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.

Frayed Edges

Frayed Edges

It is an interesting question (to me at least) why I stop where I stop to photograph, why I photograph what I photograph.  After all these years I have realized that I seem to be attracted to a certain type of subject matter.   About fifteen years ago it became clear to me  that I  was attracted to and lived on the Frayed Edges of life both in my actual life and in my mind.  In urban areas (where I have lived more than half my life) I have always lived on the Edges: in NYC I lived in Red Hook before it was groovy and cool and it was literally on the edge of Brooklyn, on the harbor and definitely frayed:  full of run down houses, broken glass and wild dogs, among other things. For the last 13 years, I have lived in the Sodo neighborhood of Seattle, very industrial area in South Sodo with no place to shop or get coffee. My building, in fact, is the only one designated as a legal live/work space in this area.  This subject matter is not about people per se. Instead it is about the what people have discarded and what they live with on a day to day basis.  This detritus contains mostly all the aspects of life both urban and rural.  In the one rural area where I  lived in the nineties, the house was an old hunting cabin up a dirt road. We heard cougars in the ravine in the middle of the nigh and worked hard to keep the woods from encroaching on us. It was seven miles to the nearest store.  It was mostly scary to be outside and I did not photograph outside  much there.

I have been collecting these Edges photographs and lately mulling them over and over in my brain. I have gone through many many folders and picked out some of the best from the past 20 years or so.  I present them to you as both still lifes/landscapes and a visual celebration of the daily walk with a camera. They are a diary, a notebook for me. These images never made it into a final portfolio but have become this a blog post. I may do a portfolio soon called Frayed Edges, done either with the digital camera  or on  film.  There are many more;  I shoot daily. These have endured for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Trailers, Georgetown near Lucille Street, Seattle, WA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Georgetown, Seattle, WA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


My Grandmother’s Attic, South Dakota

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Near Oysterville, Willapa Bay, WA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From my Grandmother’s Attic, South Dakota

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Craig, Alaska

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greenhouse Door, Gig Harbor, WA

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Banner Forest, Near Port Orchard, WA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Little Shack Along the Columbia River, WA

 

Featured Image is a detail of a trailer near Westport, WA.

Ode to Mom and Dad and Their Love of Photography

Ode to Mom and Dad and Their Love of Photography

As most people know, my parents both  passed away recently.  We celebrated their lives and their love on March 4th which would have been their 73rd wedding anniversary.  They filled the lives of others with their presence, always involved.  As children we had a big vegetable garden, chickens, bees, fruit trees.  We camped, lived life in the NW, mostly outdoors.  When I think about where they both  started and where they ended up, their life together makes sense.

My mother’s father worked for a logging company in the Pacific NW.  Her family moved 16 times before she was a junior in high school, living in logging camps around the NW.  At 16, she decided to finish high school in one place, and stayed with friends of the family in Morton, WA so she could do this.  After high school she went to college in California which was interrupted by WWII, meeting my father and then having four kids who came in quick succession.

My father grew up on a farm in the middle of South Dakota.  The farm, now thousands of acres, is still owned and worked by family members.  At 15, Dad decided that he wanted to finish high school, which meant living 75 miles away from his family in Pierre. the nearest town and also the state capital.  It took him an extra year to finish because he had to work to pay his room and board.  Both of my parents were determined to get a diploma, both were avid readers, loved to try and do new things,  They both knew that they were destined for lives different than their parents had.  When they met during WWII, at Keyport, in Washington State where my dad was stationed, they fell in love immediately and were married within a few months.

Upon their passing, my siblings and I started to go through their things and found an incredible amount of photographs that documented every aspect of their lives as well as a huge archive of photographs of their childhoods taken mostly by their parents, in particular their mothers.  It was not a surprise that so many photographs existed, it was a surprise that I had not seen so many.  For both of them,  when they turned 90, I collected many of their photographs and made books dedicated to each of their lives.  My mother had also made photo albums for each of her children and grandchildren, culling out the best from the past.  But beyond the albums, there was a giant black metal trunk full of images, boxes of seemingly random images and many envelopes full of negatives and prints.

Photography was always a very important part of what we did as a family.  In the early  1960’s, Dad bought a Polaroid Land camera that was seemed like a miracle.  Instant photography!!  That summer we took hundreds of those images.  Recently, I found a taped together polaroid of our house, and yard.  It brings back memories of that summer, shooting anything and everything that came along.

polaroidtracytonhouse163

After that summer,  Dad got another polaroid that made beautiful rectangular images.  Dad always had a camera with him;  when I was about ten, I remember his mother, my grandmother Bertha telling me to always have a camera ready, loaded and at hand in case any thing “came up” that needed to be photographed.  During most of my childhood, Dad had an old Argus 35 mm camera with which he made Kodachrome slides.  Since photography was important, it is no surprise that I loved it at an early age.  I was given a camera at the age of 10 for Christmas and took it everywhere.  I only got one roll of film at a time, but when I shot that, there was always another roll ready.  Each image was precious and important and I think this is the way that my parents felt about photography too.   Dad kept up on all the latest inventions in photography and in his eighties acquired a computer, a printer and a digital camera.  He loved printing his digital images, loved taking photographs with that little digital camera, thought it all amazing and miraculous.

This morning, I spent some time going through what may be the last major box of images.  So many questions for both my parents, so many mysterious, funny, really well composed images.  I am grateful to have grown up in such an environment, so rich in image making. So here is my thanks to both of them for passing on this love of taking a picture, for acknowledging the importance of it and for never getting rid of any images.  Our personal history is intact and so wonderful to view.

I post this blog with a handful of images from their lives;  taken by their mothers, themselves and by me.  I have written several other blog posts on the publication of their 90th birthday books, and my Uncle Bob and Grandmothers involvement in photography as well.

book order003

My Mother, her Grandparents, Parents, husband, Siblings and Children

My Mother, her Grandparents, Parents, husband, Siblings and Childre

 

book order049 dads book Kid with chair in field copy book order110 book order141 book order063

My Father at 90

My Father at 90

Since I am working this week on my Mother’s 90th birthday book, thought I would add a link to my Father’s 90th birthday book which I made 3 1/2 years ago for him.  This is a blurb.com book  and can be found on their website at http://www.blurb.com/my/book/detail/1083784-photographs-of-duane-neuhauser.   The photograph on the front cover is one of my all time favorite photographs of my Dad, even at two, he was wearing a hat.  The book contains over 160 photographs of him from the earliest baby photographs to the age of 90.  It is a wonderful gift to have both parents live to this ripe old age and to sit with them as they look through the old photographs.  I think this is one of the reasons that I have been in love with photography since an early age:  a rich family history of images makes all the difference.

I remember his birthday party as if it were yesterday.  At one point I was dancing with him, the disco light was spinning (he wanted a disco light and I am so glad we had it) and I thought it was the perfect moment.  I was worried because the book had just come out and I was projecting all of the images from the book at the party.  I was worried because the book contained some images of him dressed in women’s clothing which he liked to do.  I gave him the book and said I hope you don’t mind me projecting all the images that are contained in it.  He said the most wonderful to me.  He said, “I am not ashamed of anything I have done so far in my life.  Feel free to project away and if people are offended they should not be here.”  Click on the link above to see the enire book.  it is so worth looking at.  View Photographs of Duane Neuhauser by by Janet Neuhauser

Welcome to my Blog….

Welcome to my Blog….

Welcome to my blog.  Anyone out there reading this, I thank you.  This website and blog are an interface for me, a place to act and react to the world of photography.  A public journal.  Ruminations on 30 plus  years of involvement with the medium. A place for me to post thoughts and ideas about photography, the pursuit of the image and the gift of involvement.   I will also  feature images by others that inspire me to think, create and be a better photographer and person.

I learn something everyday about photography.  It is a miraculous invention akin to fire, the wheel and the printing press, this profound ability that we have to image ourselves, our lives and our environment, to create both fact and fiction.  Photography is my life.  I understand how people fall in love with photography.  I did 30 plus years ago.  I don’t care that everyone is a photographer these days.  I only care that I have gotten to be one.   That said I feature this image:  a self portrait made outside my front door.  I photograph what lies before me.  Sometimes I make it up, invent it and alter reality.  Other times, I am true to reality.  This image reflects that:  I was looking for a picture due to a need to make one at that moment, camera in hand  and good light, outside my front door.  Images are everywhere.

Kid with chair in field copyMy Grandmother, who quit school after the sixth grade, was a remarkable photographer.  She had an eye and she had the desire to take photographs, a need, despite hard times, no money, a stark life full of hard work, many children, and a loveless marriage.  Yet she always had her camera.  So I dedicate  this blog to her, even though she was mostly unhappy, I know that photography made her happy.  I imagine her on the farm, 75 miles from the nearest town, waiting for the mail to arrive with the newest roll of developed film with prints.  It must have been one of those moments when everything else fell away, all the chores and work and stress while she looked at the images she had made months before.  I know she  felt joy at that moment.  She once told me that there is always a picture to be made.  The photograph below  is of my father, out in the  field with a chair.  It is a perfect moment, his hand hovers above the horizon, his expression is serious, nothing else exists at that moment, just him and her, the chair, the empty horizon, the breeze, the smell of the grasses.  She must have carried that good chair all the way out into the field, camera and boy in hand just to make this photograph and I have loved it  for many years.  It is the most important thing to make a photograph when the need makes itself known, when the  recognition takes place.

ADDENDUM/UPDATE:  As a toddler, my father was reluctant to learn to walk and it must have been frustrating for my grandmother on the farm with a two year old who did not walk.  She took several pictures of him (without the chair), and left him in a field to make his own way back to the farmhouse.  I don’t think  he has walked yet before  this photograph was made.  I hope it did soon after.I love the stories photographs create and how there are so many worlds inside one image.  Five years since I started this website and am happy to report I still love photography. I am still learning and still making photographs