savannah photographic workshop

Just…DON’T. Whatever the question is, whatever the issue is, the answer is, “No.” “Don’t.” “Ever.”

Quay Street lines one side of Portree Harbour, on Loch Portree. The water side gives access to boats, and offers moorings. Opposite are old masonry buildings repurposed for inns, cafes, and shops, prettified to target the tourist trade. It’s a narrow street, mostly pedestrians, but also providing access for pick ups and deliveries, loading and unloading. As someone who lives in the heart of a popular travel destination, I understand the impulse to post this warning. Someone once gave me a bumper sticker that said, “If we call it tourist season, why can’t we shoot them?” I thought it was funny; some tour operators did not. In today’s world, maybe it isn’t.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Without intending to pat my intelligence on the back, travel is a conflict I struggle to resolve. I love visiting places I have not seen, and returning to some that I have, but the industrial scale of tourism which has inundated Savannah sometimes makes me wish others would just stay home. I’m appalled when I see a horde of photographers in a scrum at an iconic but fragile landscape, but then I’ve photographed some of those places and shared those pictures and may be culpable for helping create the mob. I don’t know why anyone would want nearly the same photo hundreds of others have already made, often better, or at least with better light, but then I have hundreds of photos of the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame.

The best I’ve come up with so far is to try to behave as respectfully and unobtrusively as I can, although I don’t always succeed. And when working with guides, pay attention to the way they interact with the community–are they part of it, or just using it as a commodity? Tip accordingly.

For more photos, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index

What We Leave Behind, Redux:

Claxton, about an hour’s drive west of Savannah, is where my antecedent family has lived since the Revolutionary War.  Several years ago I drove there for a cousin’s funeral.  Some other cousins also attended the service, taking time to clean up a family plot in the Hagan cemetery.  Although I think I was the only one there senior enough to remember attending the old family reunions that happened the first (or second?) Sunday of every June, we got to talking about that long gone event.

We (Mom, Dad, my sister, and I) would drive up there on the Sunday morning, maybe directly from church, to participate in a potluck meal.  The location was always “Uncle Herschel’s” to me; the residents at the old house were my father’s uncle and his wife.  We’d drive down a dirt road until we came to the house, alongside the road, as the road continued on to agricultural fields.  Large planks would be set up on sawhorses in front of the house and the “table” might have been 75 feet long or more, loaded, groaning, with food in wide varieties of fried chicken and potato salad, lots of overcooked vegetables, and every kind of pie and cake you can imagine. (I was young and small then, so my estimates of size may be questionable, but not the sense of abundance.)

A local attendee at the funeral told us Uncle Herschel’s house was still there, and how to find it.  Leading a cousin caravan, I drove down the old dirt road and at some point knew we had gone too far, without seeing the house.  Backtracking, we found it mostly hidden by overgrowth.  Pushing my way past the brush, I wandered through the forgotten home.

The “Old Home Place” was an unpainted clapboard building with a deep front porch that extended across the entire width of the house.  Inside was a central hallway with two rooms off either side, extending out the backdoor with an elevated walkway to a cooking room separated from the main house, to keep the heat and fire away from the living quarters.  That walkway almost certainly led to the outhouses as well.  Somewhere along the way someone had added indoor plumbing—a kitchen and bathroom.  And then somewhere along the way the last residents left, discarding some of the detritus we all accumulate.

I’ve created a new gallery on my website with additional photos shot there and included a copy of an old photograph showing the house in the background, with my dad’s generation massed where the food table was normally laid.  Dad is the cool cat seated 6^th from the left, in a sea of starched white, wearing the plaid shirt and two-toned shoes.  His grandparents Thomas Alfred Durrence (1831-1893) and Elizabeth Grice Durrence (1838-1922) owned the farm leading up to the Civil War, owned slaves, went through the war and Reconstruction; my Great Grandmother Elizabeth would have lived through WW I, and my dad would have been 5 years old the year she died; he would have known her.

“Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’
Into the future….”  Steve Miller Band

To see the Old Home Place Gallery, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index/G00001ZvD4inIsYE

What We Leave Behind:

A couple of weeks ago I received an email from a college friend about an estate sale in Athens, speculating that it might be the leavings of Wiley Sanderson, our professor, mentor, and tormentor, from many years ago (the early 1970s) in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Georgia. (GO Dawgs!)  He had passed away several years back.

If you have been fortunate to work within a creative lifestyle, and have survived at that for long, you probably had a mentor at some point who gave you the technical and intellectual tools.  That’s who Wiley was for me.  I’ve learned much from many teachers over the years, but Wiley looms the largest.  He was the antithesis of some kind, grandfatherly sort you might choose for a mentor; he was a hard and demanding taskmaster who pointed you in a direction and then insisted you think and do the work.  He was sure of the rightness of his directions and offered little compromise to anyone.  One of the signs he kept posted in the communal student darkroom was, “Most people would rather be ruined by praise than improved by criticism.”  He was committed to improving us.

An Estate Sale is the ultimate and final ignominy, the redistribution of all the accumulations of a lifetime, minus any personal value one may have attached to them.  My friend and I drove up for the sale, a pilgrimage to remember the man, and to see if there might be some memento of him each of us might want to bring home.  I did get several prints, and some books. And I remembered that what he also left behind, of immeasurable value, is the legacy of all the young voices he influenced.

Another Georgia icon lost this week—Vince Dooley.  I’m not really a sports guy, never played, so I had no direct connection, but I love Georgia football and have him to thank for many emotional autumn seasons ranging from agony to ecstasy.  It was always a little reassuring to know he was still in Athens.  RIP Vince.

For more photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index

FARAWAY PLACES

“Faraway places
With strange soundin’ names
Faraway over the sea
Those faraway places
With the strange soundin’ names
Are callin’, callin’ me”

Songwriters: Alex Kramer / Joan Whitney

It was the last night of my first trip abroad, and near the end of the first trip Barbara and I would take together. The wanderlust I had only experienced with books, TV, and movies was a real thing now, inescapable; I was firmly ensnared on the travel hook. 36 years later Barbara and I are still traveling together, through life, and to some of those faraway places, with strange sounding names. A couple of years after this trip my work began including a lot more travel, and that, combined with personal trips, has led me to 48 states and 45 countries. That doesn’t sound like much when you consider there are almost 200 countries in the world, but we continue to work on expanding our list.

A few years ago I found a postcard pinned to a bulletin board backstage at a performing arts theater where we were teaching. It said, “The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you: they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.” (Wade Davis) A couple of lessons I’ve learned from all that wayfaring are that people all over the world are more alike than different, and that they can invent an almost infinite variety of workable solutions to the same or similar problems. So now, whenever I see a ship heading out the Savannah River to ports unknown, it is a romantic image to me, and makes me think of lines from “Moon River” written by a Savannah favorite son, Johnny Mercer:

“Moon river, wider than a mile
I’m crossing you in style some day
Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker
Wherever you’re goin’, I’m goin’ your way

“Two drifters, off to see the world
There’s such a lot of world to see”

I have created a new gallery on my website with the photos from the beach that last evening. To see that go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index/G0000IFLBBLC_7j4

“16 feet per second per second” is a formula I remember from high school physics. I don’t really get the math, but I understand the idea is to calculate the acceleration of a falling object starting from an at-rest position. This is, of course, theoretical, and does not include factors such as air resistance. Galileo, an astronomer-physicist-mathematician-engineer, in an apocryphal story, in the late 1500’s, supposedly dropped two spheres of differing mass from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa to show that acceleration was a constant, disputing Aristotle’s theory that objects of a larger mass would fall faster because of gravity. If someone tried to replicate that particular experiment today, with the sea of visitors standing around the Tower, someone would likely be badly injured, or worse. As we walked onto the plaza surrounding the Tower, Cathedral, and (not shown) Baptistery, we noticed some odd contorting behavior from randomly scattered people. Since this was long before the advent of Flash Mobs, we did not have that as a quick-to-mind explanation, but soon realized it was individuals, usually with an assist from a friend, trying to use a camera and forced perspective to compress their position photographically with the Tower and appear to be holding it up, or trying to right it. My attempt was to seem to be sitting, leaning back against it. (Of course we did photos too.) One factoid I learned is the Baptistery building was necessary (for baptisms) because in the Middle Ages anyone not christened was prohibited from entering the Cathedral, and my favorite lesson from Galileo is that you can be judged a heretic, and still be right, but it might take 350 years to set the record straight. “e pur, si muove”

For more photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index

I love olives, and I’ve worked my way to the bottom of many a martini, to that prize nestling in the perfect v shape, in the only style of glass appropriate to that particular refreshment. I like them whole or pitted, gin-soaked or not, with or without pimento stuffing, seldom with blue cheese or almond stuffing and never, ever that in a martini. I love chocolate, too, but a Chocolate Martini is an abomination. In today’s world of infinite options, one must maintain some standards. Somewhere in the ancestry of every urban dweller is someone who was the bridge from country to city. For me, that was my parents. They grew up in rural 20’s, 30’s and 40’s America, which was much more remote than rural America today, and were tempered by the Great Depression and World War. Just the communication technologies alone blur the lines between those regions now, but Mom’s and Dad’s families would only listen to the radio for a carefully calculated amount of time, to conserve the batteries. Neither Mom nor Dad finished school, Dad (the oldest son of 7 kids) dropping out in the 7th grade to help work the farm, and Mom (middle child of 8) quitting in the 10th to help take care of her siblings. So the table I sat at growing up offered a basic meat and potatoes diet; nothing exotic like olives or stinky cheeses (I love those also, the stinkier the better), but they knew where every food item came from, the time and labor it took to produce it, and what (sometimes bloody) process it went through in becoming our meal. I didn’t and I don’t, except in the most general way. If there is an apocalypse and I survive the initial impact, I will almost certainly poison myself or starve to death because of that gap in my education. So maybe it’s understandable that when we passed the first olive grove I had ever seen, and with fruit on the trees, I could not resist plucking one and popping it into my mouth to taste a really fresh olive (I understand now that may be oxymoronic). I was lucky to not chip a tooth; it was hard as stone. It may be a character flaw that even all these years later I don’t know how olives get from that to delicious, but I’m grateful that when I go to the supermarket to harvest my olives, someone does know how to prep them for me.

For more photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index

I had been wanting a leather bomber jacket for awhile, and heard Florence was a great place for leather goods, so my quest, when I got there, was to see “David,” the Uffizi, and find a jacket I liked, with some random wandering the streets in between. We were staying just outside the city and when we drove in on our first morning, I grabbed the first parking space I saw. Immediately, we saw a leather goods shop right next to our parking space. They had a jacket style that seemed exactly what I was looking for, but only one in my size. It was the first place we shopped and I was reluctant to commit without looking around some more, so we spent the rest of the day shopping, but never found anything even close. First thing the next morning we went straight to the shop, but no parking was nearby, so I dropped Barbara off and drove on until I found a space. A few minutes later, as I entered the shop, Barbara’s face and the shake of her head told me right away that it was gone. The saleswoman, in halting English, told me how sorry she was, but that a customer had come in after us the day before and bought it. Knowing I would not be happy with anything else at that point, we concentrated on the rest of our casual itinerary. I don’t know if the museum layout is the same today, but when we went into the Accademia Gallery, from the lobby, we stepped into a dark hallway and at the other end he stood there, spectacular, glowing in a pool of light. Slowly, as our eyes adjusted to the low light in the hallway, we could see five of Michelangelo’s Slave sculptures, raw and muscular and more powerful in some ways than the polished, finished “David” that he had created earlier in his life. The Uffizi, the food, the wine, walking the streets–it was all so good that my disappointment over the jacket gradually receded. Three months later, when I opened my Christmas present from Barbara, it was the jacket. In the few minutes it had taken me to park the car she had bought it, arranged shipping, and coached the clerk, without benefit of any Italian language, on how disappointed to act. Even thirty six years later, I have never been able to surprise her so well.

For more photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index

I have a pretty good sense of direction. That, combined with a good, large scale, Michelin map, and I can navigate my way with little difficulty, a handy skill in the days before GPS tools were commercially available. For the drive from Venice to Florence though, I decided to take a more casual approach, just pointing in the general direction of Florence, and figured road signs along the way would keep me going, nominally, in the right direction. That worked pretty well for a while, staying on two lane blacktop for a more interesting drive than the autostrata would have been. Slowly, the road began to narrow, and the center line disappeared, but I expected that to be temporary and that that trend would reverse itself at some point. When the asphalt ended and the road turned into a dirt track I had to acknowledge that, even in Italy, all roads do not lead to Rome, or Florence in this case. I had the map. but now I did not know where I was, so it didn’t help much. About the time the road turned into a rut, I noticed a tavern next to the road, and if I must ask for directions, then a bar seems like a good, dual purpose place for that. I went in and asked, but of the several patrons hanging out, no one spoke English, and I did not speak Italian (still don’t), but 5-6 guys came out to the car, spread the map on the hood and carried on an incomprehensible (to me) conversation, all pointing in different directions. That didn’t help much and I imagine I just backtracked the paved road until I found some better signage, but before leaving I went back into the bar and somehow made myself clear to the barman that I wanted a bottle of red wine. He reached into a bin of empty wine bottles, pulled one out, rinsed it out, and filled it from a tap on a keg along the back of the bar. He jammed a cork into the top and charged me the equivalent of $1. It was delicious, but I suspect that had as much to do with context as it did with the grape. The event reminded me how important it is to just go get lost sometimes.

It was a rainy night in Venice, and my 39th birthday. It was not a heavy rain, but enough to clear the streets and make the place feel deserted. The dark corners of the city had a mysterious air, like scenes from a Cold War era espionage movie set in eastern Europe. We had just the one afternoon and evening to visit before heading to Florence the next morning, and after doing some aimless rambling to get a feel for the place, we realized it was getting close to closing time for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and we were too far away to walk there in time. We had also intended to take a gondola ride (cliche that it is, you have to do it at least once), so we hired the first boatman we could find and asked him to take us to the museum. Going by canals was a much more direct route. He took us through narrow waterways and then across the Grand Canal, putting us out onto the side of the museum facing the canal. We stepped over a small fence and crossed the patio, stopping to admire the Marino Marini statue of “The Little Horseman” with its removable phallus, and then stepped into the galleries. We rushed through to see as much as we could before closing and then left through the main door where we noticed there was an entrance fee we had missed with our “alternate” gateway. A little more ambling and we found a place to have a nice Birthday dinner. We sat outdoors, in a fabric-tented space and listened to the rain. I remember a vignette of a man running by with his coat pulled over his head, heading for shelter. The restaurant was empty so the maitre’d shooed away our waiter (who spoke no English) and waited on us himself, entertaining us with tales of his time in America working on a cruise ship. Earlier in the day I had bought a yellow bow tie with a paisley pattern (I don’t know why; I almost never wear bow ties) so I went to the Men’s Room and put it on, to dress up a bit for the evening. After Chateaubriand for Two, and a fabulous dessert (I only remember it was something chocolate), we finished our visit with a late night stroll through the Piazza San Marco. A little rain never hurt anyone.

For more photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index

Although the photographer seen here is Barbara, it does not follow that the person crawling up to peer over the edge of this mountain is me. Nope. I can see what’s NOT there from back here, thank you. We were continuing our first trip, traveling from Liechtenstein (see last week’s post, https://savannahphotographicworkshop.com/) back through Switzerland and into northern Italy, making our way toward Venice. Along our route there was a spot with a cable car up to the top, for skiing in the winter (if you are crazy), and sightseeing when there’s no snow. We rode up to check it out. Wow! My experience of mountains had, at that point, been limited to the Smokies and the southern Appalachians. I don’t think I had ever been above the tree line, and if so, not by much. When we stepped out of the cable car (about 3000 meters up), there was a very large sign, in four languages, that said, essentially, if you die, it’s not our problem. Walking out to explore, we heard a sound, a song, flowing gently in the wind. Seeking that out, we found a group of nuns (the black clad group in the background) conducting a rite. Barbara is Catholic and she said it was a Jubilee Celebration for one of them; I’ll defer to her greater knowledge of that sort of thing.

For more photos, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index