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.