A Little More Chambord, S'il Vous Plait.

Chambord View, 2006

What do you do when you finally get to visit a place you’ve wanted to see and photograph since you were in 9^th grade French class, only to find the most photogenic parts of it in deep shadow?

Such was my experience visiting Chambord, King Francois I’s 440-room “hunting lodge.” Built over nineteen years during the early 1500s, Chambord is said to be the largest castle in the Loire Valley.

In the 1500s, the government had no fixed base. Wherever the king traveled, his court and government—some 2,000 people—followed. Chambord was a distinctly impractical place to live. Its high ceilings and large windows made heating impractical. Given the itinerant nature of the government, historians believe Chambord may never have had any more than temporary furnishings during Francois’ time.

Still, Chambord is a magnificent place with turrets and towers and the branch of a river re-routed around it. There’s a terrific double helix interior stairway that prevented persons headed up and down from having to work around each other. Though never intended to be a fortress, Chambord must have some sturdy underground spaces because the French government stored many of the treasures of the Louvre and other museums at there during WWII.

But none of this did me any good when I arrived on a bright and beautiful late spring morning. Chambord’s primary façade faces slightly northwest. I have no idea whether there was any intention this siting. But I do know that the deep shadow would made it difficult to take a decent picture of the façade until late afternoon.

Only we were scheduled to be somewhere else by late afternoon

I enjoyed the visit Chambord, but was determined to figure some way around the lighting challenge. While standing atop the castle and enjoying the view, I happened to look down and realized that the solution to my quandary was right at my feet.

One of the more interesting photographic tricks I’ve learned through the years is that when the traditional shots of something are too hackneyed or not possible, photographs taken from something can be even more interesting.

Everyone and his brother who ever visited Chambord has probably taken the photograph I’d hoped to take of the castles northeast façade. But it turns out that the shot I made of the chimneys and towers of Chambord, shown above, was much more interesting for having been shot from the castle rather than from the lawn out front.

Chambord Tower, 2006

Road Trip

A little Road Music, 2010

I had to go to Atlanta last week. Normally, this would involve a flight or two and an afternoon of waiting at the airport, going through security, jostling for overhead space and so on. But I had intermediate stops, so I decided to make a road trip of it.

We Bonneys are big fans of road trips. When you travel on planes, it’s all about the taking off and the landing. If all goes well, there’s not much to the in between. Road trips, on the other hand, get you where you’re going and throw in the opportunity for adventure along the way.

If you’re a fan of Larry McMurtry, you know that the sage of Archer City, Texas, is also a fan of road trips. He even wrote a book about it, Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways. I can’t say this is one of McMurtry’s best works. It’s mostly a meandering string of stray thoughts you’d have if you were driving and didn’t have anything better to think about. But if like McMurtry, this book will prove that even if he’s just talking about going for a ride the writing style can still be delicious.

McMurtry likes to rent big cars, stretch his legs and get out on the highway from time to time. His favorite roads are interstate highways. He doesn’t seem to care so much about where they go, just that he gets on the big highways and goes.

I’m more of a Blue Highways road tripper. Interstates will get you from place to place more quickly. But they’re too consistent and antiseptic and much more about speed than I usually want to be when I’m traveling. What’s the use of going somewhere, I reason, if you can’t see what it’s like along the way?

Traveling from Virginia Beach to Atlanta doesn’t give you too many options if you have to make the trip in a single day. You have a choice of interstates and the only stretch of state highway that offers any relief is a sad stretch that both starts and ends the trip. After that, you have either I-95, which follows the coast and requires a dogleg swing to the west once you get into Georgia, or I-85, which follows a southwesterly direction that if you stay with it’s various connections long enough will eventually land you in New Orleans.

My drive down I-85 was mostly uneventful, which isn’t necessarily bad, but still lived up to just about every adjective I can think of to describe dull interstate highway driving. I don’t drink coffee and can’t have sugary soft drinks. So I occupied myself on the ten hours down and the ten hours back listening to podcasts and music. Thanks to the podcasts, I’m an expert on a lot of things that took place last week, which is probably about where their relevance ends. (I did, though, listen to actor Michael Imperioli read a great Stephen King short story, “Popsy,” on Selected Shorts.

When I switched on the radio occasionally, I couldn’t seem to find much on the dial that didn’t sound so canned that it could been have played in any part of the country. I did listen for a few minutes to a Pentecostal sermon, something about carrying God’s luggage, but turned that off when I realized that I must have missed the important part about why God’s travel plans mattered to me.

A Study in Brown

A Study in Brown, 2010

My father used to refer to people who were moody or depressed as “a study in brown.” Dad was an upbeat kind of guy with a generally positive outlook, even if he didn’t know what the future held.

During my brief trip to Atlanta last week I stayed in a grand old apartment building that has been remodeled into a purportedly posh Midtown hotel. I say “purportedly” because although great attention went into the architectural renovation of this landmark building and the décor of its lobby and restaurant, the hallways and guest rooms were decidedly dull.

I booked my room on one of those Internet hotel sites that promises great discounts. I wouldn't have been surprised, therefore, if I'd ended up with a teensy room between an elevator and an ice machine, one of those rooms so small that you can stand in one place and do most everything you need to do. So I was surprised when my very reasonable rate bought me a spacious and comfortable former two-bedroom apartment. But as the photograph above shows, it must have been decorated by “a study in brown.”

The Story of Virgil Farley

Farley Mill, 2003

Virgil Farley's father built a peanut mill just after 1900. At its peak, the mill employed more than a hundred workers. After his father died Virgil took over and continued in his father's footsteps as a responsible community steward. When there was a compelling community need—say, a repair to the steeple of the Episcopal Church, a new piece of equipment for the rural free clinic, or school supplies for the children of migrant workers—the Farley Mill could be counted on to help.

Virgil’s greatest dream was that his son Rabe would take over the mill. But when Rabe returned from World War II, it was clear that his intentions did not include spending the rest of his life monitoring the purchase, processing and shipment of peanuts. He had no interest in the local Chamber of Commerce, town politics or the needs of the less fortunate. He appeared occasionally at church, mostly to please his mother. He ran with a fast crowd, popping between the state capital city and the family’s summer retreat at the beach.

In 1945, Rabe married the daughter of a prominent tobacco grower. Their first child, a daughter, was determined to be mentally ill when she was still a child. Rabe had the daughter secreted away to an institution in another state without notifying his wife, plunging her into a depression that never really lifted. When Virgil died, shortly thereafter, Rabe closed the mill as fast as was socially acceptable in a town where a goodly number of local people would be put out of work and many noble community causes would be deprived of their largest benefactor. He would have sold the mill, but the market was soft and his lack of business skills prevented him from recognizing opportunities when they did emerge. In the years that followed, it was said in this small town where there are few secrets that Rabe regularly brought a woman who was not his wife for afternoon trysts in his father’s old office at the mill.

Toward the end of the Century, Rabe’s son, Ben, kept an office at the mill, from which he did his best to restore the wealth that his grandfather had worked so hard to amass and his father had just as diligently nearly depleted.

One day, Rabe visited his son at the mill. No one really knows what they discussed, though family members insist it had to do, like all of their conversations, with the father’s need for money and the son’s desire to preserve it. All that is known is that at some point Rabe died when he fell down the elevator shaft of the mill, but not before Ben fell, or was pushed, before him.

Wise Sudey

Wise Sudey, 2005

Wise Sudey, so called because many people believed she had a gift of prophecy, entertained visitors on the porch of her old home. Like many backwoods sybils, Sudey was gifted at foretelling the obvious and clever at wrapping more complicated entanglements in a web of ambiguity. But people came to her just the same in search of insight regarding the sex of unborn children, affairs of the heart and for the occasional message from the dead. Women consulted Sudey about the fidelity of their husbands and boyfriends. Farmers and watermen who wouldn’t be caught dead near Sudey’s place sent their wives and girlfriends to Sudey to forecast harvest prices and get bearings for fishing.

A small woman of no noticeable bearing, Wise Sudey’s was theatrical. She didn’t use a crystal ball or any of the other traditional trappings of her trade. An old lady who witnessed a number of Sudey’s sessions described: “After chatting with you, Sudey’s foot would commence to shaking. Her eyes would roll back. The timbre of her voice would change. Her normal singsong voice would be replaced by a sound that was all nervous and jumpity. When she hit her stride, she’d be going as fast as a steam engine, so fast you could barely keep up, her voice pitching and yawing as she leaned into and out of her rocking chair. Many’s the time I thought Sudey was going to rock herself right off that porch.”

Everyone knew Sudey’s business and for the most part they left her alone. Every few years the local Baptist minister would convince the sheriff to “set an example” and arrest Sudey for fortune telling. But Sudey would usually end up working out a deal with the sheriff—whose wife was one of her best customers—whereby she would agree to lay off the sessions until tempers cooled.

For every glad tiding, there were sad tidings. Her closest friends think it was the stress of the latter that finally did Sudey in. “She was always saying she didn’t ask to be able to see into the future,” one friend described. “She said it was more like a curse. Some people have the same nightmare all their lives, “ she said. “I get a new one every time I meet a new person with sad prospects in their future.”

Sadie and the Nottoway #7

Nottoway #7, 2003

Sadie Cook tended the Nottoway #7 railroad bridge for forty-one years, from the age of steam right up through diesel electric. Women didn’t tend bridges when Sadie started out. And to be honest, Sadie originally went off to learn to be a nurse. But during the Second World War, even though most railroad workers were relieved of the obligation of military service, most of the young men in Sadie’s rural hometown, and all of the bridge tenders, enlisted just the same. Considering the shortage of available skilled bridge tenders, and the fact that Sadie had pretty much grown up watching an uncle tend this very bridge, she was the logical solution.

Once she settled into the job, there was no moving Sadie from the little bridge tender’s office that rode up and down the parallel towers each time the bridge lifted and lowered. She seemed well suited to the job. Her nursing training made her a meticulous keeper of records of times and trains. She never married, and used to say the bridge was more reliable than a man any day. She never complained about working the night shift, when most of the long coal trains on the Norfolk line rolled down from the coalfields of Appalachia to the port. She had her pick up truck, her dog Prince and a vegetable garden behind the small house she inherited from her parents that was the envy of town.

Once she achieved seniority following the war, the only thing Sadie ever asked for from the railroad was that she have her weekends off. On Friday’s, Sadie would pack Prince into the pickup and drive up to Lynchburg “to shop.” But it was widely rumored that despite having had a brief dalliance with a local boy in high school, she was really keeping the company of Joy Lee Raeford, a childhood friend who taught at the women’s college. Whatever their business, Sadie could be counted on to be back in town on Sunday morning, and to trade in her striped railroad coveralls for a flower print dress to teach Sunday school to the little children and sing in the choir at the Calvary Baptist Church.

During the week, Sadie and Prince were fixtures on that bridge. Prince liked to howl at the passing trains. For years, trainmen would swear it was Sadie singing to them. One fellow even wrote in to the company newsletter calling her “the siren of the Nottoway.” Her little office was neat as a pin and decorated with pictures of young girls, whom her few visitors and the dayside bridge tender always thought were her nursing school classmates or the high school pictures of her Sunday school charges. It wasn’t until 1991, when a group of protesters tried to kill a retired doctor who was performing abortions in Lynchburg that it was learned that Sadie had been his Saturday assistant for more than 20 years, and that the tattered pictures that adorned the bulletin board of the bridge tender’s shack were in fact “Sadie’s girls,” whom she had lovingly walked through many tough hours and without remorse given the gift of a second chance.

Another Day. Another Photo Ramble.

Hampton Roads Maritime Association Building, 2010

It seems like whenever I describe the context of some of my pictures, I always seem to start with something about how it was an intolerably cold day. Well, so much for that. This past weekend was wonderfully spring-like. I have no excuses.

After having spent some time recently focusing on architectural details in buildings in New York, I decided to do the same in downtown Norfolk, Virginia. I worked downtown for about ten years. My grandmother lived downtown when I was a child. I’m there a lot for meetings. It’s not exactly unfamiliar territory.

I was downtown recently and happened to notice a particularly interesting view from the 8^th floor of the parking deck where I’d left my car. My new iPhone takes better pictures than the old one. But the view demanded a more thoughtful return. So this past Saturday I decided to focus on taking pictures from parking decks in downtown Norfolk.

Yeah, I know. Parking decks? Pretty silly. But all I was looking for was a starting point. A parking deck was as good as anything else I could think of at the moment.

Years ago I did a research project for the ad agency that represented the tourism authority in Asheville, North Carolina, a small city and summer retreat in the mountains of western North Carolina probably best known as the birthplace of Thomas Wolfe and the site of the Biltmore Estate. The agency wanted me to gather consumer impressions of their then-latest theme line, “Altitude Affects Attitude.” People understood the line, but thought the way it was portrayed visually in print ads was inconsistent with their experience in Asheville. The client got mad at the agency for trying to hide the research results. The agency got mad at me. Apparently the client and the agency made up later on because the last time I looked Asheville still uses the same tag line.

Where was I going? Oh yeah, altitude. A lot of the pictures I took on Saturday were clichés, perspective I had captured before. But I liked a few because changing my perspective—mainly my altitude—forced me to notice things about familiar places that I hadn’t noticed before.

The Lost Art of Presentation

Easter Table, 2006

My friends Mike and Dottie and I met at Dottie’s home in Richmond, Virginia, for a meeting. Mike drove down from Washington. I drove up from the beach. We were all officers of a professional society and were working together to plan a national conference.

Dottie grew up in Richmond and is infused with both charm and gracious southern hospitality. Her home was typical of what you would have expected in an affluent older in-town suburb of the city. It was a Georgian-style brick residence on a large and beautifully landscaped lot just off a busy avenue. The rooms were large, the ceilings high and the proportions were all spacious. The furnishings were traditional and exquisite. Original art filled the walls.

It was a warm, late spring day. We sat out on a shaded brick patio. Around noon Dottie excused herself to go into the kitchen and set out something for lunch.

I have lived around women like Dottie much of my adult life. Southern woman of this type don’t just throw cold cuts out on a plate. They present whatever it is they’re serving. Presentation is a big thing.

Mike, on the other hand, grew up in an Army family. They moved a lot and always lived in plain base housing. Mike’s wife is an engineer. The décor of their home is comfortable and practical. But it is not a home where presentation is practiced. For Mike, visiting Dottie’s house was like visiting Tara. Everywhere he looked he was struck by how different it was from any he’d ever lived in.

There were just three of us and we were just having sandwiches. If I’d been the host we’d have probably had lunch out of a bag. But Dottie arranged the meats, cheeses, bread, condiments and side dishes on the sideboard in the dining room as if she were preparing for a fancy party. There were fresh flowers on the table. Magnolia blossoms sweetened the air. We took our sandwiches out to the patio on China plates and used good silverware and linen napkins.

I didn’t think twice about all of this. I lived in Richmond for thirteen years. This kind of arrangement wasn’t unusual. Finally, though, Mike stepped back and said he needed a moment to take it all in. Here we were, he said, three modest marketing people having a meal as if we were royalty. He marveled at the ease with which Dottie’s threw it all together.

“My daughters know nothing of this,” he proclaimed with a hint of regret in his voice.

Dottie tried to explain that the way she did things was the continuation of habits and customs that had been passed down through the ages in her family. Just as furniture and family portraits were passed along from one generation to another, so were recipes and stories and even the way certain vases were to be used for certain kinds of flowers. The bowl in which camellia blooms floated the day Mike and I visited was the same bowl Dottie’s mother and grandmother had used to float camellia blooms. In the South some things never change.

A Cold Day's Photo Ramble

Old Towne Panel - 3, 2007

One winter day last year I went over to call on a friend in Olde Towne in Portsmouth, Virginia. Olde Towne Portsmouth clings to the western shore of the Elizabeth River and is one of the largest collections of continually occupied Colonial and Revolutionary War-era residences in the nation.

The temperature was in the teens. But the sky was clear and blue and the light made everything shine like crystal. After I visited with my friend I parked the car and went for a walk. It was a perfect day for taking pictures.

In a lot of cities, a neighborhood like Olde Towne would have been bulldozed long ago to make room for modern development. But the neighborhood survives mainly because time forgot Portsmouth. White flight in the 1950s and 1960s emptied downtown of many of its residents and businesses. But they left all the buildings behind. Most of them are still standing because no one valued them enough to want to come in and do something else on their land.

Today many people are rediscovering downtown Portsmouth. There are shiny condos overlooking the river. The Olde Towne neighborhood is home to an interestingly diverse array of families, couples and singles. They don’t treat it like a living museum. They treat it like a place to live and care for.

You might argue that renaming the residential neighborhood of downtown Portsmouth “Olde Towne” was a bit pretentious. When I was a kid, Olde Towne was just known as “downtown.” There are local boosters, of course, who would probably like it to take on more of the more gentrified feel of, say, Charleston. You can tell them by the banners hanging in front of their homes and the little gardens that look like they were pasted right out of the spring gardening issue of Southern Living magazine.

There’s an edginess, though, about Olde Towne Portsmouth, a louche feeling that’s more like Savannah than Charleston. There are pristine blocks and gorgeous family homes. Doctors and lawyers live there, but also students, painters, shopkeepers, photographers and antique dealers. Some people live in houses they grew up in. Others are relatively new and transient, drawn by the charm of narrow streets and close neighbors.

But Olde Towne’s edges are frayed and inconsistent. The crime rate’s a little high for some people’s taste. In classic Richard Florida creative class fashion, downtown Portsmouth’s retail renaissance, such as is, stems from a large inventory of inexpensive and available retail space and tolerance of a wider range of lifestyles than you might find in your typical Southern Baptist suburban subdivision.

None of this mattered on that cold January day, when all I wanted to find were striking contrasts between the bright colors of some of the Olde Towne homes and the cerulean sky.

A View of the Bridge

Centerville Bridge 28, 2009

The area where I live is bounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the east and the Chesapeake Bay to the north. The region is further crisscrossed with rivers and dotted with inland bays, lakes and ponds. If you like water, this is where you want to be. If you don’t, well, there’s always Arizona.

With this many bodies of water, the region is home to lots of bridges and no fewer than eight double-lane vehicle tunnels under the Elizabeth and James rivers and even the 17-mile-wide mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.

One of the more interesting and older bridges in our region is a very small crossing. The Centerville Turnpike bridge crosses the Intracoastal Waterway, a nearly 3,000 mile long chain of natural inlets, rivers, bays and sounds—known to yachtsmen as the “big ditch”—that enables boaters headed up and down the coast to stay out of the more exposed and unpredictable waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

There’s nothing unpredictable about the narrow stretch of the Intracoastal Waterway crossed by the Centerville Bridge but the bridge itself. It’s old. It’s built of steel. During the summer when the steel heats up and expands, the bridge sometimes gets stuck closed or can’t swing back into the closed position once opened. (There’s a system of hoses and nozzles that spray water on the deck of the bridge on the hottest days to keep expansion down.)

What’s interesting is that the Centerville Bridge is the smaller of just two cantilever bridges left in the region. There used to be more, including one of which was connected to land by a wooden trestle so low to the water and narrow that it barely had room for a guard rail and so rickety that when the bridge section closed the whole trestle shook and you had good reason to think you and your car might get dumped in the drink.

I’d been wanting to take pictures of the Centerville Bridge because it is such an anachronism and because it’s been sitting there minding its own business for almost sixty years without much other trouble than the occasional summer heat problem. I thought I might be able to chat up the bridge tender and get a few shots from inside the tender’s shack, a little closet-sized shed that rides on the outside of the bridge when it swings open and closed.

Centerville Bridge - 30, 2009

I finally went out there one sultry Sunday morning last summer and found that even though the bridge’s span is a short distance, doing a good photographic essay on it is going to call for far more time than I thought.

For one thing, the bridge is located along a narrow two-lane stretch of rural road with deep snake-filled ditches and dense woods and swamp on both sides. The bridge tender has a little parking place at one end of the bridge. There’s little room for additional visitors. A nearby marine has stern signs prohibiting use by non-customers.

One of the first things you realize taking pictures of bridges is that you have to get a good distance away to get a good establishing shot. Most of the waterfront on both sides of the Centerville Bridge is an extension of the aforementioned dense woods and snake-filled swamp. I wasn’t dressed for swamp and snakes, so I had to let the establishing shot go. But I did manage to skinny my car up against the bridge tender’s so that I wouldn’t have to walk a mile in either direction to find a better spot. (Note to self: make friends with marina owner.)

For about an hour I walked back and forth across the bridge taking close-up photographs of the steel frame. There’s a two foot-wide walkway along the deck, enough to be safe if you turned sideways when a car passed at 45 mph, but not wide enough to feel safe. The bridge opened and closed a few times while I was there. I crawled down the embankments at either end to see what there was to see there.

In the end, I wasn’t very happy with what I got out of that visit. Access to the bridge tender’s shed is block by a heavy gate and a lot of barbed wire. (I’ve learned since that I have to get permission from the Dept of Public Works for better access.) But the Centerville Bridge remains on my “to do” list because I’m determined that it should not be my bridge too far.

Would Someone from the Spoon Lobby Please Speak Up!

Spoonless, 2005

Quite a few years ago my wife stopped including spoons when she set the dinner table. She reasoned that nobody used them and that they were just something more to have to clean up. The spoons come out mostly for holidays when the good silver is being used or when guests are coming for dinner and there will be desert. Otherwise, no spoons.

I can’t claim that I grew up in a house where the dinner table was formally arranged or even set regularly. Most nights my mother and I had dinner on TV trays while watching Douglas Edwards and then Walter Cronkite deliver the CBS evening news.

Later on, though, I worked in “white tablecloth” restaurants where a table was not properly set if it did not include spoons. When I set the table at home now, even if I don’t expect that we’ll need them, I still make sure each place has a spoon. I don’t mind cleaning them.

Over the last couple of years I’ve started noticing that some restaurants have picked up on this no-spoons thing. I suppose they’re just trying to save money. Here in the South—which, for those of you who don’t live here, is generally defined as the region below a certain latitude where in restaurants grits are on the breakfast menu and iced tea is automatically refilled at no charge—one of the influence of chain food operations has been that it’s rare to find a restaurant any more that even has iced tea spoons, much less uses them. At the family restaurant where we go each Tuesday night for cheap burgers they don’t distribute spoons automatically. More often than not I have to use the handle of a fork or a knife to stir my tea.

In the big scheme of things, this spoon mania isn’t very important. I did try to find some explanation, though, on the Internet for what’s going on with the spoons. Apparently there’s a spoon reference in “The Matrix” movies, something about there being no spoon. But I gather it has nothing to do with dining.

At one web site that offers advice about etiquette, I found an illustration of a properly set dinner table where the spoon was labeled, “if necessary.” That was enough for me to discontinue my search.

I don’t know what happens after you die. I don’t plan to be buried in the ground, in any event. But no matter how I die, I hope I’ll have a spoon with me because you just can’t count on finding them here or in the hereafter.

I'm Still Not Giving It Away

The Torch Bearers, Anna Hyatt Huntington, 2003

I’m still not giving it away. And I don’t feel one bit bad about it.

Months ago I wrote about a request from a magazine for use of one of my photographs. The young photo editor was very earnest and polite about it, but nevertheless determined to save her for-profit magazine a few bucks by having me donate the photograph. I allowed as how this wasn’t possible, especially since the photograph she was interested in had been sold twice for commercial purposes. She understood my position and we parted as friends.

Well, it’s happened again, and this time without the politeness.

I got an e-mail from someone the other day asking—and there really was nothing more to the note than this—whether I have a high-resolution file of a photograph the writer had seen on my web site. (It's the above photo.)

I don’t mind sharing pictures with non-profits, and in this case would have been happy to support the rather famous regional art league of which the man writing to me was representing himself as president.

But I do expect people to at least offer the courtesy of asking whether they can use the image. If the man had asked if he could have a high resolution copy of the photo file, he’d have had it in minutes.

But he didn’t, nor did he say why he was interested in the photo. So I wrote a polite note back asking for him to describe the intended use.

He wrote back to say that it would be used in an annual art show booklet. It seems the artist whose work was the focal point of my photograph had once been a member of the guy’s art league.

But he still didn’t ask if he could use the photo. Apparently he was of the impression that mentioning the name of his prestigious art league and merely asking if I had a high-res file was enough for me to know exactly what he wanted and that this was Hudson Valley—oops, did I saw that out loud?—code for “May I please borrow your photo?”

So I wrote back again, advising him that he wasn’t making this any easier, and suggested that I’d be more than agreeable to lend the photo for a single non-commercial use if he’d just ask if he could use it. I also required that there be a credit line mentioning the name of the museum where the work is located and me as the photographer. Oh, and that he send me two copies of the booklet, one for the museum and one for me.

That was the last I heard from him.