Still Life

I’m currently, happily photographing an ever-expanding supply of found, natural objects and a familiar, dusty array of inherited and collected, man-made items - odds and ends within easy arm’s reach.  This includes family mementos, all sorts of ephemera, old, small items of indeterminate value, the flowers I grow, the bones unearthed and/or discovered in my wooded back acres and the carcasses of wild things that I find on a morning walk (or my cat leaves on the doorstep).  These are souvenirs from life’s journey.  I have a personal connection to, and there’s a story behind, almost every object.  

To some extent this project, started in 2010, is informed by my annual tours of the Brimfield Flea Market in central Massachusetts and a visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam where I encountered Pieter Claesz’s  “vanitas” still lifes.  I’m drawn to objects with Memento Mori overtones.   But I’m equally drawn to cultural flotsam and jetsam.  I love patina.  Regardless, I choose my objects based on form, texture and palette.  I favor incongruity and the odd juxtaposition.  I photograph in my garage, using natural light.  In the end, it’s just an ode to the artifact… detritus and design. 

Prints (14” X 21” & 16” X 24”) from this evolving project are being made with an Epson 3880 on Hahnemeule Photo Rag. 

Boys’ Life

I started the series that I call Boys’ Life (after the classic scouting magazine) in late 2003.  The images from Boys’ Life are a union of my children’s (two sons) real-time childhood and my own dimly remembered (and filtered-by-time) childhood.  As such, the images fuse fact and fiction, past and present, and the ordinary and unusual.  The resulting images are (for me) what memories look like.

Some of the things that interest me about childhood:  The mundane and the magical seamlessly co-exist; what’s real and what’s make-believe are equal in influence; the willing suspension of disbelief is as natural as gravity; all things whimsical; the implications of misplaced fear and unrecognized danger; the blurring of the trivial and the profound; the commingling of the comic and the horrible; that every day is a new drama and all the world’s a stage; that spontaneity is as natural as gravity; that one can experience unfettered joie de vivre without knowing a lick of French; that one can instinctively embody the notion of carpe diem (ditto Latin); a child’s bold shamelessness; a child’s crushing vulnerability; tears that are as natural as gravity; genetic resemblances; the magnitude of small things; the insignificance of big things; the power of ritual; the comfort of routine; the labor of play and the serious nature of games; the luminosity of innocence; the nuances of experience; the coming together and the drifting apart; the bittersweet inevitability of loss through gain; the mercurial moods and passing phases; the sudden changes and the gradual transformations; the abundance of opposites, dualities and dichotomies; the unveiled glance and the open gesture; and the ambiguity of it all.

 Past Life (Photo Journal) –  this portfolio is in the process of being uploaded

I was a stringer for a newspaper when I was just 18 years old, shooting town meetings, civic events and high school sports.  Many of my published photographs also fell into the category of “local color.”  I was always amused by the editor’s witty captions.  On more than one occasion the caption transformed an otherwise ordinary image.

 This series started in 1987.  I was interested in environmental, informal portraiture (snapshots).  Nan Goldin was at her peak.  She said that her life was her work and her work, her life.   I was also interested in how text modified the meaning of photographs and how photographs (like words) cannot be entirely objective.  I was interested in what could be denoted, and what could be connoted, and the symbiotic relationship of photographer and subject.

 So I photographed my friends and family during routine social situations.  Most everyone liked being photographed.  Not everyone liked what I had to say.  The text created personal as well as artistic tension.  The end result was an extended portrait of friends and family as well as an ongoing self-portrait.  It gave me an opportunity to reflect on the significance of the xy chromosome, and the ups and downs of both youth and maturation.

 I was using a Fuji 6X9 camera, a typewriter and a stat camera.  I used the stat camera to photograph the typewritten text.  The resulting kodalith negative was “opaqued,” “stripped” into “goldenrod” and contact printed.  It was a two-part process: mask the bottom of the paper and print the image on the top and then mask the top and print the text on the bottom.  It makes one appreciate Photoshop.