What we ask of a forest
There is something funny about having adults cram into a school bus. The narrow green seats, the watchful gaze of the driver, the one window left partially open… all of the details brought me back to childhood. Our destination was not school.
There is something funny about having adults cram into a school bus. The narrow green seats, the watchful gaze of the driver, the one window left partially open… all of the details brought me back to childhood. Our destination was not school. This was a guided forest walk that I had been hired to photograph for the Vermont Woodlands Association.
After grinding our way up Texas Hill, this small group of strangers disembarked and gathered for brief introductions. We were being led through the Hinesburg Town Forest by Chittenden County Forester Brandon Benedict, Audubon forest manager Steve Hagenbuch, and consulting forester Harris Roen.
We ambled down a trail and began to share our observations of the forest. The American Tree Farm System considers four values in certified woodlands: wood, water, recreation and wildlife. From where we stood, the intertwined nature of these uses was clear.
Steve pointed out how easily we were able to see through the woods, and what that meant for the birds that could utilize it. It is tempting to get stuck in a human perspective, where our natural comfort in an environment often means good visibility. Yet that same visibility can mean greater risk of predation for other animals.
As we moved on, the conversation shifted to our history with the landscape and how the woods we experience today are largely the result of a fairly destructive past. Vermont was deforested and farmed, the evidence still occasionally appearing in old cellar holes and traces of roads, now overgrown.
Fortunately, we try to manage our natural resources with more care now, but this can also create friction between those four uses. If one measure of forest health is diversity, then disruption is an important catalyst for more types of plants and different ages within those species.
I know this. It was drilled into me years ago when I studied forestry. It is still hard to accept visually.
Harris spoke of the management plan, part of which was to generate more patches in the forest. The mess was desirable. Places that are hard for us to walk through serve an important purpose for animals that like to hide from us.
These disturbed sites can also mimic what occurs naturally at times, things like blowdown. Managing a resource like this requires thinking on a timeline that extends far beyond our own. The small seedlings growing under that brush will be trees when I am gone.
This is not necessarily an enjoyable mental exercise. It is easy to mistake what looks healthy to us for what a forest actually needs. It is a challenge to reconcile good forest management with what is commonly viewed as a beautiful forest.
We hike to our last spot. My mind is churning through the dissonance of beauty and utility. The alternative to extraction is not necessarily absence.
I am struggling a bit to stay on the timeline of the trees. My whole life will be contained in just a few inches of their growth rings. But our choices have also changed the playing field for all of these dynamics. Climate change is a wildcard, another uncertainty these decisions have to account for, especially on land that belongs to all of us.
As the group looks into a dense thicket of regeneration, Brandon explains that this site was harvested only eight years ago. The trees that were removed were Norway spruce, a plantation of non-native species from when this landscape looked very different. The plantation itself was another human intervention, an attempt to replace what had been lost.
Steve looks at the site and sees bird habitat, which calls up yet another timeline. Their short lives will likely be encased in just a half-dozen rings of tree growth.
We shuffle back toward the bus. There is an awards ceremony to enjoy now. The Hinesburg Town Forest was recognized as Forest of the Year. These are not New York Times headlines, but there is a distinction worth noting.
This is a forest that belongs to the town, to many people, and it must accommodate many ideas of what a forest is for.
On our way back I see deer scat. Our group gets passed by a guy out trail running. We pass the logger’s equipment, and deep in the brush I see what’s left of an old stone wall.
Isle au haut
Moving between forest and coastline on Isle au Haut, as fog swallowed the landscape and lobster boats worked somewhere offshore.
We spent the day moving in and out of the woods along the coast of Isle au Haut. At times the shoreline seemed untouched, except for the occasional blue trail markers. Granite dropping into the ocean with no one else around. The trail meandered from rocky and rugged to quiet tunnels through the forest. Even when the sun was shining, it felt unforgiving and wild. Fog moved in, swallowing the landscape and narrowing the world around us. Somewhere offshore, lobster boats worked, their engines carrying across the water long before we could see them.
River time
An empty swimming hole, an overcast afternoon, and an hour that disappeared beside the river.
On my way home recently, I passed a swimming hole that only a few weeks earlier would have had cars lining both sides of the road, some of them precariously parked with two wheels in the ditch. This time there was no one. Just the sound of the river and a well-worn path leading down to the water.
It was overcast, and the green of the water seemed especially vivid. I set up my tripod and started making long exposures. One of the things I like about working this way is that there's nothing to do once the shutter is open but look around. Time tends to disappear. You stand beside the camera and wait for that strange transformation, rushing water rendered into an accumulation of time that our eyes can never quite see.
At one point I noticed a pair of glasses on the ground. I instinctively checked my shirt pocket and was surprised to find mine still there. Someone else had been standing in this exact spot not long before me. Farther along I found a neatly folded shirt with a pair of flip-flops placed beside it. I wondered how someone thoughtful enough to leave their things so carefully could also manage to leave without them.
I worked my way around the falls, moving the tripod from one spot to another. Before long, an hour had passed.
Turning Your Head In Nellieville
At Peter Beerits’s sculpture garden in Deer Isle, Maine, my kids knew exactly what to do. I was slower to catch on.
The kids knew what to do and as soon as the car door closed in Nervous Nellie’s parking lot, they were off to explore. I was slower to react, though forced to keep up. Fortunately, I did steal a glance at the welcome sign and noticed that exploring the spaces was encouraged. I think it also said touching the art was okay, but I kept that to myself.
We started with the Western town. Interiors were decorated with all manner of interesting ephemera, including a lot of taxidermy, but it was the people sculptures that began to transport me. We were entering their world, rooms with themes ranging from a jail to a juke joint. My son's initial reaction to the people-like sculptures was fear. They had a presence, and there was something about their stillness that filled the spaces. What struck me was their eerily fixed gaze.
Exploring the various buildings felt more like entering a sculpture, being inside the art instead of observing its surface. It was thrilling, and there were rewards for looking carefully. My daughter even noticed an installation on a second-story window ledge, only visible to those who craned their necks. My eyes roamed eagerly, searching for what was next, a stark contrast to the figures who all looked straight ahead.
As we moved through the sculpture park, the urge to capture it was overwhelming and I knew it was impossible. There were sculptures within sculptures, a fractal of creativity. The artist, Peter Beerits, seemed able to create anything he wanted, making something as simple as a rusty pile of chains into a form worth considering.
I began to feel uneasy with the way he rendered the faces of the “inhabitants.” They felt labored, and while composed of an interesting variety of materials, the faces remained estranged from the overall feeling of playful artistic freedom. Their unchanging field of view began to feel torturous in a place that rewarded looking in every direction.
There was a distinct point during our walk when I was forced to simply surrender my analytical sense. It was a struggle to free objects from their known utility and just revel in their form. It was overwhelming, maybe like a return to a child's view of the world where much is unknown but shapes, textures and sounds are that much more enticing. That this heightened way of seeing could be sustained struck me as an achievement, hard to describe, but it felt like mastery.
I felt melancholic staring at a damaged but very shiny outdoor gas grill. It was actually beautiful, a form I had only a second earlier labeled as junk. How could one exist in the world on this wavelength of aesthetic intoxication, the beauty of our industrialized mess becoming too much to bear? Maybe it was easier to see things as they are intended, to be adult-like and practical.
We walked further into the park, and the scale of the pieces changed when we encountered giant knights and a castle structure. It was like my desire to keep this childlike vision had shrunk me down to child size. The wonder mixed with sadness when we walked toward a collection of broken-down vehicles gathered in the woods, apparently watching an invisible film from an old, busted-up projector operated by an elf. To be an adult felt like losing the ability to view these films, to no longer see the magic of these mechanical beings playing together.
The kids continued to devour the structures, and I struggled to photograph what I was feeling: what is the point of photographing sculpture anyway? A place like this needs to be experienced in three dimensions. My mind came back to the faces and they suddenly felt like a mirror.
On our way out, we stopped to read the welcome sign. Peter Beerits has been building Nellieville for the past thirty years, and I hope he never stops.
woodstock fog
A lesson from the fog about accepting what is given, and rediscovering the joy of wandering with a camera.
Valley fog is more prevalent now, an early sign that the seasons are beginning to shift from summer towards fall. On some hillsides I see a subtle change in the green canopy, nothing dramatic, just a slight change in the overall hue. Dusk is creeping back towards dinner time. Less time for an evening walk or a late-day swim now.
I was down in Woodstock to get a few pickup shots for a client. A last-ditch effort to capture a summery landscape. The fog was thick and at first it felt frustrating... a waste of time to have gotten out of bed so early. For some reason, I just figured I'd take a drive and explore. Most days it all burns off by 9 or 10 A.M. It sounds exceedingly simple, but it was a revelation. Before having kids I used to love roaming the hills, finding dirt roads and just seeing where they spat me out. So, I did exactly that and chased the light for a couple of hours.
I checked back in a couple of times, and the fog was more settled into the valley bottom. It seemed like a bust, but as I was heading home it appeared to just vanish. I turned the car around and ended up getting the client work done too. As the days get shorter, I'm trying to hold onto that a little longer: get up, go look, and let the morning decide what it wants to give you.
Root to rise farm
A recent photography commission of Root to Rise Farm in Guildhall, Vermont for the Intervale Center.
Tailored tombstones
An experimental doc short about a laid off iron worker who survived a near death experience and found success launching her own company cleaning tombstones.
Postcards from Maine
I returned with a Forestry degree after college and spent a summer working in the North Maine woods. I remember my boss, at the time, giving directions, “Drive to the top of New Hampshire, head North through Canada for two hours and then take a right into Maine” Needless to say, I saw many more bears than people that summer. In the years since, I have been fortunate to film and photograph for Yankee Magazine from Kennebunkport to Lubec. One winter I explored Caribou by snow machine, followed by a summer voyage on Moosehead Lake with Captain Rocky aboard the steamboat Katahdin.
Maine has always pulled me Eastward to its mountains, lakes, forests and coastline. As a young boy I remember being woken up before dawn to watch the sunrise on Cadillac Mountain. I returned with a Forestry degree after college and spent a summer working in the North Maine woods. I remember my boss, at the time, giving directions, “Drive to the top of New Hampshire, head North through Canada for 2 hours and then take a right into Maine” Needless to say, I saw many more moose than people that summer. In the years since, I have been fortunate to film and photograph for Yankee Magazine from Kennebunkport to Lubec. One winter I explored, and filmed, the Caribou area by snow machine, followed by a summer voyage on Moosehead Lake with Captain Rocky aboard the Steamboat Katahdin.
As the Director of Photography for a PBS show, Weekends With Yankee, I got to look back at the Maine coast from inside the Nubble Lighthouse, mountain biked in Bethel, raced a schooner in the fog and filmed a memorable trip to Eastern Egg Island with the Puffin Man, Steve Kress. One of the best parts of my job is getting to share these places and stories with my kids. Last week I took them to another place I learned about from behind the camera, Rangeley. Ironically, I almost do not want to identify this area by name for fear of spoiling it. Too late… but I love the lack of development, long views, cold water and of course, the Loons. My daughter even commented that, “It just feels calm up here.”. A statement made humorous by sharing that our town has less than 500 residents and a single traffic light.
Rangeley Lake, Maine.
If I am being honest, I did not succeed in prying my children entirely off of screens, but the majority of their time was spent blissfully immersed in nature. A highlight being skipping stones, and then racing, with swim goggles on to retrieve them. The reality of our time blew in one day from the West, with a smokey haze replacing the endless blue. I recently finished the book “Immemorial” by Lauren Markham, and it was there that I learned of the term, Solastalgia. It is defined as, “a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home, but the environment has been altered and feels unfamiliar.” Kids today will inhabit a world vastly different from what I experienced growing up, with deadly floods and catastrophic fire becoming a normal headline. I hope our adventures together in Maine remain recognizable and that they can share a love of the natural world with their own kids.
Portraits with neighbors
I fell in love with photography all over again last week. Each spring there is a community picnic, and everyone contributes in some way... food, music, set-up and planning. It feels like a throw back and I enjoy getting to catch up with neighbors. When we first moved into the area, I offered to make portraits of everyone as a means of introduction. That was seven or eight years ago, and this year I decided to do it all again.
I fell in love with photography all over again last week. Each spring there is a community picnic, and everyone contributes in some way... food, music, set-up and planning. It feels like a throw back and I enjoy getting to catch up with neighbors. When we first moved into the area, I offered to make portraits of everyone as a means of introduction. That was seven or eight years ago, and this year I decided to do it all again. It was chaotic and imperfect, a make shift studio in the basement of the community house - kind of a low ceiling, stray light everywhere and lots of distraction... but it was fun. It reminded me how much I enjoy the process of working with people in front of the camera. The collaboration to find the right expression and the thrill of knowing an image was made. Much of my time these days is spent with moving pictures, but the magic of photography will always have a place in my heart. Want to create portraits... drop me a line, I am here for it.
Farm Equipment auction
Every spring the field down the road from me slowly fills up with tractors and heavy equipment. Items are lined up for the Addison County Commission Sales annual machinery auction. Akin to seeing sap buckets, or tubing these days, it marks the changing of the season from winter to spring. This observational documentary explores the sights and sounds of this event.
Every spring the field down the road from me slowly fills up with tractors and heavy equipment. Items are lined up for the Addison County Commission Sales annual machinery auction. Akin to seeing sap buckets, or tubing these days, it marks the changing of the season from winter to spring. This observational documentary explores the sights and sounds of this annual event.
Thoughts on place
I want to observe and create long term projects, extracting slivers of time that can speak to a certain familiarity and sense of place. Stephen Gill summarized this perfectly in the British Journal of Photography, “I realised that it’s all here. It’s all outside my house, and it’s also the biggest challenge,” he says. “To go somewhere unfamiliar, it’s exotic, and easy to make images. That was a language I never really tapped into. If you can latch onto your home environment, it’s unbelievable, you just have to look and absorb.” This sentiment inspired me, though it can also pose challenges because inevitably one's home environment can feel banal.
Distinct seasons are in my blood and are part of what pulled me back to Vermont. I love how the landscape gets reset every year, seeing the contours of the mountains when the leaves are gone and then entering into a world of green come summer. We live far enough north to notice a difference in the angle of the sun as the equinoxes come and go. The shadows inside our house reorient and the cats move to new sections of sun drenched floor. This shift in the way everyday life appears, with shorter nights and light from a different angle, is amplified by the time change. The rhythm of life skips a beat and forces a second glance at our surroundings. The change of season also exerts a certain amount of creative pressure on photographers; it's stressful to consider having to wait a full year if one does not capitalize on the ephemeral beauty of fall or spring.
Looking West over Lake Champlain as a snow squall approaches, Bridport Vermont.
Despite having left it blocking the door, my daughter forgot to bring her bicycle helmet to school. Moving the clocks for Daylight Savings Time has always wreaked havoc on our family routine. The late day sun is a welcome reprieve after winter, but waking up in the dark is a fresh challenge. I filled a travel mug of coffee, grabbed my camera and headed towards school to drop off the pink helmet.
I have been working close to home lately, focusing on a project defined by Route 125, our 36 mile long road connecting the Green Mountains to Lake Champlain. Creating work that is close to home affords the luxury of revisiting locations. I have been fascinated with the possibilities of how to articulate the passage of time in the photographs. The most basic impulse has been to simply rephotograph these places that pull me in throughout the year, a practice more instinctual than scientific. Forcing myself to remember and recreate previous compositions for the sake of comparison has become enjoyable. It has forced me to make peace with the unsettling notion that I am repeating myself. Initially it felt like a lack of creativity or an artistic plateau. It is a self-doubt that can be compounded by the commonplace subject matter–the landscapes and textures that have come to define home. How can I recognize what is interesting about my place in the world without forcing myself to look at it over and over again?
This thread of obsession with locality, had already been weaving its way through my photography. We have lived in our house for a decade now, and I have consistently enjoyed making photographs of the neighbors’ barn. It is the first and last thing I see each day, glancing out the window of the bedroom. Our side windows are old and made from spun glass. They have wonderfully distorted optics, at certain times of year they seem to project wave-like patterns on the walls. Looking or photographing through them also creates a beautiful rippled effect. The barn is always there, just waiting for me to make its portait. Until recently I never realized it had quietly produced a meaningful series of photos. It is always in the periphery of our life here. Over the years it has become a habit to grab whatever camera is within reach and photograph it without much thought; a muscle twitch. The neighbors' barn has been the backdrop for numerous portraits of the kids and has even appeared on our holiday cards. After ten years, now when I view these images I recognize that it is the barn that is the constant, stalwart against the vagaries of landscaping and the gnawing New England climate. The old weathered structure is what I now use to measure time, the seasonal changing shadow lines, and the growth of our children with it as the backdrop. I often wonder if the previous owners of our house admired it as I do.
Another collection of photos, created with my dog Jake, comes to mind when I think about rephotography as a hedge against an endlessly changing world. Susan Sontag famously wrote in On Photography, "All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt." I was in the habit of walking Jake down the very same stretch of road each day. And when he passed away, the collection of dog-walk photos was left spinning on the hard drive for a number of years. Finding them again I was reminded of my natural tendency to photograph the same settings and views on each walk.
Similar to the barn photos, these images represent the seasonality which defines the place where I live. Wind, rain, ice and snow were hassles in the moment, but in a body of still photography they are what help to create the sense of time and capture life gradually passing. One of the great things about dogs is that they need to walk everyday, and this repetition provides the ideal context for learning to observe. And, to Sontag’s point, this work also preserves the mortality of a beloved pet.
Jake and I walking Creek Road at sunset, Middlebury Vermont.
On the way to the school to deliver the forgotten helmet, my daughter called and let me know the PE unit on cycling was scheduled for the following day. She no longer needed it, but I was already out of the house and had my camera equipment in the car. The coffee was working now, and I began noticing the changed light. The slight disorientation of having moved the clocks fueled a renewed observation of familiar Route 125. Before long I found myself in a rhythm: driving, looking, stopping to make photographs, and documenting this early glimpse of spring.
The notion of making work close to home feels more relevant now, and it is comforting to understand that the relationship between unremarkable and striking is predicated simply on familiarity. I find this inspiring, and am also relieved that traveling for the sake of photography no longer has much draw. I want to observe and create long term projects, extracting slivers of time that can speak to a certain familiarity and sense of place. Stephen Gill summarized this perfectly in the British Journal of Photography, “I realised that it’s all here. It’s all outside my house, and it’s also the biggest challenge,” he says. “To go somewhere unfamiliar, it’s exotic, and easy to make images. That was a language I never really tapped into. If you can latch onto your home environment, it’s unbelievable, you just have to look and absorb.” This sentiment inspired me, though it can also pose challenges because inevitably one's home environment can feel banal. It is hard to imagine a viewer ever caring about how beautiful the light was, hitting my neighbors’ barn. What could be more ubiquitous in New England? Conversely it is also hard to imagine photographing any famed natural wonder and having it not be immediately lost in the flood of images already shared. In my mind trading a deep personal connection for glossy popular appeal is no longer a worthwhile pursuit, and I am increasingly more content to make work locally.
The intersection of Route 125 and Route 116 after a rain storm in East Middlebury, Vermont.
Jem Southam offers me additional inspiration: “I eschew grandeur for the sake of it, preferring to revel in a subtler scale and history. But there’s still an epic story to be told which exists wherever humans have made their homes.” In his book, Landscape Stories, Southam shows a series of photographs pulled from various long term projects. I find them fascinating and beautiful, but also somehow vulnerable. There is a sense that one's time here is fleeting, human life is a blip when considering the geologic history of a landscape. The introductory essay for his book was written by Andy Grundberg and he eloquently explains Southam’s unique work, “... its acceptance of the ambiguities of human interactions with the natural world, its preoccupation with processes of change…” It was instructive to find such a thoughtful way into these ideas, and contemplating them in conjunction with Southam’s photography motivates me to commit to documenting my place. In an interview from, On Landscape, Southam discussed the implications of creating place-based work, “I could in theory go and spend a winter in Sweden and select a place to work and make a series following the passage of a season there, in fact I would love to do just that. But the pictures would not be informed by a history of the generations living those long dark winters and as a result I think it would miss something, so my pictures come from my personal background and my own lifes living, and I believe I make better work that way.” This resonates deeply and it makes me consider how familiar I have become with my landscape, its mountains and rivers. There is incredible nuance in how they crest their banks, and all of the subtle variations associated with time of year. It is as if the landscape has a language, and the longer I spend observing it the better I become at understanding the season and this place.
An ice storm coated the landscape in late March, East Middlebury Vermont.
When I began to pursue photography as a profession, it seemed the best approach was to venture out into the world and bring home exotic images. The success of the work somehow attached to the amount of contrast with home. It was fueled by a predictable current of adventure and escapism. “Go West!” is ingrained in American culture and an undeniable facet of growing up on the East Coast. It is all part of a well-documented, at times flawed, human tendency to roam. The pink bike helmet on the seat next to me symbolizes this desire to explore. My daughter is getting more comfortable creating distance from home, for now on a bicycle but soon she will be driving too. Her world will remain small for just a few more years. I find myself somehow meeting her while going in the opposite direction.