I’ve been making archival, carefully crafted fine art photographs in the Upper Valley for over 25 years, starting as a Dartmouth student in the darkroom in the basement of Robinson Hall. Through this period I’ve worked with a view camera and 4 x 5 inch film, medium format, in my own darkroom, and now I’m finding that with pigment-ink prints on fine art paper I’m getting (after long days) prints that surpass what I was able to pull after long days in the darkroom.
Although good technique and equipment may be important in conveying a strong statement, technique is in the service of the message, a means and not an end. The point is: can an image ring us like a bell, create a resonance with the world? The visual appearance of a finished piece is more like a trick to create that impact. The technology is in the service of the emotional experience, the connection with a bigger view of the world.
Many of these images are landscapes, mostly from exposures of light in New Hampshire and Vermont, but with a few distant situations in the mix. I’ve assembled this collection based mostly on a luminous quality of light, and also an interplay with the transience and impermanence of the world it shines on.
These are places near where I’ve lived; places I’ve connected with deeply, and a few places in my travels that have had resonance beyond “nice vacation.” Even the places I’ve lived very near, like Post Pond in Lyme NH, are more like the view from a moving train window than solid furniture in the room. To me it is not “that same old place down the road,” ever. The light, the situation; it’s all changing as fast as I can respond to it, both in connecting emotionally and in reacting photographically.
Photography and the view of impermanence end up being a collision of opposites, as manifest in this show. The photograph seems to freeze a moment; there is inherently a sense of stopping time. Of course, time did not stop. Really what we keep is a visual pattern, a world of its own, now with only an imaginary connection to the bigger world, which has gone on its way and changed. The contradiction at some level makes the experience of the impermanence deeper and more poignant, in an odd way. We see what was. We know it’s gone.
These images are of transient states, places that are no longer the same, fleeting light and atmosphere, snow, mist, and dew. A wall of Post Pond images represents Post Pond as more of a process than a thing. The same vantage points, the same place, but everything is different. Really, it’s the like this in every situation.