Cowboy Tendencies

Old corrals evoke a sense of the west like few other things.  They're icons of a rough, tumble and self-reliant life on the American frontier.  In lots of ways that man against the elements sensibility still lingers in today’s western life.  And I do I believe that every boy wants to be a cowboy.  It's been true with me since my first pair of boots from Porter’s Western Store in the Santa Rita Hotel in downtown Tucson.  The year would have been 1951 if memory serves.  The smell of saddle leather ranks right up there with corrals, Wranglers and trophy buckles in stirring the cowpoke within.

Corrals like any subject can be photographed from infinite perspectives.  Sometimes, though rarely in my case since I'm such a purist, a little experimentation is in order. Here are a panorama and three other images all of which were made from two to five vertical photographs that have been stitched together.  The intent is to render more detail and acuity without the noise that can occur in very large prints made from smaller files.  My friend Terry Thompson is a master of the process and I claim no authorship of the technique.  

The corral in question resides just off Highway 285 near its junction with the road to Carson.  The ramshackle affair with its Sangre de Cristo backdrop speaks to the vast and epic place that is northern New Mexico.

Playing Games

From shortly after World War Two till 1975 Fort Ord was the main basic training center for Army recruits in the western United Sates.  In 1990 it was closed and morphed into a state university, several housing developments and a strip mall with an REI.  Its easternmost acres became Laguna Seca Raceway.  At the time it was the largest army post to suffer the indignity of being shuttered.

Basic Training was a rite of passage for thousands of young men including this feckless fellow.  The Army or at least the Army Reserve version of same was a reprieve from a rocky first year of college in which my budding career as a folk singer and established career as a beer drinker kept my eye far from the academic ball.  And that puts it mildly.
 

 

 

 

Anyway, Basic is a mythic hurdle for the callow and immature.  Just entering the presumed depths of hell makes a boy’s knees quiver. In reality, it was easy if you played the game of playing soldier and Basic was a lot like play.  I really got into those manly forced marches, shooting Expert with a WW ll era M1 and the wearing tailored and starched fatigues that had other trainees saluting me until they got close enough to see there were no bars on my lapels.  Even got a bid to go to OSC (Officer Candidate School), heaven forbid.  I can see it now, shave tail Second Lieutenent Steve Immel leading a squad of grunts in some rice paddy in Viet Nam.   Or much, much worse.

Ted Newman, another folkie from Phoenix, was also at Fort Ord.  Ted, who was a couple of years older, had enjoyed a minor hit in 1959 called “Plaything.”  Nick Todd, Pat Boone’s younger brother, also covered the tune on Dot Records.   “Plaything that’s all I was to you.  Some tricks.  Your little game is through.  Right now, stop knockin' at my door?  I'm not your plaything anymore.”  Pure poetry.

Ted and his Martin held court on Carmel's Main Beach every Sunday and I followed suit; a Beach Blanket movie without Annette and Frankie.  I don’t know if Ted was authorized to leave the post.   I know I wasn't but, hey, the south gate was unmanned.

Ted became an Army helicopter pilot and an elementary school teacher in Gilbert, Arizona and Nick became a social worker.   I opened forty restaurants over forty years.  That's forty opening nights.  I win.

 

On the flip side the vacant hulks of the old barracks take a mournful turn.  They proffer an aching postmortem for the fort and for the youthful energy that filled these spaces half a century ago.  The murals from that era and the graffiti from this one compete for our attention.  Abandoned and empty, the derelict halls echo with the voices of raucous young soldiers and the billows of smoke that accompanied them.  The words "Smoke 'em if you've got 'em." punctuated every idle moment in this man's Army in the summer of 1960.

  

Moss Landing

The Salinas River enters the Pacific just below Moss Landing.  I have the faintest recollection of being there in the mid-forties and seem to recall that its icy waters were a mecca for sport fishing.  Today its home to 300 humans and 500 boats, larger even than Monterey itself.   A former whaling port, the harbor now docks vessels fishing for King Salmon, Halibut, Albacore, Black Cod and Red Snapper.

In the seventies Moss Landing had descended into an abyss of pollution fueled by failed septic systems, a paucity of infrastructure and nasty effluent from the natural gas powered electric generator that dominates the skyline.   Several lawsuits and many millions of dollars of public dollars later the tiny village has recaptured some of its earlier glory.  A marine research facility operated by Cal State University and Monterey’s famed aquarium debuted the weekend after my visit.  One hopes that the new laboratory signals a return of the pristine shore and waters of my childhood.

Empty beaches offer serenity with a dollop of melancholy especially in fog or overcast skies as it was this day.  I shared Salinas Beach State Park with a solitary walker and driftwood sculpture from Mother Nature’s damp studio.

As the face of the moon

When I hear Zabriskie Point two thoughts spring to mind.  One, of course, is the famed Death Valley landmark and the other is Michelangelo Antonioni’s failed 1970 film of the same name.  The photogenic locale endures as a photographic magnet and Antonioni’s panned 1970 paean to sixties counter culture endures as a cult classic replete with dialogue by Sam Shepard and music by Jerry Garcia, the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd.  In it Harrison Ford had an uncredited role as a jailed student protester.   The movie ending five minute slow motion explosion fantasy with Pink Floyd’s Careful with the Ax beneath the bombast is worth the trip.  Pun intended.

Zabriskie Point is part of the Amargosa Range and of the Furnace Creek formation in eastern Death Valley.   It’s described as badlands which I take to mean dry, inhospitable and desperate.  In other words beautiful.  From the main vista point spreads a 360 degree view of otherworldly tucks, folds and creases of rock and of the desert floor stretching to the Black Mountains in the distance.  Zabriskie is often portrayed abstractly with the convolutions in the rock photographed without the context of the broader landscape.  And as with other iconic locales producing a transcendent image is a result of some skill and more luck.

Zabriskie Point is a Soviet code for a location on the moon and couldn't be a more apt for this barren moonscape.  But it was actually named for Christian Zabriskie the general manager of Pacific Coast Borax Company whose twenty-mule teams transported the borax from its Death Valley mines.  Anybody remember Death Valley Days from early television?  Who was its host? 

Kudos to Kelp

Three Stones and Surf

The Point Lobos was described by Tasmanian landscape painter Francis McComas as “the greatest meeting of land and water in the world.”  He left this earth in Pebble Beach so he certainly thought so. Still that’s some lofty lingo to describe a tiny, rocky headland.  There are legions of Mainers who would put Acadia and Monhegan into the ring with the Central Coast contender any old time.  Weston battles Wyeth in a steel cage death match.

Sea Foam

Part of the rocky part of the rocky headlands

Kelp in black and white

Kelp in Color

Unhappily for me I erased two memory cards from our recent California sojourn, erased that is before downloading the images.   So half of what I could have shown and told about Point Lobos has vanished into nothingness along with half my shots from the former Fort Ord where I majored in Army Basic Training and minored in AWOL on Carmel's Main Beach during the summer of 1960.  

California Dreaming

Point Lobos Morning

To say that California is a trove of topographic diversity puts it mildly.  With Mediterranean, Alpine, and three desert ecosystems to mention just a few the Golden State has about every kind of terrain you could want.  In the course of three trips there since November I’ve spent five weeks seeing just a fraction of its bounty and reckon I'll be back for more. So much state and so little time.

 

Within this wide array reside two iconic photographic locations, Point Lobos on the Central Coast and Zabriskie Point in Death Valley.  Both have lured generations of photographers most notably Edward Weston at Point Lobos just a football throw away from his house on Wildcat Hill.

Zabriskie Point

Here are three images from a week ago, one from Point Lobos, one from Zabriskie Point and one from the oak flecked hills above Carmel Valley.  The soft shouldered meadows of California’s Central Valley represent the Golden State like nothing else to me.   They may lack the drama of the shore and desert but they color my first childhood memories in Salinas and San Leandro.

Oaks and Meadow, Coastal Range

Remember to click on the images to see them full size.  The tall state needs a big screen.

Cactus Flower

After a week in California you’d think I’d post something from the Golden State but, alas, the computer gremlins have been in attack mode so I’m going with something from the archives.  The cactus hails from Ghost Ranch and, since we were just there, the image seems timely or at least excusable.  There’ll be precious little verbiage with this one since the gremlins have prevailed and I'm retreating to fight another day. 

Working Hands

From time to time I pull a golden oldie out my hip pocket.   Such is the case with this one of a codger and his pen knife making a whistle from a pea pod.   We found our fun anywhere we could back in the hardscrabble 1830s I can tell you that. 

The scene was Old Sturbridge Village in western Massachusetts in the early 1970s and may have been at Thanksgiving.   We enjoyed several Thanksgivings at Sturbridge when we westerners gloried in the colors, tastes and rich history of New England.  New England became our true home, the place where we spent thirty years, our children became adults and my restaurant career flourished and flagged till I rode off into the sunset 10 years ago.

Our gambrel colonial home in Ipswich was the Dennis Dodge house built in 1740.  Replete with seven fireplaces, a Jacobean staircase and a walk in fireplace with a beehive oven in the kitchen the house was magic to me.  My drive home from my office in Burlington was a 45 minutes of freeway travel and never did I regret the trip or stop relishing my return.  Garrett was baptized by Edward French at the Episcopal Church down the street.  French who had been John Updike’s Harvard roommate drove a 1968 Mercedes convertible, my favorite vehicle ever, and was married to a fiery redheaded Ballantine heiress.  Updike had also lived in Ipswich but had moved to Georgetown, Massachusetts with his former mistress and now wife.   I could write a book.  Oh wait, Updike did that.  It was a potboiler called Couples.

Old Sturbridge Village is a living museum in Sturbridge, Massachusetts which recreates life in rural New England from the 1790s through the 1830s. The Village includes 59 antique buildings, three mills and a working farm.  Customed interpreters like our old friend share the mysteries of early nineteenth century life with visitors from around the globe.

This image unlike the large format portrait posted on March 18 is from a scanned 35mm negative.

Fade to Black

These remarkably lifelike silk roses sat on a table near the window in an abandoned house in Bethlehem, New Hampshire.  They were photographed through a window though it’s not evident in the image.  The window gave enough illumination to provide highlights up front but allowed the background to fall into shadow.  That mix of light and shadow gives the flowers a sense of depth and of volume.

Bethlehem, a picturesque but threadbare resort town on the western slope of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, is famously a summer vacation destination for Orthodox Jews from New York.  The heady stew of Hebrew signs, Stars of David and New England farmhouses is eclectic and tinged with humor.   Green Acres meets Borough Park.   Gefilte fish and cider.  Yamulkes and bibb overalls.  Make me stop! 

Not so fast

A week ago spring flickered and I went for my first road bike ride of the season.  Temperatures approached 70 and all was right in the world.  Then Mother Nature had a change of heart and arctic cold blasted and blustery winds swept across the mesa.  Fickle witch.  It was 11 degrees when I picked up the Sunday Times this morning and I’ll be back on the damnable stationary bike watching old Tour de France videos by this afternoon.

On the plus side winter's resurgence sets the table for a long overdue addition to my Sketches of Winter series.  I’ve neglected the poor thing. 

Is it that obvious?

Last week I charted my journey into the digital age and wrote of my years with cumbersome large format cameras.  This nugget was taken forty two years ago in Minneapolis.  The camera was a wooden Kodak Model 2D 8"x10" View Camera made by the Folmer Graflex Company of Rochester, NY around 1941.  It was and still is a thing of beauty, an artifact unto itself.  For years it stood near a window in our dining room in Massachusetts, an angular sculpture of cherry and brass, an icon of the midcentury photographic process.  Today it’s folded into its weathered leatherette case in the garage.  It’s one of the last vestiges of hours beneath a black hood composing upside down images in ground glass.  I doubt that I’ll ever part with it.

I bought the camera, three vintage lenses, a Simmon Omega D2V enlarger and a complete darkroom set-up for $250 in 1971.  Shortly thereafter the photograph above emerged from the Dektol, Fixer and Hypo Clearing Agent.  The lenses reside on a shelf in our loggia here in Taos.   Old lenses are among the perfect forms along with guitars and the female turn of hip.  Like the camera, lenses are elegant reminders of the big camera era and of storied practitioners lugging behemoth rigs into places like Yosemite, Point Lobos and Oceano. 

Looking back, my large format images were made in the style of those masters, perhaps too much so. They were too studied and too obvious in their reverence for their forebears.  Still those were exercises that helped develop a skill set; a foundation in the basics of composition, exposure, depth of field and the darkroom alchemy that applies to the digital darkroom just as it did in the wet one for nearly forty years. 

Images of the 2D and assorted lenses may follow.

Never Look Back

My journey to the dark side began with two photographs taken more than ten years ago.  One, Agave, was taken at San Marino California’s Huntington Garden with a five megapixel Nikon Coolpix 5000 camera and was so startling in its sharpness and tonal range that I began to see my future in photography.  Until that moment I had been a dyed in the wool large format guy but was being seduced by a sweet little image from a pocket camera. 

Still, that fall I bought a spanking new Cambo 4x5 from Calumet Photo in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  I put my beautiful Schneider Symmar 180mm f5.6 on that puppy and spent early winter learning my new gear.  Then in March, if memory serves, Canon introduced its 1DS with whopping 10.1 megapixels of resolution.  As the first truly high resolution digital camera the 1Ds blazed the trail into the megapixel frontier.  The unprecedented resolution was not the only thing outsized about the 1DS.  It listed for , gasp, $7,999 which was some pretty serious cake for 2003.  But then I did have a trip to Provence scheduled and a digital SLR kit would be smaller and lighter and I did already have a couple of Canon lenses I could use.  And I did buy the thing for $7,700 didn’t I? 

Right after getting the camera I took some shots of fresh picked squash at a farm stand in East Conway, New Hampshire.  It had just stopped raining and was still overcast so the light was beautifully diffuse.  Later that evening when I processed the images I was floored by the acuity and the silvery midtones that I saw.  The photographs looked like they were made with a 4x5 and there was no grain whatsoever.  In that moment I knew I was destined for a digital path, a path that led me back into photography with a vengeance. 

I never shot with a large format camera again and sold my whole big camera shebang to Oakland High School in California for a few hundred bucks.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

There's close and there's really close

Railyards are ripe with subjects that can be interpreted abstractly.  Chunky mechanicals cry out for such treatment in my opinion.  That makes the Chama and Antonito yards of the Cumbres and Toltec Railroad perfect places to take closer look.  That’s closer as in look down closer, get in tight closer and limit what you see to what’s right there in your viewfinder closer.  This is not the time for the grand vista.  This is a killer drill for learning to see and for designing arresting abstracts. Hey, I’m as fond of a locomotive or caboose as the next man but trucks really get me going. 

What is a truck you ask?  A truck is a railroad wheel assembly that has two or more axles.  They're much like the wheels on your favorite skateboard which are also called trucks.  Get that thing out of the closet and take a look.  Ties, you know what they are. But what are the other things shown below?

 

Here and Gone

Elizabeth Town, New Mexico has long been a favorite of mine.  There’s not much left of the thriving but lawless mining town.  There is a pay for play western town that’s seldom if ever open.  There’s the shell of the Mutz Hotel and there are hulks of automobiles strewn throughout the town’s hillside site.  At the top of the hill Elizabeth Town Cemetery looks down on the whole shebang and is worth the trip all by itself.

It’s hard to imagine that this was once the home of 7,000 residents, substantially larger than the town of Taos today.  Elizabeth Town was, among other things, the first incorporated town in New Mexico, the county seat of Colfax County and the home of serial killer Charles Kennedy who lured at least 14 victims to his boarding house before killing them and incinerating them piece by piece.   A lynch mob led by the notorious Clay Allison put an end to the festivities.  Then they let Kennedy hang for several days to make some kind of statement.  This macabre display may be the genesis of the phrase “left swinging in the wind.”

The Elizabeth Town story began in the fall of 1866 when three prospectors looking for copper found gold instead.  Though they swore themselves to secrecy the vow held for a nano-second and their loose tongues led to an all out gold rush.  It turns out that the site of the town was owned Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell whose Maxwell Land Grant, the nation’s largest, included all of the Moreno Valley and everything east to past Cimarron.  The wealthy Maxwell was quite enterprising.  Since he knew he couldn’t fight the surge of treasure seekers he leased them small parcels, charged claim fees as well as tolls for the road he constructed for their use.  That was 1867.  But by 1872 the mines had stopped producing and just 100 residents remained.  That's a record setting fall from grace for sure. Then the fire of 1903 virtually erased the town and its faint residue is what you’ll find today. 

And who in the devil decorated those rusting cars with plastic flowers?  Roses and Rust, now there's a theme that's right up my alley. 

Conservatoire des Ocres Redux

I’m delighted to report that my photograph Conservatoire des Ocres #1 has been nominated for the Masters Cup, the International Award for Color Photography.  This is my second nomination for the prestigious award, the other coming in 2010. 

The press release provided by the Masters Cup says that 8,521 entries from 86 countries were judged by a who’s who of gallerists from New York, London, Shanghai, Paris and so forth. So the field was loaded and I’m tickled to make the cut in the Abstract category. 

If the image looks familiar it’s because it was the subject of a post last summer when it was included in the Color show at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition in New York.  As I detailed then, It was taken at the aforementioned Conservatoire des Ocres in Roussillon and the weaving depicted was part of an elaborate display showing the various uses of the rich ochre pigments that were once mined in that famed village perche.

To see more of the best in contemporary color photography you can log on to www.photomasterscup.com.

Center of Attention

Not far from Farmington in northwest New Mexico is Bisti Badlands, a nearly vacant 42,000 acre patch of desert punctuated by undulating mounds and otherworldly sandstone formations called hoodoos.  After photographing in Chaco Canyon for a couple of days I drove north into Bisti, pronounced Bist Eye.  Then, as often happens with me, the spawn of my original mission to photograph the lumpy hoodoos became a still life of a heart shaped stone resting on the parched earth.  This misdirection is symptomatic of an undiagnosed condition or I stopped to tie my shoe.

Bisti was once covered by an inland sea and has been inhabited, albeit lightly, for 10,000 years.  Remnants of a Chacoan society are abundant as is the burned hulk of the old trading post.  These worthy subjects along with the mounds, hoodoos and shallow arroyos that riddle the landscape would fill a book for Pete’s sake.  And all you get is a stupid rock. 

 

Clean Coal For An Energy Independent Future

I’ve passed the Cholla Power Plant, a coal fired energy behemoth, many times as I’ve driven across northern Arizona between New Mexico and California.  I’ve always found the thing compelling in a post apocalyptic Blade Runner sort of way but have never stopped long enough to capture its wonders.  When I got in the patience line they were fresh out.  However, this past Tuesday I finally shot it at its belching, spewing best, opaque plumes soaring into the sky near Holbrook and a thin blue ooze blanketing the ground for half a mile or so.  I’ve never been able to reconcile the term “clean coal.”  Isn't that an oxymoron?  Let's just say that the eruption shown above did little to assuage my skepticism.  I guess it depends on what your definition of clean is.  Clean compared to what exactly?  Chernobyl?  Bhopal? 

That fact is that polluters can profess anything they wish and, according to the gospel of Karl, if they say it often enough it will be true.  The inconvenient real truth is that the Cholla Plant is ejecting vapor, smoke and particulate matter into the heavens.  It is what it is.  The glass eye does not lie. 

Hey, I totally get the desire to achieve energy independence and can even accept some give between unyielding environmentalism and damn the torpedoes exploration.  It’s just that I don’t buy that coal can be clean or that fracking doesn’t endanger our ground water.  Or maybe it’s that I don’t trust producers to do it cleanly even if it is technically possible.  As long as a cheaper is better ethic prevails energy companies will inevitably cut an important corner somewhere along the line.  Think Deep Water Horizon.

That headline just drips with sarcasm doesn't it?

Inside at the outside

The left for dead buildings that I so often photograph also have interiors you’ll be surprised to know.  Interiors can tell what happened here even better than exteriors because of the human artifacting within.  We can tell if the purpose for the edifice was entirely residential or if there was a commercial aspect to the enterprise.  We may be able to establish the date of the building’s last habitation by what’s left behind or deduce how quickly the departed, well, departed.

Stretching the length of Highway 62 from Rice to Twenty Nine Palms are some pretty sketchy dwellings, ones that compare favorably to those on our West Mesa and Tres Piedras or another California’s beauty spot, the Salton Sea.  Folks living  in places like these must have an odd sense of place or lack thereof.  That summer temps reach 120 adds a dose of unreality to the whole ensemble.  Then there’s the Marine Corps firing range that surrounds this ribbon of hell.  If the heat doesn’t get you a howitzer might.

Garden of lost soles

Rice is a wide spot on California’s Highway 62 and, some might say, seen too often on these pages.  It's also home to a shoe garden.  Right behind the shuttered service station and across the street from an old Santa Fe Railroad siding lays an entropic display of sneakers, boots and clothing.  This was once the site of a shoe tree that burned down under suspicious circumstances.  In its place has grown a bumper crop of footwear adorning a wire fence surrounding the footprint of a long gone building .  The shoe garden has been so fertile that the fabled Mojave Desert shoe bees have fertilized the adjacent station so that leather and canvas blossums are blooming there as well.

For yet another shoe tree drive US 50, America's Loneliest Highway, just west of Austin, Nevada where the most famous shoe tree once stood.  That one burned in 2011 and has been replaced by a new one just 20 feet away.   There's clearly evil afoot.  Be on the lookout for a barefoot arsonist in a 1967 VW van with California license plate h8shoes.