Iris and Poppy

For the second day of Long Shot, My wife and I traveled to Vashon Island to see my mother, and I ended up just taking a few quick photos in her garden. And then, before I knew it, it was 6PM and long shot had ended. now I just have to go through my pictures and sort out which ones to submit for the show.

And something else happened this weekend too. I started to relax. so much of the time I am so busy being serious about my writing and photography that I seem to get stuck in a very serious rut. But I am never serious about anything I shoot on my iPhone, so, all weekend when I was shooting pictures, and had nothing but my iPhone to use, I wasn’t taking anything seriously at all, and, quite frankly, it was quite freeing. Sometimes it’s just nice to relax and see what happens when you push the “shutter.”

The Accidental Titles

I’ve been taking a class on photo books for the last three months, and while I have been working on a hand-bound hardcover accordion book (more on that later) I became inspired and made two small paperback photo books.

The first title, The Cartography of Farmers’ Wives: Photography from 1915-1976, is a short paper-back book with sampling of photography from my great-grandmother and my grandmother. Many of the photographs are landscapes from eastern Washington, although there are a few portraits as well in this contemplative story of one families relationship with the land. I look at this book as a small meditation on a much larger project that I think will probably take me the next 2-3 years to complete. Now that I know I can complete a small project with some of the information and items I have in this collection of family history that has been handed to me, I feel ready to embark on the larger journey.

The second book, A Traveling Song is a small paper-back of Hipstamiatic images I took on my phone on the road-trip my wife and I took when we moved across the country from Washington, D.C., to Seattle, Washington, in 2009. We pretty much drove straight through, and most of the images were taken from the car window while passing through middle America.

Early Morning at Fern Cove

Sometimes, I just need to get out of the city, to take a weekend on the island and ignore the somewhat chaotic state of my life. So this weekend, I grabbed my computer and my camera and headed out to Vashon Island to spend a somewhat quiet weekend focusing on some projects that I just couldn’t seem to focus on while I was at my house, or even in the city, as I seemed to be getting distracted by everything else going on around me.

On saturday morning, I was up before the birds. Low tide was at 5:30 in the morning, and I decided that if I could get my butt up at that hour, I would make a jug of coffee and go down to a tiny inlet on the west side of Vashon and watch the sky, sea, and creatures wake up. And I made it. No one else seemed to be up that early but the gulls, and the morning quietness was well worth the early rise.

This afternoon it’s back to the city and the projects and distractions that await me, but I feel more ready to start checking things off my to-do list now that I have had a bit of a calm weekend to refocus. Another thing I realized this weekend, is that I don’t have to take myself so seriously when I am out shooting. I am just trying to bring a camera with me wherever I go just to shoot. The simple act of shooting may not result in any masterpieces, and hell, it may even result in a bunch of crap that I just end up tossing, but the act of shooting and looking through photos is inspiring more longer term project that I can take seriously. Plus, it’s reminding me how to see. So I’ll just keep being shutter happy for a while, at least while I let the serious projects marinate and come into fruition.

So, long-term, serious project these beach shots are surely not, but they are an exercise in the practice of looking.

More Glances Into the Past

If you’ve read any of my posts, you’ll know that I’m in the middle of mucking about in a bunch of old family photos. The cool thing about my family photos is that I have thousands (yes, really, thousands) of prints and negatives going back 100 years. Both my great-grandmother, and my grandmother were both shutterbugs, and my grandmother kept all the negatives she could.

They both also took a lot of landscape photographs, and candid images of their families (as opposed to posed group shots), and that is primarily what I have been working with as of late.

One of the reasons I am starting to work with these images is because I am taking a photobook class. I signed up for the class mainly for the technical information (i.e. what makes a successful photobook? what is the history? what makes a successful series of images? when is a photobook the best format? etc.) that will aid with the new publishing venture in the upcoming year, and for some inspiration (as the class is being taught by one of my favorite contemporary northwest photographers).

The difference between me, and most of the other students in the class, is that they have a clear concept of one specific book they want to create. I, on the other hand, want all the information, and to be able to pick peoples brains, and see what is going on in the world of photobooks currently. But seeing as making a photobook is part of the class, I am using some of these old photographs and making what I hope will be a quiet contemplation of the land that my family farmed from 1912 through the late 1960′s. It’s a good exercise in editing, and I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Sean Litchfield

I like these very much indeed

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What is a photographers life? It’s just a life, looking through a lens

Mapping History

A few months ago I got the opportunity to start going through my grandmothers photographs. This collection is not your standard few albums with posed family snapshots, but thousands of prints, slides and negatives by both my grandmother and my great-grandmother. There are family portraits, landscapes, snapshots, and close-up shots of flowers. Starting to sort through these photographs that span my grandmothers entire life (and yes, I mean entire, as some of the oldest negatives in the collection were taken in Salt Lake City by my great-grandmother in 1911 when my grandmother was born), I find myself focused on the compositions and lines in the photographs, as well as the life lines that flow through the photographs and make up the stories of my mother’s, grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s lives.

So much of our lives have been shaped by where we live, and where we come from. My grandmother spent her childhood in the Alberta prairies, mapping the land her father farmed, and much later, helped her husband work their farm in the Wenatchee Valley. My grandfathers family had helped settle the land, and it was here, after 30 years of being a nomad that my grandmother settled down, as best as a nomad can, and found her roots.

So this is where I have started, somewhere before my beginning, in the middle of my grandmothers story, and near the beginning of my mothers story, following the maps of my family’s roots.