What is it about this photograph? Known to friends as the "Tennis in the Woods" picture it stops everyone dead in their tracks when they see it. 

I thought I'd bring you into it a little.

I made the picture in November 2012 from about 1000 feet above Martha's Vineyard. We were headed back to the mainland after an extended flight, the light was failing and I had shot all I'd intended for the day. But we were flying, the window was open and I was looking down at the ground with the camera in my hands and saw this as we flew over, so I snapped the shutter. From the air you see things as quick "windows" that pass by very fast and are gone. It wasn't until I got home and started going through the almost 500 frames I'd shot that day that I noticed this one. Taken as we flew over a large and private area on the North Shore of the island called Seven Gates, it was of a tennis court in the woods. It was so small and surrounded by so many trees and, if you look carefully, there is a pickup truck driving away with its brake lights on:

What did this mean? I couldn't help beginning to play out a mystery: Was the driver leaving the scene of the crime? Had he left a body by the side of the tennis court, wrapped in plastic? Or was he a hero and rushing to someplace outside of the frame we can't see to save his sweetheart who is about to be thrown from the cliff by the villain into the waves crashing below? I don't know about you but Hitchcock movies come to mind.

To come back to reality, what is a tennis court doing there in the middle of what looks like nowhere? This is a characteristic of photography I have always loved. Because it is often steeped in a look that is realistic, we can play with unanswerable questions or build out intrigue, innuendo and enigma almost at will. 

Nothing seems to be private from the air. You are flying free to gaze in back yards and into private property. There is a recent case where Barbara Streisand sued an aerial photographer who had been hovering in a helicopter outside her house on the coast in Malibu for invasion of privacy. She lost the case as he was in free air space (Streisand Case). I wonder what will happen as more and more drones are put into use.

Look at how everything is just there for you to see. A fence? No problem. Plant trees as a screen so your pool can't be seen from the street? Nope. The concept just doesn't work when seen from up here. (This is from a new series begun this fall of photographs of MA Route 2 from east to west.)

My friend Alex MacLean is an excellent aerial photographer. He is one of those that flies his own plane and photographs too (Landslides). He had a show at the Clark Gallery in Lincoln, MA awhile ago and gave a talk. After he spoke he got a question  from a woman in the audience asking if he ever photographed on the ground. I thought his logic was impeccable. He said that he tried it but was frustrated right way. "Drive around, stop, get out of the car, take a picture, get back in the car, drive some more, get out, take a picture and on and on. Why would anyone want to subject themselves to that?"

That tennis court in the woods haunts me. I find myself thinking of being there on a cold starry night in mid winter with all those trees swaying and creaking in the wind and maybe a mouse starting to cross it, furtive and hurrying, feeling exposed and vulnerable as it pads through the center where the net sits in the summer, with an owl looking on from a limb of a nearby tree, taking flight, swooping down with its talons extended in front of it to strike and make its kill.

I've posted a new series on the site called : Spring & Fall. This is a body of work that I wrote about on my blog called New Way and New Way 2. In the New Way posts I was wrestling with a group of pictures in the making, trying to figure out if I had a new series, thinking through how to make them and so on. I am learning that the blog can serve as a kind of guide for me. A way to put something out as a test, to see if it has viability. Please understand, for me to post a series on the site, to give it that level of public exposure, I want to be firmly committed to it. As I've spent the last two weeks printing these pictures I find I am committed to the body of work.

"Spring & Fall" uses the two seasons as metaphors for early life and late life, life in ascendency and a life in decline, meaning my own. While I would argue that I am very much in this life, active, involved and astute, I cannot deny that more of my best work lies behind me than ahead. So, this series reflects on this fact. I have subtitled the series, "Sun" for the spring half and "Setting" for the fall part.

I refer you to the site for the full series: Spring & Fall

Spring

Fall

The work has several layers, several structures imposed upon it to give it definition and purpose. I don't believe I will destroy the series by giving you some of mine, but you may find others. Color for spring,  black and white for fall. I have been doing this for a while now, putting color and black and white pictures together in varying ways. This is strictly against the old rules but we are in a different world now and the old rules definitely no longer apply. If you've been following what I've been writing you know the title must be a metaphor for all the pictures in the series were made in the same two week period in May. It may be a stretch but it is one I have made and that is that the color aerial ones imply an "above" character, a flight above the ground, which is light, weightless, free and without limitation. The pictures imply freedom to go anywhere and do anything, which I associate with real youth. Whereas the black and white pictures I made on the ground, in fog, are firmly mired in the ground, without much of an ability to escape, to get out, to be free or, in fact, to go anywhere else. Pretty dire, right? But the black and white pictures are also a far more evolved and thought through group of photographs. This is another thing I associate with older people. They know more! And can understand subtlety and nuance that goes right by most young people. The two ways of photographing are so inherently different this too serves as a way to emphasize the speed, quickness and "flighty-ness" (sorry, I couldn't resist) verses the grounded, perhaps somber nature of the old, moving ponderously and with deliberation. 100 miles an hour skimming 500 feet above someplace verses walking around looking , thinking, analyzing, placing. Too much? You decide. But getting older is much like that. Ones aspirations may be great but ones ability to do things is increasingly severely limited. Why use the subtitles  "Sun" and "Setting"? To further indicate the path through the pictures and reinforce the actual title. As an aside, I have never wanted anything I have written as titles or as texts hanging along with my work in shows to be anything but clarification and this is true here with this series. I hate the texts in museums that hang next to the piece explaining, presumably to the clueless, what the work is all about. It seems condescending and overly educational. I will most likely write a blog about titles and what they can mean and what I believe is good practice for titles and what is not.  But suffice it to say here that the title for this work provides the key to the work. Important? Very.

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