Throughout my career as an artist, primarily as a landscape photographer, but also working in other genres, I have returned countless times to Martha's Vineyard, where the Rantoul family home is. My parents built a house in the town of Chilmark in the mid sixties and after they died I share the home with my two sisters. We rent the house most of the summers and use the house in the spring and fall. As a matter of fact I am there now, writing this post rather than out photographing as it is raining and cold, with a steady fine rain that feels like a long time commitment to me.

While there have been real blocks of time where I couldn't of cared less about photographing here the past few years have resulted in a large amount of work, made both aerially and as ground based series too. 

I find it wonderful to have such a richness of beauty and form right near by. It does inspire me to work here these days, challenges me to come up with new projects and ways of interpreting what is here. Perhaps you have this too where you live. Things close by that you see daily that when seen through the eyes of an artist can be used to make art. I'd encourage this, this looking closer, considering what you pass by everyday as ammunition for your pictures. Your increased knowledge of an area seen daily on your way to work, the macro examination of your backyard, the looking  with a camera at the place where you get your coffee every morning, the different perspective and vantage point to something so taken for granted, so very mundane that it is almost invisible or as you think about that meeting coming up or that deadline approaching or next weekend when there's a camping trip or a reunion with old friends or a first date or.... you know what I mean. As visual artists we are trained observers, nothing gets past us, we are like sharks on a hunt, predators on the prowl, looking for pictures to make. 

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Now I am off island, but I was on the Vineyard last weekend and went up to the famous Gay Head Cliffs on Memorial Day Weekend in the afternoon on a nice day to see what was going on, this the unofficial start of the summer, only to find many many tourists taking selfies and posed snapshots with the cliffs or the lighthouse in the background. Not a camera in sight, all smart phones. I sat there and watched it all unfold, like a changing set of actors on a stage. What a killer this must be to the camera manufacturers who relied on the huge amateur market for most of their revenue for a very long time. Instamatics, Polaroid SX-70's, the Brownie, the Swinger, etc.

Talk about sea change, the smartphone picture is now practically universal with the point and shoot cameras for all intents and purposes gone. Yes, there are specialized cameras like waterproofs, action cams and drone cameras, but the phenomenon of bringing the camera on the vacation is really over. The smartphone rules. The best camera is the camera you've got with you and everyone has a phone with them, all the time.

You can see why the smartphone companies are making improvements to the cameras in their phones. This is a way to create a competitive edge. 

So, did I take these with a smartphone? I did not.

I am starting tomorrow to shoot at the silos that are on the edge of the river in downtown Buffalo, NY. I am a student in a workshop that provides access into the structures.

Silo City Photography Workshop

This is led by Mark Maio and he has done these for many years now.

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I wrote that the day before I drove to Buffalo from Cambridge.

Now I am writing a week or so after I've returned. What'd I do? I photographed the site along with the 30 or so others that were there. We were allowed to go anywhere in the silos we wanted, a huge complex of 88 acres of abandoned grain silos along the river.

Urban warriors delight.

On a wet, windy and cold weekend we scrambled throughout the silos, workshop attendees with cameras on tripods over their shoulders, climbing endless flights of stairs often in total darkness, creepy and at times dangerous places, leaky with holes in the roofs, exciting to be allowed in and the spaces filled with abandoned machinery, conveyer belts, spindles and all sorts of stuff. We learned Buffalo was a central depot for wheat arriving from the midwest to the Great Lakes and down the waterway to Buffalo and then Albany through the Erie Canal and then on to NY to ship wheat all over the world. An industry created for a time (19th and early 20th  century) and now mostly gone, although General Mills still makes Cheerios in Buffalo.

This is a world made for HDR photography, where many will over render and make pictures that are fantasies.

It was difficult to comprehend the sheer scale of the place. As Trump would say it was "Huge".

Many workshop attendees (I hesitate to say we were students as there were no classes, we were simply paying for organized access to the place) were returning for another year, having been many times. They ranged from camera club photographers looking to extend their range to seasoned pros working with tech cameras and 100 mb Phase One backs. One gentleman photographs models every year:

In truth, although I scampered around the site for two days shooting like everyone else, I wasn't really in my element. No regrets and I did make a few, at a silo still active, where the grain is loaded into railroad cars and trucks. I liked the colors created by the lights and the dust all over everything, extending the photographs somewhat:

But mostly I felt privileged to be at these silos, a place positively resonating with history, of an industry that was built in large scale. It was humbling.

Thank you, Mark.

Silo City in Buffalo, NY. Mark and his wife run these workshops twice a year in a professional, organized, friendly and well overseen manner. If you go be prepared to climb. Oh, and bring a headlamp.

Just finished in a still somewhat raw space is a high rise apartment building on Water Street in Cambridge. Billed as luxury living, the apartments look out on a wasteland, presumably cleared for future construction, then on to the huge blue MBTA Commuter Rail Maintenance Facility (its former name was Boston Engine Terminal) just north of North Station and Boston Sand and Gravel in Charlestown, a business made famous as scenes from the The Departed and others were filmed there.

I didn't spend much time trying to photograph the building itself but was fascinated by a fence put up to separate the new from the old, to establish the perimeter of the property and to restrict the view out to what was a sort of desert.

I have no idea what the logic of calling these apartments Zinc (Zn) is but at any rate the powers that be decided that the vinyl covering  for the fence would be a great place to have some graphics too.

What was behind the "curtain"?

This MBTA facility, which I was able to photograph by sticking my camera through a gap in a gate.

This new series goes on to look at the fence itself, what's obscured behind it and the printed graphics which depict something quite bizarre.

Boston is in the midst of a building boom, much of it centered on housing. Zinc is typical with a media room, work out facilities, expensive apartments, underground parking and a close-by T station.

The full series is now on the site here.

Technical footnote: many of you know I purchased the Sony A7R Mk II last fall and have been using it along with my Nikon for several months now. This project is the first I've made with some of the photographs coming from the Sony. Although the shooting experience is very different I found the final TIFF files to be practically interchangeable. 

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.