This Was The View That Was

Edie’s View, 2000

This is a view that no longer exists.

One fall our friend Edie lent us her little cottage on the harbor in Edgartown on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. Generations of her family had spent summers at the family compound that included the big house, a boathouse and a little one-room shack behind it for the boat keeper. After their parents passed away, Edie let her sister have the big house. She preferred the boathouse property.

The boathouse sat on a narrow spit of sand and grass between the harbor and a herring pond. A sluice running between the two created a moat separating the boathouse from the big family house. A marine railway once ran up from the harbor up into it.

During the 1950s Edie had the boathouse refitted into a small, no-nonsense Cape Cod bungalow with one tiny bedroom downstairs and one up. The mansions of the rich and famous surrounded it. But Edie’s summer place was furnished from the local church thrift shop. It sat so close to sea level and was so subject to flooding that Edie made sure all the electrical outlets and appliances were installed at chest level.

A few days into our stay, a hurricane approached. We had to get out before the storm surge came. Other friends offered us a rental house that had become available unexpectedly. It's a grand place in an exclusive community atop a hill well inland from the water, the kind of place where you felt like you had to dress a little nicer, serve better booze and use the good china. A famous Hollywood producer had rented it, but left early when his wife got scared they might be marooned if the ferry to the mainland stopped running during the storm.

We moved into the rental house. The hurricane came and went. Afterward, the sun came back out and we contemplated the house with every modern convenience, enough bedrooms and bathrooms for every person and dog, beautiful landscaping and a swimming pool.

We weren’t happy. The house on the hill was a gilded cage.

We packed our bags, gathered up the dogs and moved back down to Edie’s cottage. We sliced cheese with old U.S. Navy flatware and ate Triscuits out of the box. We read books, sailed and fished, had friends over, drank our gin and tonics from plastic cups and dangled our feet in the water each afternoon as the sun set.

Two weeks after we left, a crew came and demolished the cottage. Edie had a new place built, no bigger than the old boathouse, but higher above the water and suitable for year-round living.

The photograph above shows the view from the second floor bedroom of the old cottage. I loved that simple view with its Hopper-like colors. (Edward Hopper painted for many years at Cape Cod and on Martha's Vineyard. One of my favorites is The Long Leg.)

By the way, if anyone needs Jack Nicholson’s private phone number, we’ve got it. The Hollywood producer left it on a bedside table at the big house.

A Walk on the Shrine Side

Shrine Parade, 2006

Every September for more than fifty years, Shriners have come to Virginia Beach, Virginia, to hold their annual conventions. In 2006, both the Mid-Atlantic and South-Atlantic Shrine regional associations came. A mostly graying crowd of portly old white guys and their wives hailing from New England to the Carolinas gathered to affirm their Masonic bond and have a good time.

When I was a kid, we lived well north of the resort strip. But it wasn’t unusual in the late summer when the Shriners came to town for them to set up card games even at our corner and drink and carry on loudly all night long. One year they even had a fire engine out there, and would wind up the siren when things got dull. I can still hear my mother yelling at my father to go out there in the middle of the night and tell them to shut up. And I can still hear him trying to explain to her the futility of that approach, especially considering that the chief police was probably playing and drinking and carousing along with them.

The Shriners are a little tamer these days. Most of them are probably in bed by 9:00 p.m. And rather than keep the locals up all night, before they left town this time each group thanked the local community for its hospitality by bringing out all their toys and holding a 3-hour parade down the main drag of the resort area.

It’s easy to snicker at their whites-only tradition (there is a parallel universe of African American Shriners) and to ridicule their silly customs and rituals, their jingoistic patriotism, cornball humor, midget cars, hillbillies, potentates, pointy toed shoes, fezzes, camels, clowns and rhythm bands. In this era of oil politics, their fixation on Middle Eastern iconography and their archaic way of referring to the Mideast as “Oriental” seems especially ironic.

But I grin and bear it. Over the years, the Shriners have raised almost $8 billion dollars to support a network of twenty-two hospitals in the United States, Canada and Mexico where transportation and care for children with severe burns and orthopedic injuries are provided without regard for ability to pay. If you’ve even seen these kids and the loving care they receive at Shrine Hospitals, this legion of corny codgers having a good time on the streets of Virginia Beach doesn’t seem quite so silly after all.

A series of photographs from the 2006 parades can be seen here.

Mary's Birthday Party

Mary’s Birthday Party, 2003

I’m not Catholic, so when a neighbor invited us to "Mary’s Birthday Party," it didn't occur to me that we were going to anything but a party for another of our neighbors, an elderly widow whose name happens to be Mary. We didn’t really know Mary well, and I was a little confused when another neighbor who was invited mentioned that there might be a “blessing of the fleet” involved. But being a nice guy and appreciating the kindness of our neighbors, I threw on a jacket, grabbed the camera and walked down the lane to the party.

Turns out this was a big thing. Almost a hundred people had arrived before me. The Mary in question was not our elderly neighbor but, rather, THE Mary, the one Catholics spend a lot of time thinking about. And the “blessing of the fleet” part? Well, that turned out to be a misunderstanding.

About a 30 minutes before the ceremony was to begin, out on the Lynnhaven River behind the house a line of boats came into view. A reproduction harbor tugboat led the way, a statue of Mary perched atop her wheelhouse. The parish priest stood at the bow, his robes flowing in the cool October breeze. A dozen or so other boats carrying the faithful trailed not far behind.

Upon arriving, the priest was the first to disembark, leaving the heavy lifting to a cadre of aging Knights of Columbus. When everyone had assembled on land, the statue of Mary was carried from the boat to a pedestal on the lawn.

A worship service was held on a rise in the land overlooking the river. The theme of the priest’s homily was "Jesus was a Feminist!!" (Emphasis the priest’s.) Hymns were sung that you might have heard in the Sister Act movies, only they didn’t sing the Whoopi Goldberg versions. Parts of them were sung in Latin.

Some of my pictures from Mary's Birthday Party were selected to appear in the monthly Catholic state newspaper. Unfortunately, Hurricane Isabelle occurred before they could run. The next month the newspaper was still occupied by more serious issues than pictures from a birthday party quickly receding into memory.

The Early Bird

Outside Santa Fe, 2006

In photography as in fishing, it’s often all about how early you’re willing to get up in the morning. To catch the best morning light, you need to know your location, know how the light’s going to fall, and be in place before the sun comes up.

Finding myself in Albuquerque a few Augusts ago, I was more than willing to get out of bed before sunrise so that I could get up the highway and spend a full day in Santa Fe and Los Alamos. (It helped getting up early to be two time zones behind home.)

I left Albuquerque just after 5:00 a.m. The first hint of light was just peeking over the mountains. By the time I got within twenty miles of Santa Fe, I knew I had only minutes to find something worth photographing. The sun wasn’t going to wait for me to get to Santa Fe.

I pulled off the next exit onto a roughly paved farm road. I drove beyond sight of the highway, stopped the car, pulled out my camera bag and headed off-road on foot. It was wonderfully peaceful.

I probably should have paid more attention to where I was stepping. On the way back to the car I noticed that I’d stepped over a dead rattlesnake, its desiccated body a sign that maybe I should have been more concerned about what there was out there that could kill a rattler.

But I wasn’t thinking about that as I walked out from the road. I was captivated by the sky, the golden grass and the rising sun behind me. I had about ten minutes of excellent shooting time before the sun rose high enough to wash all that gold away.

I took a lot of pictures that day. I walked all over Santa Fe. But as the day wore on, I realized that I’d likely done my best work in those first ten golden minutes.

Los Alamos, by the way, was literally a washout. As I drove up Rt. 502 through Pueblo Canyon toward the ridgeline atop which Los Alamos sits, there came a thunder and lightning storm fiercer than any I’ve ever seen. The heavy rain sent a slushy river of mud and boulders down steep rocky slopes into the narrow roadway. A low railing was all that separated the road from a drop of hundreds of feet.

The worst of the storm passed by the time I got up to Los Alamos, which for all of its super secret technology and research, looks about what you’d expect a 1940s-era military base to look like. I would show you pictures, but there were so many so many security cameras everywhere you looked that I was reluctant to take any of the official-looking buildings. Besides, if you’ve seen one old military base, you’ve seen them all.

A series of pictures from that day, including the view from White Rock, can be seen here.

Gimme More of That Ol' Time History

Battle of Great Bridge, 2003

One group of people I’d like to spend more time photographing, especially after reading Tony Horwitz’ Confederates in the Attic, is reenactors. They’re so serious about their tasks, and have such a colorful name, farbs, for other reenactors who don’t get their attire and gear right.

A few years ago I headed out for a reenactment of the Battle of Great Bridge, in modern day Chesapeake, Virginia. To be truthful, I missed the battle because the bridge—the one that gives the place its name and isn't all that great, nor is the body of water it spans much more than a canal—was raised and traffic was backed up several miles. But I imagine it was interesting, especially against the backdrop of the Intracoastal Waterway, with its steady parade of yachts and cigarette boats.

I got there in time to walk around the “official encampment,” where little vignettes of revolutionary life were set up, including campfires, rifle demonstrations, cooking, darning and letter writing.

In my limited experience with them, reenactors fall into two camps: those who lock their eyes on you when you as much as step into their area code and want to tell you everything; and those who prefer to talk only to each other about the minutia of their gear and view sightseers as an intrusion on their ultra pure reenactment of history.

I’ll give them this, though. Reenactors are a far sight more accurate than Renaissance Faire aficionados, another group I’d photograph more if I had a proper outfit of tunics and tights and a full sheaf of bodkins. (Believe me, I don’t want anyone pointing fingers and yelling “FARB!” in my direction.) Reenactors have history on their side, whereas the Ren Faire crowd appears more interested in concocting imaginary scenarios combining Robin Hood, comely wenches, copious amounts of grog and an S&M camp out.

People who attend reenactments also seem to fall into a couple of camps: those who have a passing interest in history; and those who want to believe, or officiously impart in the children they’ve dragged along with them, the belief that what they’re witnessing actually is history, rather than just a bunch of guys who prefer dressing up in tights and britches and fighting over who gets to play General Washington to playing golf.

Pierre and Sherry

Pierre and Sherry, 2005

It’s my habit when we’re in New York to get up early in the morning and wander around with my camera.

I hadn’t known, however, that this particular Saturday morning in 2005 was when Cristo and Jeanne-Claude’s 23-mile long “Gates” environmental art installation was going to be unfurled in Central Park.

I was out just after sunrise. It was overcast and bitter cold. But I was fascinated by arrangement of thousands of saffron-colored vertical frames throughout the park. I followed the gates up hills and down, from 59th street into the 70s. The contrast of the bright frames against the brown trees was striking. They made for many interesting shots, though I found some of them to be strangely claustrophobic in a park that is usually known for being wide and open.

(Along the way, I found one vista where the frames didn’t monopolize the scene. Pierre and Sherry, above, is not named for the couple in the scene, but rather for the Pierre and Sherry Netherlands hotels, visible in the background.)

At first, I thought the frames were the project. That’s all that was visible when I returned to the hotel to join my wife and spend the day at our daughter’s place in Brooklyn. It wasn’t until we’re returned to Manhattan that I learned that each of the frames held a colored sheet of fabric.

I returned to the park early the next morning. It was a sunny day, which greatly improved the appearance of the Gates and helped to mitigate some of the claustrophobia. Several days after we left, New York was blanketed with snow, which made for an even more striking contrast with the orange frames and fabric.

You can see my take on “Gates” here.

Why I'm Not Giving It Away

Edgartown Light, 2008

An art director from a city magazine in New England contacted me this week to inquire about using one of my photographs from Martha’s Vineyard. She was hoping I’d let her use the image for free.

I’ve done this before to get my name “out there.” I’m usually quite willing to lend photos for use by non-profits. But this was different. The magazine is a for-profit business. They weren’t offering so much as a free subscription in return for the use of the photo. I had to tell the young lady that I wouldn’t give her the image for free.

The proliferation of sites like Flickr and Fotolog, in giving people like me a place to show work, has also created a problem for people who make a living from their photography. Amateurs who are so anxious to be seen and published that we’re willing to give our work away for free devalue our own work and undermine the integrity of the market for professionals.

Over the years, I’ve sold photography to newspapers and magazines. Photographs from my “Vineyard Sojourn” series have been especially popular with art directors. They don’t pay a lot. But the ethical ones consider it important to pay at least something for the images they use. Perhaps this gives them some legal coverage. I don’t know. I like to think it allows them to sleep a little better for knowing that they’re treating people the way they’d like to be treated.

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art used the work of amateur photographers in a recent advertising campaign. Here’s a nonprofit that has every reason in a tough economy to be looking for ways to shave expenses. I’ll bet most of the people asked to contribute to this campaign would have been more than happy to allow use of their photographs for free. Yet the Met insisted on compensating them for the use of their photographs.

That’s what I call a class act.

I’ve been photographing the lighthouse at the mouth of the harbor of Edgartown, Massachusetts, for more than thirty years. It’s the kind of target that’s so magnetic to photographers and painters that you sometimes have to jockey for a position because of all the art workshop participants who have staked their tripods and easels in the sand around it waiting for the sun to come up.

You’d think that having shot the lighthouse for so many years I’d have exhausted the ways of presenting it. But last fall I was determined to see the Edgartown Light in a fresh way. In thinking about what I might try to shoot on this trip, I’d pledged to spend a lot more time exploring negative space opportunities. By using the lighthouse as a small, but critical element in a negative space photo, I was able to stand way back from the mosh pit of workshop painters and photographers, mitigate their presence in my photograph by making them so minuscule as to be unnoticed, and create a photograph that is both all about and nothing about the lighthouse.