Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers on the NPR radio show Car Talk have a category called the " Non Automotive Puzzler" that ranges far and wide from anything to do with cars.

For the most part this next post is "non photographic" in that it strays from some deep and heartfelt analysis of photographers' works, or mine, for that matter. Let's  call this a "quasi photographic post" as it does contain photographs, but uses photography descriptively rather than artistically.

It concerns something that's been going on over summers for years at MIT just up the street from where I live. It is the Flea at MIT and it happens every third Sunday from April through October. A geekier, more eclectic group will not be found anywhere else. It is something and I recommend it highly.

I went yesterday. More accurately,, I stumbled across it yesterday while riding my  bike to go work out.

Need a tube for that Heathkit stereo amplifier you built in the 60's? I know just the place.

The poster is for Morning Pro Musica, the WGBH radio show I woke up to for years hosted by Robert LJ. Lurtsema. He would start his classical music show every morning with bird song at 7 am.

All that stuff (above) came out of a Mini.

Need a new (sic) computer? Just the place.

I couldn't help but notice this guy had a parrot on his shoulder. He offered to take a picture of me with his parrot:

Later that same morning  I met up with my friends Liz and Mercedes for brunch in Brookline.

After, we went to my studio to look at work then drove back to my place so I could hand over my 8 x 10 camera to these two. 

Both work in large format film so I decided they should have it instead of it sitting unused in a closet gathering dust. And yes, talk about going back a ways, that is in fact a Zone VI 8 x 10 film holder bag hanging off Liz's shoulder.

Career update on these two friends and TA's: Liz has begun printing for a show she will have next March at the Danforth Museum in Framingham, MA and Mercedes is about to load up a truck in Brooklyn for the drive to Penland in North Carolina where she will begin a three year artist in residency in September. 

That 8 x 10 Toyo Field camera brought me career-crucial pictures for 25 years. I hope it continues in Liz and Mercedes highly capable hands. I look forward to seeing what they make with it.

Yesterday I drove from Boston up to the Connecticut River, the border between New Hampshire and Vermont. I hitched a ride using the service North Star provides up river several miles and put my boat in the water just above the covered bridge at Cornish to paddle back down river to where my car was parked. 

Warm air and water in mid August and only a few of us on the river. I paddled under bridges, watched  kids flying and somersaulting into the river on a tree swing, battled strong headwinds and stopped several times to photograph. In places it was so shallow you could walk right out into the middle of the river. It was glorious.

Here are a few of the pictures I made:

One of the stops I made was where a small stream flowed out into the river:

I paddled up stream as far as I could, got out and sat on a downed tree and ate my lunch, then headed up the stream for a ways, walking on rocks in shallow water, camera in hand, hearing a train go by on the New Hampshire side of the river but cut off from the world looking down making pictures. I found about equal parts of beauty and mankinds' detritus on the stream bed.

and finally, this supporting a bridge over the stream

here converted to black and white.

All this about as good as it gets: the day, the air, summer, being out on the water. This while unable to keep Robin William's suicide just a few days ago off my mind. I wasn't a big fan, as he was too frenetic and manic for me, but there were moments when you just couldn't believe what he was doing, so brilliant and so very funny.

I also liked some of the acting he did in movies like Good Will Hunting or Good Morning Vietnam or even Mrs. Doubtfire. What a talent and what a huge loss. 

Depression is awful. There has been some in my family. I think I have only really been depressed once, after I finished grad school a very long time ago. 

Imagine deciding to end it all and to not see the time yesterday along the river in northern New England as being worth living for. 

Tragic.

Wait a minute. Can a "trilogy" have four parts?

Well, maybe. Read on.

The overall concept is to photograph Massachusetts Route 2 from the air starting about Rt 128 near Boston on out to where it stops at the western border with New York.

As I can only photograph about 1/3 of the state at a time the project broke down naturally into thirds, hence..."trilogy". But I have now photographed 4 times on the project, hence the "PT 4".

Thanks to new friends Jerry Muller (pilot) and Charlotte Richardson (plane owner) I have now flown twice to work on the Rt 2 Trilogy (Aerials) project on their kindness alone and I am most grateful. We take off from the air strip at Stow, MA and head west along Rt 2.

Today's flight was a little shorter than last time and by the time we were close to home the day was clouding up and it would rain soon. 

Footnote:

As we landed and were taxiing the Cessna up to the gas pumps to top off the tanks, we were confronted with this:

As we pulled up, he hopped back in his plane and took off, lunch on board.

How cool is that?

Next up? I need to print the ones made today and last April to complete the series.

And I need to post them on the site.

Stay tuned.

Conversation between two readers of the blog. One. relatively clueless and the other, in italics, a little more aware.

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He's going to subject me to these again? 

Yes, he just did them.

Why would he do that?

Guy thinks he's got a hold of something, probably.

I wonder what he's thinking?

Maybe we should read what he's got on his mind.

____________________________________

I know, I just did these and then I just posted about them. Well, I've spent the past few days printing them and they have opened a few doors for me, so I thought I would share whatever perceptions I have about them.

First, an important point, hopefully one that is relevant for you too. This is something fairly new in the medium's  history, I believe. I don't think we know much about the pictures we make when we make them. I hope you can follow my logic here. It is partly due to the fact that we are making more pictures now without cost or hindrance (in this our digital world). It is also partly that the devices we use to capture our pictures can be capable of truly astounding quality; meaning detail, subtlety, dynamic range, color depth, ability to make large prints, etc. What does all that mean? That, for the most part in the consumer photo world, pictures are made all the time with no idea of what's really contained in them. In the world I inhabit, the high-end world of "photo as art" presumably the final image is in print form and it is of  high quality, with lots of detail, faithfully rendered in all its amazing subtlety. Do I know the picture when I take it? No, not completely. I think I come to terms with my pictures when they become prints.

Back to the subject here which is us taking another look at these:

which were introduced previously here. These ones, showing a chopped up side of a building like some collage, or mosaic, are the core pictures of the series and are what I've been leading up to with the preceding "pipe" pictures.

The series starts with this photograph used on the title page:

A hopeless, leaning-over-too-wide-a-lens-photograph. But it isn't really part of the series. What it is, is a map of the overall wall we are about to see broken down into pieces like a puzzle. I know what you're thinking: jigsaw puzzle box cover. Right? Yes, that's exactly what it is. This image of the whole wall, hopelessly distorted though it may be, is the guide to the pictures about to ensue. So, somehow, all the following 15 or so pictures in the series come from this one wall. With some being shot closer, some overlapping others, one even going vertical and rendered as a 35 x 24 inch print, composited from multiple frames:

So what's my intent? To dissemble and restructure our understanding of something by looking at its composite parts. Isn't this really what photography does? Make analogies and metaphors to larger things and issues? It takes a small slice of something and allows larger and more universal stuff to flow out.

So, if I can build a framework around the series it is this: the earlier ones (as in the two above) are contained by this stupid pipe that runs through them. This is my way of telling you that they are connected, that no image here rests on its own, that they relate to each other, not literally as I've framed them in a discontinuous way, but that one precedes the other, or that one follows another and so on. This then gives you a process by which you can begin to form an understanding of a pattern that would make up a whole in the next ones, which don't give you this guide of a pipe going through them. Make sense? I hope so.

Back to my original point. What did I know when I took the pictures? Well, honestly, not everything. I "learned" the pictures while I was printing them. This is another reason I believe in the follow through that is printing our pictures. Don't print and you don't know. Simple enough.

This finishes my breakdown of the dissembled series called "The Wall".

___________________

Ok. So now I've read it.

Does it make sense?

Well, certainly more than it did before. It did make me realize that there can be a lot more to pictures than just what they look like at first glance.

I think probably part of his point is that we all should be looking at things maybe a little harder, particularly when they are rendered beautifully and presented on a gallery wall.

Man, I can't wait to see the prints of these now that I've read all this stuff about them.

Well, he shows at 555 Gallery in Boston. I bet he's got the prints there.

I think I read somewhere that he's going away again and he is leaving these and some other portfolios behind at the gallery so that people can come in to see the work.

Guy gets to travel, doesn't he?

Yeah, and they all seem to be these photo trips he takes. Wish I could do that.

Heh, do you know the works of Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Piet Mondrian, Ellsworth Kelley and Aaron Siskind?

No, never heard of them. Rock band or something?

No, not so much. Forget I asked.

Ok.

_______________________

The Wall pictures are new, as of June 2014. They are from Chelsea, MA. 

These are in sequence.

Think they're good. 

Wonder if you do.

Try these on:

First one just a placeholder, to orient you where I am shooting, not intended to be part of series. Will serve as thumbnail on title page like so:

Series starts here. There is some correction for convergence.

The ones with the pipe in them, the five below, run to six in the full portfolio. The pipe is the visual device intended to provide continuity through this sub group and need to be hung left to right in a single row.

But the pipe pictures really serve as the preamble to the core of the series which is these next three:

of which there are six in the printed portfolio (I have to hold something back), then to begin to finish here with the roughly center framed door.

Then to the last one, which is the only one that lets you out, the idea being that the negative space of the sky becomes surface much like those in some of the earlier ones that have panels that were also light blue.

And finally, there is a bit of  back story. There always is.The day I shot these I loaded up my bike on the top of my car, drove over the Tobin Bridge, parked in an empty lot in Chelsea and rode throughout the city until I stopped here to make these pictures. After I did these I rode down by the water and made another series (that I am working on now). I rode back to my car to put the bike back on the car and walked over to Mystic Brewery, where I tasted a couple of very fine beers and took the tour of the brewery.

My idea of heaven on earth in a day.