Penland Two 2014
Day two of teaching at Penland is actually our first full day of classes. The author Christopher Benfey and I are co-teaching a class called Word/Image. This morning we sent students out to write about an object they liked. "Description" and to "keep it simple" were the goals. Chris read us a few paragraphs from James Agee's "Let us now Praise Famous Men" and I told a story about how Aaron Siskind, as one of my teachers, told me to, you guessed it, "keep it simple". After an hour or so they came back in and read what they wrote. This afternoon they will then photograph the same object under the same guidelines. This is a great group, enthusiastic and hugely motived and we have made a strong start.
I was down in Spruce Pine again this morning, working off an area I'd photographed two years ago but with a new awareness of inherent possibilities in a part of town struggling for survival and trying to present itself as prosperous in tough times.
The town sits up against a hill and there are several plots of land that are now parking lots where buildings used to be. Hard to appear prosperous with empty lots right down town.
Clarity of intent or enigmatic? Specific or ambivalent? Intentional or indecisive?
Tomorrow?
Penland Three 2014.
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
