BirchLane.org
September
Sunday 29
Dogtown & Z-Boys. After church today (at which we heard an impassioned sermon about the cruelty of war), Daryl and I went to Pleasant Street Theatre to see "Dogtown & Z-Boys," which was being shown to raise money for a skatepark in Northampton. I loved the movie. This is a photo of Nancy Vonnegut who has designed a series of T-shirts to support the park.
Saturday 28
A Walk to The Poet's Seat. Betsy and I (and Daisy) went for a hike today. At the top of the mountain we found the "Poet's Seat."
Friday 27
Art Show. A stranger writes about this:
Browsing your page is like walking thru museum and watching a documentary on the history of photograph at the same time.
Low light, a glass of wine and soft piano music in the background... these are the conditions in which I to view your gallery.
Simple photos: no extravagant angles, not fancy manipulation, no blowout colors and contrasts. Just moments in time magnificently capture in one frame of film. Just moments that once were and now are gone, but oh, how much they say to us. They are but just one frame of millions that compose our lives, our history and our culture. And some how you manage to capture a whole life, a complete story in history and those details that defines us as a society in just that one frame.
Art is everything we do, from our first kiss, to our first son, to our last good bye… but you have managed to make art your life itself.
Thursday 26
The Rolling Stones. I saw him waiting to get into Madison Square Garden to see the Stones tonight.
Wednesday 25
Happy Anniversary.
Tuesday 24.
Some Good News. Today, I learned that one of my photos is going to be used as the image for the Holiday Card for the largest magazine industry association in New York City--and the company I sell printing for will print it; so it's a great promotion for both me and and my company.
I was also asked to be the photographer at Thursday's FMA Day in New York City. It is an important annual event where magazine publishers and circulation directors get together for a day-long series of seminars....and lunch and cocktails.
Monday 23
Pick Your Own.
Sunday 22
Mercury.
Saturday 21
A Walk in the Woods.
Friday 20
Secrets. (coming)
Thursday 19
Music of the Lake. (coming)
Wednesday 18
Dorothea Lange.
I went to the opening of the Dorothea Lange show tonight at Edwynn Houk Gallery, The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother" (pictured below with Jenni Holder, Director of the gallery in New York City) is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea Lange made in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California. Lange was concluding a month's trip photographing migratory farm labor around the state for what was then the Resettlement Administration. In 1960, Lange gave this account of the experience:
I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).The images were made using a Graflex camera. The original negatives are 4x5" film. It is not possible to determine on the basis of the negative numbers (which were assigned later at the Resettlement Administration) the order in which the photographs were taken. Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895 and is best known for her work documenting poor conditions of the migrant workers who traveled in large numbers to California during the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s. Her photographs brought much-needed attention to their plight. Lange used photography to document the difficult period of the Depression and to motivate agencies and individuals to take action to improve the situation. With her photographs Lange was able to capture the emotional and physical toll that the Depression and other events took on human beings across the country.
Dorothea was noted for her work of Japanese Immigrants rounded up and placed in camps following the attacks on Pearl Harbor. She was hired by the War Relocation Authority to photograph Japanese neighborhoods, processing centers, and camp facilities. Lange became angry with her employers for the perceived injustices she witnessed in the internment camps.
The ironic thing about Dorothea Lange is that she never considered herself as an artist. She had a passion for people and her motives were to capture on film the plight of the human spirit. She photographed bread lines, strikers, tenant farmers, the Central Valley, and the Great Plains.
At a time when America was facing some of its greatest challenges, Dorothea Lange was there documenting the changes. Her images left behind a legacy for the entire world to see and her images stand as reminders of the proud spirit that make us Americans.
Lange was fascinated by America's melting pot society and the changes that it underwent. She turned her camera on the racial and ethnic diversity that was and is America and she documented the struggles that change often brings. Her images captured both the positive and the negative. Both the good and the evil that society holds within.
Stricken with Polio at a young age, Dorothea believed that her disabilities gave her a heightened awareness of the plight of others. She overcame her handicap and used her camera to record that same immense spirit that allows people to overcome their own limitations.
However, it was her own immigrant ancestry as a German American that gave her work direction. Dorothea Lange died of cancer in 1965 just prior to the opening of her exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Tuesday 17
Dinosaur Tie. (coming)
Monday 16
Keats.
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed — see here it is —
I hold it towards you.Sunday 15
And I Love Her.
AND I LOVE HER (The Beatles)
(Lennon/McCartney)
I give her all my love
That's all I do
And if you saw my love
You'd love her too
I love herShe gives me ev'rything
And tenderly
The kiss my lover brings
She brings to me
And I love herA love like ours
Could never die
As long as I
Have you near meBright are the stars that shine
Dark is the sky
I know this love of mine
Will never die
And I love herBright are the stars that shine
Dark is the sky
I know this love of mine
Will never die
And I love herSaturday 14
A Hike in the Woods. Betsy and I (and Daisy) went for a hike today to the Chesterfield Gorge which is a rock canyon with seventy-foot-high walls carved by centuries of rushing water from the East Branch of the Westfield River. The surrounding forest features hemlock, ash, and oak, and is home to bears, bobcats, and turkeys. Visitors may enjoy a half-mile trail along cliff tops that offer views of the gorge, the river, and the surrounding forest. Chesterfield Gorge is the entrance to an extensive natural recreation area along the Westfield River, recently designated a National Wild and Scenic River. Catch-and-release fly fishing for trout is a popular pastime. The Reservation is adjacent to a mountain bike corridor known as River Road that connects the Reservation to nearby Gilbert Bliss State Forest. Chesterfield Gorge is also adjacent to the General Marquis de Lafayette Trail, which runs east to west through the hilltowns. Stone abutments of a ca.1770 bridge that spanned the river are all that remain of an important link in the former post road between Boston and Albany, NY. Stagecoaches used the bridge, and a toll gate was established at its eastern end. During the American Revolutionary War, redcoats marched over this bridge toward Boston following their defeat at Saratoga, NY. In 1835, floodwaters swept away the bridge along with nearby gristmills and sawmills.
Friday 13
Tribute. Names ARE People:
On display from Tuesday, September 10, through Sunday, September 15 in The Charles Englehard Court on the first floor on The American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City are two chalkboards used by firefighters from a local firehouse who were dispatched to the World Trade Center last September 11. Among the names listed (few in number) are those of nine who perished. The chalkboards were restored, preserved, and framed for the firehouse on east 85th Street by the Museum's Sherman Fairchild Center for Objects Conservation. Peace. And Pray for it.
Thursday 12
New York City. (add words here__)
Wednesday 11
Drop by Drop.
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.~Aeschylus
Tuesday 10
Boston. (add words here__)
Monday 09
New York Times Editorial.
Things Regained, Things Lost
he city has felt Sept. 11 coming for weeks and weeks now. The closer it comes, the more time seems to wrinkle. In August, many New Yorkers found themselves looking back a year, if only to remember a time when they didn't know what was coming. The past has a way of looking inexorable. It's almost impossible, now, to imagine the early morning of Sept. 11 a year ago without also imagining a train of events already in motion — flights boarding, workdays beginning — and a cataclysm approaching.
In the year since, New Yorkers have suffered two severe shocks. The first was the obvious one, the impact of the planes, the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center into 17 acres of dire rubble and the loss of nearly 3,000 lives. Just how profound a shock it was has been demonstrated by medical studies that show a high incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder among the city's residents, many of whom were eyewitnesses to the unimaginable that morning. To be caught somewhere between the malevolent if insubstantial will of the terrorists — between their intention, their purpose, that is — and the all too substantial destruction of buildings that defined what we take for granted in this city was the fate of most New Yorkers that morning. For everyone, it was a dislocation unlike anything else in our experience. And that made it common to us all.
The second shock New York has suffered arises from the aftereffects of that morning, and particularly from the almost indescribable cohesion the city felt in the first days and weeks after the attack. It's impossible to talk for long about New York, and especially Manhattan, without using a unifying metaphor, without calling the city a machine or an organism. But most of us experience the city in a non-metaphorical way, as inhabitants of our own, often tiny, separate worlds. New Yorkers have never looked at one another the way they did that morning and in the days following. There's no need to exaggerate the bond that arose in this city as the towers came down and stark realization set in. If you were there, you'll remember that sense of collective focus, that clinging together, as vividly as the clouds of powdered concrete and smoke that filled the air. That coherence, amid so much incoherence, persisted for days and then weeks. It persisted among those working at the recovery site and among those who were only trying to help recover each other.
And then somehow we were nearly all plucked away, one by one, by the claims of daily life, the very thing that seemed unrecoverable on Sept. 11. There was no real trauma inherently associated with shifting one's attention back to the concerns of everyday living, getting back to the job. For many New Yorkers, there was real relief. In a way, the dense concentration of the destruction, which seemed to become more and more hidden as time passed, helped the rest of the city begin to go about its business.
But there was a loss in this return to something akin to normalcy, a shock. We felt a moment vanishing, the receding of those first few days of citywide concentration, citywide commitment. That unity, that clinging together was the only joy to be found, but it was, in its way, a profound joy, amid profound grief. There is no preserving a time like that, except in memory.
Since then, almost all of us have returned to a more familiar city, the one collectively made up of our separate worlds. The very clean deep hole at ground zero, something that seemed impossible a year ago, before or after the attack, looks less like a miracle of hard work and unrelenting zeal than a tangle of intentions and obligations and desires and government entities.
Time slowly makes it possible to know more and more about what happened on Sept. 11, and so we keep returning to that morning again and again. We understand it differently, without the intuitive grasp of the complex emotions that seethed through the city in its aftermath. Every time we look back, we see more clearly what we've lost. A certain measure of anxiety has marked each of us. The bedrock assurance of day-to-day ordinariness has shifted beneath us. Until the shadow of this anniversary began to loom, you might have said that the city was really its old self again. But we were never quite so wary of shadows before.
These are losses that perhaps allow our lives to reflect more accurately the complexity of the world we live in, and so, in some sense, they are not necessarily to be mourned. The dead we do mourn and will mourn for years to come. As we watch this city change under the weight of that day, and under the weight of ordinary days as well, there's also that other loss to consider. No one would ever want to reclaim that sense of citywide communion at the price we paid for it. But having paid the price, no one wanted to see it go.
This city has only begun to recover itself, a year later, no matter how routine any other Tuesday than the second Tuesday in September or any other date than 9/11 might look. On a late summer morning, midweek, you can stand almost anywhere in Manhattan and feel the city rumble. The rumble seemed to fade away that morning a year ago, once the roar of the falling towers had ended. And in the silence afterward, it became clear that what made this city a single thing, what gave it its metaphorical unity, wasn't the asphalt and the steel and the rock beneath it all. It was the people.
Sunday 08
Melancholy.
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!~Hamlet
Saturday 07
Are You a Photographer? (add words here__)
Friday 06
Norbert and Bettina. (add words here__)
Thursday 05
New York City. (add words here__)
Wednesday 04
More Man Ray. " The admirable thing about the fantastic," Andre Breton declared, in his extensive, explanatory essay, 'Surrealism: Yesterday, To-Day, and To-Morrow,' translated by Edward Titus and published in the special Surrealism number of 'This Quarter, September 1931, "is that it is no longer fantastic: there is only the real."
After Man Ray, Portrait of Edward James, 1937
Tuesday 03
Man Ray and Me. For the past month I have been held spellbound by a few books I checked out of the library
Robert Doisneau, A Photographer's Life, by Peter Hamilton
Eakins, by Sylvan Schendler
Man Ray, Photography and Its Double, by Emmanuelle De L'Ecotais and Alain Saytag
Man Ray, American Artist, by Neil BaldwinDuring his first year in Paris and a half in Paris, Man Ray photographed Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Henri Matisse, Francis Picabia, and Fernand Leger. According to Baldwin, "Man Ray's personality meshed with the medium perfectly. Roland Barthes has written of the 'great portrait photographers as great myshologists.' Man Ray was in the process of mythologizing his past life as he moved more deeply into photography, and the other-worldly tone of his early portraits, their ever-so-slight haziness, made his subjects look as if they had sprung from a past of the photographer's fabrication."
After Man Ray, "Titayna," 1928
Monday 02
Where I Found You. An old photograph I happen to like. Andre Breton believed the proper province of Surrealist painting to be the replication of the artist's inner landscape.
Sunday 01
A Beginning Begins Somewhere. Neil Baldwin writes in "Man Ray, American Artist:
"Man Ray found one way to hold on to Lee Miller, using the same vehicle he had employed with Adon two decades earlier, and with Kiki: his work. Adon had been immortalized asleep in the Ridgefield cabin. Kiki's back had been forever emblazoned with "f" holes. Lee's lips were now abstracted from her body to hover in the Parisian sky dirigible-like, lurid and red......The Lips......Its title exemplifies Gertrude Stein's insistence upon embodying 'time in composition.'......Peter Gay could just as easily have been writing about Man Ray when he observed of Mondrian (another obsessive stylist) that 'painting was the aesthetic correlative for his repression, his way of coming to terms with himself--at once an expression of his problem and an embodiment of his solution.'"
