Diptychs in Fresh Works - Five

Tractor, Kingdom Road, Blue Hill, Maine, MMX

Despite having visited the Blue Hill area for many years, I had not explored Kingdom Road until 2010. One August morning I thought I would drive out before breakfast to see what was photogenic there. It was not long before I came upon this red tractor and green hay-bailer sitting out in a freshly cut hayfield. Not wanting to wander into the field uninvited, I mounted a 150mm telephoto on my Pentax 645n for this diptych, which would magnify the images I wanted to make. I shot the scene a few different ways, and like this pair the best. I shot the tractor image then walked a few feet to the right for the second image of the trailer. If you look at the background you will see some repetition of the plants and trees. Telephoto lenses have the property of low depth of field, which makes things in front of or behind the main subject blurred by being out of focus, which can be a disadvantage or can make the main subject of a photo pop out at the viewer. The advantage of this approach was to get the farm equipment in profile and sharp, while the background and foreground were softened, but still recognizable.

Diptychs in Fresh Works - Four

Sheep May Safely Graze, Greenstory Farm, East Blue Hill, Maine, MMX

Not far from our new house in East Blue Hill, Maine is Jay Carter Road, a long dirt track leading to several houses and farms along the West side of McHeard Stream. One farm a short distance down the road is called Greenstory, and they raise sheep. I shot this small flock one morning, trying different lenses and two different cameras, but the sheep became disinterested in me rather quickly. As a result, the early diptychs of these ovines were much better because the sheep were still looking on me with some curiosity, perhaps expecting a treat. I took the start of my title from the J.S. Bach cantata.

Diptychs in Fresh Works - Three

Rocks, Ocean Path, Acadia National Park, Maine, MMVIII

Acadia National Park’s spectacular views are sometimes obscured by thick fog in summer. Fog can have a very interesting effect on a subject for the open minded artist, generating a softly defined negative space. A spectacular example in Japanese Art is a set of folding screens by Hasegawa Tōhaku (1539-1610) depicting a pine forest in fog. Late in his life while living in a Buddhist monastery, Tōhaku portrayed these pine trees in washes of sumi ink rapidly fading from black to grey, with much of the paper left totally white. 

Hasegawa Tōhaku, Pine Trees in Fog (松林図), 16th Century, Momoyama Period, Ink on Paper, right hand screen of pair of byōbu folding screens, Tōkyō National Museum (東京国立博物館).Japan.

In photography, fog results in an image emphasizing the foreground or the main subject and removes much detail from the background that might compete with the main subject in a fair weather photo. I shot these two pictures near the end of a hike with Lansing Wagner, as we walked down the Ocean Path down the eastern shore of Acadia the fog closed in, and the visible world became more intimate. We came upon a very cracked section of the pink granite that is the bedrock of Mount Desert Island, and the cracks seemed to converge toward one point. I tried to emphasize this convergence with the 45mm wide angle lens on my Bronica RF645, which exaggerated the perspective, and by splitting the composition into two frames I hoped to draw the viewer’s eyes in interesting ways into and around the composition. The bluish-grey lichens and green foliage provided subtle colors to contrast with the pink granite rocks in the print.

Diptychs in Fresh Works - Two

Radar House, Radar Road, Sedgwick, Maine, MMVII

I photographed this odd, blocky building without knowing what it was, and as I did so I was thinking about how to make the simple structure less banal. While the lushly growing lupines and other plants, the peeling yellow paint and rusting metal doors framed a compelling subject, I wanted to approach it creatively. I was not content to simply document it. So I decided to photograph this diptych shooting the building from the two corners, which would give a glimpse of both sides of the building, along with the front. In the back of my mind I was thinking of David Hockney’s photocollage of a desk, a more complex composition that shows the top, sides and front of the furniture.

I was later told this was a World War II radio house for a radar installation, but recently I learned this is not quite right. Built in the postwar, the 1950s, this was the Sedgwick Z-6BB Radar station, that had an unmanned radar tower and equipment to transmit data to Charleston Air Force Station in Charleston, Maine. The Sedgwick station was a Bendix model AN/FPS-14 radar, placed to fill in gaps in radar coverage from the larger installation at Charleston.

Diptychs in the Fresh Works exhibit at the first Flash Forward Festival Boston - One

I thought I would post descriptions and information of each of my five diptychs that curator Paula Tognarelli picked to put in the Fresh Works show on view June 2-5, 2011 at the Flash Forward Festival Boston. 

Burnt Blueberry Field, Radar Road, Sedgwick, Maine, MMVIII

The Radar Road blueberry fields in Sedgwick, Maine are among my favorite places in all the world. Carpeted with the low-bush, wild blueberry plants native to the northern parts of the US and Canada, with small patches of other plants, these fields explode with life. The plants change during the growing season, from the blossoms of spring to the concentrated blue-black fruit ripening in August to the reddening leaves of autumn. But these fields would rapidly go to shrubs and trees in climactic succession without the intervention of humans, who value blueberries above a forest. To keep unwanted plants at bay, the common practice in Maine is to burn the fields every few years, usually after harvest. This kills off many susceptible weeds, but not the blueberry plants, whose roots tolerate the heat and then grow again the next year.

I shot this diptych one cool spring the year after this particular field was burned. While the ground was still blackened with soot, the new blueberry plant growth was quite red, while ferns and grasses that also survived the previous fall’s burning sprang forth in green. While this appears surreal, it is actually a faithful recoding to film of what was there. No digital manipulation is done to my prints of this scene, I only adjust the brightness of the sky buy burning the upper part of the image to get the clouds to show up on the paper.