Finding a Style

Tower, 2010

I know I’m sounding like a broken record, or at least someone making much ado about nothing. But putting these thoughts about personal photographic style in writing helps me think things through. So I’ll have to beg your patience as I do it once again.

Some people have such consistently practiced styles that merely hearing their names brings to mind a specific subject, tone or visual style. If you hear the name Gregory Crewdson, you know it’s going to be a meticulously staged and lighted tableau. If you think of Joel Meyerowitz, you think of exquisitely colored large format photographs.

I’ve spent far more time than any right-thinking person should figuring out how to describe, or even identify, my own photographic style. I probably wouldn’t be so obsessed with this except that when you enter juried competitions you have to write an artist’s statement. I’ve seen some really bad artist statements and I’ve seen others that genuinely enhanced my ability to enjoy and understand what I was looking at. I just never could write one for myself that I thought sounded like I had a single coherent thought in my mind.

When I asked a few friends to tell me if there was a consistent element to my photography, my friend Christine thoughtfully answered by saying that my photographs:

“…are clean, clear and often feature dramatic colors and architectural details. There’s a classic, even ‘New England Yankee’ feel to his choice of subject, color and style.”

Recently I’ve been talking more about trying to make photographs that have familiar starting points, but which really aren’t ultimately about the thing that was the starting point. Well, I think I may be getting closer to describing this in more articulate, if stolen, language.

The other day I listened to author Joseph Skibell and his editor, Elisabeth Scharlatt of Algonquin Books, describe how Skibell’s first novel went from being something in his imagination to being a book on a bookshelf.

How A Blessing on the Moon became a success is one of those stories that inspires writers to dream big, to get up earlier in the morning or stay up later at night writing out of the belief that John Grisham-like success can really happen overnight if you just try hard enough.

Skibell’s experience is unusual in that he finished the manuscript for his book one month, found an agent the next and had a publisher and contract by the end of the third month. It’s even more remarkable because the novel is about the Holocaust, a subject that’s been covered before in hundreds, maybe thousands of books. I mean, why do we need another Holocaust novel?

Here’s why, said editor Scharlatt:

“What caught my eye was that it’s about a subject you’ve seen before and thought you knew. But this book brought an entirely new way of looking at that familiar subject.”

I really like the way Ms. Scharlatt says this. So I hope she won’t mind if I adopt it as part of my artist’s statement, something to the effect that I’m trying to show you something new about something that you thought you already knew all there was to know about.

The two “Tower” pictures, above and below, are good examples. The subject is the signature tower of our local convention center. The picture below is what it really looks like. The picture above is my impression of it, an impression far closer, I like to think, of what the architect was envisioning.

Tower (the literal version), 2010

Cradock

Buds, 2005

In the spring of 2005, during a visit to the Courthouse Gallery in Portsmouth, Virginia, I saw a display about two of Portsmouth's neighborhoods, Cradock and Truxton, that had been built just after World War I for workers at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard (which is actually in Portsmouth, but is so named to distinguish it from the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, which is located in New Hampshire).

Truxton was for black workers. It was simple, just houses built close to one another. There were few amenities. Cradock, on the other hand, was for white workers and their families. It was conceived and designed by the same architects who designed the New York Stock Exchange, and had all the amenities workers and their families, many of whom had migrated from Appalachia in search of steady work, might need, including a place where residents could skin and render rabbits. Befitting a place with close ties to the sea, the basic layout of Cradock was in the shape of an anchor. There's a historic marker at the front of the neighborhood that proclaims Cradock to have had America's first strip shopping center.

Between the 1920s and early 1960s, as wars and conflicts kept the shipyard busy and work plentiful, Cradock was a proud working class community. Some young people who grew up there followed their fathers and grandfathers into the shipyard. Others distinguished themselves in the professions, business and the arts.

But the racial segregation that initially defined Cradock eventually gave way to racial integration, a bridge too far for some long-time Cradock residents. The same "white flight" that emptied many inner city neighborhoods during the 1950s and 1960s also emptied many of Cradock's residences.

By 2005, when I first visited, Cradock was down and out. The majority of its homes and apartments were in very poor condition. Its churches--there were once churches for just about every Protestant denomination--were losing members and, in at least one case, closing. Crime had become such an issue that the police set up a substation right in the middle of the neighborhood. The sincere efforts of a few hardy long-time residents, a small number of sweat equity investors and a growing population of gays, lesbians and Wiccans were having a hard time overcoming the momentum of decades of slum lords, deferred maintenance and general decay.

None of this deterred me. In fact, I hoped that in my exploration of Cradock I might witness the neighborhood's re-birth, inasmuch as Cradock, if restored, would be very much in line with the late 20th Century concept of New Urbanism. Each week for several months I spent afternoons walking the neighborhood, getting to know residents and taking pictures. Most were initially skeptical of me--the first question I typically got from people was, "You ain't a cop, are you?"--and I was careful not to arouse their suspicions any more than a guy with a camera might. During one visit, I encountered Portsmouth's city manager, who was so intrigued by my interest that he tried to sell me Cradock's roof-less and flooded movie theater. Over the weeks I got to know enough of the leaders of Cradock's various circles that my presence was no longer questioned. Things were going so smoothly that I even naively imagined that my photos of Cradock might become my homage to Bruce Davidson's 1960s essay on Harlem.

But the more time I spent in Cradock, the deeper my understanding of the neighborhood's problems became. I wondered, "Why are so many of the young men in this neighborhood not working?" and "Why are so many young people not in school, and why do so many of them, the boys especially, always look drugged up?" As I started asking these questions, some of the more criminally involved members of the community I'd gotten to know were beginning to realize that I was seeing more than they wanted me to see.

As cool spring breezes gave way to hot humid summer temperatures, tempers started to flare in Cradock. Domestic disturbances and racial friction spilled out into the streets. Gun shots typically heard only in the evening started being heard in the daytime, sometimes while I was present.

In late May, one of the neighborhood crime bosses sent a signal to me that I would do well to stop pointing my camera at some of the things going on in Cradock. By this time I had finally pieced together the answers to my questions. The answers weren't pretty, and just knowing them was putting me at personal risk.

The braver photographer would have persevered, perhaps even gone deeper into the criminal life of the neighborhood. I chose to take a break to take care of a personal health issue. When I returned a year later, the neighborhood had declined even further and many of the players I'd met in 2005 were gone. I was too depressed by what I saw to continue the project.

Over the years, many people who live or grew up in Cradock have come upon my Cradock photo essay and written kind notes thanking me for showing what some of their old haunts look like today and telling stories and filling in details about some of the places shown. There continue to be people living in Cradock who are working gallantly to breathe life and health back into the neighborhood. The City of Portsmouth has prepared a redevelopment plan for Cradock, but it seems unlikely that it will ever be implemented.

The full essay can be seen here.