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.
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.
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.
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.
I lived in Civita di Bagnoregio for 32 days from mid-November into December of 2019. I received a fellowship from the Civita Institute to photograph the old Etruscan hilltop town with my pinhole cameras. I took my 120 film pinhole camera (the “Zero”), my 4 x 5 inch pinhole camera (the “Leonardo”), 35 long-exposure (30 days) metal tins–homemade pinhole cameras from various containers, round tins, an old Saltine tin, altoid tins, and several tins that were from different origins, all of which I exposed onto paper (Those long-exposure images are the subject of another post). With the two bigger cameras, I shot color negative film and those are the ones shown here. I worked everyday shooting the 120 film camera with medium format negatives. That camera is versatile. I set it to shoot a rectangle and advanced as if I had shot a square. Overlap occurred and in some instances, two or more negatives were butted against each other. I also double exposed several negatives. This technical information is important because it is what I hoped I was doing. In other words most of these images are made from two or more negatives side by side on the film. Negatives that were together on the film were scanned and printed digitally. Not every image was on purpose. Some are plain old happy accidents that I am, well, happy about. All of the negatives are fabrications, not actually how it “looked” because I exposed different places together that I thought would look good. I was lucky to be in Civita before the pandemic hit and lucky to leave right before it became widely known. Civita and Italy have withstood centuries of plague, earthquakes, war. The strength of Civita is in the buildings, the cobblestones, the people. I hope that that strength comes through. Everything here has been printed on 17 x 22 inch paper as artist’s proofs and most are available for $100.00/each. Please inquire. There is only one of each image available at that price, The featured print is a part of the portfolio. Titled: Road to Tunnel (with Cloud) UPDATE: I have sold 11 of these images that I call Artist Proof Prints at 100.00. There is a slight discoloration or exposure problem in each.,I have nine left. Inquire with your interest. The corrected edition prints start at 400.00 per print. They are made in an edition of 10 and the price goes up to 750.00 each as the edition sells out.
