As most of you know, I was a resident at the Willapa Bay AiR for the month of October. Photographing with my 120 Pinhole camera onto color negative film, I wanted to make a personal record of the Long Beach peninsula, a place I have been going to regularly for over 30 years. Two miles wide and 28 miles long, the peninsula is bounded by the Willapa Bay to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. The roar of the ocean is a constant. The people who live there make their living from oysters, cranberries, fish and the tourists. Leadbetter National Wildlife Refuge, on the north is a wonderful place to hike and walk. Cape Disappointment is on the South end along with many camp grounds and the Lewis and Clark museum.
I set out every day to photograph, often taking no more than 12 photographs a day (one roll). I looked at and listened to the ocean and the birds and the bay. Here is my first take on the images. Thirty-four of them are in this portfolio and I am amazed by how each one speaks to me. As always thank you for looking. Please visit the Willapa Bay Peninsula and love it as much as I do.
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.
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 wanted to make a new Home page and have my website open up to it. But alas, my template will not allow it. Might have to change, but in the meantime what I wanted to do on the home page was offer one item for sale each week. This week it is an old school contact sheet, silver gelatin, single weight paper of two sets of negatives printed together that my daughter Jess and I took in about 1994 with my old Mamiyaflex TLR. We had a deal: when I shot a photograph of her, she got to shoot one me. In this case, I shot a whole roll of her and she shot a whole roll of me. (12 photographs each). We shot these with the intention of the two rolls going together. I never made prints from this because I loved the sheet so much. It shows a little wear and tear because it has been hanging, unmatted on a wall for the last 20+ years. I have decided to offer it for sale for $200.00, un-matted and unframed. It is backed on a piece of rag paper 11 x 14 inches and will look lovely framed. The contact sheet is 8 x 10 inches. There is only one of these! And I won’t make another silver gelatin print of it. If you are interested go to my shop and buy it. You can pick directly from me and save shipping costs or I am happy to ship it. You can pay through pay-pal. This contact sheet is part of the portfolio, Kid Pictures, a 20 year documentation of my daughter and other kids growing up. Thanks for reading and for your interest. Help me pay my bills!
