FINDING IMAGES

---

Pay Atttention

There are two ways to find photographic landscape images: go to places often photographed and wait for something unusual to happen, or go looking for something special where no one would expect to find something special. The latter is was of necessity. I had explored the west with my view camera, taking advantage of Bose business trips. With an occasional exception what I found is locations that had been thoroughly covered which made living there the only way to make something special.

Instead I found the New England provided surprises, with many places where no one had thought to look. Prime example are the three images below, all made from the breakdown lanes of Interstate highways, the first two on the Mass Pike (I-90) and the third on I-495.

I hope I have made images that surprise a bit because they have been hidden and I have worked diligently to find them.

It took 28 years and a great deal of driving and paying attention to the roadside, or occasionally the side of a well-trod path.

It is human nature to be find a way and to stick with it. I learned from childhood that the best is found or done by taking my own way, even if I didn’t have a clue where that would lead. I learned that from my two fathers: my engineer Dad who died much too young at 59 but threw huge expectations my way and then a bit later from Prof. Amar Bose whose life was to do what no others have done. He succeeded. He was my professor and advisor at MIT and then hired me as the 5th employee of his company, Bose Corporation. He taught me by example to the point that I eventually learned to do it my way.

The first example was a view from the Interstate Highway known to me as the Mass. Pike. It was a few miles east of the Bose campus in the direction of Boston. I had learned to pay attention to what was passing by and while I was driving over a filled in valley on the Pike I saw something amazing. (The filling, I was told, was the top of the hill on which Dr. Bose built the building that housed his company, an irony if there ever was one.)

One spring I looked into the valley as I drove and found myself near the tops of the maple trees covered with red buds. I was flooded with excitement for I had never imagined such an image and I knew I had to photograph it. With my view camera against the guard rail (above) I was a bit nervous about the high-speed traffic a few feet away. But the images took possession of me and I photographed on the Pike for ten years. One of the first springtime images is below. The image was nearby but hidden unless you were looking for it. It is called Spring Flowers and I am told it is in the Cincinnati Museum of Art. For me it was an exciting beginning.

I soon found another overlook on the Pike in Millbury, Mass. One day it gave me a treasure I call Spring Sunrise. Below that is a photograph a few feet from a well-traveled trail near Walden Pond. I returned every year for ten years and it never happened again.

And below that is the image that inspired the title of my collection. It is a small stream running under Interstate 495 in Littleton, Massachusetts. I think these images convey the kinds of hidden worlds that motivated my 28 years of photographing the landscape.

It is human nature to be find a way and to stick with it. I learned from childhood that the best is found or done by taking my own way, even if I didn’t have a clue where that would lead. I learned that from my two fathers: my engineer Dad who died much too young at 59 but threw huge expectations my way and then a bit later from Prof. Amar Bose whose life was to do what no others have done. He succeeded. He was my professor and advisor at MIT and then hired me as the 5th employee of his company, Bose Corporation. He taught me by example to the point that I eventually learned to do it my way.

The first example was a view from the Interstate Highway known to me as the Mass. Pike. It was a few miles east of the Bose campus in the direction of Boston. I had learned to pay attention to what was passing by and while I was driving over a filled in valley on the Pike I saw something amazing. (The filling, I was told, was the top of the hill on which Dr. Bose built the building that housed his company, an irony if there ever was one.)

One spring I looked into the valley as I drove and found myself near the tops of the maple trees covered with red buds. I was flooded with excitement for I had never imagined such an image and I knew I had to photograph it. With my view camera against the guard rail (above) I was a bit nervous about the high-speed traffic a few feet away. But the images took possession of me and I photographed on the Pike for ten years. One of the first springtime images is below. The image was nearby but hidden unless you were looking for it. It is called Spring Flowers and I am told it is in the Cincinnati Museum of Art. For me it was an exciting beginning.

I soon found another overlook on the Pike in Millbury, Mass. One day it gave me a treasure I call Spring Sunrise. Below that is a photograph a few feet from a well-traveled trail near Walden Pond. I returned every year for ten years and it never happened again.

And below that is the image that inspired the title of my collection. It is a small stream running under Interstate 495 in Littleton, Massachusetts. I think these images convey the kinds of hidden worlds that motivated my 28 years of photographing the landscape.