Druid Hill Park, Baltimore, MD, 2010

Wyman Park, Baltimore, MD, 2010

I always love a trip to Baltimore. The Baltimore Museum of Art has a wonderful Courbet, Woodberry Kitchen makes a mean cheeseburger, Normals has some great old books, and Josh and Amber are still the best hosts. Thanks guys!

Marine Park, Brooklyn, 2010

The print details:

8×10 archival pigment print on rag paper, edition of 10. The cost is $30 plus $5 shipping. I’ll start shipping them next week. Thanks!

Which is perfectly fine. I kept going, and found a few more that I liked:

They’re all nice enough, but I got the feeling that I wasn’t really connecting with anything… I don’t think these photos lead anywhere exciting.

I shuffled the images around in Lightroom for a little while and something finally hit. Three of the thirty-or-so photos I took last month contain a seed of an idea that feels interesting and needs to be explored further. Now that I see it, those three stick out from the rest like a sore thumb; they look nothing like the photos above. It’s too early to say anything except that I’m excited again, after what feels like a long summer of aimlessness.

A move down the block doesn’t sound like much, but this transition has definitely shifted my worldview a bit. Maybe it’s just a matter of priorities; moving out of a cramped apartment into a house we own is a big change, and it’s taking some time to adjust. I haven’t had a back yard in more than twelve years, for example, and there are days when all I want to do is stare at this:

It’s not much, yet, but it’s ours. There’s a fig tree back there that’s just getting ripe, with one tempting branch hanging over our fence. Guess what I had for breakfast? And yes, the house came with its very own cast-iron sink birdbath.

And then there’s the work! Nobody told me how much work was involved in keeping a 100-year-old house from collapsing into a pile of bricks. Lets just say that a lot of creative thinking has gone into keeping this place standing over the years, and my wife and I are having a wonderful time unraveling all of it.

In the midst of this packing and unpacking, I have had some time to think about photography and where it is taking me. I started running this summer, mostly through the waterfront neighborhoods of Gowanus and Red Hook, and I’ve started to become interested in photographing the neighborhood again. I’ve photographed around here before (I put a good amount of time into urban landscape photography last summer, for example) but I think I’m seeing things a little differently now and have some new ideas.

One artist I’ve been particularly inspired by over the last month or so is Rackstraw Downes. Downes is a plein-air landscape painter who has done a lot of urban work, including several paintings in my neighborhood. He’s not the easiest artist to follow; his work is quite scattered online, and I don’t hear about much in the way of exhibitions. Interest does seem to be picking up steam, though, and he had a few exhibitions this summer and a new catalog of his work that is at the top of my wishlist.

I came across two articles on Downes last month, one in the Wall Street Journal and one in the New York Times. The images accompanying the Times article are particularly good. I also came across this interview with Downes from 2004, which includes a painting from the park in Red Hook where I run most days. In fact, the grain terminal in that painting was the subject of my very first large format photograph!

Get Off My Lawn Issue #1, published by Geoffrey Ellis

Photo zine impresario Geoffrey Ellis released issue #1 of Get Off My Lawn  this week, and I am very happy to have my work included. The zine features the work of eleven photographers who are 34 years and older. (I am only 33, but I was grandfathered in). Get Off My Lawn is a tongue-in-cheek response to the calls for entry, contests and publications that require “emerging photographers” to be somewhere between the ages of 18 and 34. Contributors include: Noah Beil, Geoffrey Ellis, Grant Ernhart, Alan W George, Liz Kuball, Sarah Lacy, Ian Lemmonds, Jennifer Loeber, Dalton Rooney, Andrew Martin Scott, and Justin Visnesky. I received my copy a couple of days ago, and it is fantastic.

Geoffrey’s zines have a habit of selling out quickly, so I would get over there and get one if I were you. I have a promotional copy I would like to give away, too. Just leave a comment here or, even better, click the little Twitter button attached to this post and post a tweet about it. (Make sure your tweet links back to this post so I can find it.) One lucky commentor/tweeter will receive a free copy of the zine with one of my photographs on the cover, signed by me. The winner will be announced on Tuesday, July 6, so good luck!

Update: Bill at expiredfilm.com won the zine. Congratulations!

Geoffrey still has copies left, you can grab one here. (Look in the sidebar for the “Add to Cart” option.)

Jamaica Bay Wildlife Preserve

“How to Be a Poet” by Wendell Berry
(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Hear this poem, and others, ready by the author at speakingoffaith.publicradio.org.

Composite from collected images tagged with “half dome” on Flickr.

Phil Underdown, from The Trappers Lament

Phil Underdown, from The Trappers Lament

Phil Underdown, from The Trappers Lament

I particularly appreciate Underdown’s project statement for this work. He leads us into the pictures without trying to overwhelm us with jargon and big ideas. The work is very personal, and his writing reflects that.

Images from some of his other projects below:

Phil Underdown, Grassland #188, from Grassland

Phil Underdown, Grassland #45353, from Grassland

Phil Underdown, Field 002.3 November 2004, from The Field

Phil Underdown, Tent Caterpillars 002.7 September 2006, from The Field/Tent Caterpillars

Much of Underdown’s work fits very well within the notion of “The New Pastoral” that I wrote about recently. There is an emphasis on open space and the beauty of light and natural forms, while never ignoring the human presence in the landscape. In The Trapper’s Lament, Underdown seeks to reconcile his own difficult decisions in the face of a destructive beaver population near his home. The viewer is exposed to hard truth in the warm glow of the Adirondack sunshine. In Grassland, he looks closely at a decommissioned airfield that is gradually reverting to a natural state. The wetland-turned-airfield-turned-grassland will never be exactly what it was; it is now uniquely the product of a collaboration between humans and nature.

Of course, I can’t ignore my personal connection to this work either. This is a landscape that I love, and Underdown is looking for insight into many of the same questions that I have. It is work that simultaneously reverential, curious, and critical; beautiful without being cloying. Underdown is doing everything that I love about landscape photography, and I will be following his work closely in the future.