Waiting for the Sun

Time stands still, Winter Solstice 2015, County M, near Blue River, WI

"Color is the deeds & the suffering of light." Afternoon of the shortest day, Winter Solstice 2015

"Haven't I seen you round here before?" Gone the way of the lead sled, Hgwy 61, WI

Watch the skys, Central House Hotel December 2015.

Time waits for none

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phonography album of questions

Fall fireworks in a small town

WiscoSouthern engine slicing light

Rear of the Central House Hotel, home of the Gideon Bible & purportedly haunted. Priceless hotel bar.

Big Bayou Blue Heron, St Petersburg Florida

Cracker range, old Florida, Marion County

Entrance to Bald Bluff trail, Boscobel

Spring storm across the cornfields, Hgwy 18 W. of Cobb, Wisconsin

Cleaning up my phonography files. Square format Instagram edits- filter paintings would be a good description for these digitally mediated images. Thinking about creating a squarebook to see what language suggests itself as a narrative. Slicing light and putting it to paper now has an entirely different measure of process than in did carried out in darkrooms. And using a phone for capture…facility and facile have the same root. I find myself constantly measuring the weight of my intentions and quality of my focus (not just the lens’) as the fluidity & diversity of digital photographic media makes the significance of all images slippery. And the quantity immense. Thousands of instant images. Transitory. Unrooted, non local, a-historical, protean. Meaning runs off the surface, deliquescent, Daliesque.

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Maundy Thursday, Midwest

Maundy Thursday eve

Winter not quite finished with us, somber in mudseason.
Phonographic +1 exposure , desaturated.

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Wauzeka, 8 am

Wauzeka Wisconsin, February. Looking south 8am. Silence. #driftlessworld #landscape #rural #winter #phonography #smalltowns #quiet

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Blacksmith’s house

As if dropped from Deadwood S.D. into our Wisconsin River bottoms, I never tire of reimagining this building’s stories.

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Three Visions of St Francis

Summertime growing up in Villas, NJ lots of my friends’ families were Catholic, Irish or Italian, some German or Polish. Almost all were blue collar, factory & shipyard workers. Or they got by otherwise. Some stayed with grandparents. The blessed Virgin was ubiquitous: on dashboards, front lawns, jewelry, framed next to her Son in every dining room where the mother fed the neighbor kids as well as her own. Some kids went to St Raymond’s school on Bayshore Road, but most went back to Philly, where their real homes were; the Villas was for summer vacation, fresh air for the kids, breathing room for mom and the Villas Fishing Club on the bay for men- only. The boardwalk over in Wildwood for everybody with a car or bus fare.

Labor Day Weekend marked the end of summer firmly as a door closing. The following Monday morning the streets were silent, window blinds pulled down, driveways- twelve hours earlier festooned with wading pools, kids, grills, beer bottles & fishing gear, empty. A vacuous quiet descended. Left behind we were all watchers in this new found emptiness, watchful for artifacts of the prior occupants, for signs that summer had existed at all. Mary would stare dolefully back at us from within her blue robes at various locations throughout the neighborhood, daring our trespass.

And then there was St Francis, keeper of beasts & of nature, benevolent & compassionate. Guardian of the wildness inside us all and protector of the earth, he would keep watch along the bay all winter long, and ever after.

Three Visions of St Francis Guarding the Delaware Bay

Three Visions of St Francis Guarding the Delaware

Three Visions of St Francis Guarding the Delaware Bay

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Chasing Iconography Down the Road

Paul Vanderbilt & Alec Soth’s current Madison exhibits and accompanying text/audio and Frank Gohlke’s Thoughts On Landscape have me thinking about visual rhythms, algorithms and typologies.

Photos individual, paired, in series syncopate with what- anticipations, expectations, apprehensions?– in the viewer. And the resulting resonance renders them meaningful. Or.

The thing in itself, the subject without the photo, the photo without the viewer, retains meaning in situ independent of the intervening  eyes. Is it when the human attention drawn to the object of the len’s affection focusses deeply in that moment,  that the recognition of coincident, adjacent, harmonic- or dissonant– significance in the image(s) occurs? & Association liberates vision from its expectations.

And thinking too much impedes seeing:) A series of random views that made me stop and shoot during recent travels:

Umbrellas at Willow Vineyard, Cape May

Levitation. Seaport promenade, Manhattan (thanks to Liz S. for the tipoff!)

Wisconsin River Autumn, early morning

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