Category Archives: Tuscany

JUNE 5, 2015

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N.B. The wrong month and day were inserted yesterday

Humility

This is where we live. On a real farm in the hills of Tuscany. Those cows are out our door and down the slope maybe 150 yards away. Most of the time I don’t think of cows as subject matter that I’d be interested in, but when this double rainbow fell into their field they suddenly became more important to me just by being in the space. It’s the humility that gets to me. They’re not exciting the way wild animals might be. They just ruminate around, eating, lying down, wandering to the pond for a drink and a cool place to be, what a life. I could learn something from them.

There are evenings when we walked down the road just to be in their presence. They stand and look, and we do the same, and often something happens that is as simple and ancient as old dutch landscape paintings, with hay ricks and wagons, and farmhouses and sometimes a wonderful weather event in the distance. I don’t know what it is about this ordinariness, but it goes in deep, and I continue to try and find my way to making photographs that tell it right.

For a city guy to to be in this kind of country, without the drama of street life, is a lovely problem  to take on, especially for a ‘photograph a day’ project. Some days things are very quiet in the country, so making work requires a different kind of openness.

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On the walk back to the house  Maggie (then the space behind her was bare gravel, and now, 2 years later, it is lush with flowers and clover and trees – a magical transformation made by Maggie) picked up two rose petals which were dazzling in her hands in the low light.

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JUNE 3, 2015

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Accepting the Unexpected

Gianni knows how we like strange stuff to work with, me for my still lives, and Maggie for her constructions and other assemblages. On this day he brought a small barrel of wood shavings he saw in a woodworker’s atelier and had an immediate response to. So in they came and the first response was to how great they smelled, like being in a sawmill and taking in the sweet fragrance of pine and chestnut.

We give back and forth with Gianni. Whenever we come across something quirky or mysterious in some way, or very old and once of use in the old methods of working the land here, we bring it back for him. Part of this give and take brings us closer to the culture here and makes us more aware of the past and what remains of it in the present.

By accepting things as odd as this bowl of shavings I open myself to new ways of looking, and now that I have been making still lives I surprise myself by what speaks to me. I feel that seeing and photographing is an ongoing process of opening, again and again, to the unexpected, no matter what form it comes in.

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MAY 2, 2015

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Off Limits

We have had a special friendship with Gianni for 20 years. It was his character and generosity that led us to think about starting our own workshops in Tuscany 20 years ago. At that time he was the director of a large azienda; Castelnuovo Tancredi, on which there was a castle and 7 renovated farmhouses capable of holding 40-50 people. The castle was lived in by the owner, who at 102 is still living there! And who danced at our wedding when she was 87.

So, Gianni is, for us, and I know for many other people too, a special keeper of the flame of old Tuscany. And it is with him that we frequently go off on jaunts around the countryside searching for old treasures that carry the history of  the region. And this year we have taken a studio all together to make a kind of museum out of these finds, and also to work on our own projects in. But when I made these images 2 years ago, while doing the picture a day project, we were just finding our way to living here more regularly.

Maggie has learned her Italian by speaking with Gianni who is immensely patient with us, and is a great communicator himself, while not speaking a word of English. I find that I can photograph our lives as if I was out on the street anywhere in the world, and that this trio we make provides countless picture opportunities. It brings up that same lesson again and again; do not treat the intimate space of family as if it was off limits for doing serious work.

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MAY 24, 2015

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Sudden Light

It was a sudden light show. I moved from tree space to tree space watching it play out; where was the strongest sensation, what made me gasp? A few steps into the next pairing I saw the shadow of a man who was nearby, fall on the trunk of the cypress, and it was a sudden jolt of a new possibility.

There were others too, of the trees alone, and some are strong on their own, but this one made its way into the considerations for this blog. maybe on another day I would feel differently. Photography is like that.

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MAY 22, 2015

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Moon Song

This is the old barn we live in Tuscany. I saw it every day during that first year and no matter what angle, or what time of day it was, the place kept on surprising me. It’s so interesting how many aspects any place can have. All you have to do is keep looking and the seeing of it quickens the blood.

This Quercia, or what the Italians call an Oak, seems fairly nondescript by day, but that evening it sang to me under the moon.

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MAY 19, 2015

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3 Contadini

Marino, Marino, Maria.

Maria is married to Marino, and her brother, Marino, lives with them. They are in their 80’s and older, and have been together on their farm for more than 60 years. They are the last of a dying generation of people who live on and work the land. They are entirely self sufficient. They are wise and warm, and wily, and funny too, and have generous hearts that have remained open in spite of the hardships they’ve endured by living in a manner that belongs to the early part of the 20th century, or maybe even earlier.

The things they know about the land, the animals, the seasons, the very meaning of the winds, could fill a book. And Marino (with the stick) was a prisoner of war in WW2, and managed to walk all the way back home from up near the Russian border. Each time we visit with them we come away with a feeling that we traveled back in time to a part of Tuscan life that every day is slipping further away.

To make a portrait of these people – as you might imagine they are not aware of the ways in which we moderns make photographs all the time – so to make a portrait that holds their innocence as a value, requires a delicate method of being very present and yet as direct as they are, but also by maintaining a space that doesn’t take anything away from them, nor make them skittish. So genuine Interest in their lives and stories provides a basis for being in and observant of their rhythm. It supports the making of informal portraits.

There is a touch of anthropology in working like this, not that I know anything about that science, but over all these years I’ve learned how to be with people, and to become slightly invisible while being very present. This is part of the ‘way of being’ that photographers develop in order to slip into the lives of others.

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MAY 18, 2015

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Anniversary Day

One day a year Maggie and I travel Once More Around The Sun and find ourselves on the road where we were married 14 years ago. It is a road enclosed by tall Cypress trees, male and female trees mixed together for the last hundred years, or more and whose shapes tell you the difference. The female trees are rounder, thicker, taller, and have small, round, fruited pine cones the size of chestnuts, all over them. The males are slender, not s tall and seem to bend in the wind easier. They certainly are the inferior looking part of the species.

We always go for a walk there at the time of day that we were married, around 6 o’clock. Some days it’s sunny, as it was on our day, and others, as in this image, cooler, clouded over, grayer. We have had it every way and it doesn’t matter what kind of day it is, it’s still our day, and we always make the most of what we are given. Which, as you may have heard me say before, is what is at the heart of the photographic experience; ‘make the most of what you have.’

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MAY 14, 2015

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Simple Forms

There are moments and places that speak to me out of their simplest, most elemental nature. It could be the light – as it often is for me – or their form; mysterious, pure, layered, intricate, organic, ancient… This sunny space between two dark buildings announced itself, as places often do, by making me gasp when I turned into the lane, and when I gasp I know I am in the right place, or the right moment. I trust that gasp to be something from my source speaking without words. Words come later, but in the moment there is only the intake of breath that means, Now!

These simple forms; the house fronts in the light, the pair of quintessential Tuscan trees, the cypress and the pine, the face full of ivy on the building on the left, that flawless blue sky, the blush of pale color on the sunlit facade, all of these ordinary facts combined to make something ineffable, yet felt with the precision and economy of a Haiku.

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MAY 13, 2015

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Stone Portraits

Some years ago, on a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I found myself in the hall dedicated to Roman culture, a place I have always loved to wander through, but this time I was moved by something I had seen dozens of times before but was never stopped by in this way.

The room has several stepped rows of sculpted marble heads of Roman men, women, and children, from what might have been all walks of life, although it’s hard to know since only the heads are there and not the clothing which would certainly tell us more about them. But they seemed to be worldly, political, wealthy, and of a class that had their portraits done, whether for funereal purposes or as home decor. As I walked the line and carefully looked at each face they seemed to come alive to me, alive in the sense of discovering the individual in the stone as I slowly moved my vantage point around for each head. It was as if at a certain point, ‘there it was!’ the revelation.

I became excited enough to consider making a series of all of these heads where I would try to find the essential position where the spirit of the person emerged from the stone, as if they were sitting for a portrait with me. This idea came before my current interest in still lives, but I see now that it was a preview of this new interest, and it is still one I would like to pursue. However when I called my contacts at the Met the idea was met with a kind of slack interest, and a sense that it was too much trouble for them, and I was off to Europe soon after, so I let it drop.

Here, in a friend’s workshop in Tuscany, is a head of Mussolini, and as I considered it I could see that this notion I had of finding the essential character in the stone is still a workable one. That egomaniacal bastard is in there somewhere.

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