Tag Archives: Tuscany

JUNE 4, 2015

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Siena

I usually have been fairly straight ahead when I photograph. I like standing at my own height, not stooping or bending, basically looking at the world from eye level. It has suited me for 50+ years, but here I was in Il Campo, the vast piazza in Siena,  a place I love to go to. It’s a fan shaped piazza that is made of old bricks and it slopes downhill making it a great place for people to lie down in and take the sun, or just hang out.

So imagine my surprise when I opened my eyes and saw the tower from this position. Instead of rolling over and becoming right side up I decided to experience the dislocation and see what making a photograph like this felt, and looked like.

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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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JUNE 1, 2015

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You Will Be Surprised

When I am out walking with Maggie (who, among many other professions during a well lived life, was a dancer) the unpredictable often happens, so carrying a camera is a foregone conclusion. She, spins, and kicks, and runs and laughs, like a 6 year old, and she is more than 10 times that, but her energy and humor are part of the bounty she has brought into my life. Every so often I think; ‘why haven’t I made a book about her?’

While considering a photograph for today’s blog this one popped into view, as did that thought once again. I must have a thousand photographs of Maggie from our 20+ years together, probably more. This is a photographer’s dilemma; the thought that someone close to you is not the stuff of a book. In fact the family and loved ones constitute a great subject for an intimate work, if only we are willing to take the time to look closely at what we have. It also is a portrait of how one ages. Consider Nick Nixon’s series of the four, Brown sisters. When looking at them we see the wear and tear of lives spanning 40 years which, even without words, is an amazing document that grows deeper with each reading and every year.

So, look into your files for those images that you though were too personal, or too familiar, and try looking at them as if you were a stranger who has discovered this trove in a flea market trunk, the way John Maloof discovered Vivian Maier. You will be surprised.

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MAY 31, 2015

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I Take It In

After Rome we came home. What a relief to stand in the open countryside and simply look. That to me is one of the joys of being out of a city where the activity is all over the city’s surfaces, and the layered densities of the movement and constant life on the street build a fevered concentration in me. I love it when I am there, whatever city I am in, because I am truly a city creature, but, oh, the surprise of the spacious and quiet Tuscan countryside, brings out another side of who I am. And that is my meditative nature.

I stand still and let my heartbeat find the rhythm of what I see and smell and hear, and often, then, I see something small and maybe even familiar, but with a freshness that opens me to accepting just the pleasure of seeing it, and slowly, it seems so slow after the city , I take it in.

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MAY 25, 2015

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A Meadow

We were driving to Rome for a shoot I was to do at Cinecittá, when along the way we passed this meadow. It was perfect timing, as nature was calling, so what better place to stop and take in while letting out.

The abundance of wild flowers, the heady perfume of the meadow on a warm day, the gentle roll of the land, (they call it dolce, sweet) even the march of trees across the space, produced a peculiar sensation of awe and tenderness in all three of us as we stood on the verge of the meadow and looked in.

How often I have been stopped by something purely visual and yet encouraged to ‘take it in’ by the olfactory message that was being given off by where I was. I have learned to trust this instinct, this dream, or trance state, produced by the union of the whole sensory palette of seeing, hearing, smelling. Sight is not alone in our experience of place.

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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 20, 2015

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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.

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