Took this one today, using a rented 105mm macro lens:
Quite pleased
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Category Archives: photography
Videos from Nova Scotia Faces
It’s getting on for 40 years since I first started working on Nova Scotia, and I’ve finally found a productive outlet for the thousands of photographs I collected in junk stores, mostly in the 1970s before others saw the possibilities in vernacular photography. Here are two videos, produced in the last couple of days:
Sixth Grade Class Photo
I suppose there are millions in this genre, but this is the only one I’m in:
This picture has been on my mind for years, and it recently resurfaced with its metadata intact (names written on the back). What, I wonder, happened in the lives of those people I more-or-less knew pretty well at the time? How could the tales be collected? I left Andover MA myself about a year later, after 7th grade, and most of what I remember so vividly about the Shawsheen district of Andover has been effaced by decades of progress: the American Woolen Company mill (closed in the early 1950s) became a Raytheon factory and then transmuted into condos, the Brothers of the Sacred Heart school also condofied, and I doubt that commuter trains stop at Shawsheen.
hopper in flagrante
Photographic ruminations
What part does equipment play in what a photographer is able to do? Clearly, in the last 6 months Betsy’s 60mm macro lens has taken her into almost magical realms of vision and transformed her capability to capture what she could see. My own fascination lies with ultra wide angle perspective, ever since the adventures in the 1970s with the 21mm Zeiss lens on the now-defunct Nikon rangefinder camera.
While there are ultrawides for digital cameras (I’m actively considering the Tokina 11-16mm), they’re pretty large and not so very portable, but tempting nonetheless.
At the moment I find myself lusting after a smaller and less obtrusive solution, Voigtländer’s Color-Skopar 21mm on a Bessa R4A body, a 35mm film camera. I happened upon a FlickRiver pool for that lens, and I continue to slaver. My birthday is approaching…
The Saga of Poor Alice G.
My life has been entangled with things Nova Scotian for more than 40 years, ever since I realized that I wouldn’t be going back to Sarawak for PhD fieldwork. The choice of Nova Scotia was both fortuitous and serendipitous (the tale is sketched elsewhere). In 1972, soon after we arrived in the Annapolis Valley, I started visiting antique stores (well, many of them were basically junk stores…) and buying tintypes, portraits, photo albums, boxes of snapshots. Thousands of them. I’ve been working on that trove ever since, and many are now resident on Flickr, where they await the Next Step.
A giant step occurred today as I fiddled with one of the images in Aperture:
(on the back, in spidery handwriting: “the last snap Ernest took of poor Alice G.”)
This one has been a challenge and a puzzle since I bought it in 1973 or so. Here’s today’s rumination on the image:
Snapshots have tales to tell, though we can rarely know the truth in all its detail. Sometimes we have only fragments of testimony, thanks to an informant’s evoked memories, or to notations on the photographs themselves. Is it remotely possible that we could discover what happened to Poor Alice G.? We have some information to work with: the locale is probably one of the harbors of Nova Scotia’s Fundy Coast, and the date is probably sometime in the 1920s or 1930s. Alice G. is perhaps in her early to mid-20s. Would Annapolis Valley newspapers of the time have carried obituaries?
…so I did a quick Google search for ‘annapolis valley newspapers’ and found the Annapolis Valley Newspaper Extracts Project, run as a labour of love by Phil Vogler.
I started looking through the ‘Vital Statistics’ there summarized, looking for possible conjunctions of fact…
How about THIS, from the Berwick Register
Grevatt, Alice Maud d/o Arthur Grevatt, died at Berwick, 26 June, 22 years. [30 June 1926 obit].
Bingo. And just by chance I’ll be in the Annapolis Valley next week, and can go to visit the Berwick Register office and see the obit.
waving goodbye to Makeshift
visiting badgers
blueberries and waffles
our lives brightened
gone down the driveway,
their new adventures leave us
bereft of badgers
The camera’s eye
I spend a lot of time looking at photographs, what with my own digitization projects and my wanderings in photographic history. The frame centers the viewer’s attention on details, and allows the photographer to express an aesthetic of composition. Sometimes one finds delicious bits within photographs. Here’s one from this morning’s Shorpy posting:
um… on the First Day
State Street Bank, 1964-1965
In 1964-1965 (Junior and Senior year of college) I was employed as a Progress Photographer on the State Street Bank Building, one of the first BIG buildings in Boston’s Financial District. This allowed me carte blanche to wander around the building site, usually one or two days a week, and take pictures of anything I thought might be of interest to the general contractor (Gilbane Inc., still very much in business). They paid me for prints of pictures they found useful, usually scenes recording construction progress. I used the opportunity to take hundreds of pictures that I knew they wouldn’t be interested in –construction details, men at work, stuff that appealed to my developing aesthetic and compositional sense.
The 100-odd rolls of negatives lived in a box on a shelf, and I always figured I’d get around to doing something with them someday. That someday arrived last December, and in a month-long blitz I scanned more than 2200 images, and was overwhelmed with the riches and possibilities. It’s taken a couple of months to get to the next stage, organizing and putting up a bunch of sets of images at Flickr, but now there’s a Collection of five sets, about 250 images in all. It may be most effective to watch the Men at Work set as a Slideshow.