It’s been a while since I posted any of my own photographs here — photos without headstones, that is. But today I installed Adobe Lightroom on the ‘ole PC, imported all of the old photos that I haven’t looked at in a while, and came across these composite photos from 2003.

I was going through a phase of making montages, inspired by a small series that Lisa made when we went to Sequoia National Park the year before. (I swear I didn’t know at the time that James Balog and David Hockney were doing this, too.) In early 2003, we still lived closer to Boston; and the old, rusty Central Artery was coming down as the Big Dig moved the highway underground. So I decided to spend an afternoon focusing on the old and new. (This was also the outing where I got detained by The Man.)

At the time, I was exploring the concept that photographs mediate experience in a completely artificial way, that they frame the world and construct experience, and that they’re essentially untrue. So I was purposefully not making my edges match or worrying too much about color constancy when I stitched them back together. Pointing out the unnaturalness of photographs was my goal. Moreover, the Artery always struck me as ugly, and I always felt disoriented when I was on or near it; I was trying to get that feeling across, too. Maybe it works, maybe it’s too “unpicturesque” or self-conscious — I’ll let you decide.

Central Artery Montage - Boston, MA (Click for larger . . .)



Central Artery Montage - Boston, MA (Click for larger . . .)



Central Artery Montage - Boston, MA (Click for larger . . .)

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Today I finally got out and photographed a bit. How do I pick where to go? Usually I look somewhere west of me (about 1/2 of the Commonwealth) because I’m on a suburban/rural swing right now. I’ve been thinking, though, that I might be missing out when I just jump onto the turnpike.

So last night I got out my Metro Boston atlas — which includes 167 of the 351 cities and towns and roughly 4.3 million people — closed my eyes, flipped through the pages, and stopped at Dighton. I had never heard of this small town, known as Taunton’s “Southern Purchase” when it was founded in the 1690s. Nor was I aware of Norton, a northern neighbor of Taunton and another place I photographed today.

There are many, many cemeteries in Dighton, far more than one would expect for a town of 5,000 people. I visited two: Hathaway Cemetery and Dighton Cemetery, perhaps the oldest in town. Here are some highlights.

Hathaway Cemetery

Submit, Wife of Isaac Babbit
1799-1877

Victory and through victory Life

• Ardelia Hathaway (♀ - 1843-1921)
• Roxcy Hathaway (♀ - †1833 Æ26)
• Mercy Austin (♀ - 1821-1880)
• Almedia Wheeler (♀ - †1886 Æ53)
• Anjenette Pettis (♀ - †1898 Æ81)
• Benjamin P. Jones (♂ - †Jan.? 9, 1864 Æ49, Died at Bermuda Hundred, Virginia) [1]
• Adeline Woodward (♀ - †1864 Æ24)
• Gideon Walker (♂ - 1838-1907)
• M.J.H. (†1870), L.B.H (†1908), R.P.H (†1918), G.L.H. (†1958), B.M.H. (†1949)

Dighton Cemetery

In Memory of Mrs. Elizabeth Richmond, the Worthy Consort of Silvester Richmond Esq. who paid the Debt of Nature June the 23d Annodomini 1772 in the 65th year of her Age.

Sincerely lamented by her disconsolate Partner & Children

• Thomas King (♂ - †1713 Æ70)
• John Reed (♂ - †1720/21 Æ2 yrs)
• Mr. Matthew Briggs, “who died of the smallpox” (†1703 Æ58)
• J. Emmons Briggs, M.D. (♂ - †1867 in Burlington, Iowa, Æ25)
• Patience Ann Briggs (♀ - †1832 Æ15)
• Mercy Briggs (♀ - †1783 Æ30)
• Huldah Horton (♀ - †1884 Æ81)
• Nathaniel Bower (♂ - †1728 “Æ3 yrs & 3 mo. wanting 5 days”)
• Elizabeth Bowers (♀ - †1748 “Æ3 yrs & 9 mo. wanting 5 days”)
• Abigail Bowers (♀ - †1748 Æ30)
• Bathsheba Baylies (♀ - 1745-1822)
• Lusannah Turner (♀ - †1844 Æ31)

[1] - It’s likely that the date was actually May 9, 1864, not January 9, 1864.

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I went out photographing in the Commonwealth today for the first time since starting my master’s program. While I would have preferred the opportunity to go out and work on my projects over the last nine months, the absence gave me time to think a bit about what I’m doing and where it’s going.

So I found myself in Upton and Northbridge today thinking about one of the recurring themes in my project: new subdivisions.

I have been told that my work is political or has an anti-growth message, but I don’t think so and certainly haven’t consciously tried to impart any particular message. In my mind, my project is primarily about how the six million people in the Commonwealth fit into this rather old landscape, about the margins where people and nature meet. And today I realized that, although towns in Metrowest and other suburban areas are all subtly different, they all follow a number of general principles.

First, dispossession. Historically native peoples and then farmers and poorer people have ceased to hold land. Towns divest themselves of common land, and it becomes fungible. It ceases being inchoate when subdivided into lots and stripped to a tabula rasa state. Infinite, terrifying potential is transmuted into something real and limited which we can comprehend and apprehend. This tends to be when I started to get interested in a scene.

Today I became aware of a certain kind of violence visited upon the land during suburban transformation. Most (if not all) of the trees in a wide swath are felled. Rock is blasted, pulverized, and excavated. The ground is stripped, leveled, compacted, and then replanted with new grass and thin trees. It’s not all like this, of course, but I realized that many of my photographs reflect this microcycle of destruction during construction. Nature itself has to be dispossessed and made anew.

And yet, at the same time, we prize the presence of small portions of that primordial nature at the margins of property because (thirdly) new suburbia is founded on human dislocation and separation. We move to new places and live next to people we don’t know or have time to get to know, and we feel the need to have some separation from them. Plus the goal of suburbia — in this Commonwealth at least — is the negation of the urban and its problems. (If it’s not a conscious goal, it’s at the very least a conscious accident on the part of town planners and residential developers.) This negation has in its manifestation a measure of wildness and nonlinearity.

But this elevation of the “non-city” shouldn’t be equated with a total lack of order, for the final aspect of exurban development is unachievable Platonic perfection. Just look at the closely manicured lawns free of weeds and ornamentation, or consider the carefully chosen shrubbery and the fine expanses of mulch bordering everything. Exterior perfection and harmony mirror a desire for household and familial perfection.

In my Commonwealth images, I have been trying to show the outward appearance of these changes, the margins between wild and tamed, the self-similarity of suburbia, and the absurd ways that things go awry. It’s not political, per se, as I don’t have any suggestions in mind that I wish to advocate. My goal is to show a slice of our inner thoughts by examining the outward appearance of our things.

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A few weekends ago I visited Leyden and Montague, way up on the Vermont border in West-Central Mass. Turner’s Falls (in Montague) seems an unlikely place for a photography school and an even more unlikely place for an aspiring photography museum, but it has both.

Click for larger

After talking to Lisa and a few other people and reviewing a bunch of my images, I realize that in the Commonwealth project I am exploring (primarily) how humans are situated and interact with the natural environment, particular with respect to development, habitation, and land use. This idea provides a convenient way of tying in the Signs of Nature and High Tension series and also points to some possible ways of organizing the material.

I’m also trying to put evidence of ongoing human interactions into the project to take the edge off the whole post-Apocalyptic, human ruins feel that it — and a lot of contemporary deadpan landscape photography — seems to have.

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I was a bit feverish yesterday and today, so I wasn’t able to enjoy the fine weather and continue my Commonwealth project. Instead, I took a look through my files in preparation for the West Newton Cinema show this coming Winter. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that over the last three years I’ve photographed in roughly sixty communities, or roughly a sixth of Massachusetts. Not all of my excursions to these towns have resulted in images that meet my expectations or are coherent with my emerging vision for the project. So, I’ll have to revisit places like Dover, Harvard, and Sudbury; although I like the images very much.

Still, I’m rather pleased with my progress. At last, I have enough images that the project is beginning to feel coherent when I look at 10-20 images, as well as containing several images that are interesting on their own. I’m gradually feeling more hopeful that this wonderful (but long-term) project may prove a success. A few weeks back I talked to an archivist at a local museum, and there’s some enthusiasm.

Now I just need to start working a bit harder, so that I can finish in less than twenty years.

In order to keep you up-to-date in the meantime, I have installed some new photo management and publishing software on my website. It’s rather snazzy but takes some configuring to fit snuggly. So keep watching.

Also, as an international playboy, my interests flit around quite a bit. First a dalliance with this, then a flirtation with that, all bound together by travel and brooding introspection. (The ladies seem to like the brooding badboy.) But if your interests don’t align quite with mine, you may find some of this a bit tedious. So I’m helping you be more selective with more narrow RSS feeds:

• Everything
• Photography
• Software Engineering
• The American Soul

Happy reading!

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In conjunction with my recent post on Afro-pessimism, I’ve been thinking about Images I see of other places that attempt to show it to outsiders.

By looking critically at my own Commonwealth, do I get some license to look similarly at others’? That’s my own question for me ruminate on.

But I’ve been thinking more earnestly about images of India. दीप्ती and I discussed it while waiting for the Cookie Lady to show up on Friday. Westerners show India as shining but dysfunctional, full of promise and inequality — this is the West’s dominance myth as it confronts globalization — or as the colorful, romantic spicelands of Bollywood. And of course, there are art photographers, such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mary Ellen Mark, and other from the Born Into Brothels set. But how do Indians show India?

Matthew, Bill, and I discussed it for about a minute at Gillian’s birthday party in the South End yesterday. Bill mentioned photographers who traveled with Gandhi but no names. Earlier in the day I found about a half-dozen names and a few dozen websites, but nothing to report yet. If you know anyone you think I should look at, let me know.

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New images from the Commonwealth series.

Hancock, Mass. (2006)

Springfield, Mass. (2006)

Tyringham, Mass. (2006)

Worcester, Mass. (2006)

Hopkinton, Mass. (2006)

Hopkinton, Mass. (2006)

Sherborn, Mass. (2006)

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In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts more than six million residents occupy only 7838 square miles of land. Humans suffuse the landscape, creating a mosaic of housing, farmland, and natural space. I travel to see and photograph what our built environment in this narrow sliver of America looks like and how we relate to our natural spaces and to each other. Most of my recent work examines tensions and transitions at the nexus of different land uses.

A scarcity of land available for new development in Massachusetts (partly the result of peculiar zoning regulations) has driven up the price of traditional suburban homesteads, both old and new. But the desire for home ownership and the dream of social mobility remains untempered by the high cost, leading many new homeowners to look at lots once considered marginal. For instance, a surprising number of upwardly mobile suburbanites have built their starter dream homes abutting power line corridors, sometimes with the poles in their front yards. The “High Tension” series is an on-going visual exploration of what happens when NIMBY meets an actual backyard.

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Ever since my contemporary art presentation, I’ve received a surprising amount of positive feedback and probing questions. And I feel better about showing my work, knowing that I have prepared my audience. All of which has had the effect of improving my outlook on the camera club.

One consistently thoughtful club member took a look over these pages and posed the following query:

I’m interested in your series of signs of nature and have a question: you mention the work by Charlotte Cotton and her way of categorizing, and I wonder into which category (ies?) you would put your projects, both Commonwealth and the Signs one. Is it deadpan? Does it emphasize “thingness”?

Here is a bit of my response.

While I have considered similar questions a bit when writing artist’s statements and such, I increasingly find myself asking the following questions when I photograph: “What am I doing today? Is it consistent with what I’ve done earlier?” Having this rubric helps focus me a little, but I’ve only recently started thinking about what I want my photographs to say when I make them. Having better answers will help me make better images.

I suspect I used to treat my photographs as inkblots of my subconscious mind: “What does this place mean to me? What do I see?” I guess I’m still doing that, but now I try to integrate both the answers and the questions into my photographs instead of waiting to divine the answers on the lightbox. In a year or two, the questions and answers may be completely different. We’ll see.

Anyway. I haven’t made claims to objectivity in several years, so I don’t share that with the deadpan folks. Photographs frame “truth” and can at best only suggest something (perhaps purposefully false) to the viewer. Lately, while working on the “Commonwealth” series, the ethical and subjective component of this mode of photography — what I’ve been calling pseudo-documentary — has taken a primary place in my thinking, as I aim to ensure that I don’t misrepresent the people and places I photograph and as I think about my own relationship with the subjects of my work.

Still, in terms of aesthetics, I guess my work fits somewhere in the broad intersection of deadpan, still life (”thing-ness”), and
documentary or “aftermath” imagery. More and more of my images seem to rely on each other for their artistic and conceptual content and require the idea behind the series to pull its weight. “Signs of Nature” (hopefully) shows the pervasiveness of human interactions with nature and the top-down control of acceptable leisure pursuits; the nature-human nexus in Massachusetts is very tightly coupled, and the signs suggest we share a lot with our “blue law” ancestors who
mistrusted working class fun. I suspect these images lose much of their force when they’re viewed individually.

Similarly, the emerging theme of the “Commonwealth” series — what our built environment in this narrow sliver of America looks like and how we relate to our natural spaces and to each other — definitely has the largest set of influences: both recent deadpan folks (Thomas Struth and Stephen Shore), photographers who try to elevate the ordinary or distill its essence (the Bechers and Jeff Bruows), and the earlier photographers we all know (Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, etc.). It’s nice to be in a place where I’m refining my style instead of my technique; but when I think about the 351 images that will eventually make up this series, I still don’t know how I want them to look or feel.

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Images from the High Tension series.

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At my presentation last week, which went very well thankyouverymuch, I started with some images by Alec Soth.

I really like Soth’s images, but when I look at his work I sense an ambiguous relationship between him and his subjects, as though he doesn’t truly respect the people he photographs. Or perhaps, like Diane Arbus, he identifies with them but doesn’t like himself. In his photographs, the American poor and working class — whether along the Mississippi, at Niagara Falls, or in their Bible study groups — come across as the “other.” Perhaps they retain a sense of mousey dignity, but there’s implicit judgment.

Soth likes to stare, so we could give him the benefit of the doubt; he could just be showing us (like Jacob Riis or Weegee) something we ourselves voyeuristically want to stare at.

Do I do the same thing? Does my sense of Midwestern propriety — although attenuated a lot over the last decade — create negative value judgments in my own work?

These questions occurred to me yesterday. My newest set of images (just back from the lab) pick at some of the common threads of my Commonwealth project: signage, post-industrial landscapes, suburban development, powerlines, and clutter. Often (but certainly not always) something is amiss, unexpected, or absurd. I think — I hope! — that my images are playful without being snobbish, that the judgments are gentle in the pseudo-documentary mode I occasionally employ.

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I knew that the Commonwealth project was going to be big, but I only started to get an inkling in January, 2005, when Leslie and I were walking along the levee outside Nicolaus, California.

“Everyone is going to want to buy your book.” For a photography monograph to have more than a hundred plates is unusual. With my project, having just one for each municipality still means 351 images. How does an observer look at that many images? How can they be presented without overwhelming the viewer?

Fortunately (?) I’m quite some distance away from having to worry about publishing the entire series. At last count I have images from about 30 towns. Beth from the Camera Club told me to get cracking, but the last thing I want this to be is anything like birding. Hopedale: check! Brockton: check! Still waiting to see a Chicopee in its native surroundings.

The size of the Commonwealth project opens a possibility I hadn’t expected: subprojects. I had always expected themes to emerge, but in the last half year two new projects have sprung forth. I’ve already shown the first set images from the Signs of Nature series. While photographing on Presidents’ Day I realized the beginnings of the High Tension series.

A month earlier in Tewksbury I photographed the houses of people living under the hum of high tension power lines. Yes, the amazingly high cost of living in the Bay State has led a surprising number of upwardly mobile suburbanites to build their starter dream homes abutting power line corridors, sometimes with the poles in their front yards. In February I continued the series in Littleton, Mass., where I realized people were settling on where they settled. There must be a sort of tension that exists where NIMBY meets an actual backyard. And how much stranger for upper-middle class folks to actually choose to locate near an existing hazard.

When time permits, I’ll post a few of the first images from the High Tension subproject.

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From the Commonwealth series:

“Be American - Georgetown, Mass.” (2005)

“Dalton, Mass.” (2005)

“Buckland, Mass.” (2005)

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From the new Signs of Nature series:

“No Parking - Douglas SF, Mass.” (2005)

“Parki - Douglas SF, Mass.” (2005)

“No Motorized Vehices - Douglas SF, Mass.” (2005)

“Gate 25 - Douglas SF, Mass.” (2005)

“Danger Unguarded Water Area. Alcohol Prohibited - Waconah SP, Mass.” (2005)

“Pole 20 - Waconah SP, Mass.” (2005)

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Yesterday I left the house far earlier than ever before to photograph at sunrise with some camera club folks on one of the beaches of Plum Island.

I like the ocean, but I’ll confess to being a landlubber (photographically at least). So I headed back up the island, over the bridge, through Newburyport, and down Route 1A (which Gillian called “the slow road to nowhere”) to Rowley. There I drove some backroads and had a decent time photographing, eventually making my way to the town’s common. I wandered around, photographing some rebuilt antique tractors, talking to some locals, and enjoying the beautiful weather.

“Are you from the paper?” I brought my camera down from my eye to see four or five people about my age (or slightly older) looking at me, all wearing “Rowley Agrictultural Commission” badges. This has happened to me before and probably isn’t an unfamiliar experience for anyone who uses two camera bodies and has a camera bag slung over his or her shoulder.

“No. I’m just out working on a project.” Stares. “I’m photographing in all 351 towns and cities of Massachusetts.” This usually gets intriguing smiles and conversation.

“A collector’s set, huh?” asked the main ag guy (who didn’t look like any farmer I’d ever seen in Iowa or elsewhere).

Hmm . . . “Not exactly. It’s more of an art project.”

“Merit badge, eh?” Whatever. “Anyway, welcome to Rowley.” Yeah, thanks.

So now I have an ethics problem to work through before showing pictures from Rowley. If I could only show my favorite photograph from Rowley — supposing it turns out well, a double-exposure that shows the tremendous pressures suburban farmers face, with a farmer’s “going out of business sign” and the subdivision across the street from it — do I help out the dismissive Rowley ag man? Or would I spite him and show an antique tractor, making him seem quaint and out-of-touch?

It’s a moot discussion. Of course, I would show whichever one I liked better.

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