Of course, there are different kinds of risk. There is jump off the bridge attached to a bungee cord type of risk. There is being on the front line in a war type of risk. Then there is career risk, the kind that makes you jump ahead, stick your neck out, taking a chance on an idea you've had or sticking up for yourself among colleagues. The cliché "nothing ventured nothing gained comes to mind."

Last week I took a risk and yes, it feels good to have done it. Each session at Penland, where I was teaching, the faculty present their work in evening slide shows. Each has 10 minutes to show whatever they like in front of the community of artists and craftspeople present in that particular session of classes. I chose to show the work of mine from the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia (Mutter) and the pictures from Reggio Emilia in Italy (Spallanzani Collection) to, what turned out to be, a stunned audience. The two times I'd presented before when teaching there I had shown landscape work and work from older series so there was some shock at seeing pictures of medical specimens up on the screen in the auditorium that when projected were about 16 feet across.

Finally, for the last work I showed I put up slides of the new "Monsters" work. Notice that there's no link to the work on the site? That's because I am withholding posting them for a bit, but stay tuned as some will go up soon. "Monsters" will be shown at 555 Gallery sometime in the next year, dates to be determined, meaning we haven't figured that part out yet. Want to see this work? Let Susan Nalband at the gallery know your feelings: 555 Gallery. BTW: I am pleased to announce here that I will be showing in Boston with 555 Gallery from now on. What's that mean? Want to see works of mine? Contact the gallery. Easy.

It was wonderful to surprise the crowd with this work. Before mine, Mercedes Jelinek showed hew work along with her killer video of her making pictures using photo booth (Mercedes) and then Chris Benfey went, standing in front of the audience, reading a poem he wrote and some wonderful phrases that were observational, personal, quirky and marvelous. 

Ah Penland: so much, always powerful and positive and as though two weeks there can sustain an energy level throughout the following year. 

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.

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.

If you've been following this blog you know I have been headed to Penland in North Carolina to teach for two weeks. I arrived yesterday and after unpacking, settling in and having dinner went to a local rodeo in a Burnesville nearby with friends. 

Mercedes was there with us:

This morning we headed to Spruce Pine, which is the nearest town of any size, down in the valley where the the freight trains rumble through. For the past two years I've photographed in town every morning before teaching, sometimes bringing a few students with me and sometimes not. Those series are here: Spruce Pine 2012 and Spruce Pine 2013.

Mercedes and I photographed in the most industrial and commercial part of the town,

where, on the one hand you could say that it was a visual desert, devoid of value or aesthetic. On the other: that it was an honest place devoid of anything but function and necessity, where beauty snuck in and prevailed despite the best intentions.

 I was able to get above the one or two story shops and buildings to point down.

Structurally, I am going to try to post a blog a day while here, counter to what I said before I left home. The effort is to try to bring you into the class a little and to share with Penland students this process of combining pictures with words as description. We'll see how I do, as it will get very busy as soon as students arrive.

Stay tuned.

I don't know about you but this time of year (May) feels like being shot from a canon.

I wasn't even here in New England for much of the winter but the part that I was here seemed long, cold, gray and snowy. I know good pictures can be made outdoors in that kind of weather but I may be becoming a fair weather photographer because I don't have much stomach for it anymore.

I just got back from a few days on Martha's Vineyard last week and shot daily. I also had friends visit from the mainland, saw MV friends, made a presentation to a gallery, discussed a new digital book with the publisher and worked on another book project due to be published this fall. I was able to tour my off island friends around the island that one of them had never seen before. This was something my dad loved to do, to show visitors his favorite parts of the island and I love this too. I also dealt with flat tires, dead mice in the basement, broken water lines and the exciting topic of hiring someone to dig a drywell for drainage from one of the scuppers on the roof.

Early May is pretty spectacular on the island. As it is surrounded by water and in the spring the water is cold, it keeps the island wet, foggy and colder than the mainland. It also means that spring doesn't happen on the same schedule as it does in the continental USA. That's cool on its own. The light can be bright and blue, if the sun is out:

This is the same tree I was shooting last fall

which has turned into one of those projects where you see the same thing, over and over again, in different seasons. Can be relentless. We'll see if I overdo it. I like pictures that are about the differences between things.

I also am making more long lens pictures, probably because I worked that way in California in February.

These textural pictures must be a little hard to understand at your screen size... a few inches across. But try thinking of them as 30 inches across and you might begin to get it.

I know, pretty much a cliche´, this vertical. So sue me. That's No Man's Land out there on the horizon, an unpopulated island I photographed from the air a couple of years ago.

This is down in Oak Bluffs at the new fish pier. 

The other thing that's really nice about Martha's Vineyard now is that it isn't crazy yet. Before school gets out and midweek, the Vineyard is very relaxed and not  crowded in May. The tradeoff is that it can be very cold. But get a few days of warm weather and beaches are empty, there are no lines and traffic is sparse. A month from now things will be very different.

My daughter was there last weekend, with her family, and as the weekend went on I was getting texts asking if the house was available this coming weekend as they wanted to come right back. That's the Vineyard: you can't wait to get there and you hate to leave.

Ah, the Vineyard. You must have a place you hold dear in your heart. Mine is the Vineyard.