“We were always intoxicated with colors, with words that speak of color, and with the sun that makes colors live.” Andre Derain (1880-1954).
About inspiring mottos.
COLOR IS JOY: I can definitely say, this is one of my lodestars.
IMOGEN CUNNINGHAM ON HER FAVS:
“Which of my photographs is my favorite? The one I’m going to take tomorrow.”
Klee on colour.
As a serious amateur photographer, I could have drafted this artistic manifesto that Paul Klee wrote when he visited Tunisia before WWI: "Colour possesses me. It will always possess me. That is the meaning of the happy hour: Colour and I are one." I say, Amen!
FROM A LETTER BY VINCENT VAN GOGH
“Not everything I do is a success, of course, but the work is getting along.”
Arles, April 9, 1888
ON PHOTOGRAPHY AS A VIBRANT ART FORM
In her review of Andy Grundberg’s new book, How Photography Became Contemporary Art, Jackie Wullschlaeger describes how he tells the story of the recent “remarkable rise of photography from the margin of art to its vital center.” She notes that “in his “pilgrim’s tale,” photography is a lone bold character setting out to carve a role beyond its obvious documentary function. It tries to imitate established media […] before finding its independent voice. Claiming acceptance on its own terms, photography is so successful that it revolutionizes the entire concept of what art can be.” She adds that “if color [photography] tends to fix images in time and space, black and white is nostalgic, mysterious, yet timeless, probably because of the strong formal qualities.”
Jackie Wullschlaeger, Financial Times, February 17, 2021.
ON PHOTOGRAPHY AND MUSIC
“Photography, I believe, works along the same lines as music. You have a composition or a frame, and within it you have lines, phrases, strokes, rhythm, accents, rests, but there is also spontaneity. If that comes together, even in a portrait, the viewer is not always aware of it, just as you’re not aware when you listen to music exactly what is happening to you.”
Marco Borggreve, Dutch photographer in Gramophone Magazine (January 2021).
MORE RAPPAHANNOCK BYGONE HOMES
Hanna Arendt in “Men in Dark Times” (about Walter Benjamin): “This thinking delves into the past…not to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages [but], like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light, but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and to carry them to the surface.”
The sign read Land for Sale at this remote site on Red Oak Mountain Road. The ruins pointed to what must have been once a thriving farm with a large home, barns and a chicken coop. The compound looked poignant on a sunny and windswept morning.
My Artistic Credo
“The uglier, older, meaner, iller, poorer I get, the more I wish to take my revenge by doing brilliant color, well arranged, resplendent.”
— Vincent van Gogh
A Propos My Fascination With Ghost Towns and Derelict Structures
They were the last ones to leave the town (a semi-fictional story I wrote several years ago after visiting the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, in Southwest Africa)
Business in Namibia’s Skeleton Coast had been declining steadily over the past few years, as fewer and fewer diamond and gold panners in the nearby creeks had any luck. Most able-bodied men had already moved away, while some of the older and more stubborn folk and their kin had taken up fishing. For lack of pupils, the small local school had closed two years ago, and Sunday church services these days rarely attracted more than eight or 10 elderly people.
Jakob’s wife had been prodding him with increasing conviction to move out as well. She claimed the couple and their five children would have a better future settling eastwards, where her own brother owned 10 head of cattle and raised subsistence crops at the edge of the Kalahari Desert, which kept his family well-fed. Jakob, however, was an adventurer at heart and much preferred to live by the ocean and sand dunes than as a farmer dealing with the erratic bushland weather.
Ultimately, day-to-day life in their town became unbearable; as the fish catch dwindled because of the changing ocean currents and the town’s general store and the bakery closed, Jakob made up his mind to resettle. By the time they finally left, all the other townsfolk already had gone. There was barely enough hay left to feed the horses on the three-day journey inland, and the wife hastily baked a few loaves of bread, which—together with morsels of ham, cheese and dried codfish and a few kegs of beer—would willy-nilly sustain the family on their arduous journey.
The rusty horse-drawn carriage that led them away had little space for their meager belongings, besides the seven passengers and their satchels. From their cupboards and bedroom furniture, they managed to squeeze into their crumbling suitcases a couple of pots and pans, some raggedy clothes, and a handful of prized work tools retrieved from the disused shed.
The family woke up before sunrise to get a head start on their trip, before it became unbearably hot to cross the Namib Desert. With a full moon shining and the Southern sky brimming with stars, it was painful to trot past the main square and see all the shuttered buildings and stores. Weeds had already taken over the lawns, and the streets were starting to be covered by a thin film of sand dust from the nearby beaches. While the two older kids were eager to start a new life elsewhere and showed no regrets about moving, the younger ones cried hopelessly, grieving for the loss of their home territory, their playmates, and the loyal family dog buried in the back yard.
Several years later, Jakob and his older son came back to the area on a fishing trip in their brand-new 4x4 truck. He tried to go back to the cemetery behind the Lutheran church to visit his parent’s grave, but the whole town had been literally buried under the sand dispersed by the windswept dunes, though you could still recognize the church spire and the imposing water tower. Flocks of seagulls flew back and forth over the ghost town, and a few hundred yards from the coast you could still see the shipwrecks perennially washed by the ocean waves. On the beach, there were only a few like-minded sports fishermen displaying their fancy gear, while in the distance a herd of seals paraded playfully on the sand.
Another iconic Rappahannock barn past its days of glory
Old Barns of Rappahannock County
I’m fascinated by ghost towns and disused structures. In this vein, several years ago my wife and I visited the Skeleton Coast of Namibia (in Southwest Africa), littered by numerous vessels shipwrecked by rocks and fogs. Onshore, the ghost town of Klomanskop, once a thriving diamond mining center, beckoned visitors. In its heyday, the town featured a butcher, a baker, a post office, and an ice factory, and European opera groups came to perform sporadically. After the mines were depleted, the population left in droves and by the mid-1950s, the town was completely abandoned. According to a National Geographic Travel report by Paul Cooper, the dunes that once rolled over the railway tracks now burst through the ghost town’s doors and porches, filling its rooms with smooth banks of sand.
Here in Rappahannock County, VA, where we have settled since March, the mainstay of economic activity continues to be traditional agriculture and cattle and sheep farming, despite the emergence of boutique organic farms, orchards and wineries. Alongside working farms, barns and silos, the landscape is dotted with charming disused structures reminiscent of the days of yore.
Meandering by the Rappahannock byways
Rappahannock country roads, often called “Hollows” (ours is Old Hollow) are often a visual feast. Today, as I was walking leisurely up the Hollow to the sound of the nearby water rush of the Thornton River, I came across this intriguing site where a house had been demolished. All that was left was this disused mailbox, which nature made sure to transform into a site-specific installation, lavishly decorated with echinacea flowers. Poignant, melancholy and beautiful.
How I came to digital photography
My early photographic memories were of faded black and white family albums depicting relatives who, for the most part, had died in Germany before I was born. Later on, my parents would—very sporadically— take family pictures on weekend outings or vacations. In the 1960s, my father bought a fancy German Rolleiflex camera which, again, was seldom used to portray family events.
My first serious camera was an analog Nikon single lens reflex (SLR) model that my wife and I bought in the mid-1970s and used primarily for travel, under the old M.O. of taking film rolls to a photography store for development, or else, obtaining first a contact sheet to select the better images. With this new camera, we took classes with an American friend and neighbor in Rio who was a professional photographer and exposed us to the basic techniques, as well as to the principal artistic photographers of the 20th century.
Coming to the U.S. in 1979 to pursue a busy career as an economist at a multilateral organization, I seldom had a chance to use my Nikon, including because of the underlying concern that taking good shots would require a considerable effort to develop them at a Motophoto outlet and file them in old-fashioned albums.
It was only after I retired from that job in 2008 that I started to explore in earnest the potential of I-Phone photography, and take a few local courses in the medium. Extensive domestic and foreign travel has since provided the opportunity to shoot novel images, and also prompted me to look with a keener eye at landscapes and people closer to home.
More recently, a number of trips to Sicily, Croatia, East and Southeast Asia and, just before the pandemic, to India have provided ample opportunities for shooting. I also have enjoyed documenting landscapes in Michigan, where our children live, and around our vacation home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.