Penland Four 2014
Yesterday we went to Marion, NC for a few hours to photograph. It felt very good to get off campus, to see new places and have new experiences. We are now building out our initial concept of combing words with images to allow more pictures than one, beginning to use narrative form and sequencing to make a group of pictures.
Marion was wonderful:
After an excellent lunch at "Bruce's Fabulous Foods" where we were seated in the banquet room in back, we returned to Penland. Bruce offered us a choice of about 13 different flavors of cheesecake for dessert.
Class? The students are doing really well now. Motivated, working hard, interested and interesting.There is still a great deal to do and next we will move on to working collaboratively.
Each night at Penland, after dinner is "Slide Night" where faculty and studio assistants present slides of their work for the whole community, about 200 people. So far we've seen work by metal workers, which includes iron, and wood and clay.
Photography, which will be myself, Chris Benfey and Mercedes Jelinek, will present next week.
Stay tuned.
Related series
Penland, North Carolina 2012
These photographs were made in late June and early July 2012 on a trip from Boston, where I live, to teach at Penland School of Crafts near Spruce Pine in North Carolina. I drove down there and back, photographing some along the way, but mostly photographed in the small town of Spruce Pine and near to Penland. Each morning at 6:30, often with two or three students along, we would spend a couple of hours photographing in Spruce Pine. The idea of coming back to someplace to photograph, to study it and one’s results from the previous day seemed to resonate with the students and it certainly did for me. Spruce Pine is small, bifurcated into older and newer parts and reflects present day US economics and hard times. It has a railroad that goes right through it, sits in a valley alongside a river and is lush in late June with dark green foliage.
Working this way in North Carolina brought me back to days in my deeper past. There were many road trips spent photographing, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, sometimes with students, pulling over in some little town, walking and shooting what I saw and what seemed worth trying to make into a picture.
Of note here to other photographers is that this is the first group of pictures I have made with a new camera, a Nikon D800E. This is always a love/hate relationship for me, getting used to how a new camera works, how it sees and imposes itself on what I want it to do. No one wants to be stumbling with buttons and controls while taking pictures and, as cameras are now very complex, it takes me a while to feel comfortable with its newness and being unfamiliar.
Spruce Pine, NC 2013
The Spruce Pine, North Carolina pictures come from when I was teaching at Penland School of Crafts in April, 2013. Most mornings I would head out early to town, a few miles away, before class to first have a coffee then walk the town.
This is the same town I made a group of pictures in last year called Penland, North Carolina 2012:
http://nealrantoul.com/projects/penland-north-carolina-2012
