Category Archives: photography

Summer

So what happened to June and July? A strange summer, mostly unseasonably cool and foggy here in midcoast Maine, while sweltering ‘most everywhere else (fires, plagues of frogs, rain and more rain…). I put a lot of time and effort into four Convivium Questions:

…which l enjoyed working on but can’t really claim had any useful effect beyond my own sorting out of what I was inspired to discover and put into words, and of course plentiful Collection Development by way of book purchases to salve arising curiosities.

In photographic realms, just a few Flickr Albums generated, but no new ground broken by way of image projects, and no public display lined up until maybe next spring. I have ideas for Blurb books, but nothing underway. I now have the wherewithal to make good scans of a lot of old negatives from 40-50-60 years ago, and those might feed into books too.

And in musical realms, I continue to play for an audience of one, and to acquire irresistible new-old instruments via Jake Wildwood, but Betsy is of the opinion that there are Too Many instruments, so there’s a plan afoot to recycle some of the rarely-played via Jake.

Otherwise, the rapidly-approaching 80th birthday is beginning to loom…

at the end of May

Last night’s coffee porter photo

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seems a cunning synecdoche for where things are at the end of May 2023 — a dynamic blend of order and randomness, of the literal and the figurative, of the stochastic and the entrained, of moments hunted and moments preserved, and with Imagination to the fore. There’s no better way for me to live, delightfully below the radar and in deep appreciation of family and friends.

coughed up by Flickr

Every now and again an image hidden in my Flickr photostream floats into view and tempts me to re-think a project that’s been back-burnered by other fascinations. Today’s case in point is from 2018, and Flickr tells me that somebody looked at it yesterday –no idea how, or why, it was chosen, or discovered:

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One of a bunch taken along a stretch of rocky St George shoreline (see the Flickr Album from that expedition. I see all sorts of wonderful lithic landscapes, full of interpretive opportunities, and expressing an aesthetic rather different from that I’ve been drawn to in the last few years).

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and

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So it’s high time to think about the creatures of the lithic world again, and try to understand just what it is they’re trying to communicate. Each tells a geomorphological story, involving an odyssey of exposure to heat and pressure deep in the Earth’s mantle, a tectonic-driven journey upward to the surface, transport and abrasive sculpture from parent rock somewhere far away (probably Canada) to the shore in St. George by glacial advance and retreat, and then a few thousand years of tumbling by waves of the Gulf of Maine. Awesome.

Hessians

One of New England’s Autumn rituals is the Binding of the Evergreens. A bolt of [gunny] sack cloth or burlap or tow sackin’ or hessian (dialect variants for pretty much the same very rough cloth, almost loose enough to qualify as net) is sourced from somewhere (Tractor Supply, maybe?) and wrapped around ornamental evergreens for the first 5 or 6 years after they are planted. One must wonder why (not to mention where and when and wither and how) this custom came to be and to spread to its present territory?

And of the style and other niceties of the Binding: The most common configuration is the line, which often looks nothing but military:

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The ideal is a uniformity that is rarely achieved. Most straggle and sag and some even wander. Some manage to stand in a line as if on parade:


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(most of these can be read as faces…)

With Evergreens planted as specimen trees, there’s more latitude for the fanciful when it comes to Binding. It’s not clear if the Binders consider that they might be doing Evergreen Sculpture, or if the main point is to ward off hungry winter-browsing deer, and you get the burlap around her good enough…

Remarkable characters sometimes emerge:


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hawk-nosed portrait head with extravagant plumed headdress


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I can’t decide between genuflection and a couch too deep


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Exercise: caption this as you will

Some are marvelous portraits of character. I read this one as disgruntled old sergeant with silly tufted headgear.


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Longtime I’ve thought of these as Hessians, a tip o’ the hat to the 18th century Germans with whom the Crown sought to maintain order in 1770s North America. Others collected can be seen in my Hessians Flickr Album.

ADDENDUM:
My friend Brian Higley, landscape architect and vegetation whisperer, comments thusly:

I like to call these, trees in bondage. Whenever I see them, they look pretty tortured to me. But maybe the more creative way to see them is perhaps… homage to the landscape artist Christo. See the forms without any preconceptions, only for what they are as sculpture. What happens to the flora when you wrap it? … The wrappings can actually serve a purpose in some cases, but those cases included, it usually means that someone has planted the wrong species of plant in the wrong location, or deer.

Some species of evergreen trees and shrubs are extremely sensitive to wind and can become dessicated in the winter. If the winter wind doesn’t kill them, they will stay nice and brown the rest of the year. Wrapping can keep them alive and perhaps green.

Heavy pressures from a starving deer population (the case in several places I have worked) can make it next to impossible to have any new plantings without a seven foot deer fence around your entire property. Many people with money do just that, and then the remaining deer have that much less land to feed on. When they are starving they will eat anything in sight, including things they aren’t even supposed to like. Some people like to wrap up their plants in winter to protect from the hungry deer, a reasonable protective measure by tree loving owners, but in my view the dressed up soldiers stand out as a loud and obvious symbol of defeat. Really? looking at wrapped up trees all winter? I get it though. Falling in love with your trees can be as irrational as falling in love with another person.

Now if you live in Beacon, New York and you happen to get a nice little fig tree, and you wrap it all up and bury it in the fall to keep it from getting too cold, you can get some nice figs every year — it is totally worth the trouble. And the ugliness you have forced upon the plant, and the rest of the world, is justified.

scanning photo albums

Yesterday I began sorting through some accumulated heaps of Abandoned Ancestors and came upon a slim and anonymous sixteen page album which I scanned and reordered and uploaded as a Flickr Album. The most remarkable image is surely

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but this one is a close second:

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One rarely finds such direct engagement with the photographer as seen in the riveting gaze of the woman on the left, and there’s the further enigma of the evidently symbolic arrangement: the five participants seem to be holding hands in an expression of solidarity.

The album also includes nine cyanotypes, all of male subjects doing outdoorsy things. This one is especially gripping:

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But what does it all mean?

Learning to read albums of snapshots is challenging, since context is often missing and all one usually knows is that the assembler of an album cared about the photos included, and invested energy into arranging the images on the pages. What can we make of this pair, from the disintegrating and faded remnants of a small album from perhaps a century ago?

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(see the scanned album and try figuring out its story)


Perhaps further exploration of that album will give us some hints, but it’s a salvage operation. Most of the photos are faded, and so needed extensive work with Lightroom. There are a few captions, but nothing definitive. As vernacular as it gets.

Clark Island at low tide


“The Mysteries of Pebbles” by Paolo Mucciarelli and Enrico Ranzanici (via BoingBoing)

(and review How did I arrive at this fascination with imaginary beings?)

Yes, well… today’s photographic expedition took us to the intertidal zone at Clark Island, where I discovered all sorts of Personages and some lovely Surfaces. The Flickr Album offers the whole set, more or less sorted into a Narrative. I can’t pick a favorite.

landscapes

In the middle of the 2022 Joint Show I’m starting to wonder what comes next? A new desktop machine is on order for me (a Mac Studio), and I expect to be working on several Blurb books during the fall and winter. One subject that keeps nudging me is Surfaces, which are mostly abstract patterns of ambiguous scale, often manifesting as Landscapes of the Imagination. While rifling through the sprawl of desktop files I happened upon a collection of candidates I started several years ago, which I should augment with recent images.

Before July gets away from us

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July has been busy with summer stuff, including the arrival of [really quite magnificent] metal prints for our Joint Show in September. I’ve added a link to some other images from Flowers Cove to the page summarizing my part of the show.

A Convivium Question about Myth led to another exploration of the Twelfth Imam.

And there’s been the usual daily pleasure of eclectic reading in the barn, and the garden is burgeoning. A visit from John and Laura and Kian will round out the month!