Penland Finish 2014
The two week class I've been co-teaching with the author Christopher Benfey has finished. Chris left this morning and Mercedes, the studio assistant, and I are here until tomorrow morning. Most students have left as well.
At Penland studio classes wrap up with a "show and tell" of student work the final Friday of the session. This allows the whole community to see what all the students have made. Penland is actually "Penland School of Crafts" meaning the emphasis is on making things. This includes: pottery, fabric, paper, book making, glass, iron, painting, metals, wood, jewelry, photography and on and on. Each session will offer something different as well. One was our photo class, as it included work on writing as well, and another one was working with gut. Yes, strange as it may seem, the results were fascinating as the gut when treated became almost transparent and was often used as a surface to write or to draw on.
I used the time off to go photographing and returned to Marion, NC to try to finish work begun last week while on a class field trip. If you've been following this blog you know I've been going down to the closest town, Spruce Pine, every morning before class, sometimes with students and sometimes not. This morning was "not" and I really hit a wall.
But Marion redeemed that as I found "warehouse heaven" in something called Chamad Warehouse. Yes, of course it has a website: CHAMAD.
Some old manufacturing complex now storage for small companies and maybe Fed Ex or UPS too.
I will post more about this when home and after working the files but on the back side it had, in a parking lot, and beyond what I can only describe as a "sacred space". I know, Rantoul's getting out there but this was something. I only hope my pictures can do it justice.
Addendum to yesterday's post: Headed for Williamsburg, VA to see a former student from, oh, about 1978!
Finally, I am forever grateful to Chris Benfey and Mercedes Jelinek for a remarkable experience teaching at Penland.
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
