Perhaps because I am a senior photographic  person I find I have been thinking about the concept of what pictures we make at what periods in our lives. Looking at something I made in my mid 20's (Take Me Back) and comparing it to something I made recently (Spring and Fall) I can safely say that there was no way I could build a structure around a body of work back then like I do now. It was far simpler when I was young.

Photography was a lot simpler back then too. Besides all the technical changes photography has had, it is a medium much more aware of itself now than it was in the mid 70's. We know more about it and what it can and cannot do than we did then. It would have to be, after all that we've seen coming out of it in the past 40 years.

Of course, what perspective does someone have at 20 years old? Certainly little on himself/herself, but for most people none on much of anything. 

This then leads me to the core concept: making art that is age appropriate. By age appropriate I really mean something a little larger, that it is emotionally and intellectually age appropriate. Can this be boiled down to developmental changes? i.e. when we are younger we make work that is impulsive, reactive, intuitive, often simpler, emotional and self centered. When we are older we make work that is contemplative, intellectual, considered, knowledgeable, refined, careful. Simple enough, right? I mean that we should use what we've got and at my age I have a great deal I can use for I've been doing this so long. On the other hand, I can't go out and on an impulse make a huge body of work of a brand new idea, putting life and limb at risk and hang over the edge, so to speak. While I am physically constrained due to my age, I just can't because I don't think that way now.

As usual, I am thinking of a photograph I made that references my point. This below is at the Grand Coullee Dam in Washington.

I made this in the 80's. I am standing at the top of the dam with the tripod of the 8 x 10 view camera leaning up against the wall and the camera tilted over the wall and pointing straight down. My left foot is pushed up against the back tripod leg, keeping the camera from plummeting down the dam into the water and I have stretched myself tall as I can to see up at the ground glass to focus the image under the dark cloth before inserting the film holder to take the picture. This is high risk stuff. This is a photograph made a long time ago.Would I do this now? I think you know the answer.

Finally, how does one take a passion that is still as deep and resonate as it was when  younger and make art that is relevant and meaningful today? There is a catch, of course, and that is to not make the same pictures over and over again. Without moving on and relegating our done work to past work we fall into one of many traps, but the trap of repetition is to be avoided at all costs. Move on!

Also, as a rule it appears that later work may be as ambitious as earlier work but perhaps more thought through, in that the artist seeks to use the materials to his/her purpose as a device to make the point. In earlier years I would come across a place or an area and think to make a series of pictures from it that could compose a whole, be it a story or a thread or a concept. I would photograph the place, putting all my eggs into one basket, to focus whatever insight I had into a cohesive group of pictures to make a complete set in a short period of time. While I still do that occasionally, much of my work now is done over longer periods of time, with perhaps multiple shoots to get to the end. Slower because of being older? Yes, partly, but also slower  because I am aware of more things going on, more subtleties inherent in something I am photographing.

So, are you making pictures now that are symphonic? Large in scale, grand and extroverted? Or are you making more modest pieces, intimate and reflective, emotional and heartfelt? And does age play a role here?

I for one am still making the latter but am also involved in larger pieces too, assembled bodies of works that span time and often place. Why? Because I am thinking less and less of single pictures existing on their own. Maybe laying out and making books has taught me ways of connecting pictures to pictures more. At any rate, I am now involved in three larger series:

a look at Massachusetts Route 2 as it heads from the suburbs west of Boston to the border with New York State in three parts.

Hofsos Trilogy:

a look at the small town of Hofsos, Iceland from inside and outside perspectives.

and Spring and Fall, a body of work of Martha's Vineyard that encompasses pictures made of the same area made on the ground and also made from the air:

Not to get morbid, but there is the phenomenon of classical composers final and unfinished bodies of work becoming their own requiems after they are gone: Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler and Faure' to name a few. You probably know others. 

Just saying.

The right picture at the right time.

Subscribers to my blog have been missing out for the past week or so as the blog had a short hiatus while I worked to populate the website with work made over the past several months. I am happy to report that job is done and there is much to see.

Some of the work was discussed while I was making it, mainly in California this past February, but you soon learn when keeping both a site and a blog, that blogs come and then are gone quickly, while work on the gallery page stays and people can refer to it now or in the future. So, there are new thumbnails on the gallery page you can click on to see all the work from the new series. Take a look and you'll see:

Mt Tamalpais, CA:

Central Valley, CA Aerials:

Before and After Aerials CA

Skate Park CA

Salt Point Park CA:

Monsters MA:

There are still a few more to add but I will work to keep the blog going while I include other series.

By the way, if you're new to reading this blog you may subscribe (and unsubscribe at any time). Just add your email address on the right side of any post. I will not pester you, sell the list or share it with anyone. 

Finally, as I have been posting blogs on this site for over two years now, there are a great many to read.  They are also searchable by categories but also by name.

I'm calling a new body of work "Before and After Aerials" as it is a portfolio of work from before I shot aerials one day in February in the Sacramento River Valley in California as well as pictures made after we landed. This was a marathon day and significant for me personally. It was an affirmation of worth and ability, that I was still able to make pictures of viability, substance and beauty and that I was continuing to move forward; important, if you think about it. Don't stay where you've been. Yes, it is safe there, but it is death artistically and creatively.

At any rate, on the way to the airport for my flight with pilot Stan in Yuba City, the light was beautiful. I was early, as I always seem to be, and stopped along the way to shoot in town.

And at the airstrip before we took off:

When we landed about an hour or so later, I headed back to town but saw this from the highway and got off at the next exit:

I'd never seen one of these before but the company website describes them as being  like a BJ's or Costco without having to pay to join.

The store was huge:

If you look closely you can see there is a flock of pigeons circling in the sky above the store. Along the front were 8 Italian Cyprus trees, looking neglected and sad. The store was closed and it was midday during the week. Not good for Food Maxx.

The massive parking lot free of cars gave me a unique opportunity to put my Mallchitecture hat on once again:

After lunch I was headed back west across the valley towards the coast where I was living in Santa Rosa. But once again, the area was so good I had to stop.

Where there was a barn, derelict and on its way out for sure, looking used and possibly unsafe, standing there proud and beautiful in its purity of form:

About as elegant as anything I'd ever seen.

So, what I've shown you here are the bookends of the day. I wrote about the aerials I made that day here and here. It was a major day. The last thing I made a picture of on my way out of the valley and headed into the mountains to drive back to Santa Rosa was this:

of the fruit trees in bloom. These were the same trees I'd photographed from the air a few hours earlier:

Big Topic:  

It might even be the biggest we have as photographers working digitally. I know it was huge when I was teaching. How do you edit the work? How do you deal with a large quantity of images? How can you be effective and consistent when confronted with hundreds or perhaps thousands of images you've created? The ratios are staggering. An example: usually when I go up to shoot aerially, I hire a pilot for a one hour flight. In that one hour I typically take about 400 pictures.The final portfolio that results from that one hour flight needs to be under 25 prints. 

This is a large enough topic to warrant several posts. Before I go into how I work with over 400 frames at a time let's go back a bit and look at the older and more established workflow from analog days.

I had a couple of ways I dealt with many pictures. In roll films which, for me, was usually 120mm and occasionally 35mm, I made contact sheets. Often I would set up the darkroom for just a session of getting myself up to date on making contact  sheets. I wouldn't worry too much about too dark or too light or too contrasty or too flat. I would simply make the contact print so that the most images on the sheet were viewable and reasonably exposed. Contact sheets were a compromise, of course. After a session like that I would usually bring them home with me. At home, with a beer in hand, I would sit in a chair and look at them with good light over my shoulder and maybe a magnifying loupe to see them better. Over several sessions I would mark off with a Sharpie pen the ones I wanted to print. These would then serve as the guide for printing when back in the darkroom. Remember the contact sheets were the first time I was seeing what pictures I'd made as positives, close to what they would look like when enlarged.

Sound systematic? Well, it was. My whole career I have made a huge quantity of pictures. I had to have some way to edit these down into a manageable number. 

In the mid 80's I started working in the 8 x 10 format. This changed my "proofing" process quite a bit. For the first few years working this way, I made contact prints of each negative that I developed. This was because I had no 8 x 10 enlarger. 

You can clearly this in the example from the series "Mount Auburn Cemetery" as the shape of the negative along the edges tells you it is from 8 x 10 film. So, from these contact prints from the big negatives I would move on to making the final prints, as contact prints. This changed when I started enlarging the 8 x 10 negative a few years years later and, to be truthful, I seldom contact printed the 8 x 10 anymore. It was so big I could read it well enough by placing it on a light table. 

All of that system worked reasonably well as the years flowed on. I was working in black and white, I had a manageable system in place, I could edit a roll or several rolls of film down to a reasonable number to print, or take a day's shooting of 8 x 10 film of 15 or 20 frames and print the ones that worked. I would store the contact sheets made, sometimes with notes on them, with the developed film. I wrote printing notes on the plastic sleeves used to store the negatives right over the frame printed so that if I needed to print it again I'd have a head start.

#9 was  48 seconds at f8 and using a # 2 1/2 filter. This meant I would expose the paper for 48 seconds, having set the aperture on the lens on the enlarger for f8 and would have put a  #2 1/2 magenta colored filter into a filter drawer above the lens to control contrast. That was he baseline for making another print later.

Final note on analog editing: somehow it all looks okay to me: manageable, a serviceable system. In Editing 2 I will bring us into the "threshold " years, that time when many of us were working in a hybrid manner. While still shooting film and processing it ourselves, we had begun scanning our negatives, working on the files in early versions of Photoshop, towards making some sort of print and, within a few years, inkjet prints.

Stay tuned, as it should be riveting.

What?

 Tafoni? Sounds Italian.

 What is it? Some kind of ice cream? 

I know, a shape of pasta, right? Like Anelli or Bucatini.

Well, no: actually it is rock.

Wikepedia has a very nice description and definition here:

Tafoni (singular: tafone) are small cave-like features found in granular rock such as sandstone, granite, and sandy-limestone with rounded entrances and smooth concave walls, often connected, adjacent, and/or networked. They often occur in groups that can riddle a hillside, cliff, or other rock formation. They can be found in all climate types, but are most abundant in intertidal areas and semi-arid and ariddeserts. Currently favored explanations controlling their formation include salt weathering, differential cementation, structural variation inpermeability, wetting-drying, and freezing-thawing cycles, variability in lithology, case hardening and core softening, and/or micro-climate changes and variation (i.e. moisture availability). Tafoni have also been called fretting, stonelace, stone lattice, honeycomb weathering, and alveolar weathering.

with a lovely photograph of just where I was two weeks ago:

Salt Point Park along the coast north of Jenner, CA

I was in northern California for the past month photographing. What follows is some of the pictures I made while there.

I posted some of these before (here) but the series has taken on larger proportions as I have been printing them.

So, I'll include more here:

These are from from the second trip out there. Salt Point was about 1 1/2 hours from where I was staying and the weather is very different along the coast so it is was difficult to tell if I'd get there in good enough weather to photograph. I did.

This time I used a shorter lens and would  hover over these shapes and forms as though from a plane and found the sandstone was taking on the shapes of body forms; odd, eroded through time, wind and water.

This almost seemed outside of my control, seeing shapes that were filled with character and personality, as though I was an anthropologist or archeologist at a dig looking at unearthed human and animal evidence from a past age. 

But perhaps from another planet too as some of the organic shapes were not from ours. I don't know that I'd had an experience quite like it while photographing. I'd had the feeling before of  being so immersed in what I was doing that where I was was no longer important. I'd also had the experience of shutting out of everything else around me . 

That was considerable as this was going on at my back:

I hope you enjoy these. If you do, let me know, as few people like working in a vacuum. Neal's email