Westchester County, New York, 5x5 Platinotype

Westchester County, New York, 5x5 Platinotype

It has been an amazing fall in New York. Although these photos don’t give a sense of the phenomenal colors we’ve been having, certain structural aspects of the woods begin to show themselves as the leaves fall, creating opportunities for new compositions.

Sortino, Sicily, 5x5 Palladium Print

A very long day on the road outside a small town in Sicily.

Sortino, Sicily, 5x5 Palladium Print

Sortino, Sicily, 5x5 Palladium Print

Van Cortlandt Park, New York, 5x5 Platinotype

Two more photographs from the Bronx/Westchester border. In the 17th century, this area was part of a huge estate owned by Adriaen van der Donck called Colen Donck. It began just north of Manhattan and ran well into what is now Westchester county.

Westchester County, New York, 5x5 Platinotype

I am going on a short vacation, no new photographs for a week or so.

Prospect Park, 5x5 Palladium Print

I got a chance to try out my new 4×5 pinhole camera in Prospect Park this weekend. I think this is a nice counterpoint to the sharpness of the photos I take with my Hasselblad. It’s also a good complement to the palladium printing process, which lends a soft and dreamy feel.

I’ve sometimes thought of pinhole photography as a bit of a gimmick; more about the technique used to create a photo rather than the photo itself. But, as with every photographic instrument, the real challenge is in the hands of the photographer to transcend equipment and technique to create something representative of a personal vision.

I have been spending a lot of time in the woods lately, but there has been something off with my photographs. They are too sharp, almost hyper-real, and not at all representative of the way I feel about being out there. So I’ve decided to go retro and see if I can capture that feeling in some other way. This image is almost a bit too soft and indistinct, but there’s definitely something there. Clicking on the image for a larger view helps quite a bit, as would a bigger print, I think. I am going to continue working on this for a while and see where it takes me.

I’ve finally got enough film from the trip developed and scanned to choose a few photos for the website. I still haven’t gotten to the film from Pantalica, a giant necropolis outside of Siracusa where I think I took my best photos. These are from Monreale and Monte Pellegrino, just outside of Palermo.

I was a bit surprised when I showed this photograph to my wife this morning and she said that she had seen it already. After all, I just took it yesterday afternoon, and developed and scanned it last night after she had already gone to bed. But she is convinced that I have taken this picture before.

Now, I know that I haven’t taken this exact photograph before, but she brings up a good point. I spend an awful lot of time walking the streets of Brooklyn looking for interesting sidewalk scenes. This one caught my eye, like many of the scenes I photograph, because of some interesting geometric details: the vertical line of the window and the door on the left, the twin satellite dishes, the checkmark made by the sign and its shadow and the door that floats just above it. This is one of the reasons I love the view camera—it forces you to take your time and allows you to be very precise in arranging the scene. It’s not just about the lines and shapes and tones that make up the picture; there is something a bit melancholy here in the sagging roof and drooping wires and dirty stucco that says something about this neighborhood and its place in the world.

One of the things I often do in my pictures is empathize with inanimate objects. It has to do with how I see the landscape, and how I put together a picture. I won’t take a picture unless I can find some kind of connection, some kind of personality in the objects I am photographing. To me, this is a photograph full of possibilities, and I could take a hundred more like this and find something new in each one. To most people, though, it’s probably just a picture of the side of a building. One of many I have taken, which probably isn’t all that different than the work of a lot of other photographers.

I guess I am trying to bridge the gap between how I see my own work and what the rest of the world sees. When one of my professors tells me that I am printing too dark, I bristle. It’s one thing if that were a technical issue, but as an artistic decision I feel that it’s necessary to stand by my work, even if it isn’t a decision that makes everyone happy.

Which brings me to my final question: how much of your art is driven by personal, creative goals, and how much do you let the others influence what you do?

People insist that I will like dancing if I just give it a try. Or cilantro. “How could anyone hate cilantro?”, they ask. I say, at 31 years old, there are a few things I do know: I don’t like to dance, I don’t like cilantro, and I prefer to photograph landscapes. So this is what you get when a landscape photographer takes a self portrait.

I was taking this photograph in a somewhat out-of-the-way spot in Central Park yesterday when a tourist with a point-and-shoot digicam walked by. He saw me setting up my shot, stood right next to me, pointed his camera right where mine was pointed, snapped a pic, checked his LCD, and walked away without ever saying a word. While it’s entirely possible that he might have spotted this exact scene had I not been there, I suspect that he saw me with my fancy pants camera and assumed that I knew what I was doing. I would love to see how that shot came out for him.

Another from Philadelphia. More on the way as soon as I can develop it.

PS: Sorry if the site looks a little screwy right now, I just updated the stylesheet. Try refreshing and see what happens. If you still see weirdness, please let me know.