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.
Wisp
A wisp of fog rising from a stream hidden deep in the woods signals to me to look at where I am. The silence of the Tuscan evening, the last light, and the fragile note of the vapor’s trail. Sometimes it is astonishing to see what calls me to attention. The smallest thing can be the lever that lifts the significant moment from the broad generalizations of reality.
Nature and Culture
Ah, Nature and Culture. Hand in hand they march together, constantly surprising us by their affinities, incongruities, dimensions, choice of habitat, and simple will to defy all expectations. Sounds a lot like photography to me. So when I came upon this bunker-like window, along the street of a tiny borgo of just a few houses, it stopped me in my tracks.
How did this get there? Was it by human hand? Or was it a volunteer seed dropped by a bird, or shat out and pre-fertilized and grew into this lovingly embracing, but prickly plant. And though when I see this, and make a photograph of it, what really comes to mind instead of merely a big print, is a vision of it in a grand scale, on a plaza somewhere, or in a big white box space of a museum. It looks so formidable and dangerous, and also playful and funny.
So many things to see in things.
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.
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.’
Who Could Ask For Anything More
What return to home! And to be greeted by Maggie and Nature in the double embrace of love and beauty. Who could ask for anything more?
Turnaround
Nota Bene: The hotel in Milan where I was going to post this from yesterday had an internet failure, so this is late.
The fast trip to Washington brought me to the Philipp’s Collection to meet an interesting group of photography collectors who were thinking of donating works of mine to the museum in the Treasury Building. We then all went over to the Treasury where we hung out in the conference room where much of the nation’s financial decisions were made, and then met with Ben Bernanke who was gracious and appreciative of the positive spirit of all these collectors and their future gift to the museum.
After lunch there I was back on a plane to Tuscany. A fast 24 hours that left me slightly ‘out of body’ but happy to be back in dear old worn and lovely Italy.
All of a Piece
Oh, the mornings! Sometimes they were as sweet and ancient as the dawn of time. Looking out at the pooled mist lying in the valley I felt the sea that must have filled this basin in the valley eons before the present.
What moments like this do to me is bring me to a stillness that daily life too often shatters. In that stillness the wonder of it all fills me up like the mist in the valley, and makes me linger and sail out of myself to the trance state we call ‘witness.’ And sometimes I don’t remember the actual making of the photograph because the whole experience is all of a piece.
This quality of being present is what I love about the act of making a photograph. Ideas, even ideas about things beyond what is in front of me, slip though the veil between me and what’s out there, and bring the experience inside so that outside and inside blend together like the rangefinder image in the Leica, until there is an alignment, a sense of the whole.
When I recognize and understand that moment of alignment the photograph feels authentic.
Later on that day (15th) I flew to Washington DC to meet with a group of collectors and to have dinner with my daughter, Ariel. We met at a restaurant in a complex in DC that was and looked so different from the Tuscan countryside I left 12 hours before, but which had in common some of the same color palette, but in the most exaggerated way.
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.
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.
ONCE MORE AROUND THE SUN 