Scituate, Mass.

Scituate, Mass.

Hull, Mass.

My loss is your gain. Here are four pictures from my project:

Sherborn, Mass. (2006)

Beartown Mountain Road – Great Barrington, Mass. (2007)

New Salem, Mass. (2007)

Great Barrington, Mass. (2007)

Some themes really stood out: construction, high-tension lines, signs, roads, redevelopment. Many of the photographs are formal landscapes that focus on the margins between developed and wild land. There’s a sense of transition, although not always the one you might expect from pastoral to suburban or from urban to blighted. These changes often involve a tension between open and (recently) undeveloped land and the way that it’s going to be used in the near future. Property lines are visible where the trees start or the street ends. The houses of a new subdivision hide behind the trees that remain after construction. Those tense boundaries are where I have been fixing my gaze.

There’s also a fair amount of things being not where they belong — or at least not where they’re expected: a pool table on the side of the road, decorative hearts hanging in a tree, big piles of dirt in suburban developments, roads through the countryside, houses right under high-tension power lines. But I am trying hard to avoid nostalgia or sentimentality or any kind of top-down narrative. After all, the whole reason that I started this project was to look at the way that we live today and not to traffic in clichés and the traditional way of looking at the Bay State.

But I was briefly worried that I was developing a rather conservative body of work. Some might interpret the photographs as saying that I disapprove of development — that is a typical reaction from many of the people who have seen what I’ve done over the last half-decade — but my feelings are much more ambiguous. (Who knows, maybe they’re obvious to everyone but me.) People do have to live somewhere, and I haven’t made up my mind about many things that go along with that statement. And far from judging the unusual or absurd slices of life that I come across on my extended, intramural road-trip, I hope that my sense of amusement and celebration shows through. (I’m the guy who wants a dinosaur sculpture in the front yard, you know.)

Obviously, you’ll make your own judgments when you look at the work (someday). And your interpretations will be more important than my intention. Whether I succeed or not, just know that I never set out to make a political point or to advocate for any particular lifestyle.

Now I just have to get another 180 slides scanned and photograph in about 280 more towns and cities. . . .

* — It had never occurred to me that I could use more than one photograph from some towns. Publishing multiple volumes opens that possibility.

Soon! I’ve set it aside for far too long. The book helped me decide that it’s time to get back to it. It’s possible that the act of publishing will actually help me figure out how I want to finish up the project.

Self-portrait, North Brookfield, Mass. (2006)

Last night after looking at our Australia book and thinking about what I would put in a new book, I decided that I need to dust off my old slides that relate to the project. I had forgotten how much I love some of them. After a hard drive crash in 2006 that ate up most of my old scans, I need to rescan a bunch of photographs before I can publish them. The good news is that I now know a lot more about post-processing than I used to, and I’m determined to do a better job than I did the first time around.

Step One: Tonight I calibrated my PC monitor for the first time in years, fixed a few flaws in my scanning workflow, and created a new scanner profile. Early results indicate that it might be easier to get what I want this time around.

Making the scanner profile

Stay tuned!

And I’m thinking about rejoining my former camera club when it starts up in a few weeks.

Stay tuned.

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 . . .)

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.

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.