Blackbirds, 2022, Archival Digital Print
Blackbirds rate among my most favorite: their silhouettes, their size, their song and seeing them in flocks on white snow is like nothing else.
The black-oiled sunflower seeds were the great attractor in this current snow.
There were seeds on the porch table, too, but that space belongs to the Juncos.
Plane, 2021, Archival Digital Print
Yesterday morning a single-engine plane flew low back and forth overhead. Its target was the big apple orchard behind my neighbor’s land. Its insect buzz was alarming even though I knew what it was doing. Fruit farmers hire these flyers to spread fertilizer or anti-fungal chemicals, but in the very cold weather they are used to stir up the air and bring down the heated air toward the ground. I was already feeling as if I were channeling the Blitz and tasted the terror of WWII, and the shot I got as it went on a loop over the house confirmed it. The power of images to set a place and a time — even one I never experienced except through media — is real.
Truck and Red Maple, 2021, Archival Digital Print
The moment when conjunctions of two or three forms sit in the space with such precision and rightness, we know that surely the universe seems perfectly planned. This Red Maple had a brother who was closer to the picture plane, but it was taken down in a wind storm several years ago. The stump shows on the right,
Chickens and Geese, Archival Digital Print, 2021
I’m thinking here of those early French photographs I saw at The Met a long time ago. It was the Gilman Paper Photography Collection, a trove of early photographs that changed me. That show altered the course of my thinking about photography and its possibilities.
Siblings, 2020, Archival Digital Print
Siblings [enlarged], 2020, Archival Digital Print
The Cheesecake, 2020, Archival Digital Print
Homage to Bonnard’s The Cherry Tart, Virginia is as lured as is Bonnard’s Dachshund.
Face on the Screen, 2020, Archival Digital Print
I was thinking of Bronzino’s portrait of a young man when I took this. It is actually a still from a short video, I had wanted to get my head turning but failed. I like the gaze in all paintings and photographs. I’m always suspicious of people who won’t look you in the eye. It portends trouble. Not mere shyness but something hidden and rarely positive.
Zachariah, 2020, Archival Digital Photo
My proud Pilgrim Gander, Zach, has just fathered a son, Burdock. Pilgrim Geese are doting parents and Zach watches his boy attentively at all times. It is being able to know and observe these beings that balances the horror of the national scene I read about and the ugliness, from the Minnesota murder of a man whose crime was being Black, to the milestone of deaths from Covid-19 that we just passed.
Adolescent Turkeys, 2019, Archival Digital Print
The first whiff of Autumn came last week. Now in spite of the high temperatures and the violent thunderstorms and drenching rains on many nights, the summer’s end nudges at us. Another sign is the young Turkeys who long ago fledged and are now long-necked and adolescent. The flock is big. Here are a few stragglers. Their sibs already crossed the road and were safely hidden in the grasses. These two had attitude and risked the on coming car.
Field of Sunflowers, 2019, Archival Digital Print
On Saturday I saw thirty acres of Sunflowers just coming into bloom. I was reminded of the moving scene in the film Everything Is Illuminated when the three travelers find their destination. She is an old woman living in a small house surrounded by blooming sunflowers. How radiant is our world if we can See.
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