The fogs of a lifetime

Farm in Fog on the road to Ukiah. 1969.

Silent Running, Putney Vermont. 2005.

The Bridge to Nowhere. San Francisco. 2009.

Canopy. Point Reyes National Seashore. 2013

Three weeks of exploring the Fog Series, the photographs from which my article in September’s Shadow and Light magazine will come, culminate with a short look back at the long history of the series. It all began in 1969 though I didn’t know it at the time. That first image, Farm in Fog, and the feelings I felt when I saw the farm, stopped our VW on the road to Ukiah and made the photograph are as fresh as yesterday. That it took 36 years to identify a second image for the nascent series is evidence of my inattention. It’s not like I didn’t see any fog between 1969 and 2005. We lived near the ocean in Massachusetts for 25 of those years for heaven’s sake. And a tidal river was a block away in the mid-Seventies.

The second image from 2005, Silent Running, was made on the socked-in Connecticut River during the Putney Rowing Regatta in southern Vermont. I was tagging along with my friend the writer and photographer John Snyder who was on a magazine assignment. Then in 2009 while on a fashion shoot at the Presidio of San Francisco I made a dozen or more fog shots including The Bridge to Nowhere taken the Presidio of San Francisco. I didn’t put it all together till a fourth photograph in 2013, Canopy, from the Point Reyes National Seashore in West Marin County, California signaled that The Fog Series had become just that, a series. It only took 55 years. But who's counting.

Riches to Riches in the land of plenty: Sonoma here I come.

Bishop Pines and horizon line on Bodega Bay.

The sun burns through in Tomales.

Depth of Field in Valley Ford.

As was the case last week these images were made in California fog, specifically along the Sonoma Coast. They lean toward abstraction and the shapes within seek interpretation. They’re details rather than landscapes.

The soul of Sonoma is agriculture so wherever you look is a tilled field, a farm, a dairy or a vineyard. Gifts from the soil and the cheese, bread and wine from nature’s abundance are what makes Sonoma my very favorite place.  Then there's the seafood. Don't get me started on freshly shucked oysters at the Marshall Store on Tomales Bay, cheeses at the Cowgirl Creamery in Point Reyes Station, and the best pastries ever at the Route One Bakery in Tomales. My list of tastes to be rediscovered is long but I have a big appetite. There's wine to be quaffed in Sonoma I'm told.

Happily, I will soon be savoring Sonoma and West Marin after a absence of five years. What was an annual pilgrimage before Covid will begin again. I am giddy with with giddiness.

Otherworldly treasures

Pines and fence line. The Presidio of San Francisco.

Sea Grass. Cayucos, California.

As thick as it gets. Cayucos Beach.

The bridge to nowhere. The Golden Gate Bridge from Battery Godfrey in the Presidio of San Francisco.

At least two probably more of my most satisfying photographic moments were fog cloaked mornings on the California coast. Correction. Four were in Coastal California and another was at a rowing regatta on the Connecticut River nearly 20 years ago. Photographing in thick fog is almost too easy. The dense, mysterious otherworldly atmosphere makes every shot magical. I guess that’s the reason that picking ten for Shadow and Light out of a hundred is such a scramble.

Today’s offerings come from the Central Coast and San Francisco. All were taken in early morning soup. The San Francisco image was accidental. A friend and I had hired a model but when he was half an hour late, I was able to play near fog shrouded Battery Godfrey with the Golden Gate Bridge disappearing into the murk.

Succinct is my middle name at least for today.

Other World

Bishop Pines in pea soup fog. Bodega Bay.

Tufts on the road to Tomales.

Ground Fog. Taos, New Mexico.

Years ago, I wrote an article replete with ten photographs from my Fog Series. Nearly all were from the California coast starting in Cayucos on the midcoast to West Marin and Sonoma on the north. Much of this glorious stretch was first imprinted on my brain more than 75 years ago when my mother and I lived in Salinas then Oakland and San Leandro. The rugged coast so often blanketed with fog and the oak studded coastal hills and valleys are my first memories of terrain and place. Visions of them tug at my heart like no other.

Those feelings continue to draw me to coastal California. For several years before COVID I made the pilgrimage to the coast every year. It was usually in September and that was meant to coincide with the vendage or grape harvest. If my main goal was to photograph the coast, visiting wineries was a very close second. I began those efforts in Paso Robles on the inland side of the Coastal Range since it is the closest wine mecca when driving I-40 across northwestern New Mexico, northern Arizona and California’s Central Valley. It’s a 16-hour haul so I often stay in Tehachapi or Bakersfield. 14 hours has proven to be my daily limit. At 14 I’m sleep driving at 80mph.

As I write this entry, itself a draft for my September-October issue of Shadow and Light Magazine, I’m planning another wine and photography safari for the second week of September.

True to my new mantra Less is More I’ll include three images in several posts. These examples from the Fog Series are more intimate and abstract than those in my article six years ago. They appear soft focused even blurred. For the most part there are neither black blacks or white whites. It's more about shapes than details. One feels the dampness and silence.