Last fall two old friends and I did a rapid road trip from Savannah out to the mountain west and back, our “Go West Old Man” tour. This last spring, March and April, I posted several blogs about the trip, tied to portfolios/galleries posted on my website.
Organizing a grouping of images based on some shared aspect is useful (thus galleries based on location-State/chronology/geography). Inevitably, in a total shoot of thousands of pictures, there will be some you really like, but that just don’t fit easily into any of the groupings.
This is one of those, an accidental find of a classic diner. I have several of these unicorns I’m calling “Outakes” which I will be sharing in the next few weeks.
Mary and Wiley Sanderson at his 90th Birthday Party
“Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Dylan Thomas
Yes, this photograph is supposed to look like this, and no, it is not out of focus. In fact, everything in the photograph, from closest to farthest, is in exactly the same focus, because this was made with a pinhole optic, not a lens which would bend the light. By refracting the light with a lens we can make a selected distance much sharper, but then every other distance will be softer, the further from the focus point, the softer it will be.
Some might say that with smaller apertures on the lens we can make multiple distances sharp using greater depth of field. Not so. We can create the illusion of relative sharpness because of the “circles of confusion,” but I’m not going there.
I have mentioned my mentor Wiley Sanderson several times in this blog. Throughout my life I have had good teachers, formal and not. Sanderson was different. He was a hard, demanding teacher, the toughest I ever had, and I learned more from him than anyone I’ve ever met, except my parents, sister, and Barbara.
Here at his 90th birthday party I learned he had Alzheimer’s, but was assured he was doing well, contented, smiling, and happy. That was just wrong. If anyone was going to rage against the dying of the light I always thought it would be him.
So much student work at the beginning of his course sequence was done with pinhole, and most of his personal work explored so many possibilities of that approach. I don’t mean an oatmeal box with a needle hole punched in it. The pinholes we and he made used precision drilled apertures, giving us an accurate f stop and allowing a calculated exposure.
It seemed appropriate to use a pinhole to photograph him.
“And you are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today And then one day you find ten years have got behind you” “Time” Pink Floyd
The first thing she said was, “The barrels were so much larger then.”
I see my daughter and grand-kids infrequently. When my granddaughter first visited River Street Sweets she was about 5 and blown away, paralyzed by indecision. Twenty two years later, as we stepped out onto River Street she remembered the shop and wanted to go back to re-create the photo. We sort of did, here with her “baby” brother on her right (he missed the first visit by 4 years) and partner on her left, filling a bag, again.
Elaine Longwater, an old friend, passed away recently. She was independent and free-spirited with a big, generous heart, a strong business woman and a fine artist.
I don’t remember when we first met, but in the early 80s we were both part of a photo-centric group of friends. I had just moved back home after a year and a half working on a road crew, doing exploration drilling for lignite coal, and was looking for something, which I still can’t articulate.
I was spending a lot of time then walking along the Diamond and Shipyard Road causeways, photographing the marsh, looking for some kind of insight, maybe a bit like Thomas Wolfe’s longing for “A stone, a leaf, an unfound door….” (“Look Homeward Angel”) How elemental, how simplified can a composition be and still be dynamic?
Elaine’s home was a modest cottage on a large, wooded lot with enormous azaleas and camellias, fronting on a tidal creek with a long marsh view, on Burnside Island, at the end of Shipyard Causeway. It is a restful place, always seeming just on the edge of wildness, with the ebb and flow of water in the creek, and the light defining and redefining the landscape, ceaseless reminders the world is bigger than us.
She gave me an open invitation to go there anytime, whether anyone was home or not, to just hang, or photograph. I even did some oyster roasts, and there is no better roast environment than a chilly fall evening on a riverbank, on the marsh, with a big roaring fire.
It became a playground of sorts, a place where I could experiment, technically and aesthetically. I could try stuff just to see what it would look like. It didn’t have to be good, or satisfy client or critic. Failure is a big part of learning; there I was free to do that, and learning is so much easier when you are having fun.
We had some fun. We made some art. We made some memories. RIP Elaine.
