In Storage

Kingston, New York

MADRID

New Haven, Connecticut

I keep saying that if you see almost-a-picture, or "90% of a picture"—just wait and see if the missing element comes along. It often does.

Back in the Pod Again, with Roger Overall

Woodbury, Connecticut, tests for making digital negatives for platinum printing

Photographer, videographer, podcast personality at The Documentary Photographer Podcast, and wonderful interviewer, Roger Overall, in County Cork, Ireland, was gracious enough to interview me for the third installment of The Documentary Photographer Podcast, back in the spring of 2012. He even more graciously took time out of his busy schedule last Friday to do an interview for a new 'cast, #21, triggered by the TOP Pt/Pd print offer.

Of course we caught up on what happened on the Giant Drive-in Theater Road Trip, which was just about to launch at the time of our last talk. The discussion ranges from logistics of a really long road trip working with large and ultra-large format cameras and the needs of the, ahem, film—as well as digital capture, in the heat wave and drought of that year (it's worse now), moving on to the problems of doing a large edition of prints in the Pt/Pd process, referring to, of course, the current TOP Pt/Pd print offer. We got into quite some detail about how you integrate digital tools and procedures into a traditional process (see illo).

Before that, on the road trip front, we talked about the irony of finding yourself carrying five forty-pound cases of equipment into an insecure but air-conditioned hotel room because the secured/alarmed car is turning into an oven at four o'clock in the afternoon when the shade temperature is 104° F and there is no place to park the car in shade!

We discussed how, in Buena Vista (I coach him how to pronounce it properly), Colorado, I found the Comanche theater, on a plateau at 8,000 feet, with mountains rising all around it, and it was over 100°F at five o'clock in the afternoon. Climate change is here.

If you have an hour to kill, there are worse ways to do it than listening to Roger's podcast with me. ANY of Roger's podcasts will be worth your while, because he is such a good interviewer that I will vouch for any one of his intervening 'casts sight unseen, even though I haven't caught up, because he's simply so good at asking the right questions to find the interesting discourse.

9/11/14

Canaan, Connecticut

Today is our 43rd wedding anniversary, though a lot of people have a more recent anniversary of another sort on their minds. The Knights of Columbus at a church in Canaan had a large flag suspended from a ladder firetruck, a tent with benches and chairs and a coffin draped in a flag. A man was reading names. Oddly, at least during the minutes I was there making some pictures, the names being read don't seem to have been the Twin Tower or Pennsylvania crash site victims, because every single one of them began with military rank. Captain, private, and so on. I guess it might have been a list of police/fire casualties.

 Great Barrington, Massachusetts

We went for a little look-around in the fittingly gloomy weather hoping for a few pictures with interesting light. Had a surprisingly nice lunch at a pizza place, which had their flag in the parking lot flying at half-mast.

More Trucks

Torrington, Connecticut

No idea how the blue paint on the trailer got there to echo the vintage Ram van. Also, it proves possible to make a picture on sunny summer day.

Speaking of Trucks

Torrington, Connecticut

This isn't a junkyard. It's adjacent to a place that appears to do automotive repair work along with heavier-duty truck service and general machining work as well. All on a part time basis since I seldom see activity. Just like most of the remaining farmers around here, it may be that a general purpose mechanic/machinist needs a day job. Sometime when there is activity when I walk by, I'll have to go in and ask. This is right in the middle of a mixed residential/commercial area perhaps half a mile from the center of town.

TOP Platinum/Palladium Special Print Offer

"United African American Baptist Church, Iron Gate, Virginia, 2002"

"Dawn, Shepaug River at Steep Rock, Washington, Connecticut, 1996"

It's four years since our first TOP Platinum Print Offer. The second one is now officially up and running, and will last just five days. These are two of my favorite 8x10 format photographs, available as platinum/palladium prints during this sale for a fraction of the usual gallery price.

Truck Butts

 Watertown, Connecticut

Landscaping and construction crews seemed to be everywhere, end of summer I guess. But perhaps the beginning of a new series?

Davidson/Caponigro

New Haven, Connecticut, 9/9/14

After a doctor's appointment in New Haven this morning, I was able to run over to the Yale/British art museum to catch the Bruce Davidson, Paul Caponigro exhibit. British? Well, not crazy at all. Both photographers did large bodies of early work that proved pivotal to their careers, in Britain, back in the late 50s and into the 60s.

The Caponigro photographs are exquisitely seen and beautifully printed, but I've never really responded to this work and it was never an influence on me.

But the Davidson prints! I knew almost all of the pictures intimately, from reproductions, but have seen almost none of them before as silver prints. As an aside, neither the literature nor the staff could fill me on when the prints were made—vintage or contemporary? The donors are all credited handsomely, but the curatorial detail of when these prints were made, right after shooting, or after forty years of contemplation, seems worth asking and telling.

These pictures, along with contemporary work by Ken Heyman, were directly instrumental in my deciding, fifty years ago, to pursue photography as my life's work. Can't get much more influential than that. A detail about presentation—no gigantism here. The Davidson prints appeared to be 8x12" picture area, conventionally matted, in a 16x20 narrow black frame. This makes me think they may be vintage, but I'd love to hear that he still prints them this way.

The show closes Sunday, so if you have any interest in either of these important American photographers and can make it to New Haven by then, your trip will be well rewarded. I'm going to see if I can dash down for a longer look between now and then.

One, Two, Three

Watertown, Connecticut

Six seconds. First shot catches the Prius coming into the frame. Two seconds later, just its shadow leaving the frame. Four second wait as another car goes through, then the third exposure for the clean view of nothing but the road surface and curb at the right, before another car comes through.

There's a strong tendency in thought—or at least writing—about photography, to emphasize the single, perfect image. There's also a similar tendency to emphasize the idea that pictures should be used in a series to tell a story. I'm quite amenable to the first tendency, hoping to make a single definitive picture of an interesting subject. But then I tend to think that if one perfect picture of a white country church in a rural setting is nice, perhaps a set of fifty or more of them might be even nicer. Or, one really fascinating drive-in theater in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania on a misty morning...you get the idea.

David Vestal had no use for the idea of the picture story. "If you want to tell a story, use words. That's what they're for. If you want to show what something looked like, use a photograph." I mostly agree, especially when I see advice, or even workshops, teaching that photographs are about storytelling. Nope. They're about showing what things looked like. But sometimes, it's interesting to see how, what they look like, changed, over the course of six seconds, or six decades.