A Twofer with Jeff.

Yesterday was one of those rare days in the darkroom when I finished more than a single print. A second print in one day seems like a gift. 

Harold Jones used to say that you should be able to make a decent print in an hour, using just a couple of sheets of paper. It seems like I could do that twenty years ago. Maybe my standards were much lower then.

At any rate, yesterday was one of those experiences of flow in the darkroom. It was a day when I felt like I was watching the prints make themselves. I just had to get out of their way.

Jeff is the father in this image. He is another work colleague. One of my favorite people that here, to be honest. He is an earthy, free-wheeling guy who would much rather poke you in the eye than take things seriously. Which makes him a lot of fun when work gets tense. He has a gift for deflating self-aggrandizement.

He is also one of a couple of fathers I know who have been through a recent divorce. In an effort to explore the experience of fatherhood, he seemed like an important person to photograph.

I met up with Jeff and his kids on a bitterly cold January weekend. It was the kind of weather that keeps you indoors for the month. I was struggling with my own son. I had serious cabin fever. It is hard to get my son off a computer even when the weather is nice. Getting him out seemed hopeless in the weather we were experiencing, and it was starting to wear on me.

Jeff didn't seem bothered, though. He had taken his kids to a boat and camper show. It was a perfect situation for a parent in the winter. His kids would run from boat to camper as their interest held out. They would scamper through and claim bedrooms for themselves, check out the bathrooms, and then move on. It was a brilliant bit of parenting. A camper might as well be a playground when your kids are young. The funny thing was, Jeff wasn't the only parent who thought of doing this. The entire convention center was filled with families. Parents watched as their kids wrought utter destruction on unsuspecting boats and RVs.

One of the lessons I learned during this project was to start thinking about composing from the back of the image, and moving forward. I think it is a side effect of Instagram that we look at images on small screens at a small scale. We forever see the subject, the person photographed for example, but have a harder time seeing the background. There's a missed opportunity when your app makes all of your images square. The environment is as much a part of a portrait as the person photographed.

I was working hard, during the afternoon I made this image, to think about re-framing a subject using graphic elements from the background of the image. I was trying to compose the important shapes of the negative space first, and the move forward, filling the scene like a director places actors on a stage. This is something that David Morano was pounding into my head the whole semester I was working with him. It felt like a huge leap.

In this image, I worked to position Jeff's daughter into the square formed by the back of the camper in the background. The head-slapping gesture she is making leaps out of the contact sheet from this roll. It was a fleeting gesture. In this image, it reads as a comment about her father. Maybe that isn't fair, but it is a liberty worth taking. 

I also wanted to steal a little from Sally Mann and use the contrast of her pale skin tone to make her the center of attention. She kind of leaps out from the shadowy background of the camper. It is also an interesting juxtaposition with the general dark swarthiness of Jeff in this image. How do kids survive us as we parent them on long afternoons?

A day when you watch prints make themselves.

Tim was the first father I contacted. It became clear that this project needed to evolve into photographing other fathers with their children. Tim seemed kind of ideal because he is a work colleague. We are on good terms. His family deals with many of the same issues mine does. There are two professionals in the family, both teaching college and juggling teaching schedules. Tim said he spends most afternoons with his son while his wife is working. That's not exactly my schedule, but it feels familiar. There are a lot of long stretches of childcare that get mixed into Tim's week.

I walked away from the session with an important insight: give your portrait subjects some time to forget that you have a camera. The first images from this session feel very formal and stilted. Eventually, Tim's son just got tired of being on his best behavior and let his guard down. The playfulness of the moment was rewarding to document. I find that beyond photographing, I want to bring moments like this back to my own parenting. That's been one of the subtle rewards of this work. I get to observe other fathers in action and reflect on my own family.

The image was taken in January. In Minnesota, that means that conditions for making an exposure are marginal, at best. Tim's house has a huge, lovely picture window, which helped. Most of these images were taken at extreme settings; something like f/2 at 1/15. Not quite fast enough to hand-hold and not quite enough depth of field, even with a wide lens. So if you get your nose up to this print, Tim's face is pretty gauzy. Combined with an expression caught at an odd moment, he seems kind of far away from the scene. 

The other lesson from this afternoon was more profound. As I was leaving, Tim quite politely said "No, don't go. It's nice to have a conversation with another adult." 

It's easy to think that as photographers we are taking from the people around us. I walked into Tim's house needing an image to help a project grow - I certainly had an agenda. It hadn't occurred to me that the process of being photographed gives something back to the people in front of my camera. 

It might be just an afternoon of conversation that didn't revolve around Minecraft is nice, for a change. There might be something empowering about having someone step into your life, for a moment, with a camera. There might be some dignity in the experience of being in front of a camera, when a photographer seems genuinely interested in your life's experience. It's a question that is becoming more and more important to me. How can the act of photographing be an act of giving back to a friend, a stranger, or my community. 

The Great Re-Print of 2015

Yesterday was the first day of the great re-print of 2015. Actually, yesterday was the second day of the great re-print of 2015. Monday, the 6th of July was supposed to be the first day of said reprinting, but I left my negatives at home when I headed out for school. Jeff, my department chair, called me a "dumbass" when I told him what I had done.

I am just coming off of a sabbatical. It was an amazing experience. I took some graduate coursework from the art department at Mankato State University, including some graduate photography hours with David Morano. There's a lot to say about how positive the experience of working with David was for me. It will probably have to go into the sabbatical report and not a blog post. Suffice it to say that I had been very stuck as an image-maker for many years, and working with David was incredibly helpful in returning to making photographs.

Printing again in the darkroom at the Rochester Community and Technical College.

One of the things that David offered up as a challenge was to print black and white in the darkroom. I took him up on the challenge. At first it was a matter of pride. Over the course of the semester, though, it turned out to be a strong tonic. Working in the darkroom returns me to a place where I remember being excited about making images.

The last comments David had during our final meeting were essentially, "These are really nice and all, but you know they should probably be on a warmer toned paper." It struck me at the time that he was probably right.

In the next two months, I have to re-print and frame twenty-five images. It seems do-able.

Unless I am going to have more days like yesterday. 

The first day back in over a month of not printing. It. Kicked. My. Butt. It took me an hour to track down what caused this:

Contaminated developer, I suspect.

Best guess, the developer was contaminated somehow. At the end of the first hour, I dumped all of the chemistry I had just made, and started over. Problem solved. 

It took another couple of hours to come up with a print I could live with of this image of Matt and his son.

Over this course of the sabbatical, this body of images has evolved from images of my own family, especially my son, to images of fathers as they are spending time nurturing their children. 

Matt is a neighbor, and a friend of some friends, but not someone I know especially well. So it was a bit of a stretch to walk into his back yard for the first time and spend a really enjoyable late afternoon photographing. I really enjoy the process of landing in a situation like this. I get to make conversation with another dad while I am making the images. I am finding that I learn how other fathers approach childcare. I get to steal ideas about how to keep a kid engaged, playing and upbeat. For Matt, it's pretty easy. His son is at an age when the stuff in the garage is pretty interesting.

When I exposed this image, I was interested in framing Matt's son inside the window of his toy car. Matt had pushed the back seat of his own minivan out of the garage and was sitting on it. It seemed like framing his son in the car window set up a nice juxtaposition of a father in part of a grown up car and his son inside of a child sized car. There is something in that about modeling behavior and the beginnings of forming an identity. 

The Caddy...

The Cadillac, Los Alamos, New Mexico, 1996.

I found this article by Ken Hollings (link) on Salon in March that gets to the core of what fascinates me about my grandparent’s old neighborhood in Los Alamos.

From the article:

“Levittown’s original inspiration is the planned community created in secret at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to house the technicians and scientists of the “Manhattan Project” busily engaged in developing the first atomic weapon...Levitt developed the basic models and techniques for preparing low-cost suburban homesteads out of prefabricated units while fulfilling military housing contracts during the closing years of World War II when storage facilities, dormitories, and administrative buildings had to be built quickly, cheaply, and in vast numbers.”

While Hollings is writing about Oak Ridge as a precursor to Levittown and the suburban neighborhood, He might as well be writing about Los Alamos (which was also part of the Manhattan Project.) The neighborhood my grandparent’s lived in was built by government contractors. Residents could choose from three different floor plans. My aunt has joked that as a kid, she always knew where the bathroom was in a house she was visiting.

Hollings goes on to relate the “low-cost suburban homesteads” of Oak Ridge and Levittown to the greater cultural freak-out in the United States at the dawn of the nuclear age. He makes connections between this new, pre-fabricated architecture and flying saucers, the rise of the military-industrial complex, and the creation of the American Psychiatric Association.

These relationships are what drew me to photograph in Los Alamos in 1996. The vaguely prairie-style design of government subsidized housing quietly suggested that there was much more going on in the place than you could ever capture with a camera.

Go-Cart, Los Alamos, New Mexico, 1996.

My grandfather had a government job that he wasn't allowed to talk about. Most fathers in Los Alamos in the 1950's had government jobs that they weren't allowed to talk about. That is part of what makes Los Alamos kind of surreal. Los Alamos is Levittown on the mesa, or maybe the Stepford Wives on the high desert. There are world changing secrets kept behind closed doors, but you never get that sense driving down the street. 

My grandfather's generation did not seem to question it that much. He believed profoundly in what he was doing. If I had ever asked him if it was stressful to keep those kind of secrets, he only chuckled, I am sure. Keeping those kinds of secrets would have really eaten away at me. 

To relax, he over-engineered toys for his children. Solving a problem on a drafting table was his dearest expression of love. It must have also been deeply relaxing at the end of a day at work.

This go-cart was built for my mom and aunt. He designed the steering system and welded it together in his car-port. Originally, it had a battery powered engine on the back. My mother, as a young girl, yelled that it should go faster. Moments later, she drove it into a fire hydrant.

I played with the go-cart as a child. Every kid on the street played with it when I was a child. We would coast down the long hill of Manhattan Loop. There was no stopping the little car. My grandfather forgot to engineer brakes. Instead, you coasted to a stop or stuck out your feet and slid them on the ground. It is a miracle that no one ever backed out of their driveway and hit one of us.

Photographed in Plainview, but Elgin is where all the action is.

I sat up in the middle of the night thinking about Plainview, Minnesota. Plain-view. The name itself is a poetic challenge to a photographer to make an image that isn’t plain.

It had been a rough night of sleeping, because I had been processing a sort of challenge.

This spring, I will be taking nine credit hours of graduate art courses at Minnesota State University, Mankato. It’s part of a sabbatical. I met with a couple of faculty members there at the end of October to talk about registering for classes as a non-degree graduate student. David Morano, the photography instructor spent a lot of time looking at my work and then issued a sort of challenge. “I bet you couldn’t show up at a small town in Minnesota and make photographs of someone you don’t know.” Hence, a late night thinking about making photographs and approaching strangers for portraits. Plainview seemed like a good place to start.

I drove to Plainview early on Halloween morning and sat down for breakfast at Ma’s Cafe. It’s the kind of small town breakfast place where a lot of people come regularly to socialize. If you sit at a table long enough, someone strikes up a conversation just to find out why you are there.

Lois made a comment about my camera, and a request to make sure I got her good side. Which seemed like an invitation to ask if I could make her portrait. She was with Cheryl and Dennis, and all three were planning a night out a Polka convention at the Kahler hotel in Rochester later that night. Lois made the observation that Elgin, Minnesota is where all the action is. Elgin has three bars, a church, and a fire watch-tower. All three of my new acquaintances thought I needed to get down there to make interesting images.

After breakfast, I finished a roll of film walking through Plainview. Plainview is home to the Jon Hassler Theater, which is going to stop producing plays at the end of this month. It’s a shame, because small town arts organizations are amazing, and it’s sad to lose one when the time, energy or dollars run out.

I met Buzz in the lobby of the Theater and asked to make his portrait. Buzz is someone I’d like to photograph more, and I am working on some plans to get back and meet up with him.

After I finished the roll, I headed down to Elgin. I only found the bars, not the church. I walked inside the TKTK bar and asked permission to photograph. The owner thought it was pretty funny when I mentioned that Lois in Plainview said Elgin is where all the action is. I finished up another roll and headed home to develop my film and get ready for Halloween with my kid.

David’s challenge included the clause that shoot film and make prints in the darkroom. I was able to set aside some time that weekend and knock out a print of Dennis from the cafe.

Franklin and Bicycle, Los Alamos, New Mexico, 1996.

The Franklin had been the family car in the forties and fifties. It  made the trip to Los Alamos from Indiana. For most of my young life it  sat in the back yard in a metal shed under a couple of tall pine trees. Next to the shed was a frame of a home built RV that was started and never finished. The RV body was filled with rusting metal and scraps that had been saved as raw material for future projects. That part of the yard was a wonderful place to play as a kid. Luckily, no one ever ended up with tetanus or hantavirus. A few yards past the shed and  Franklin, the yard turned to scrub oak and boulders, and then it dropped off into a shear cliff at the edge of the Mesa. As a child, I thought the canyon went down forever. Looking at it on google maps, I am not so sure it was that deep.

My grandfather became know in the neighborhood as the guy who collected old bicycles. Every ten broken speed on the block ended up in the shed, along with the bikes that the family outgrew or left behind. 

The small bike in this image had been mine. It was a Christmas gift in 1976 or 77.  My cousins Beth and Leon inherited it at some point. My grandfather expected toys to get a couple of generations worth of use.

 A friend just told me he found the images "evidentiary" in the sense that Weegee's images blasted away at crime scenes with a similar flash. I appreciated the sentiment, although I don't think my images stand up to a comparison with Aurthur Fellig's. I don't get to claim any forethought on the question of lighting. I wish I had known more about off-camera flash then.

I was drawn to photograph there because I was haunted by my childhood memories of time spent in that house and around the city. In that way, maybe the strange lens of the Holga and the relentless blast of the on-camera flash makes sense. The images are about searching dark recesses and remembering in an imprecise way.

The Recumbent

For years, my grandfather would take a daily ride around Manhattan Loop. That was the street he and my grandmother lived on in Los Alamos, New Mexico.The bike he rode daily for years was a blue ten-speed touring bike with frayed tape on the drop-handle bars. My grandfather was a tall man, about six feet. The bike was huge as well.

As he got older, I don't think he felt comfortable on the the touring bike. He was fairly certain most drivers were out to kill cyclists.

He had been reading about recumbent bikes for a couple of years in the cycling magazines that were piled on the floor next to his brown leather recliner.  Being an engineer his entire life, he decided that the recumbent would make a great project. He could build his own, and he would feel a lot safer riding when he was sitting up and could see the cars coming at him on the street.

So he raided the shed in the backyard. The one with the old Franklin, which had been the family car when they first moved to Los Alamos in the fifties. The shed that was filled with deceased bicycles from neighborhood kids that met unfortunate accidents.

He drew up plans on his basement drafting board and eventually started brazing and painting until he had a ride-able recumbent. Eventually, the recumbent became my grandfather's daily riding bike.

His daily uniform was one of a dozen pairs of identical gray or white coveralls. Most pairs had a huge homemade patch on the back that my grandmother or aunt sewed on for him. The patches were usually an inside joke.  They said things like "Dow's Fixitorium." Some had a drawing of the Beechcraft Bonanza that he still kept at the Los Alamos airport, even though it had been decades since he could fly.

He spent another good decade riding around Manattan Loop each day on the new bike. As a teenager, when I would drive my mom up for thanksgiving dinner in a 1971 Volkswagon Beetle. We would sometimes pull in while he was doing laps.

The legs of his coveralls would flap in the breeze as he passed us. Then we would watch as a giant, reclining man continued down the hill sort of whistling and muttering at the same time. The huge oval patch on the back of his coveralls would disappear as he rounded the loop. A few minutes later he would come from the other direction. Ten times around the loop made a mile. Not bad for a man in his seventies.

Model Airplane, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1996.

When I am browsing a contact sheet, I never know what images are worth hanging onto and what images I need to let go of. Smarter photographers than I am say that in the current age of Instagram, the real trick is to learn how to edit images ruthlessly. Select only the best images to present publicly. The best photographers take plenty of terrible images. They just know how to keep them private.

This image seemed worth the time to scan and clean up. I can't tell if it should have been kept private. It may not survive the next round of editing to end up in a portfolio.  

My grandfather had built a model airplane, like the one pinned to the foam core in this image, when I was young. It had a rubber band powered propeller and was made with paper glued to a balsa wood frame. I loved flying it with him. It was a pretty flimsy toy to let a five-year-old play with, and by the end of the summer he had patched it so many times that none of the original paper was left.

I started putting together this model while I was working on an MFA in Albuquerque.  I was photographing my grandparent's home in Los Alamos on the weekends. In the course of visiting my grandparents, I kept thinking about that summer I spent with them when I was five years old. 

I was trying to find some life balance when I picked the model up at a hobby shop. I put it together to prove I could do it. My grandfather spent his youth building things and I never felt like I met his expectations of competence as a carpenter, mechanic, or photographer. Somehow his voice often shows up in my head expressing doubts. He kind of had a gift for doing that to the people around him. 

The Recumbent II

I went to graduate school a year after my mother died. I had wanted to be back in New Mexico for graduate school, and felt fortunate to be accepted to the photography program in Albuquerque. In addition to having long admired the program, It was a chance to be close to my family and I was pretty clear that any artwork I would be making would involve processing her life and the aftermath of her death.

Years after I left graduate school, I was trying to organize some negatives and I found this treasure trove of images I had made around Albuquerque and Los Alamos while I was in school. I had been visiting my grandparents in Los Alamos on weekends for a while, and had started photographing the city and their house with a Holga.

My grandfather was a larger than life figure. My grandmother called him a "complicated" man. Most of the images I took on those visits seemed to center around him and the fantastic projects he had engineered around the house in the forty years he had lived there.

The Holga images were mostly processed and put in a box along with their contact sheets. They didn't seem like graduate-school work; I felt like I was supposed to be doing things that were more important.

So when I found the box of images years later, there was a real sense of loss. The best, most honest work of those years had been ignored in a legitimate effort to just finish school and get on with living.

I've really felt compelled in the last year to finally do something with them. Here you go.