Lying there in a field, thrown away, reminding me of Richard Misrach's dead animals thrown into a pit in Nevada under very suspicious circumstances. The series, called "Desert Cantos" starts off this way:

On March 24, 1953, the Bulloch brothers were trailing 2000 head of sheep across the Sand Springs Valley when they were exposed to extensive fallout from a dirty atomic test. Within a week first ewes began dropping their lambs prematurely– stunted, woolless, legless, potbellied. Soon full-grown sheep started dying in large numbers with the same symptoms — running sores with large pustules, and hardened hooves. Horses and cattle were found dead with beta burns. At final count, 4,390 animals were killed.

photograph by Richard Misrach

To be clear, Misrach offers no answers but uses these pictures to analogize about the atomic bomb testing the US did in this area in the 50's and 60's. Miscrach made his pictures in 1987.

The question occurs to me that I probably couldn't have or wouldn't have made these pictures of uprooted evergreens in a North Carolina tree farm if it hadn't been for Misrach's pictures serving as precedent.

I know, they are only trees, right? There is no real tragedy here. Or is there?

Think about this. I made these late one morning with a gentle rain falling in rural North Carolina in March 2015. We stopped, realizing what we were about to drive right past. Out in a field, uprooted, chopped down and left there what, to be fed into a chipper or buried like Misrach's corpses? What a waste. Sad, really.

Grown to be sold to be a centerpiece in a family's homage to Jesus Christ's birth on December 25th? Or, depending on your point of view, to be cut, bought, brought inside, covered in plastic lights, draped with fake snow and tinsel with gifts from Walmart strewn around its base to be ripped open by children in a feeding frenzy on Christmas morning. Hard sometimes not to be cynical.

I'd like to bend this work and the idea of life cut short into a piece about how our contemporary times ruin everything. How we live in a disposable society and throw what we don't want away. But it's just isn't true. This particular carnage of some evergreens in North Carolina isn't about "now" and the cheapness of things in 2015. For it is universal, isn't it? There is nothing particularly timely about these pictures. We've been ruining things since mankind started.

At any rate, I wrote this pessimistic view last week when it was rainy and cold and New England was relentlessly hanging on to winter. By Saturday the sun had broken out, the temperature was higher and I spent all day at the Griffin Museum mentoring photographers and looking at some very fine work that affirmed my point of view that there is good in humanity after all. 

It didn't hurt that I had beer and a burger that night with Frances and Paula from the Griffin. We told stories and laughed and life was good again.

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.

Odd to be posting new pictures made almost two years ago but I have spent the last week or so resurrecting this now older work into prints and I am very excited about them.

Forti Dei Marmi

That is a link to the full series but I will give you a few here too:

I think of these as being indulgent as they are so filled with the love of color... but I am getting ahead of myself.

In the fall of 2012, still enjoying the newness of being retired, a friend and I made a trip to Italy to stay with close friends who were having a delayed honeymoon in a small house in the hills in Voldottavo, about 20 minutes from Lucca in central Italy. Would I work? Would I make pictures? Could I pull that off in the middle of vacationing, being a tourist, shopping, eating, drinking copious amounts of wine, laughing a lot and overall having a great time? As I packed up my full kit in Cambridge prior to leaving, which includes several lenses, tripod, laptop computer and hard drives, I thought I would soon find out.

How do we resolve this? This desire to go someplace wonderful and then deal with the conflict of the fact that if it is so wonderful, we have this desire and need to make pictures? Luckily for me, I had in my traveling friend, Marybeth, someone who understands this need and is amazingly helpful in letting me go do what I need to do. Without her these pictures would not have been made. Marybeth isn't an artist, but she sure gets my need to make pictures and I am everlastingly grateful for that.

I made four bodies of work while there:

Luna Park

Trees

Rivalta

and now printed, Forti Dei Marmi. You tell me? How'd I do?

The deal we struck, Marybeth and I, was that we would go if I could get back to Trieste where I'd shot the stands of trees three years earlier about 30 minutes west of the city near Palmanova. I'd made a series of pictures there in 2009 (Trees, 2009) and I very much wanted to be there again with a camera to make a series  in color.

So, here I was in Forti Dei Marmi, an Italian seaside resort, which was very trendy, posh and managed, with my friends shopping as it was market day and me wandering around, camera in hand, looking for pictures to make. I found myself down by the beach. As so often happens, pictures began to unfold and reveal themselves to me as I walked about. First it seemed to be about the sand and how it is always manicured at "paid" beaches in Italy. Yes, there are public and paid beaches in Italy. The paid ones are always made perfect at the start of each day with tractors dragging along behind them a rake that disappears the previous day's foot prints. So, I worked with that for a while. The sand was flat and rich in middle tan/gray, contrasting with the changing rooms in bright bright colors.

So, from the sand there are one or two transitionals, pictures I make to help get me from one idea to another in a series.

"It was one of those days where if you stood out there looking at the meeting of the water and the sky, if you just let your senses relax and take in this light, this color, this sound, you could, yes, it true, you could feel like you were able to see forever and be at peace with yourself."

I wrote that in the evening after we were back at our hillside home, sitting outside under the trellis at the table where we were about to have a wonderful meal. 

From there we move on to these, printed as pairs:

The pictures move on then to a Pantone wheel of colors, the changing rooms paid beach goers rent to put on their swim suits in the summer:

For me, Forti Dei Marmi was good, very very good, short but sweet.  It took me almost two years to get to it, but with it being 8 degrees outside as I write this on December 31st in Cambridge, MA it feels great to put my mind back to a perfect, and warm, day in Italy. 

Hope you enjoy it.

What do you do with new work? Sit on it? Show it around? Take it on the road? And when do you know new work is finished? And why does it need to be?

This is the thing: there are many many people turning out new work all the time. There are too few places showing it and there are too few people purchasing it to make being a photographic artist viable for most. Portfolio reviews provide a service, they give people a forum in which to get work seen. On line galleries are usable as they allow you to get your work seen by many without a big financial investment (although have you ever read what people write about work on those? Pathetic). Websites are also good as they allow you to show a lot of work made over your career. Shows are best, of course, but the cold hard truth is that fewer people are going to see shows these days. Even though anyone who knows anything about art advocates for seeing the actual print hanging on a wall, the truth is that more people will see your work in some secondary way. This means that more are seeing your photography than ever before because it is on line in some way but that they are not seeing it in its best light. So it goes.

My friend Patrick Philips (editor and publisher for the magazine Martha's Vineyard Arts and Ideas: MV A&I) speaks eloquently about our consumer-based culture. I believe this connects with how we are hanging onto a previous model for art that denies the reality that we are into some big changes here. The newest thing? Art being sold online. Amazon, Saatchi, Orignal Art, etc. are all selling art directly to buyers with no middleman, no gallery, no context in which to place the art. Good idea?

Back to you and me. Back to discussing what we do with our new work. What I do is get people to see it. I subject friends, colleagues, assistants, to new work, then pay very close attention to what they say and don't say  about it. Seeing the work through their eyes is a really important part of why I do what I do. This is the place where I learn how its working, whether I've printed it well, how the sequencing is working, if I have too many or too few, and so on.

A couple of weeks ago I was a guest at Michael Hintlian's Crit Group at his home on the north shore (Michael's website). They showed work, discussed it and Michael helped them arrive at an "A" edit, meaning that the best images stay and anything else is out. Michael's approach is excellent and tough but considered and fair. Contact him through his site if you are interested in joining his group. This proved to be an excellent way to share new work, to get responses from those very experienced and those newer to the medium. 

When do you know new work is finished? For me, this can be hard but usually when it feels right, sits right in my heart and in my head, looks complete and somehow appears "solved"to me. At  this point I am usually looking around for something new, getting anxious to go somewhere, to begin something new.There can be a certain peace of mind when you realize you're not into that work anymore, that perhaps you've moved on to another body of work or a new idea.

Why does new work need to be finished? So that you can move on, of course. We should finish bodies of work as much as possible before we move on to a new project. I have learned to think of past work as the best I could do at the time I made it. This doesn't mean that I accepted compromise, simply that it was what I was capable of at the time. Looking back at past work I see problems, of course, things I'd like to go back and fix. But life is short and there are many many new projects that lie ahead. Dwell in the past or move ahead into the future? That's a no brainer, at least for me. I don't know if I can say this correctly, but perfection is not always the goal. This seems strange for me to say as I am such a stickler for my work being as perfect as I can make it. But striving for technical perfection is at the service of making my work speak eloquently. By this I mean that I want the image to come through without the constraint of some small flaw or poor print quality getting in the way.

One last thing as I ramble along here: watch out for the end goal. Is it to achieve  fame and fortune? Is it realizable? Does it matter? Or is it to immerse yourself in the work, to be involved in seeing and sharing your insight, to be making things that are beautiful and enrich your life and others' lives? 

New Work: make it the best you can, show it around, finish it and move on to the next one.

Quick notice that I have some new work and some work made a couple of years ago on the site for the first time. The first, called Mountain Work, are pictures from Italy I made in the fall of 2009 and also include photographs from Utah, Vermont, New Hampshire and the U.S. West Coast as well. This body of work was completed in 2011 and has not been exhibited or on the site before.

Mt. Washington, NH

I also have new work up on the site from Spruce Pine, NC. These were made in April 2013 while teaching at Penland School of Crafts. This is the second body of work I've made from Spruce Pine. The first, made in 2012 is called: Penland and is also on the site.

Spruce Pine, NC

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