Series Notes
AERIAL 2014-2023
Since 2014, I've been taking pictures from the windows of commercial airliners during my travels around the U.S. and Mexico. But somehow, despite thinking of these pictures frequently over the years, I'd never done much of anything with them -- other work always seemed to take precedence. Then, in the fall of 2023, I decided it was long since time to gather them together and see if there might be images there worth printing.
Time has a way of getting beyond my plans, so I've been grateful to have found the opportunity to explore this series of photographs. I'm reminded of how often I've been asked by other passengers what I was photographing and why, and there were those who seemed genuinely perplexed by my responses. I wish I could now somehow show them these pictures and say, "See? THIS is what I'm photographing. And this is why I always take a window seat."
The images here are from that accumulated body of work. The prints are split-toned, using Piezography Pro inks on 13x19 Hahnemuhle Agave paper.
CAMPO 2018-2024
I began to photograph the countryside found in the Pátzcuaro, Michoacán region of Mexico in 2018, for no particular reason other than I wanted to get out into the open country. Prior to that, I had photographed for a number of years primarily within the town itself, and I started to feel a strong pull to see what I might find beyond town boundaries, out in the campo.
I walked, hiked, drove, rode horses, and photographed, curious to find in what direction the work would go, trying to stay open to whatever it was I might encounter. A particular thread emerged at one point — I started to realize I was frequently making pictures that involved pathways of one kind or another. It then occurred to me that I was moving through those landscapes just as people have for hundreds and thousands of years, and I was often traveling the same roads, walkways and paths they had traveled.
I also encountered animals, as previous humans had, fellow travelers through the countryside, far more intimately connected to it than me. I learned to see them as talismans of sorts, or seasoned guides, and I looked to them for lessons on how to go about being in the campo.
Much of modern humanity has become largely disconnected from the experience of moving through the non-urban environment, an element of life that was at one time primary for all humans on the planet. I do not have the same operative connection that our ancestors once did, but I possess the same genetic make-up. And as I walked along the paths and trails, I began to realize I was resonating, likely as they once did, with the primal force of movement and connection to the natural physical world.
There is something fundamentally, genetically familiar about walking through open land. It gradually became clear that my photographs were an attempt to confirm a connection between that exterior environment and my internal structure — my genetic hard-wiring and my particular spiritual/aesthetic orientation.
I do not know directly the experience of people who traveled by foot or on horseback from one place to another in order to engage in commerce, or to visit family and friends. I don’t know what it’s like to migrate long distances in search of a better life, to escape persecution, or to embark on a religious pilgrimage.
But when I make a photograph that reflects my experience of connecting with the landscape surrounding me, I can also feel a connection to the humans and animals who came along before. It enlarges me spiritually, and I experience humility flowing along the tether of that connection. The photograph, when successful, carries that experience, and it then becomes available to the viewer who is open and inclined to receive it.
PUEBLO 2014-2024
When I began living part-time in Pátzcuaro in 2014, I primarily photographed there in town, drawn again and again by the dense, rich visual environment. Gradually, I realized that what I was seeing was the accumulation of visual meaning left layer by layer over long periods of time, even as it was also being slowly eroded, revealing glimpses here and there of earlier layers. It seemed this process occurred not just visually or architecturally, but also from cultural and religious perspectives (a sort of real-life pentimento) and I started to get a tangible feel for why Mexico has often seemed surreal to me, and others.
All one needs to do is look at Mayan or Aztec art and architecture (or here in Michoacán, the Purhépecha) to see the origins of this aspect of Mexico. Indigenous art and religion stubbornly refused to be subsumed by the Spanish conquest, and the syncretic nature of Mexican culture today is a testament. The European surrealists were attracted by this in the 20th century, including André Breton, filmmaker Luis Buñuel, and Salvador Dali. Breton called Mexico "the surrealist place par excellence," Buñuel became a Mexican citizen, and Dali was quoted as saying he would never return to a place that was "more surreal than (his) paintings." Amongst Mexican artists, painter Frida Kahlo is perhaps the best known surrealist name, though photographers Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Graciela Iturbide are no less important.
I continued exploring the town for several years before venturing further afield, not only into the campo as mentioned above, but also into other towns and villages. While my work could not be described as surrealist in any overt sense, this aspect of Mexico lies just beneath the surface of my pictures, not unlike the way it lies there behind facades and below the surface out on the street. The longer and closer one looks, the more visible these other realities become, and living here serves as a daily reminder that what we call objective reality is nothing much more than a comforting fantasy.
JARIPEO 2022-2023
While most jaripeos (rodeos) in Michoacán are about straight bull riding, the one in Lagunillas shown here is a jaripeo de lazo, which involves a team of several horsemen attempting to lasso a loose bull, then subduing it sufficiently so that a rider might mount and ride it. Both versions are compelling endeavors, forcefully driving home the size and strength of both the bulls and horses, while underlining the frailty of human beings. There is something very primitive and elemental about a jaripeo, with this human-animal relationship front and center, showcased against the contemporary backdrop of ear-splitting banda music, big stadium screens, cases upon cases of Modelo beer, and the ubiquitous cell phone. Another example of the surreal in Mexican culture.
PANTEÓN 2016-2023
It's difficult to think of a more striking example of the differences between Mexican and American culture than their respective burial grounds and attitudes toward death. For an American, walking into a Mexican cemetery the first time is unforgettable -- you're either repelled or transfixed, and I fell into the latter category in 1977. In Michoacán, with its largely intact Purhépecha culture still revered in many places, the celebration of Noche de Muertos adds several more layers of mystery and fervor to these places already soaked in both. It often seems impossible to photograph in Mexican panteóns, but they're so compelling, both visually and culturally, that I keep going back. And did I mention surreal?
BAY 2011-2023
When I resumed photography in the early part of the 21st century, among the first pictures I took were of Cape Cod Bay. At that time, I'd been going to the Cape for over twenty years and had spent many hours gazing at that horizon, mostly just trying to come to terms with how to go about living on the planet. As I began to photograph again, it was a natural transition from staring at to photographing that combination of sea and sky. It was a view that had previously soothed and inspired me, hypnotized me at times, astonished me at others, and now it was becoming a photographic subject of endless variation, subtlety, and startling beauty.
I'd been exposed to the beautiful work of Hiroshi Sugimoto early in my photographic development and I later learned he first began photographing water in 1977, the year I first visited Mexico. He made his first seascape pictures in 1980, the year I first saw Cape Cod. This sort of synchronicity seemed important somehow, but as someone educated in the Western approach to creativity, one that emphasizes the primacy of being original, I resisted taking these kinds of pictures for a number of years. Gradually though, the pull of the air and water and light overcame my fussy quasi-sophistication, and I recognized that the pictures I reluctantly took were merely records of a profound, often spiritual experience that I needed to continue having. This realization liberated me from the arbitrary constraints of my learned artistic framework and gave me the self-permission to just take and relish these pictures as often as I liked.
CLAY 2019
Cape Cod is a narrow peninsula thrust into the Atlantic Ocean like a flexed arm, a pile of sand, rock and clay left behind by the retreat of the last glaciers over 15,000 years ago. Wind and rain originally eroded and shaped it for thousands of years, until sea level rose high enough for the ocean to begin doing the same some 6,000 years ago. It's a place in constant movement and flux, especially during often violent winter storms, which can remove several feet of the outer shore in a winter's time.
Erosion reshapes the beaches and exposes geologic layers previously hidden beneath the sand. Every year, something new is revealed, and in 2019 at Ballston Beach in Truro, large clay deposits, as if by magic, suddenly appeared. There was a window of only a number of weeks before they too were eroded by the tides, simply gone forever, dissolved into the sea. It felt at the time like a valuable gift to have been there to witness and photograph that remarkably beautiful substance.
And it's reassuring to me that the pictures I took formed a series of photogravures, prints made by hand with carbon-based ink, as elemental a process as exists in photography. The Clay Series is comprised of ten prints in editions of five, printed on an etching press using traditional etching ink on 15x22 rag paper.
DUNE.BLUFF.BEACH.OCEAN 2023
There is a reason artists and writers have long found their way to the dunes and ocean beaches of Cape Cod. As I allude to in my Statement, the intersection of varied elements (wind, sea, tides, sky, sand, light, etc.) creates an environment with palpable depth and intensity -- a true power place. People have sought inspiration and renewal in this expanse of sand, water and light for generations, and it's the defining environment of the Outer Cape.
The establishment of the Cape Cod National Seashore in 1961 preserved these landscapes in their mostly natural and primitive state, including a smattering of simple man-made structures clinging to the dunes in The Province Lands. The Dune Shacks, originally built out of flotsam and jetsam by the 'surf men' who patrolled the outer beaches watching for shipwrecks in the 19th and early 20th centuries, were adopted, in a sense, and re-built or built from scratch by artists and writers beginning in the 1920's. So began the presence of a human creative and spiritual energy in this most elemental of environments.
When the Seashore was established, the Park Service wanted to raze the shacks, but public opposition eventually forced the Park to offer owners of the shacks lifetime leases to continue using their dwellings, after which the Park would reclaim them. Many of the leases have now expired, and in 2023, the Park announced a bidding process for 10-year leases on eight of the shacks, essentially eschewing the notion that the shacks should be considered traditional cultural properties. The proposed leases appear to be structured such that commercial lessees will not be prohibited, which means that real estate concerns could obtain leases for the purpose of renovating and renting the shacks for substantial amounts. The potential effect of this process (which has been shrouded in bureaucratic layers of non-disclosure) is unclear, but one thing does seem certain: the dune shack community will change, and it will almost certainly become less elemental, spiritual and organic.
The dunes in The Province Lands of Provincetown, as well as the bluffs of Truro and Wellfleet, are simply astonishing places, fragile landscapes composed primarily of sand, fully exposed to the powerful forces of the ocean and its weather. Walking through these places one cannot fail to sense the elemental power that flows through all the various permutations of intersection. It's often difficult to maintain some semblance of perceptual balance, as it feels like you're being buffeted by unseen waves of force coming from multiple directions at once. It can be a transformative and inspirational experience.
While the elements that comprise the title of this series are distinct topographical zones with distinct characteristics, they form what is essentially a coherent visual and elemental whole through their ongoing, inseparable interactions. I've photographed the quieter, less turbulent bay side of the Cape for many years, but somehow never seriously turned my attention to the landscape of the ocean side. I can't help wondering what took me so long, but given the impending changes that now loom large, I'm grateful to have the opportunity to photograph The Province Lands and the shacks as they currently exist, before potentially disturbing change descends.
STATEMENT
This photograph is from my first trip to Mexico in 1977. It was taken during a visit to the home of Erasto Gutierrez, a weaver in Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca. I have only one remaining gelatin silver print of this image. It's one I treasure, a deeply personal image, as strange and mysterious to me today as it was the day I took it.
ABOUT
Image: Self Portrait, Mexico, 2022
CONTACT
Image: Chester, Guanajuato, 2014