The Nantucket pictures are the first “series” I did. Made, over  30 years ago, it is amazing that making this one modest group of pictures began a whole career.

I was teaching a summer photography workshop on the island of Martha’s Vineyard and took the students on a field trip to Nantucket for the day for a change of pace. When the ferry landed, I told the students to go make pictures and I would see them late in the afternoon to head back to Martha’s Vineyard. Off they went and so did I.

I had no real idea that something major was going to happen but it was one of those times when much of the work I had done until then was preparing me for how I would photograph that day. It was right: the light, the scale, the camera, my seeing, my effort to try to make a group of pictures that would connect to each other in a specific sequence to make a whole that was larger than its individual parts. After a few hours and several rolls of film I knew I’d had a breakthrough and broke down in tears when telling my experience to a friend on the ferry ride back home. Several months later the prints were finished and the next year they were shown in a summer group show at Light Gallery in NYC and in a one-man show at the RI School of Design Museum in Providence, RI. But more important to me was that I had found a way to make pictures that still serves me well today.

After making the Nantucket pictures the year before, I tried to make several other series but was having little luck. On a spring break trip to California my soon-to-be wife and I were staying at an inn in Napa Valley in the  town of Yountville. Getting up early the next morning, I started walking through the side streets of the little town.

The light was soft, gray and a little foggy and I made this series. Of course, after this I assumed that the light would have to be gray from that point on in making work this way. It wasn’t until 1996 with the Portland, Maine series that I proved my original theory wrong.