Oct 21, 2019 | Blog
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.
Jun 25, 2019 | Blog
I know this about myself: I often make photographs and then don’t look at the actual images for a year, sometimes more. I can easily ignore whole bodies of work as I shoot them. I am not kind of photographer who shoots, reviews, edits, prints, then shoots more. For me, the best part of photography is in making the photograph in the field; it is exhilarating and much better than post processing. I find that when I edit as I work on an idea, the subject gets stale.
That said, one problem arises as long as I am hooked on film (and all my images these days are shot on film). It is absolutely necessary to write down the following soon after making the photograph: location, the date, the film type, exposure time, ISO, and of course the camera and pinhole size. I quit taking notes and writing down what I did when I got my first digital camera several years ago. Now after shooting film again for the last five years, I find I want to return to certain subjects and find the portals, the little river, the big trees, the end of a road campground, the slough. It is impossible to tell where many images were made. Good images and bad record keeping exists in my life. I vow to do better. I will take concise notes I will.
Of course with digital, one has lots of metadata but without GPS turned on, no location exists. But what is photography about anyway? Pinhole photography is about pausing for 30 minutes or more and just looking. Not that I eschew technique in pinhole photography. I am just not a technical kind of gal and refuse to pretend that I am. After all, the image is about feeling, the light, the moment, the weather and of course it is about the ISO of the film and the size of the pinhole aperture and the exposure times. I have began a notebook just for keeping film and camera data with little drawings of my photographs at the time I make them. Hopefully, this will help me be able to return to the scene. The featured image was taken on a road trip to California I think in 2016. It is a happy accident. I decided to try an all night long exposure and had a hard time getting up before dawn to close the camera. I actually closed it sometime after the sun came up. This image is easy to find again. But the exposure/film combo was not recorded.
The images below have unrecorded exposure times and location and were based on knowing that a good photograph could be made from what is in front of me. That is the exciting moment in photography. These are just a few of the total shot this way. Some can be found again easily, some can not.
Jan 5, 2019 | Portfolio
I have posted a lot of these images before but now I am hopeful that I can make them into a portfolio and put it up on this website. Here is a statement that I haveI wrote.
The images in this collection are made on color negative film, scanned and printed digitally onto cotton rag paper with archival inks. They were either made in a Zero 2000 medium format camera; or in a large format (4 x 5 inch) camera. Some were all-night long exposures, most were exposed for 30-45 minutes when light phenomena happens that can not be predicted. That passage of time is important in these images, for pinhole photography gathers light and records an extended moment differently than the camera with a lens. People become shadows, trees seem to replicate themselves, crashing waves flatten out. colors exaggerate while double exposures occur without intention. Movement is recorded while the time passes. I call this group of photographs Innards because the landscape is soft and the light is layered with what feels like memory. The images put me in touch with a side of myself I didn’t know existed. Over years of experimentation with the pinhole camera, I’ve come to this unconventional place, a mysterious landscape that glows and glistens from within–slightly ominous, endangered, beautiful, and sad. Imperfect and personal.
The preview image is a double exposure titled SomeWhere Near Yachats, Oregon Coast.
Many of these images are available in a self-published boxed book called Innards. Purchase of the book comes with your choice of a print in that is in the book. Published in an edition of 24, there are 10 still available,. Go to the shop on this website to preview the book.
Dec 11, 2018 | Blog
As most of you know I was a high school photography teacher for 24 years. I loved the job, working everyday with young people who were intrigued by and creative with photography. Teaching them was fun. I have now retired from that job. I hate that word retired. It sounds as if I am off to bed to do nothing for the remainder of the days I have left. For me retirement is not about that. I developed a good work ethic over the years as a high school teacher which continues to pay off now: I get up and drink coffee with my work. I honestly do not know how I had time do the high school job. I spent at least 60 hours a week working including with the commute (which involved a 30 minute ferry ride). On top of that I tended to my studio and did what I could with my personal work. I had shows and grants and sold photographs but it was “on the side.” Now it is all about simply producing for the pure joy of it.
So what am I doing right now? The Pinhole Landscapes of course. The Innards Portfolio as I have come to call those images. I am also working on a cookbook of my Mother’s recipes, the DSLR images I randomly take, the Pinhole Project, and two personal pinhole projects called Getaways and Home (a future post is in the works) and I of course am updating my two websites and applying for grants. The Pinhole Landscapes involve a lot of post-processing: the negatives are very dusty and the color is off. Sometimes I reverse them horizontally. Sometimes I change things in photoshop: the aspect ratio, the background among other things. I want these images to knock me for a loop, just like the darkroom has in the past. I refuse to be judgmental about post-processing decisions.
I just spent 17 days in November in New York City photographing the archive of my dear deceased mentor from graduate school, Judy Seigel. Many things amaze me about her work. She produced a huge, incredible body of images from the about the time I met her (in the early 1980s) until about 2015. Her work ethic was so strong. She was not always easy to be around. She asked me hard questions and got impatient when I did not have an answer. Yet I learned so much from her and I have continued to learn from her looking at her images while I photographed them. She produced a strong and unappreciated, odd body of work. She had an unique vision. She was experimental and fearless. She thought a regular silver print without any “post factory manipulations” was boring. Her work inspires me to go into the darkroom with the Innards Portfolio. They are film negatives after all. I have an idea to transform these images and make them both about process and the image. I will let you know how that works. Meanwhile, the studio is glorious, depressing, exhilarating, Some days I do not go out: I mean I do not go outside at all. Forgive me if I have canceled a date with you. But now that I have the gift of time, I am using it.
In the past I eschewed the DSLR. But in fact I am shooting with it now and again, especially when I am on a road trip. Here are some photographs with the DSLR from my recent trip to the Grand Tetons. I did shoot a lot with the pinhole camera as well, and I took along a telephoto lens (a rarity for me) for the DSLR. I used it to make studies for the pinholes. Maybe you will see some sort of relationship between the two types of shooting. Maybe not Let me know. You can see two of the trip’s pinholes in the More Innards post. Another post on them later.
To the Grand Tetons and Back, 2018
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These images are but a few of the 500 or so that I made with the DSLR. It will take some time to sort them out. The images above have popped out as favorites. The featured image is from inside a cabin near Jackson Lake with the Grand Tetons in the background.
Jun 6, 2017 | Blog
I am pleased to announce that six of my Pinhole Landscapes will be on view this summer at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art (bima.org) in a show called Women in Photography; I am one of ten women being exhibited. When Greg Robinson, the curator asked me to be in the show, he wondered how being a woman had influenced my work. It was an apropos question. I have long wanted to photograph the landscape but not in the way it had historically been done. I did not want to work in the same vein copying the greats, like William Henry Jackson, Timothy O’Sullivan and yes even Ansel Adams. And it seemed that all the greats had been men. Making the urban night photographs (Nighttime) had inspired me to try the landscape in a kind of crooked way (see asterisk below). I wanted color, mostly because I love the way the long exposures at night shifted the colors and recorded a certain kind of movement. I knew I could not get that feeling during the day with the a lens camera. The pinhole camera allowed for both a long exposure and color. I have owned a 4 x 5 pinhole camera for years with which I had mostly made still lifes (loupe-holes). I began with an all night long exposure, and it was a perfect negative (a happy accident I later discovered). I scanned that negative and printed it digitally. There was something about that image (Tomales), a seven hour exposure that made me realize that I could do the landscape both at night and during the day. In a crooked way, with the pinhole, with film. The long exposures, in the wind, rain, snow, darkness, make the images soft; the pinhole records light and time like no other type of camera. Mostly when I am making images with the that camera, I am pushing the exposure envelope hoping to get enough light on the film, hoping for the image that I see before me, but it is always turns out differently once it is developed. Sometimes I am constrained by the available light. Sometimes I am in love with the light and the moment and simply hope for the best. All in all, I am well into making the landscape my own way. I am happy not to see the image immediately. Not to be able to actually look through the camera. I love the mystery and the uncertainty. The crookedness of it.
I am beginning to understand that photography is as much about time as it is about light and the pinhole records both. Each image seems to happen against the odds. Usal Beach, below is an example. Taken on the Lost Coast in Northern California, on a dreary, gray evening. It felt creepy, with the abandoned campground, dried-up river to the ocean, high crashing surf, strange noises one could hear but not see. A whole town once existed on this site. The three mile drive on a treacherous dirt road keeps most people away. Yet on the evening I made the image, it seems there had been many people on the beach that day, there were lots of footsteps in the sand. No one was there when this image was made. The waves were close with a steep drop off yet the surf looks deceptively calm in the exposure. While making the image, I had little hope it would turn out. When I saw the negative a month later, I knew I had something.
Usal Beach, CA
I don’t mean to take creepy landscapes but somehow end up in creepy places. Usal Beach was followed by several more images but the one below taken near the Dyke Access Road on the Columbia River speaks to the same aesthetic. Cottonwood Tree, Columbia River was made with the camera perched on a plastic box near the water. It started to rain about 15 minutes into the exposure. A big ship came up the river, in from Astoria. It moved slowly and I decided to make the exposure the length of time it took the ship to come past the camera, about an hour. The cottonwood tree was a victim of flooding and erosion from a very wet winter. I was surprised how it seemed to be growing out of the water. The wake from many boats on the river must have created that effect because the tree looked like it was growing out of the mud when the photograph was made. Again, none of the boats appear in the photograph, because the exposure is too long to record their speed.
Columbia River, WA
There are four other images in the show. One made three years ago, the others within the last year. I hope you can stop by BIMA. The show will be up the entire summer. The work of the ten women included in the show is diverse and interesting. If you are in the Northwest, the opening is on Saturday, June 24th, from 2-5 pm for friends of friends of friends, all are welcome.
Featured Image: The Little Klickitat River
