Jess on Halloween

Jess on Halloween

I’ve been looking back on all my portfolios and blog posts and decided to go about things a bit differently lately.  It is thus that I give you Jess (my daughter) dressed up on Halloween. A bit of cool air for Halloween. just saying its breezy these days.

We usually started with the fall weather.  Halloween was happening and we would have long discussions about what Jess wanted to be.  For the first Halloween in Washington State I actually sewed a clown costume.  After that I did not sew again.  But we would narrow it down to three or four or five costumes and begin to look in thrift stores for parts of a witch or accident victim, a fairy princess, or a vampire.  All pieces could be used again.  We did not actually put the costume together until the day of Halloween after school was out. Jess and her boyfriend continued the tradition dressing up as Cheech and Chong. I always  photographed Jess on Halloween which has now turned into a part of the Kid Pictures. Please go to the portfolio  Kid Pictures to see photographs of Jess and the other kids we knew. There are more images but this is time sensitive and I am not in touch with my hard drive. Next year.

Willapa Bay iphone photographs

Willapa Bay iphone photographs

I learned in August that I had been offered a residency at the Willapa Bay AiR. I am very very happy about this. I’m going for a month beginning October 1st. At Willapa, they feed and house me and I just do my work. I recently bought an Ondu 120 pinhole camera (My Zero is on it’s way out) and it is a fit. I love the way it feels in my hand and so far it works fine and dandy. I have also made about 30 long exposure tins that I can put up around and

leave in place for a month. Of course I will also do some urban night photography.

I have been going to the Long Beach peninsula since 1985. My friends, Jo and Bob had a beautiful place in Seaview and I was welcome. Later, I went there with my daughter and we had many adventures with Jo and Bob and their family. Oysterville, the location of the AiR, is beautiful–old and full of ghosts. I have hundreds of photographs of this place from all the years past. They are typical of me: a mishmash of time well spent, of my daughter who was my partner in crime and the landscape, always the landscape. May I do that landscape justice with the pinhole, in this familiar yet odd place full of memories and ghosts.

UPDATE: I am at the Willapa Bay AiR!

Three weeks have gone by already. I am impressed by the seriousness of the people here. There are 4 writers, a painter and me. We are treated very well–Chris, the chef, cooks our meals daily. I feel so grateful that I have been given this time to work. Thanks to all the spirits past and present but especially thanks to Cyndy Hayward and Jeff McMahon for making this incredible place happen.

While my iphone photography is not pinhole, most of the iPhone images were made at the same time as the Ondu, the Zero, and long exposure cans were. The pinholes, the iPhone and the DSLR are cameras that are important in my grand scheme of things. I have only posted a few of these iPhone images to Instagram. I post them here because my pinhole work is film and negatives on paper and won’t be ready for another few months and I want you to see what I am doing now. My iphone is my diary. You want more images? Follow me on insta. neuhauserat1C and/or go to www.thepinholeproject.org and join the project.

 

UPDATE: It is now January of 2022. I have uploaded all of my iphone photographs from the Willapa Bay AiR and deleted those that were  posted below and replaced those images with more than new ones more than you probably want to see. i shot over 600 iphone photographs during the month. I edit them differently each time I try. This edit is my top thirty or so. I have to remember these are iphone photographs. The thinking is that the iphone is inferior. I do not believe it. I will load the film images into this blog soon which are finally almost done. Hopefully you will see some similarities between the camera types. And I will learn something.

Oh South Dakota

Oh South Dakota

I just returned from a momentous trip to South Dakota where I stayed in my Uncle Ray’s house and rested and recuperated.  I am now ready to begin work on this site. The ranch where I went has been in our family for three generations; (that is almost 120 years).  It is a quiet place, about 75 miles from the nearest town including 30 miles on dirt roads.  My grandparents house still stands  beautifully in its oldness. My father was born there.  I  am amazed at how much knowledge Randy and Leanne (my two cousins who run the ranch) have and how hard they work. They are both ranchers and farmers.  It is a complex and tough job, with very little financial rewards.  They are my age and need to retire.  They are actively seeking someone to take the reins from them.  It is a different life from the one I know. but everyday there is so much to do,  The days fly by and I think Leanne summed it up when she said, “you can live anywhere these days and  I am never ever bored here.  It is my home.”

Of course I photographed a lot.  Down in the breaks, the landscape is spectacular.  The Breaks which contain Deep Creek run down to the Cheyenne River.  The landscape is deceiving because one feels the flatness of it and the vastness.  Driving right up to the edge of the Breaks, one does not realize that in just a minute there is a huge drop-off..  Down in Deep Creek there are lots of cattle with many calves.  They were not afraid of us and stood in the skinny roadway and looked very seriously at us.  I wondered who they thought we were.

i  remember my grandmother always having a camera ready to go by her back door.  Among other things she was a serious amateur photographer.  She told me once, when I was a child   “Have  the camera ready because you never know when you will need it.”  Her photographs are rich and beautiful and an inspiration to me. She photographed her children, visitors, the landscape, the animals.   I felt her presence strongly and found an old lard can which I will make into a pinhole camera.  I checked the back of the bathroom door where she kept a strap that was used to paddle all the miscreant children (but never me). It was gone.  I was given a beautiful coat she made and a dress of hers and two cigar boxes of my grandfathers.  I could still smell the cigars in the boxes, and still love that smell even though the cigars caused his death. I spent a whole day alone there, sitting in the old house, remembering.  I went up to the attic to find a bunch of children’s toys on the floor.  I was happy that children still played there as I once did. When Leanne had time, she took me back to the house and we looked at the old Bible among other things. Grandpa had written the births and deaths of people in the family in the Bible.  I felt heartsick that I had not been there more but I felt lucky to have this place as a part of my history and lucky to be able to go visit. Another important part of the trip was going and coming back.  My friend and I camped in the National Forests.  So many of them have been  burned and we camped in several burned out places.  It snowed one night!  There was a moose in a camp one afternoon.  We felt it was a good sign that no grizzlies were around. I was so amazed at seeing the moose that I  did not think to pick up the camera to take a photograph.  I was glad to camp in the burned out  places.  No one was usually around and the air was cool and the light beautiful.  I took lots of photographs of these places.  I will write more about the trip in future blog posts.  All of it is still new and I am still awed. Some bad things did happen but many good things as well.. Here are some photographs of the ranch.  I am still editing the pinhole images.

First four images:  My Grandparents house, the Shed, the Stairs and a field of winter wheat. Last three Images:  Landscapes along the way there and back.

Powidoki

At first it was wonderful to just meet Gio (John) Apruzzese, and to know there was another human close by in this deserted lonely town. I was curious about his writing. He was very easy to talk to and the books in Lo Studio provided fodder for our talk. Turns out Gio can write and does mostly at night.  I am a morning person, up with the light, looking to shoot.  That was the perfect arrangement, for two people experiencing Civita at the same time.  We would meet up for dinner, the end of my day, the beginning of his. And talk we would with good food and wine.
After the fellowship Gio connected me with an artist in Lodz, Poland, Bronka Nowicka with whom he had worked and after seeing my work, she wrote a piece on photography and on Gio’s poems along with her personal history of photography and time and suggested that we collaborate.  You could not avoid the idea of time when in Civita surrounded by the ghosts who woke me up at night, trodding the cobblestones. Perfect for the pandemic we wove our thoughts together swerving and darting and bouncing around. Heartfelt emails passed between us while alone.  I looked forward to what Gio and Bronka had to say. Spo-tkanie or  We-aving  was published recently in Powidoki, (Afterimage), an art and science journal from the Strzeminski Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz. Here is a link that describes the journal:  https://powidoki.asp.lodz.pl/o-nas.  This is the link to the text and images in Powidok:  https://jpapruzzese.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Bronka_Nowicka_Powidoki-nr.4_v1-1.pdf?fbclid=IwAR12ksU7T–rRQFjQy4pby_4adcqecGgGvQu8_V9Gu9zNQGCajOZk73aniY
As always thank you for reading this post.  This is an excellent addition to my fellowship.  I am grateful.
A New Website

A New Website

I am a lucky person.  Mostly.  Since the pandemic began, I have been staying home, like most people and as most of you know, I shattered the femur in my right leg, August 24th.  It took almost four months for that to heal.  In the meantime, my friends have been very good to me and while I have not done a lot of new pinhole work,  I have been well taken care of and  been well fed.  A website designer and friend, Angela Prosper thought I should definitely upgrade my almost ten year old website.  She is so right and she designed a new one for me;  She is a great designer who is visually smart and creative and also has the ability to explain the technical “stuff” to an techno-idiot like me.  Go to her website and you can see for yourself: rainydayprosper.com

On the new website there is a place for you to sign up to get an email each time I post something new (probably about twice a month).  I have a new Mailchimp account.and will send you an email {if you fill out the newsletter form) when  I do a new blog post. .  What else have I been shooting all these long months of the pandemic?  I turned to flowers and have begun to photograph them with my 8 x10 inch pinhole camera on color negative film. I found a box of 8 x 10 color negative film that I won in a raffle several years ago.   I also  been given some awesome tins for making new long exposure cameras.  I made two into cameras and are still exposing–one is a lunch box, (it has become a 2 hole camera) several are beautiful round tins that were old tobacco cans and one is a  big potato chip can that has become a three hole camera and is exposing as we speak along with the lunch box camera.  I dreamed about doing pinhole portraits of people.  So along with this new website, I will post a few photographs that I have made in the last year and hopefully snag you for my new email list  Thank you for reading this post.  Oh and I made some long exposure pinholes of the parking lot where I live in Sodo and was in a show that was featured on zoom.  Here are some images that are recent.  The featured image is called Portrait of Jenny Riffle because well it is her.

Flowers: double exposure

Flowers as they died.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three hole camera from My. Doorway

Mom and Dad’s Grave

Portrait of Jenny Riffle

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sun Trail as It Moved Southward

My Front Door: 2 hole camera

An Array of Nine Cameras: The Shunpike Window

Two Hole Camera from the Shunpike Window

Self-Portrait after 911

Self-Portrait after 911

Here is another one of a kind print from the early 2000s.  This is a self portrait taken with my old Mimaya TLR (twin lens reflex):  the film slipped when advanced.  I would get many frames that overlapped (a precursor to the pinhole images I do today).  The camera normally shot a square but  with the overlaps. the images became rectangles.  This silver gelatin print I toned in sepia, then blue toner.   It is the only toned print I made of this self-portrait and I will make no more because this print is made on Portriga Rapid, grade 3, fiber based, double weight, warm toned black and white enlarging paper which is not made anymore. This image was shot and printed shortly after 911; I am wearing a New York City firefighter’s t-shirt which was sent to us by a nephew who was a firefighter and worked at the Trade Towers after the attack.  I felt like I was in a prison, looking out at the world after 911.  This image is this week’s one-of-a-kind offer, printed on 11 x 14  inch paper and matted with 4-ply museum board 16 x 20 inches.  Ready for the frame!  Price, including the mat is $200.00 plus shipping and tax.  Go to the shop on this website to see the image with the mat.  Thanks for your interest.

Sepia and blue toned gelatin silver print from a double exposed from 120mm black and white film. 6 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches, 1/1