere there may still be metal boxes filled with roses and pansies and tomatoes, and the wings of airplanes beside passing clouds or sans clouds. He flew frequently on business trips, the sole remaining record of which may still be preserved in these airplane wing photos. Even then I wondered why anyone would want pictures of these things, hundreds of them. My father was a very practical person, but if I'd asked him why, I'm not sure he'd have had an answer.

You've asked, you've begged, you've cajoled, you've waited, and at long last, it's finally here. Jane Roth proclaims the book, "Scintillating, a 21st Century Masterpiece!" Even the cat is purring about the, "deft cohesion Roth has brought to the blog journals." There are 80 pages assembled to illuminate themes of the year. Everything has been re-edited and polished for publication. This is the book you've waited for.

In all seriousness, it was a great deal of fun going back over the year's wanderings, discovering where I'd been, and realizing a bit more about why I'd gone there. It's easy to preview the entire book at the Blurb Book Store. There's even a button to view it full screen and a place if you want to leave a comment.

There are two editions. Check one out now, even if you don't want to own it. You won't want to wait until everyone's talking about the movie.

Click http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/invited/703334/be844bc7bb8e3a52386faa8de2669c97
for the STANDARD EDITION of BEST OF TODAY'S, 2009. It contains the same images and writings as the deluxe edition, but in a comfortable 11" X 8" format.

Or click http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/invited/703495/3e5d599f912c12360baac59e93f75906
for the DELUXE EDITION which was rebuilt and customized for the larger 11" X 13" format.

Lullaby

HENRY DAVID THOREAU (meditating on branching form melting sand and clay take by "a cut on the railroad"):

"It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is "in full blast" within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit- not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviae from their graves. You may melt your metals and cast them into the most beautiful moulds you can; they will never excite me like the forms which this molten earth flows out into. And not only it, but the institutions upon it are plastic like clay in the hands of the potter."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The thaw was short-lived. The day after I took this, a great, warm rain washed the last of the ice and snow down the river, and then the weather turned colder, and soon it snowed. Winter is still in charge.

Prelude

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL

How Ice Becomes Me

And so I listen to the song of the flowing river and
Witness the ageless alchemy of freezing and thawing,
The tug of the moon,
Caress of the sun,
and the cosmic architecture of ice?

In witless, unhurried waves
Glacial domes chew continents,
What we call culture,
An outpost in an interstadial valley.

Ice slows pulse,
Numbs nerves,
Sends respite,
Ossifies.

The clench and release of
Crystal jaws
Crush fall flotsam,
In a rigor of electrons.

And the river sings more loudly.
Is this midwinter thaw but one of its ploys,
Release the wounded prey to gain a better grip?
Or is it of the flow that pulses in my veins,
And sanguine prelude of a season to renew?

Gigue

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Ice Sorcery

Of the simple wonders, ice ranks high.
I go to the river to learn its magic.
Frozen,
it's crystal scaffolding builds
a dome in air, its hallowed geometries stop
the river's flow.

Last week the hard freeze broke,
the ice ran free,
ten thousand silver lizards
scampered for the rocks, no sooner free than scurrying for their lives,
glistening in the sun
above the undertow and
huddling nightly
beneath the moon's
wordless
incantation.

River Song

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

One could almost believe
it is a live intelligence,
the ice,
so many strategies it finds
for climbing the river's rocky edge,

far more nimble
than I
and my tripod,
trying to get aimed,
and focused and set and....

First rule of winter:
Beware of thin ice
and carry an extra pair of socks.

Petrified Presto

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL

Metamorphosis

Look
into the eye
of a snow storm
and it becomes a field of daisies flying wildly,
crystallizing into flowers as they blow,
and deeper yet,
a frothing sea
of galaxies strewn across the heavens
where stars
lie like salt crystals.

Etude in Sharp Staccato

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

What are the lessons of winter as I walk along the river path?
Sleigh bell winter,
sub zero and transfixed;
even suspended the raccoon's nightly sortie on the barncat's bowl
and broke autumn's ceded husks, cracked its brittle leaves.

Feet get heavy and fingers grow numb trying to catch magic.
Space constricts.
I stand beside the car,
fingers too stiff to open the clasp on my backpack
and unable to escape inside the car with the backpack locked to my
        spine.

If the essence of photography involves stopping the world,
what does one photograph when the world stops?
Or has it merely stood still a moment to pose?

Hilltops

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: Where are you? A few weeks back I wondered about the process by which a place becomes just space. Now I have some other thoughts and questions.

1. Is space always defined by measurements and coordinates? Is place always defined in spite of measurements and coordinates?

2. I know the hilltop birch in this picture and how the field falls to the farm on that shoulder of land before it tumbles over into the next valley and how the water that flows there finds Bee Brook before reaching the Shepaug River, and I know the hidden hill behind this one as well and how on the hill beyond that there's an old farm that looks back at us. I know that from the top of the hill behind me I can see all the way to Mt. Tom and where my house is and town and the valley where the state road runs. Does the motorist know place in the same way the hiker does? or the pilot? or the astronaut? When they gather together around a table for dinner, are they all in different places?

3. And those people who always turn the wrong way when they come out of the elevator even though they've done it dozens of times.... Is their difficulty spatial? or platial?

4. Sometimes the world is flat. How come? Growing up on Manhattan Island, I knew the hills. I've walked the city since I was 8 and I've climbed Lenox Hill (Though I never knew Robert Lenox ran a tenant farm there), and I've climbed Murray Hill (Though I never knew there was once a fancy estate with stony soil masquerading as a farm there), and I've enjoyed the view from Morningside Heights and walked in the streets below (Was there really once an insane asylum where Columbia now stands?) and I know how the subway rattles overhead where Broadway takes a dip too deep for the IRT to stay under, and I've even been told that the word, "Manhattan," means "Island of Many Hills." However, words can lie; there's no hill at Curry Hill. My preferred means of travel in NYC has always been walking; I know the hills in my muscles, but no matter how I may be puffing on my way up to see Tulip Trees in bloom in Inwood, no matter how often they may tell me the Bronx is up and the Battery's down, I still know the Island of Manhattan is utterly and totally flat. How did that happen?

5. And when you wake in the middle of the night, and you don't know where you are, where are you?

6. Are you sure you're awake?

Sleigh Bell Harmonies

GUEST JOURNAL by Jane Roth: When I look at snow covered, 19th century homes and barns, I am reminded of Paul Gage (1850 - 1934) who was a successful harness maker in Washington Depot, CT. Along with designing and making straps and fittings for draft and pleasure animals, he also produced bells for winter sleighs. People knew which neighbor was arriving by the harmonic tones Mr. Gage designed. Join me in imagining Mr. Gage's symphonies.

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: I took this photo last winter in the early morning of March 9th. When Jane saw it she wrote the journal entry above. Unfortunately, nobody else we knew was enjoying winter on March 9th, and it seemed downright unfriendly to post this then.

We've just come through a week of bitterly cold, windy dry air and a three day, above-freezing reprieve. As good as it felt to stand and photograph with the sun on my back, the same sun melted the wind-blown snow into a scrappy, gray mess. As I write I hear the chatter of white crystals blowing agains the windows. There's a nor'easter due, and I'm hoping that tomorrow morning I will be standing in a field somewhere enjoying sleigh bell weather again.

Along the AT, No. 6

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: In the last of the River Walk fields the AT passes a lone, ghostly silo. Stone blocks the size of a large buffalo or pachyderm suggest the outline of a retaining wall or foundation. What was the scale of the operation that justified cutting and moving these hefty stones? How many oxen did it require? Where are the people who can recall this place?

But there's always a hill beyond the hill along the AT. Ahead is Silver Hill with an elevation of 1,266 feet. It's a short but steep and rocky climb to the top where there's a good view facing west. Then its down Silver Hill and up Bread Loaf Mountain, and Pine Knob and on to the Taconic Range and the Berkshires and eventually even into Canada.

Before the top of Silver Hill is a shelter with a rocky overlook facing east where someone has built a swing out over the Housatonic River Valley. From it one can sing and swing and watch the sun rise as the bird's feed in the valley below.

NOTE: All of the AT images in this series were shot in March of 2006.

Along the AT, No. 5

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: When you are most alone on the AT, you are still joined to other wanderers in a continental continuity that spans the nation's eastern cheek from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. There's always someone just out of site along the AT.

Along the AT, No. 4

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The AT is a path across both space and spirit, a line of wilderness along which we track ourselves.

Along the AT, No.3

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL:

Many find this section of the AT monotonous.
Progress is measured by how many fields have been crossed.
The boundaries are centuries old.
Rock walls hauled from the black earth transfix the acres.
Ancient trees seize the margins and lift a lattice of Gothic tracery.
Beyond there are always more hills.
Many find this section of the AT monotonous.

Along the AT, No.2

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The stroll along the AT continues. Between Kent and Cornwall it follows the corridor of the Housatonic River. As it nears Cornwall Bridge it crosses some fields that are mowed for hay. In March the ground is still cold, but the damp air is beginning its work.

In photographing the landscape, fog is the great simplifier if only one can get the crop right. I experimented with cropping tight to the cluster of tall trees on the left, but the image seemed static, too neatly balanced left and right, closed in. The framed mountain is only half of what is important here. We are moving along the AT, but we look sideways, perpendicularly to our direction of movement. The dissonance provided by the "bleeding" chunk of tree, left, and the hint of a second hill is a reminder that lateral movement across the picture is a second axis.

Sadly, the image suffers from a technical flaw and probably will never be printed, but this compositional pointer seems important to remember. Will it still be so when I am back on the AT with a changed atmosphere, different eyes and, hopefully, a steadier hand? Will anyone else think it matters? Does the effect even work as intended, or are the cues too subtle? How does one find the balance point where both the axis of the trail and the axis "out the window of the train as we pass" have equal pull?

Along the AT

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: My photographs are the record of my wanderings. They follow a regimen: wander, shoot, review, realize & publish to my blog. I try to wander every day and all the rest follow. In the past I've compared photography to fishing. If there's any sense to my analogy, then my blog is dinner, but I'm really more like a dog in the field following myriad scents, and no matter how I try to stick to the regimen, some scents are lost.

While re-cataloging my photos this week I came on the record of this forgotten journey along the AT. I recall walking this way and stopping here back in March of 2006. If correct, the photograph tells me it was 8 in the morning. Exhibiting at Macricostas was still a year away. I remember making decisions about where to stand and how to frame the trees and vines and choosing to do it just this way. At the time the whole shoot seemed very promising.

I've forgotten how it got forgotten, why I followed different scents. Perhaps I rushed to review the shots too quickly. Often, time is needed between shooting and reviewing. I've decided several images I made on this shoot were worth my attention, and the discovery of the photos is likely to send me this way again some morning. A wanderer can always thread his way back to the place, though the experience, if useful, will be entirely different.

Once upon a time I passed by here too quickly. Be sure to let your eyes get accustomed to the fog.

Skarf Mountain Whirled

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: With the snows of Sunday's photograph barely done whirling, this image looks back a half year to the same barns last May. Some might take pleasure in knowing that there's less time to the return of this world than backward to it. I say, why rush? I want to taste each season as it comes, and I haven't yet had my fill of winter's delights.

This was the shot I was looking to imitate when I headed into the blizzard. Of course when I got there I realized that changing conditions called for something quite different. The odd surprise was that, without the clouds to point the way, I couldn't even find the spot from which my wide lens had set this tree in motion.

Whiteout Over Skarf Mountain

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: What is it about the solitude of a raging blizzard like this that I find so serene? I shot this yesterday at Skarf Mountain. The blacksmith's shop is the back, red building almost at the center of the picture.

The trip had been dicey. Instead of taking 20 minutes it took closer to an hour. When I reached the farm the thermometer in my dash board, which had read a reassuring 9 degrees F. on the way over, had dropped to 7. When I opened the car door, wind and sparkling snow blew in and reminded me to put up my hood. This was fine, crystal snow that didn't stick or compact into balls. It just blew around. It was especially deep in the hollow of the farm road, and it was cool falling in around my ankles.

Because I didn't know how much cold I could take, I moved quickly. I sought a specific spot and composition, and when I couldn't find it I might have panicked, but decided immediately to drop my plan and fall back on things I knew. A broad, rocky, swamp of a brook divides the west field from the east field. If I could cross into the east field I knew the angles would work, but the whirling drifts of snow made the brook hard to see. Wandering into it would be an ankle buster at least. The bridge was near the back end of the field. My spot with good angles was just on the other side.

And so it was that when I set my tripod here, just east of the brook, the moment fell into place. It was as if a switch had been turned, and inside the whirl of wind, urgency and drifting snow was a kernel of downy stillness in which to stand, a place where the hollow, old barns might remember sheltering the herd through other storms and other times, a place where the forge might remember fire, a serene place to watch the magnificent expanse of wind and white drifting in front of me.

On the other hand, maybe it was just the quiet from turning down my hearing aides so they wouldn't whistle with feedback under my hood.

BE SURE TO CLICK THE PICTURE TO VIEW LARGE.

Blacksmith in Technicolor

ISAIAH, chapter 54, verse 16: "Behold, I have created the blacksmith who blows the coals in the fire, who brings forth an instrument for his work;"

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: This marks the start of the fourth year of TODAY'S. The first photograph published to TODAY'S was a monochrome image of a farm in Cornwall. There have been relatively few monochromes since. I decided to publish this image Wednesday (way back in 2009) in monochrome to add a patina of age. Is that a cheap way of populating the image with ghostly presences? I immediately missed the rich colors of brick, wood, and rust. On the other hand, it simplifies the composition and, perhaps, encourages the viewer to zoom in and wander around the shop. Until one makes that journey, the color image seems to me to be too now - more about the current state of things than spirits still playing at the benches?

I also wondered, might this shop be better explored on video? Is still photography better suited to composing a single farrier's presence than leaving the viewer to wander and search among the general, smithy mayhem? I'm interested in what viewers think.

In the meantime, zoom in and explore the benches. To help you on your tour, here's a link to an early, illustrated textbook on farm blacksmithing that will tell you what some of the tools here were used for. How many can you locate? Can you spot the unfinished wagon wheel the smithy might have been working on when he stopped for dinner?

The Blacksmith's Shop

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW: "The smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands."

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: ...and here is the blacksmith's shop. It was the hub of the farm, at the meeting point of the two major axes of work. Three walls have windows to catch the breeze when its hot and so on a cold day approaching winter solstice, as here, sun shines in all day long. The farm house is just beyond the window shown above; the barns are behind.

Unused shops are a magnet for clutter, but much of the clutter here is what was left when the forge ceased working at least a half century ago.

Click on the image and you can step in and have a real look around.

Storm Over Skarf Mountain

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: The farm's founder was a blacksmith. His land was fertile and prime, on the top of a mountain just outside of town. When the sun shined, it shined here from dawn until dusk. His family were leaders of the community. Some of his grandchildren live on the hills behind me.

Like most New England farms, the crops varied with the economy - tobacco, corn, grain, and always dairy. It's been a half a century since the golden Guernseys who once grazed here, last "came home." Except for a bit of hay, both barns and farm house sit empty.

The large barn on the left was the cow barn. The barn has received so many changes and adaptations that it's hard to tell for what purpose it was originally built. There are both metal cow stalls and older wooden ones still in place. To me they look too small to hold the large dairy cows I see on farms today. Most of the up-hill portion of the barn is for hay, but at some time in the past a milk room was carved out of part of the bottom floor. Hidden behind the cow barn in this image, and facing onto a common barnyard, is a small barn for bulls and another for heifers. On the far (south-facing) side of the cow barn are giant doors that swing open onto the barnyard, and in the fall someone still pushes a tall wagon full of hay inside between rows of empty cow stalls where it will stay dry. Beside these large doors is a long row of windows that still fill the milk room with sunlight and whose shadows still mark the passage of a day.

The two, wooden silos were made by the Unadilla Silo Company in 1951. They probably replaced earlier silos in the same spot. Wooden silos were inexpensive, and farmers expected to have to replace them as they aged. The boards of these have shrunk, the iron hoops fallen slack from disuse. The bill for each silo was $250 and another $50 each to ship them from Unadilla, NY. A small passage leads from a space behind the silos down into the milk room. Most summers vines block access.

The buildings on the right include chicken coops, outhouse, a corn crib, machine shed and food storage. They cluster nicely around an area that may once have functioned as a dooryard, orchard, and garden. The old farm house is visible at the back. At the corner where the axis of the barnyard galaxy and the axis of the dooryard galaxy cross is the blacksmith's shop.

May the Joys of the Coming Year Be Many

The photo and greeting card above was made by my daughter, Melissa Cherniske. Portrait photography is her business and her bliss. You can find out more about her work and commission her to photograph your family by going to http://www.LENSCAPES-PHOTO.com, and clicking on "portraits."

The Idea of Farm House No. 8

PHOTOGRAPHER'S JOURNAL: From my former classmate Tom Hubka, in his excellent book on the connected farms of New England, I learned the phrase the old-timers used to describe the farm. I've added a second phrase to make a two stanza rhyme:

Front house,
Little house
Back house
Barn

Front yard
Door yard
Barn yard
Farm

In the early 19th century the farm had no front yard, no pickets, but it always had a dooryard. The door yard is the place outside the kitchen in front of the ell or, "little house," but it was often also adjacent to the back house where the farm shops were located.

So it was the true center of farm life. It was not only a place to chop the firewood or harness the ox. There, vehicles were repaired and animals butchered. A chicken running headless one moment might soon be plucked there. Nearby corn was shucked and apples sorted; bushels for canning as sauce, crates to be pressed into cider, a few choice ones chosen for pie, and one red beauty polished and eaten. It was also the place to greet neighbors and spend some time catching up on the news of the day. Young ones played and old ones idled. Keeping a messy door yard was a sign of slovenliness and akin to moral turpitude.

Today the door yard may be grass or it may still have a vegetable or herb garden. Very possibly, however, it has been paved for parking. As a place, the dooryard, once the work center of the farm, has completely vanished.