Tag Archives: Tuscany

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 15, 2015

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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.

05-15 L1028815Later 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.

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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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MAY 12, 2015

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Inside The Light

My eye is dazzled regularly by the Tuscan light.  A light that caused us many years ago to name our book on the region; “Tuscany: Inside The Light,” because it so often seemed as if the light was emanating from within the landscape rather than falling on it.

There is something very special in the composition of the soil here which I believe contributes to this light effect, and my reading of it this way. The earth here is not the typical dark earth of many agricultural zones. This earth is known as the Tuscan crete, which is a light toned, clay-like material deposited millions of years ago as sea bottom, and as such it is incredibly nutrient rich, but not dark. I believe that this light toned earth forms a base below the grasses, grains, sunflowers, vineyards, etc, that are part of the landscape here.

This produces a more reflective surface than a dark soil does, and so there is a luminous lift to the light bouncing back from the land, which I believe is what generates the special qualities of Tuscan light. Certainly daily atmospheric conditions emphasize light and color as well, but from my 20 year point of view working here, it is the accumulated resonance of this scattering of the light that accounts for these remarkable and emotional displays.

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MAY 10, 2015

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Small Touches

I have often thought that habitual, ordinary gestures, create the encyclopedia of forms that define our states of mind, expressions, attitudes, etc. And from the subtle differences in the way each actor performs them we have unlimited opportunities to see them again and again, in ways that add freshness, maybe even originality, to the interpretation.

Here, at 60 miles an hour, the relaxed hand of the driver could have been in the same pose were he sitting at home on his couch watching the football game. However, as I passed him (my wife was driving) I noticed that in the overall grayness of the day, and the monochrome of the cab and its paint job, the fleshiness of his hand became the live element of the frame within the frame within the frame.

Small touches, almost nothings, can often be the telling moment that makes me alert to seeing, even while being in a moving car at 60 milers an hour.

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MAY 9, 2015

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The Jewel

How lucky I was to be out early that day because the world was completely suffused in morning fog. Everything was a blur in the mist and magical to see, or try and see. After about an hour of walking and shooting this gauzy world the sun burned though and lifted some of the ground fog, and for a moment, really, just a moment and then – whoosh –  the world was lit.

But that moment between the two was a delicacy that lifted my entire being.  What a world we are in, what a magical, remarkable, unexpected jewel of a world!

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MAY 8, 2015

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What We Know

The stairs up to the studio were almost always in a shadowed space, but in the spring of the year, for only a few weeks at most, a lozenge of light, or some days a tentacle, or a band, or fan, or spray, depending on the cloud cover or angle, slides down the wall and describes a new space in what is a familiar but often overlooked passage.

It points out how we can still be surprised by what we think we know.

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