In this post I am referring to Portland, Maine, just about two hours up the coast from where I live in Massachusetts. Last month I wrote about returning to Portland to make pictures on a twenty year anniversary of pictures I made there in 1996. Appropriately, that essay is called: Twenty Years Ago. The original Portland series is on the site here.

I went back again this week to try to add to the pictures I made last month. Once again, humbled by the difficulty of making good pictures while walking neighborhoods and pointing a camera at houses, streets, cars, alleys, sidewalks and fences, I worked to transcend the ordinariness to speak to larger issues. I walked and photographed. This has been my form of street photography for a long time and it is both all too easy and very very hard to do. I had great light, both on a late afternoon shoot and an early morning one the next morning.

I started here:

just as I did last month:

As I walked along, looking and photographing, I learned that one thing was a priority in terms of interest and emphasis: color. So, while the pictures I made a month ago were originally rendered in black and white, and the originals made in 1996 were made also using black and white, this new series will be in color.

Of course, there's some back story to this change. In 1996 I was only a black and white photographer. I did not even consider color in those days. It wouldn't be for another 6 years that color would begin to work its way into my process. And now, I am primarily a colorist photographer, meaning much of my work is about color. For instance:

Great Salt Lake, Utah 09.2016 

So here I am, referencing work made 20 years ago, returning to the scene to make pictures there again when I came across this:

Here is the first in the Portland Series from 1996 and intended as a wake up call to the fact this was first time I made series work in bright sunlight and the first series I'd made at all in 12 years. Here's the original: Portland, Maine 1996 

And here is the same building this past week. With one tree larger and one tree gone, still bookended by a vehicle left and right, still looking like it's posing with a smile on its face, waiting to be photographed, perpetually sunny in disposition even though there may be doom and gloom around the corner. Made my day, of course, coming across this after so long.

Let me posit something for minute. Imagine using a thing you did long ago becoming the reference for what you do now. Imagine using that precedent you established, not someone else, but you, out on your own, making something that forms the basis for a thing you make now. You could be a potter,  an architect, a musician, a writer, doesn't matter. How would that thing you did back then influence what you are making now? And conversely, how does what you are making now affect the thing you made in the past? Is the older piece seen now through a different lens, informed by this newer interpretation? Of course, here we are looking at these two projects, one made and one in the making, from an internal perspective, that would be me, the artist making the pictures. What about the external? Someone coming to these two bodies of work from the outside, as you are. Would you choose to reflect back on yourself twenty years ago, asked to go there by looking at these pictures? Can I do that, light a path to that way of thinking, reflecting on you, the you you were then? I hope so.

In my current Creative Practice class at the Griffin Museum we are doing just that. Talking about and discussing ways to imbue pictures with meaning, to make our work resonate and vibrate with import, with things to say or question going beyond the boundaries of a photographic document as a depiction. My class is experienced and accomplished people working within the broad definition of photography who have a real history of creative expression.

Back to the pictures and to color.

I can't help but be reminded of photographer Harry Callahan's statement that we always make the same picture. That early work isn't less or inferior and newer work isn't more or better, that it is all part of the work we make. That means, of course, that we own it all, flaws and all, as much as we might like to dismiss what we think of as lesser work, or work made through a series of bad decisions, perhaps shown and published, even though we wish it hadn't been. This is true for us all.

Who would have thought that going back to Portland twenty years later could have  brought so much to the surface? Not me. My idea behind going back to photograph 20 years later really came about because I was curious about what it would look like, what changes there would be to the neighborhood. Little did I know.

Portland, Maine. Great town, btw. Much more alive and culturally active now than 20 years ago. If you go and like BBQ, check out Salvage. 

I just got back from a couple of days on the island of Martha's Vineyard.  The afternoon I arrived went rapidly downhill to an evening that had fierce rain, flash floods and tree-branch-breaking winds. By the next morning the rain had ceased but the wind was still up.  At 8 or so I drove up island to the Chilmark town beach called Squibnocket where all hell was breaking loose.

The waves were pounding into shore in rapid succession.

To photograph this was way out of my comfort zone. I don't usually shoot stuff that  moves. What did I do? Answer: the best I could.

If you've been to Squibnocket, the waves were washing right across the parking lot. 

Of course, I loved all of it.

After that I drove to Vincent's Beach, farther down the south side of the island.

Where the waves had created sea foam, like whip cream. 

While walking in I came across another photographer walking out, camera on a tripod just like me. In an odd sort of way it was like coming across myself. He pointed to his wet pants and said to be careful the waves were coming right up the beach. I thanked him, walked down the beach a ways, plunked my tripod down in the sand, looked through the long lens on my camera and started shooting. Guess  what happened next?

Before I knew what hit me I was knee deep in a wave washing ashore. So much for "watching out."

This is what it looked like that morning at Vincent's:

This beach where the summer people slather on sun block, kids build sand castles, lawyers and stockbrokers waddle out with their Sunday New York Times to soak up the rays and body surf the waves. This high-end beach looking now very different and really deadly. 

Twenty years ago I made a series of photographs in Portland, Maine. The series is on my site here. It might be helpful if you looked at those first, as they are the frame of reference this new work is based upon.

When I wrote several blogs about the work I discussed the photographs and their timing, the pictures made as the last snow was melting in March and the fact that it was the first group like this I'd made in several years. The posts start here.

Last weekend I drove to Portland from Cambridge on the twentieth anniversary of when I made the first pictures, stayed in a motel and photographed in about the same neighborhood I had in 1996 on a cold, bright and cloudless March morning to see what was different and what was the same. Not only different and the same about the neighborhood but different and the same about me too.

March 1996 Portland Maine

March 2016 Portland Maine

It was a humbling lesson.  I did not try to duplicate pictures or try to survey exactly where I'd been two decades ago. That would be dull, predictable and too much like a survey, for I am an artist not a  documentarian. But I did want to be in the same area, with similar light and then see what happened.

It was very cold and very early, the light as sharp, clean and crystalline as any I've ever seen with strong sunlight and deep shadows filtered and channeled by the buildings.

2016

Why would I presume that I could be as "sharp and clean" as I was twenty years ago? Was I trying to regain my more youthful self? Presuming that I could perceive and render with decisiveness? No. I was there to see if I could muster the forces inside to make relevant statements, to see if I had wit, perception, clarity and design in hand, to measure the level of my game. But I was also there to see if my perception of what a picture was had changed in the context of this familiar territory. We all agree we are the same person we were twenty years ago and yet we are not as well. There is so much that happens to us that changes us. Would this be perceptible in the pictures I made?

2016

2016

2016

I don't know that I can answer that, yet. 

Funny to have pictures you made twenty years ago rattling around in your head when you are making pictures now in the same place. Certainly I could work to repeat myself but that is something I have no interest in. Have you gone back to something you did in the past to re-realize it, to re-aproach it? Maybe its my being 69 years old at work here, I don't know. But this thing I am trying certainly has its challenges built in.

What did I find? I found that I learned that re-obtaining the feeling of exhilaration and magic of those pictures I made twenty years ago did not come so easily. Just because a veteran like myself points a camera at something with intent and purpose doesn't make it any better than pictures made by someone completely inexperienced and clueless. In fact, the very nature of having made pictures in the past that were good carries the weight of presumption and makes photographing now more difficult. Call it baggage. I did make one or two that day that sing but will clearly have to work longer and harder than just one March morning to make a new series that will be truly good. Scratch the idea that I can bring a high level of insight to reality at the flick of a switch, on call. I never could and I certainly can't now. As I said, humbling, but exactly as it should be. 

What a truly odd thing to be doing! To be standing out there on the sidewalk in 20 degree freezing sunlight on an early Saturday morning in March, pointing the camera at the side of a house and banking on the premise that I am perceptive, endowed with ability and discernment, able to speak of larger issues in this very small sphere of place and time. No wonder artists are so misunderstood!

2016

1996

A footnote about the tools I used: I found myself obsessing less about what I used. I did use a camera with a wider lens than I did in 1996 and a 5:4 rectangle for shape  to contain the width and exposure settings to try to favor the highlights so as to keep them from overexposing as they were very bright. This meant I lost some detail at times in the shadows. So be it. I was also framing looser as if what was on the edges needed less overt control or that I felt it was okay not to overthink it. 

Now that I am feeling better since hip surgery 5 weeks ago I've been shooting a little (but I still can't get through a full day as my endurance isn't up to where it needs to be), printing and I find myself in a few meetings as well.

I met this past week with the new-since-last-September curator of photography Sarah Kennel at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. Sarah came to my studio to look at my work. This was the first time we'd met. Sarah comes to the PEM from nine years at the National Gallery in Washington, DC.

We had a great time. I used to dread these presentations, feeling nervous and insecure and probably wanting too much from one meeting. But I realized over the past few years that I really enjoy them now. What a great opportunity to have a one on one with someone who has invested in spending the time to look at your work, to discuss it and to fit it into a larger sphere historically, culturally and aesthetically.

Sarah was terrific; telling stories, looking with real concentration at the work and sharing from her own experiences both in Washington but also in her new position. 

When someone has had a long career such as myself it is challenging to know what to show a curator for the first time. What I do now is ask them to choose a few portfolios from the gallery page on my site. That's just what Sarah did and she listed them in an email before we met so that I could make sure the portfolios were ready to view when she arrived. We started that morning with the Oakesdale Cemetery series from the mid 90's (here). This was a good choice as it brought Sarah into an approach to making photographs that spans over forty years of making series work. While Oakesdale is certainly not the first of the series work it is as close to seminal as anything I've done.

(When we laid out the book the designer and I used four from Oakesdale Cemetery for the cover of  my monograph published in 2006.)

From there Sarah and I moved on through a few portfolios she had mentioned she wanted to look at. After those I had pulled two more I hoped she'd be willing to see. This can be tricky as people get fatigued by looking at too much work. Invariably they say that they can look at more but one can only absorb so much. So what we did was too look at one series that were lighter, simpler, perhaps prettier or less substantive. These gave us a chance to simply enjoy pictures without needing to do any heavy lifting. The pictures were the aerials from Martha's Vineyard known as "Waves" (here). They are simply a visual and sensual delight and gave us a nice break. This led us to a discussion of Sarah's move from D.C. to the North Shore of Boston late last summer and how she has yet to explore the area with her family. She is from California. Can you imagine being new to this area? So beautiful here. She has much to discover.

For the last series, as we were well into our second hour and we both had commitments coming up that same day, I chose to show her the Benson Gristmill Series I made last fall (here). Why those? Because they show the way I am working in series now as opposed to the Oakesdale work from 1996 made twenty years ago. Hopefully, the refinement shows. They are very much "the same but different". The same: black and white, high print quality, tightly sequenced and describing a walk through a given and defined space. Different: digital, rectangles instead of squares, a wider lens, bigger prints and a different sensibility informed by what photography is now and my perception of it that has been altered by the past twenty years. The Gristmill series is also very dense and takes real concentration. Sarah gave it her full attention.

BTW: I wrote a couple of posts about the series after I printed them:

Benson Grist Mill

Benson Grist Mill Part ll

This was one Sarah liked very much.

Unusual for me to admit this but as we were looking over the last few prints in the series I shared my lack of resolution about how to end the body of work. Sarah had an idea that made a whole lot of sense, why the series should end a certain way. Now the last image in the series is this one:

The reasoning is hard to appreciate on a small monitor on line but the print drives the point home. The prints in this series are made on 22 x 17 inch paper. Only the center branch and leaves are sharp in this image, as though the intent is to hone in on one small part. This is something photography can do so very well. Notice the way the photograph is laid out, the out of focus building in the back serving as the backdrop for the small leaves in the foreground, the two trees there to frame the image. It's a fitting end to the series for the whole body of work is about this, this hyper way of looking at things, something so many of us do as we really photograph, as we turn our attention to the ordinary with a heightened sense of awareness.

I have Sarah to thank for this revelation. She found a strong conclusion rather than something that read like a run-on sentence. That's it right there. What good curating is like. You know how an author really needs a good editor? Well, that's it. Often artists need good curation. 

Thanks to Sarah Kennel for a wonderful and insightful meeting. I look forward to more.

This is the second post I am writing about recovering from surgery and thinking about pictures. The first, 11 Days Out is here.

In 2012 and 2013 I extensively photographed  the forty miles of sand dunes in the southern California dessert called the Imperial Sand Dunes, nearby Yuma, Arizona. I hiked them, drove over them in a jeep, photographed them from the perimeter road, shot them from the air several times and even rented an ATV one day to be able to get further in to these massive dunes that can be as high as 300 feet.

As is my practice, I made prints into portfolios from the two trips I made to photograph the dunes. They sit in my studio now printed on 22 x 17 inch Canson Baryta Photographique paper. Each portfolio combines aerials with ground based work.They look good and present the extended shoots well. But there is a major flaw in this work and one I am guilty of in other bodies of work where I make pictures over years and several trips (my Wheat work comes to mind). Working this way, printing in response to new work made lends no perspective or focus to the work, it is just a compiling of what I think are the best pictures made. Making separate portfolios from different years becomes an artificial construct and succeeds in only separating and diminishing the work. So, I've decided to change that.

I've been working to consolidate, edit tightly and make one new portfolio of finished work from both years. Note the added benefit of now being at least 3 years from it. MUCH better to have some distance. Here are a few that will be included

It's shame that I need this forced down time to concentrate on this work. But I know once I get back on my feet I'm going to be shot from a cannon, on to new projects and never looking back. Perhaps this is what advanced years in a field gives you: the knowledge of how bad you're going to be at something based upon having been there so many times before. At any rate, still being on crutches forces me to slow down and focus on the Dunes work and I am thankful for that, for it is good work.

A little on the technical side here. In earlier digital days, now 10 years ago or so, the cameras weren't good enough for what I wanted my pictures to do. The file size was too small to allow larger prints of high quality. I would step the file size up using Genuine Fractals but is was a poor substitute for the larger file sizes of today. Since about when I made the Dunes pictures the first year in 2012, all that has changed. I can go back to these confident in their inherent quality and can make large prints that hold well, keep sharp, have excellent dynamic range, superb color rendition and don't get noisy. This is the maturing of the medium and it is a very good thing.

BTW: these pictures are simply remarkable (you've heard such modesty from me before, no doubt), rich and subtle and bold and refined. Notice how the color is different in each one? That's because of different days, times of days and years that I made them in. At 1.5 inches across on your smart phone you are not doing them justice. It is the print here that really counts. Over the next few days I will start production, making them on 30 x 24 inch Epson Exhibition Fiber paper. When done they will reside in a custom case with a title page and artist statement. It will be a limited edition portfolio of approximately 20 prints.They will be available for viewing at 555 Gallery in Boston. Passionate about good prints? Me too. Come see these. I mean it. Knock your socks off.

Note ( as of mid February 2016): I've just finished printing these and they are viewable on my site at: Dunes 2012 & 2013.