The First Supper

 Night one in France didn’t inspire confidence to say the least.  11 pm, two hours late and one thin wafer from divorce we blew into Baudinard edgy and hungry.  Happily the gracious Josiane Luthy pulled our sorry buns out of our funk with a plate of local figs and melon with the admittedly Italian ham otherwise known as Prosciutto.  A nice young Cotes du Rhone rouge.  Food and wine therapy anyone?

Picturesque and idyllic Baudinard sur Verdon sits on a hill just above Chez Josiane.  Baudinard is a lovely but fading village of a 150; an idyl too distant from schools and jobs. 

Set on what was once a shepherd’s property our home away from home was hand built by Josiane and her husband as a getaway from their business in Marseilles and has become her year round dwelling. 

Railroad Buffs at Bibb Overall Convention

Two Thursdays ago I met my photographer friend at the junction of US 285 and 64 in dusty Tres Piedras.  TP, as we call it is, a bastion of off the gridders who favored habitation would appear to be an old school bus.  Daryl Black and her husband Fred built an energy efficient, architectural show piece in TP but are not of the former persuasion.  The Blacks are just hip to sustainability and a fairly pared down life style in which where’s plenty of adventure and luxury and no waste that I can see. They drive the speed limit to conserve gas for heaven's sake.

So, Daryl and I convened at about 7am in front of the now closed gas station and diner, shot a few frames and decided to head north on 285 toward Antonito, the terminus of the Cumbres and Toltec Railroad.  There was no plan but to follow our instincts to wherever.  Whenever.

All the images are from the Cumbres and Toltec’s two railyards, the other being over the pass in Chama, New Mexico.  It’s the pass we drove to get to Chama ourselves and where we saw the second engine plowing up the west flank to get the train over the pass.  It's so steep it takes two coal burners to top out.

Special Edition

Cruz Blanca

A couple of shows are looming, one of them opens this Thursday, September 1^st at the Historic Taos Inn and will run through October.  The exhibition curated by the inn’s owner Carolyn Haddock is titled “Photographs of Light Landscape and Legend” referring to elements that have made Taos and northern New Mexico an art Mecca for over 100 years.  I ‘m delighted to be in the company of three of Taos’ photography luminaries; Lenny Foster, Gus Foster (not related) and Kathleen Brennan.

You're getting late notice since I just learned of the thing myself. I'm Living on Taos Time I think.

Pecan Grove #1

Opening September 23 and through October 3 is Taos Fall Arts Festival, the cornerstone of our vibrant fall art season and the year’s largest single art event.  My images Pecan Grove #1 and #2 have been juried into Taos Select, formerly Taos Invites Taos.

Bylines from Byways

In the next couple of months you’ll see more frequent entries and more pics.  Soon we’ll be ensconced in lovely Baudinard sur Verdon or on the backroads of France.  So just to prime the pump, here are images from the blue highways of northern New Mexico with pal Jeff Curto last weekend.  Jeff who is a nationally recognized photographer and teacher was a fount of knowledge, of course, and it was most intriguing to see how differently we each approached the same subject.  It’s been said that if you give five photographers the mission of duplicating a very specific set of shots you’ll get five very different sets of shots because we’re each wired uniquely. So true.

These are from tried and true locales; ones you’ve seen here before.  That’s because I was playing tour god, er guide, with Jeff and we were hitting Taos icons; in this case La Hacienda de los Martinez circa 1804.  

Th milky quality of image two is due to a Neutral Density Filter.  I was hoping to catch even more cloud blur with exposure times up to 30 seconds in bright sun.  Alas the sky was nearly still.

Next time travels with Daryl Black.

Injection Molded

I was photographing with friend and noted photographer/educator Jeff Curto this morning.  A rare treat since Jeff hails from Chicagoland.  Anyway we were discussing the photographer’s imperative of looking literally everywhere in the scene to find an element or composition that attracts and that may also be may be different than any that came before.  This is a tall task when plowing well tilled turf like Ranchos Church, last week’s subject.  It means, in effect, look beyond the obvious, perfectly functional money shot and find a unique perspective.  Today’s image is simply a stack of discarded fiberglass chairs lying on the ground.  When shot up close and personal they’re quite abstract and not instantly identifiable as chairs but as patterns and textures and shadows which are pleasing in and of themselves and not because they’re chairs.  The scene was the rail yard of the Cumbres and Toltec Railroad but the image you see has no such context.

In Living Color

The peripatetic John Farnsworth asked to see Moon Over Ranchos as originally shot, in glowing russet hues. This one's for you, mon amis.

Moon Over Ranchos

Every few months I’m bound to give you another taste of Ranchos Church, officially San Francisco de Asis.  This one happened just moments after the sun fell below the horizon behind me, bathing the church in a divine glow.  The magic light is cast so evenly over the adobe skin that it reveals every blemish and vein of the mud and straw. The soft shadows seem to caress the church's famous buttresses.

Flip Flop

I can’t get enough of La Morada apparently.  Above is an abstract take on that venerable edifice with the white rungs piercing the air.  Below is a similar ladder against a motel wall in downtown Santa Fe.  These are about contrast and angles and seem to be an apt pairing. Simplicity reigns.

Lift and Seperate

 I just taught a one on one workshop at La Morada de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe.  Out of the workshop comes a very different take on the morada than what you saw a couple of weeks ago. The lock, weathered woodwork and adobe speak of the passage of time and probably say southwest but don’t identify the Morada as the subject. 

While I favor black and white, this image is more effective in color since there are so many similar values.  In other words, it needs color to create separation between the elements in the composition and to give depth to the picture.  In color the metal components fairly jump out from the wood. In the black and white's gray midtones not so much.  The operative word would be "flat."  Of course, that’s just my opinion.  What’s yours?

Peeling The Onion

Peeling paint tells a story of seasons come and gone.  The tales of a dormant railroad car in North Conway and long demolished general store in nearby Bartlett are heavy with personal history. 

New England was my home for 30 years and these decade old photographs stir thoughts of crisp autumn air, wood smoke and long friendships.  It doesn’t mean these two photographs were necessarily taken in fall it’s just that those are the flavors of northern New Hampshire to me.  I know exactly where I stood when I pushed the shutter release in each of these images.  That kind of recall is probably part of every photographer’s memory bank but this is the first time I’ve appreciated the precision with which I could remember the moment.  It seems even more remarkable given the tens of thousands of images taken since.

Another Point Of View

Here you see both crosses from last week's entry and with a lots more context.  We're looking southwest from Taos Pueblo and you can see how large La Morada really is. Usually these lay chapels are quite tiny which may reflect the size of the Penitente community and its limited resources in 1830 or so but the Morada of Our Lady of Guadalupe is a substantial edifice..

We do know that this morada is the largest and least altered one in New Mexico. It may also have been the first and most important of all the moradas in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. These lay chapels were built in response to the secularization of the Catholic church by the Franciscan Brotherhood which left "genizaros", those of mixed Spanish and Indian blood, on the outside looking in. The genizaros were usually former slaves who, even after becoming free, were not accorded the rights of truly free men.
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A Tale Of Two Crosses

 Cruz Negro

Cruz Blanca

La Morada de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe is a lay chapel established in the early 1800s by an ultra conservative Catholic sect known as the Brotherhood of the Penitentes.  That's penitente as in penance and there was penance aplenty suffered by the brothers at their own hands. 

Abutting Taos Pueblo the morada has an epic view of Taos Mountain.  If you picked a site for your dream house this would be it.  In contrast to the severe iconography of the black cross the white cross seems pure and hopeful as it rises from the decaying adobe.