Being an artist photographer can certainly feel like gambling at times.  Throw some pictures out there and you take your chances. I did promise a look at and analysis of three black and white, film-based series I made. This is the third gamble of looking at a body of work now posted on the site but never written about before. Actually, Thompson's only been shown once, in a one man show at Panopticon Gallery in 2006 when the gallery was in Waltham, MA.

First up was Billings, MT, then Vignole, Italy and now Thompson, a northern Connecticut rural town with a housing development smack dab in the center. This one has a mid-eighties feel to it, and clearly was a refresh of housing which was much older. 

Here is the part of Thomspon that I photographed:

You can see three rows of  buildings in the center of the frame, with a river snaking by to the left and some open land  which might be a baseball  field at the bottom of the frame. Clearly this had been mill housing in a former life.

My pictures begin at the top, where mail is delivered and there seemed to be a common room used for meetings:

The above circle is spread out as I am standing very close and making the picture with a very wide lens. More on this farther down.

We'll see the circle again as I photographed the housing development in a loop so that I finished where I started from.

(As usual, I am not gong to go though each photograph here but ask you to take a look at the full series on the site: Thompson, CT.)

For the most part this was classic row housing:

The series is as much about detail within a larger framework as anything else. The Hasselblad Superwide (SWC) is once again the camera, a fixed focal length camera with a 38 mm Biogon lens, which is very wide for the format. Notice here the front of the building looks relatively normally rendered, straight lines are straight and so on. But then look up to the two small  dormers on the top. All hell is breaking loose with these as they are spread apart and we are no longer looking at them head on. Of course, this is the wide lens doing this. The SWC is a camera that can be very sneaky in the way that it images for, kept level, it can look deceptively "straight" . Hasselblad knew this all too well, as they  provided a bubble level mounted right into the top of the camera with a prism on the finder so that you could see the level as you shot. I am a little biased here, but this is probably the coolest camera of all time.

You can see the level and the small prism in the illustration above.

I thought it might help you understand the pictures better if you knew what a  unique tool I used to make them with. 

Back to Thompson:

Each building had a gap between it, used as a car park. A tree in the middle of the frame? Of course. Used as a visual tool or device to split the square frame to make, in effect, two pictures, one planal and rigorous and one open and spatial. Notice again how "fast" the lens is - meaning how much space is rendered here from foreground to background. Look at the concrete walkway as it pulls back in space. Fast.

Another classic device being used here by me, the photographer. Photographing the space between the forms, not the forms themselves. Why? To comment on how the buildings occupy the site and to draw attention to the unique rendering of the lens once again.  I learned this from my teacher Harry Callahan who did some wonderful things with  buildings later in his career in Peru. Buildings as book ends on an almost  empty shelf. Notice the screen of the foreground tree branches. Deliberate, and I could not have made this series with leaves on the trees.

As I walked down the row of housing on this early spring day with bright sunshine, I saw many cases of "individualization" (I have no idea if that is an actual word but it fits).

Much of this series is about making a statement only to reiterate it later in the same series. Notice the parallel structure of these two photographs.These very black doors always seemed a little ominous to me.

Individualized or just junk? This one directly above just slays me as the birdhouse floats in space, the smiling cow and the American flag on the lower right. Who needs fiction when reality provides richness like this.

So, as I went down the front of the first row things begin to open out and, as I wrote in the beginning about these three series, Billings, MT, Vignole, Ialy and now Thompson, CT, these are late career, mature, flat-out series, loaded with everything I know how to put in them. In car buying lingo, this series is fully optioned out.

Here is the door idea moved to the other side and in white instead of black. Where am I headed? Around that corner and out, way out.

Bang on! Standing square in the middle, pointing up a little, no correcting for converging parallel lines; what you see is what you get. Excuse my enthusiasm here for my own picture but: love that! Also, what the hell is going on with no window in the bottom left row? A kitchen in back with cabinets along that interior wall? We'll never know.

With that small mystery unsolved it would seem to be a good time, yes, it's true, to stop Thomspson, CT in mid stride, so to speak. 

What's next in part two? I will leave all this behind and walk into another world right next to this, of trees and flowing water, that seemed at the time like a parallel universe and something I had never done in a series before, then come back to the the second and third row of  housing to finish up.

Will it be as good as this was? You'll have to wait and see.

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Get your ticket and get on the water bus called a Vapporetto, and ride it a ways in the lagoon that surrounds Venice and you might end up on Vignole. Right away Vignole is different, not like Murano or Burano, but agricultural, with few tourists and sparsely populated. When teaching for three summers in the mid 2000's in Venice it is where I went when off on weekends to get away, to take pictures by myself, to grab a few hours of serenity before going back into the maelstrom that is Venice in high tourist season.

The series was made in 2007, at the end of decades making 120 mm black and white pictures with film. These negatives never met an enlarger in a darkroom, however, as I scanned them, then made inkjet prints.

Google Maps gives us a good idea of what the island looks like:

The full series is on the site at: Vignole

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Next up is Thomspson, CT.

In the last post I warmed up for a discussion of Billings, Montana but didn't actually get to it. In this one, I will.

Billings starts off simply enough: a clearly residential area with some sort of rock or hill behind it. It is bright, almost mid day-like in the way the light falls on the development house practically centered in the frame. I also pointed the square format camera up a little as the horizontal center of the frame is at the base of the two car garage. The photograph is descriptive and open tonally, meaning no dark secrets, no hidden meanings.

The second picture reinforces the first in that, once again, the bluff behind the  houses seems to be a constant. There is also a hint of some future content to come:  the wires and electrical poles off in the distance. This picture establishes an expectation that the next picture will in fact show us a house with the bluff behind it:

which in fact it does, although here it is far more obscure and secondary compared to the prominence of the truck on the right and the fenced in jungle of growth in the foreground. I have a belief which is that if you precondition the viewer to look for something,  that will drive them to find it in subsequent pictures in the series, or to work to figure out why it isn't there.

The next photograph,  which is # 73 on this street, brings us back to the house itself having prominence in the frame. To my eye the small amount of rock behind this house seems to be there to support or compliment the really brutal face of the house with its two garage doors, two big windows above these and four windows above that. This is such an "in your face" house compared to the other ones that are far more standard. This house also seems to be built into the hill more than the others preceding it. 

One of the things I was up to here was that I felt that this was an unusual thing, this residential community either nestled up against this rock wall or actually built into it. If so, then my task was to wrestle with that and to play with that as a visual issue in the pictures I made of the area, and to use the constancy of the bluff behind the houses as a way to bring continuity to the pictures. This is something anyone would want to do, to bring a connection from picture to picture in a set or a series. It is part of the reason I loosely define this way of working as narrative in form. 

The next one again reinforces that we are in a similar pattern of looking here. I remember noticing the hanging kayak and thinking that was really clever storing it that way. So, I believe this is all about having a belief in the power of observance, being keyed into looking, really looking, and that photography can do that, display close observation. Ultimately some of my pictures are about what I do to the thing I photograph and some are more about being an aware observer. This is the latter.

I also want to draw attention to the printing in these pictures. It is very bright and open and this is highly deliberate. Compare this to the earlier days of Nantucket or Yountville and, although the camera may be the same and they are all black and white, there really were some huge changes between those eartly 80's series and this one from Billings in 2004.

I am not going to show each picture in the series here as they are represented in full on the site but suffice it to say that they continue along with this same theme prevailing until I got to here:

where I turned 180 degrees and photographed where I'd just come from, also to show that I had gotten to a dead end but not why the street ends there.

This one gives us the answer, of course. It is one of those parks created by letting locals use the path under the high tension electrical lines for dirt bikes and running.

Now, as I approached the ending of the series I found myself in a maize of wires:

Ironic, at least to me, as there was actually far less confinement in the earlier pictures of the houses but here things were very much restricted by all the wires in the way. At the same time, an approaching thunderstorm was darkening the sky, over shadowing the area with a sense of something big coming.

What was my interest here? Going from "closed in" to "opening out" but from one kind of confinement to another is primary for me.  But it would also would have seemed irresponsible to me to not continue the bluff to its end,  which I did in the above picture.

One of the things that is wonderful for me about going back into some of these now older bodies of work, and then needing to explain them a little as I share them with you in the blog is that I look at them again too. I don't know if you feel this from some of your earlier works but it often is like looking at the work as though someone else made it, or through some lens where time has altered the group's meaning.

If you've enjoyed this please then do take a look at the full set on the site:  Billings, Montana and remember, a big screen will help you to see these in full. If you're on a Mac, clicking Command + will get the image bigger on your screen too.

Next up? Vignole, Italy

New old? What kind of title is that? A logical one, I hope. I've been doing some housekeeping to the site, with you the reader being the beneficiary, as past works that have never been on the site before are now in place.

In the fall of 2006 I had a large one person show at Panopticon Gallery. This was one of the last years the gallery was in Waltham while it was owned by Tony Decaneas. This was a large space and in preparing the show I was interested in promoting the series work that was represented in the then new book of my  work called "American Series". So, I showed several of the series in the book, including Oakesdale Cemetery and Yountville, CA but also printed new series from Billings, MT, Vignole. Italy, and Thomspon, CT as well. All three of these series are now represented in full on the site.

Contrary to current practice these three series were printed quite small, about 10 inches square.

Billings, MT

Vignole, Italy

Thompson, CT

In order to do these three series justice and to be respectful of the work, I will write several posts dedicated to each series.

First up will be Billings, MT.

I hope you will join me. 

This is the fourth and last installment about the Portland, Maine pictures I made in 1996.

There are three more photographs in the series. Here is the next one:

With the numbers 35 and 33 this one makes me think about: serendipity, chance, similarities and differences, and, a recurring theme for me, the same but different. Serendipity as if you lived in No. 33 you'd be fortunate not to have this big hole in your front steps. Why is one side in worse condition than the other? "Similarities and differences" in this case is much like the "same but different" in that these two sides, these two apartments were made presumably exactly the same, with mirror image rooms and entrance doors. But time has modified them, individualized them, differentiated them. Look closely and you can see many differences. Decay and  atrophy are persistent themes in my work, so it comes as no surprise to me that I was attracted to these crumbling concrete steps.

And now for a change, the second to last photograph in the series. For the first time we are looking over a fence into a backyard, and one that is chaotic. There is still some containment and convergence too, notice the fence on the left and the steps on the right. There is also a filthy snow bank, lots of junk and a difficult path to the building in the mid background which is being threatened into obscurity by the tree branches. Imagine leaves on those trees in mid summer. They might block the house from view completely. What else? Rather than moving in close to eliminate the fence in the foreground I chose to leave it, with its sharp points looking like spikes that would gouge you if you tried to jump it.

So here we are at the last picture in the series, this one showing real depth as we skim along several backyards. This is the first time we've seen a picture like this in the series. There are some obstructions to our release out of the picture, some junk in our way, but for the most part the path is easy. If you've looked at other series of mine you'll know that very often there is either an opening out to the rest of the world in the last picture or a barrier to that leaving. Take a look at the last image in Yountville, CA or Nantucket, MA as examples.

Here at at the end you might ask if there was some big point to these pictures, some conclusion to be drawn from the series that speaks to a more fundamental message. Another way to phrase this question is to ask if I went into it with a purpose in mind, a goal to achieve, some ulterior game plan perhaps to use these pictures to make a broad statement about something? Very simply, I did not. A series like this is an evolving process, made intensively over a short period of time and involving discoveries, trials, false starts, attempts and misdirections as well as successes. The Portland, Maine pictures do speak to the place, to where I photographed, to the light that was present those two days, to the time of year I made the pictures, to the issue of selectivity, how a photographer chooses to bring something to prominence, to photography and yes, to the width of the lens I used to make the pictures. But they do not dictate outcome, the viewer's interpretation of just what these pictures are about. This answer may irritate you, seem devious or that I am shirking my responsibilities as the person who made them. I don't believe I am. 

Long ago, some years after I was finished with my graduate studies, I went to an opening at a gallery along Lansdowne Street in Boston, on the back side of Fenway Park, at a gallery called, if memory serves me, Enjay. The work was by Harry Callahan and, as he'd been a teacher of mine, I went to see the show and also him as I knew he was going to be there. Openings weren't Harry's favorite thing to do and I remember late in the evening, Harry leaning up against the counter in the back room while a drunk European man was verbally assaulting him with questions about what his work meant. He was standing right in front of Callahan and was screaming at him:  "What's that mean?"he yelled, pointing at a picture of Harry's hanging on the wall and then, he pointed at another and yelled, "What's that mean?" By this time Harry had given up trying to reason with the guy. Although Harry could take care of himself, I went to his defense, pushing the man back away from Harry and yelling at him to leave Harry alone.

Forgive me, but I've never felt it was incumbent upon the artist to explain the work.

Before I close this post I wanted to touch on a couple of more points in regards to this group. One is result based coming from the conditions and circumstances I found myself in while making the Portland pictures. Were you to have the actual prints in front of you and were comparing earlier series to these and some series that follow this one you 'd notice right away, of course, I was working under brighter and contrastier light. If you know photography you know that alone usually makes for more depth of field, meaning I was able to use a hand holdable shutter speed with a smaller aperture. This is very apparent in the Portland pictures due to their being sharper from foreground to background. 

The other point is that this was about to be an incredibly productive time for me. While I still continued to work in 8 x 10, that is a device that tends to produce pictures in a more measured manner and this was as true in the mid 90's as it had been for the previous ten years and also would be over the next ten. But having this Hasselblad SWC in my hand again, after a moratorium of many years, would also allow me to make many new pictures, series like the Oakesdale Cemetery series the following summer or the Hershey, PA series in the early spring of 1997. These, along with Portland,  have proven to be seminal pieces in my oeuvre, shown frequently in various shows, some of which are in the 2006 monograph American Series. In fact, the Portland series are in the permanent collection of the Boston Atheneum and the Peddocks Island series is in the collection of the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. 

And lastly, my printing by this time was well practiced and fulfilled a very clear set of objectives. The Portland series, while now shown as inkjet prints, were originally printed in the darkroom on Kodak 14 x 17 inch Polymax F surface paper and toned with selenium. The prints are about 12 inches square and printed in a very straight and undramatic way, meaning that they run from the D-max of a full black on up  the scale to a Zone VIII and IX white while I made a clear effort to contain detail in both shadows and highlights.

If you're read through all four of these posts I thank you for hanging in with me. Sometimes these posts are a lot of work, but they also bring me back to where I was and what I was at the time I made a group of pictures. I am appreciative of both the opportunity to share them with you and also the challenge implicit in doing a good and thorough job.