Hidden Worlds

A Lonely Photographer

It is a source of pride for me that I have always been alone when photographing, for it is likely I have fond something no one else has seen.

There have been many images from 20,000 sheets of 4" x 5" film. I have chosen my favorates and put them in 18 galleries that unite images where I have seen an image of a subject I especially lie to photograh. Clicking on any of the 18 images below will take you to a gallery. Fourteen states are represented, but the real glory comes from hear home, when I can visit the exact same spot morning after morning, until one day instead of my greeting the morning, the morning greets me.

For a quick overview, click on my favorites.

Flowers

Melanges

I have been blessed by my wife’s, Susan, passion for flowers, and by a roomy and fertile yard.

A melangé is a mixed assortment and just as I have often worked to remove a center of attention in my landscapes, I do it here. It invites the eye to wander sometimes with subtle clues where to roam next and sometimes with none at all. I have been blessed not only with Susan’s hard work but with some photographic luck. I had built a trundle under my camera so I could make a series of exposures by moving the trundle a few inches at a time. One July afternoon Susan brought into my studio a large basket of blossoms while I brought a lack of forethought (not unusual). I thought for a second or two “what do I do with these” and then started plucking the petals one by one and placing them in the trundle. Susan was not happy, especially when I asked for a second basket. Soon a kind of tapestry emerged and she calmed a bit. My only guideline was that there should be no concentration fo draw the eye.

There are four melangés of which this is the first. Click on the image to go to its gallery. Further down are smaller assemblies and a few eplorations in other directions.

The lighting under which the photogaphs were made is non-directional sunlight, something that could never appear in nature. I made about 120 exposures in six sections with focus stacking so every part of the flower gets equal treatment. When illuminated with 5000K LEDs, the flowers appear to be there in front of you. Prints are available in any size up to 44" x 120" (ten feet) and also cropped into dypticks and triptychs. Examples are shown in the galleries.

LightSongs

Two crafts join, inspired by a name.

I was given a commission to make photographis of musical instruments. Since the symphony has been a life-long passion I had often admired the beauty of the instruments, I think of as a reflection of how the wood and metal must shape the sound. I in turn commissioned photographer Doug Saglio to create the raw material for what has now become digital artistry. As my 80th birthday approaches, the view cameera on my back is no longer a possibility, but some digital science is practical.

It is amazingly difficult to coax something completely new out of something completely familiar. Several years and a few terabytes later some shapes that intrigue me have emerged. Below is an exhibit at the St. Botolph Club in Boston. Click HERE to go to the gallery.

the prints

Prints are available in two formats: 1. Signed by hand and numbered with editions limited to 150 prints or less, including all sizes, crops and materials.

2. Poster Prints on the same paper and printer as limited edition prints, but in a poster format. Prints are not number and a signature is digitally embossed in the print.

While I am still able to print I have priced the poster prints at a 70% less than limited edition prints. Late in my career and in these difficult times, I would like my work to be as accessible as possible. Most are printed in sizes to fit ready made frames.

When I began photographing with a view camera in 1974 my goal was to find unique images and to print them as well as possible. I explored national parks in the west and northeast but both were already well documented or had subjects or vistas impossible to render in a reasonably sized print.

It wasn’t until 1980 that I first noticed spring on the Massachusetts Turnpike (I-90) 20 to 30 miles west of Boston. When the Pike was built valleys were often filled yielding elevated roadways. This gave me something very unusual, a vantage point at the height of the tree canopy and yet close enough to photograph. The experience changed the way I thought about making images. Now it was texture first and composition second. Although it is not possible in every image, it has affected my work ever since.

The three images below are from the early 1980s in Weston. They illustrate the progression of color from mid to late April to mid May as various species of tree, especially maples, come into leaf. Click HERE for further comments and to go to the gallery where there are full screen versions of the images.

A wonderful irony.

The Bose building where I worked for many years was near the opposite side of the Turnpike. It was built on a large hill called (officially) “The Mountain.” To build the Turnpike, I am told, that the top of The Mountain was removed to provide fill for the Pike’s valleys. So I have always thought that, as you can see in the images below, that to make the photographs below I was standing on fill that had whose removal had made way for Bose Corporation’s headquarters. I had worked in the building from the time of its construction in 1970 until I left Bose in 1990 to pursue photography full time.

Achieving high color saturation but with full control is easy with Photoshop and a really good printer. It was impossible up to the mid-1990s except with a process called dye transfer printing.

It is complex because of the many steps and is further complicated by the need to keep the three colors of each of eleven film images elements in register.

The image first has to be “seperated” into its three color layers, the subtractive primaries: cyan, magenta and yellow. This is accomplisthed by contact printing the original transparency onto a special black and white separation film with red, green and blue light respectively. The process is then repeated with a very high contrast film to correctly capture the highlights in the tranparency. Additionally two color correction masks are made to use during the separation process.

In 1987 I was given an assignment to photograph a small stream in Littleton, Massachuseets called Beaver Brook for an article by John Hanson Mitchell. John lived in a carpenter gothic house he built himself in an area though which Beaver Brook flowed known as “Scratch Flats.” He had written a history called Ceremonial Time of Scratch Flats covering the period since the last ice age 15,000 year ago..

While photographing the brook one July afternoon in 1987, my associate and assistant, Michael Conrad, spotted a small stream passing under I-495. It was late in the day and I came back several mornings to photograph the brook from the highway. One morning a fog blocked out some interferring power lines (now they can be removed easily in Photoshop without the need of fog). The image is reproduced below. It has sold out its edition. A version without the fog is in the gallery RIVERS & STREAMS.

The quotation above is from John Hanson Mitchell’s Ceremonial Time. “...that undiscovered country of the nearby, the secret world...” brought to mind “the hidden world of the nearby,” and then a short verse:

out of the corner of my eye
in the hidden world of the nearby,
untended gardens thrive
or pass from time unnoticed
As I continued to photograph and especially my experience at Walden Pond, and now my experience writing about the destruction of our planet I began to think that this touched upon something very important, and perhaps even endemic to our species. This may be stretching it, but I don’t think so. eight years of photographing with a view camera, the view camera capturing ever bit of texture and color possible with the technology available. Clicking on an image will take you to its gallery.
Among these images, although they were unexpected in once sense, they were nevertheless in national parts. However, those on interstate highways and others on the most ordinary of roadsides still amaze me. On of my favorites was at a busy intersection on my commute when I worked at Bose. You can see it by clicking here: MY ROADS.
Clicking below will take you to the index for the relevant galleries.

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