Yountville 1981
I made Yountville, CA in 1981, less than a year after I made the Nantucket series. This was still a new way for me to work, connecting pictures to pictures, and I was very excited to have found a system that would allow me to make bodies of work, rather than unconnected single pictures.
With these I followed the same model as with the Nantucket pictures. Flat light and walking around an area. In this case it was early morning in March and there was fog that wasn't burning off yet. It kept things flat, good for the pictures I was making in those years. Yountville is one of the towns north of San Francisco in wine country. I have been back to visit the same streets several times since, and have even tried to make new series from the same place, with little success. Yountville is much more built up now.
I was interested in forming linkages from picture to picture:
I had no training in this way of working. Graduate school had been mostly about single pictures, not groups or series of pictures and I don't believe we ever talked about sequencing. I don't think I had anyone to talk with about these pictures either. Working in isolation has its rewards, of course, as there's no one there to tell you how wrong you are. On the other hand, working that way makes for work that is perhaps too much a singular view or that has an emotional tone that is unsupportive of the work.
I remember sweating bullets over the prints. With the Nantucket series I'd established a precedent for flat prints but ones that were full, meaning that the prints could go into deep blacks but still stay predominantly in the grays without strong highlights. With Yountville I worked to do the same.
What was printing like then? I had a darkroom carved out of a 1/2 bath in my apartment, with the enlarger mounted above the toilet. Turn 180 degrees from the enlarger and bang you were right in front of the developer, sitting in a sink that I'd made that was about 8 feet long. Two to three minutes and then the stop bath to the left and then into the fixer, agitated, then white light on after 45 seconds or so. Look at the print, decide what could be improved, turn off the light, go back to the enlarger, pull out another piece of paper and repeat. And so on, often for several prints. After fixing, the print went into a holding tray of water. When it was time to final wash the prints I would put them one at a time into a Zone VI plexiglass washer for 10 minutes or so, then into fixer remover which also had rapid selenium toner in it, then back for a final wash of 20 to 30 minutes, then the prints were squeegeed and placed face down on a plastic screen drying rack. The prints would dry over night.
Yountville has been shown numerous times and is included as the first series in the monograph "American Series", published in 2006.
Related series
Nantucket, Massachusetts 1980
The Nantucket pictures are the first “series” I did. Made, over 30 years ago, it is amazing that making this one modest group of pictures began a whole career.
I was teaching a summer photography workshop on the island of Martha’s Vineyard and took the students on a field trip to Nantucket for the day for a change of pace. When the ferry landed, I told the students to go make pictures and I would see them late in the afternoon to head back to Martha’s Vineyard. Off they went and so did I.
I had no real idea that something major was going to happen but it was one of those times when much of the work I had done until then was preparing me for how I would photograph that day. It was right: the light, the scale, the camera, my seeing, my effort to try to make a group of pictures that would connect to each other in a specific sequence to make a whole that was larger than its individual parts. After a few hours and several rolls of film I knew I’d had a breakthrough and broke down in tears when telling my experience to a friend on the ferry ride back home. Several months later the prints were finished and the next year they were shown in a summer group show at Light Gallery in NYC and in a one-man show at the RI School of Design Museum in Providence, RI. But more important to me was that I had found a way to make pictures that still serves me well today.
Hershey, PA 1997
The Hershey pictures were made at a time when I was expanding my understanding of what was possible within a series project. I had made the Portland, Maine series earlier in the year and the Oakesdale, Washington series the previous summer. This was a farm that looked abandoned, off the side of the road on the way out of Hershey on another spring break trip to photograph, heading back home to Boston with a friend. We stopped and photographed for a while. It was cold and gray as much of March is.
Oakesdale, Washington 1997
Made in 1997 while in Eastern Washington in the earlier years of shooting the Wheat country called "The Palouse" in the 8 x 10 inch format. This series was made hand held with a Super Wide Hasselblad camera as a result of believing that I should loosen up the structure of the series work I had been making until then. My interest had been mostly in urban places( Nantucket, Yountville, etc.) comparing newer areas to those that had been made more individualized by owners over a longer period of time. The Oakesdale Cemetery sits on a hill surrounded by the wheat fields I had been photograping and is a far more emotional response to a place. My good friend Robert Gooblar was very sick and would die the following year. He was very much on my mind as I walked around this utopia of a cemetery on a hill on a hot mid afternoon day in July.
The Oakesdale series has been shown and published many times now but the original sixteen prints were made conventionally in a darkroom, are selenium toned and are about 12 inches square.
