Mom after some early blackberries.

Old snaps, new scans!

I can't stop thinking about this movie.

"One day, when I was nineteen, I was sitting on the bow of the ship anchored in a bay in the South Pacific. As I looked at the land, heard the roosters crowing, saw the thatched huts, etcetera, I thought down to the water level and then to the immediately changed and strange world below the waterline. But it was the line inscribed across the variable landmass, determining where people would or would not live, where palm trees would or could not grow, that hypnotized me. The whole world changed as a result of an interior illumination—the water level was not what it was because of a single command by a higher power but because of an average result of a host of actions—runoff, wind currents, melting glaciers. I began to apprehend things in the dynamics of themselves—motions and bodies—the full account of how we came to be a mystery with still plenty of room for religion, though, in my case, a religion of what we don’t yet know rather than what we are certain of. I was de-denominated."

"I never allude to persons or places or events in history. I really do want to begin with a bare space with streams and rocks and trees. I have a little, a tiny poem that says something about the only way you can do anything at all about all of Western culture is to fail to refer to it. And that’s what I do. This makes my poetry seem, and maybe it actually is, too extremely noncultural. And perhaps so. I grew up as a farmer and I had at one time a great love for the land because my life and my family and the people around me depended on weather and seasons and farming and seeds and things like that. So my love for this country was and is unlimited."

From this interview of A. R. Ammons.

From a William Eggleston book. (Which?)

Clockwise from upper left:
Tennessee, 1985
Atlanta, Georgia, mid 80's
Massachusetts, mid 80's
Near Minter City and Glendora, Mississippi, 1969-70

"I'm not exactly sure that anything means 'Southern' for me. I like to look, and look around, and the South is one place I am most of the time, which means that obviously what I see around me are Southern things, but I've always tried to take that out of my photographs and make them more...not based in a place. I don't see my works as 'Southern works'. ... I'm trying to – working either in the South or in a foreign environment – essentially take the same picture, which is the picture I believe in and is illustrative of my kind of working."

From this interview of Eggleston. But then John Szarkowski in his introduction to William Eggleston's Guide:

"Artists themselves tend to take absolutist and unhelpful positions when addressing themselves to questions of content, pretending with Degas that the work has nothing to do with ballet dancers, or pretending with James Agee that it has nothing to do with artifice. Both positions have the virtue of neatness, and allow the artist to answer unanswerable questions briefly and then get back to work. If an artist were to admit that he was uncertain as to what part of the content of his work answered to life and what part to art, and was perhaps even uncertain as to precisely where the boundary between them lay, we would probably consider him incompetent.

"I once heard William Eggleston say that the nominal subjects of his pictures were no more than a pretext for the making of color photographs - the Degas position. I did not believe him, although I can believe that it might be an advantage to him to think so, or to pretend to think so. To me it seems that the pictures reproduced here are about the photographer's home, about his place, in both important meanings of that word."

From Elisabeth Hogeman's book After the Garden, 2014.

I would have loved these photos regardless, but Ellie was in my photo classes at UVa. 

Tom Uttech, Nind Awatchige, 2003.

Tom Uttech's paintings slay me. They were in the American Art Museum's show about birds. He also takes photos!

Tom Uttech, Nin Nissingwam

I am embarrassed to say that I haven't taken any pictures in a year and a half, since I went back to school. Excuses include broken camera, broken light meter, too busy, etc. etc. But now I'm done with school! And my camera ought to be fixed! I need to pick one project to do over the next 7 months and print as I go this time. I have too many projects that failed because I didn't print along the way and think about the final product. Welcome to 2016, this blog is super chatty now. Here is something old.