Late into the night of January 2nd, 2009, I skated out onto the pond at the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation and began to photograph the ice.
The sky was clouded over and lit poorly by moonlight and light pollution from New Haven. The trees around the pond were so dark as to be almost indistinguishable. The ice itself, covered by a thin layer of snow, glowed uniformly pale white.
My camera was mounted on a tall lightweight tripod. I set the tripod on the ice in front of me, lined up the camera with the pond horizon, and began skating.
The result was a series of photographs that capture something of the abstract beauty of a winter pond at night. Above is the first of that series. More will be forthcoming, with any luck.
A little more than a month later, R. and I traveled to Maine, to spend a weekend winter camping with Alexandra & Garrett Conover. On our way back to Brooklyn we stopped at Moosehead Lake and spent part of a morning wandering around its vastness and dodging snow machines.
Again, the sky was clouded over and the ice was covered in snow. But though the effect was similar, the quality of the light was substantially different.
Earlier that month, on a drive from Brooklyn to New Castle Pennsylvania, I began a series of abstractions – attempts to capture certain facets of the experience of traveling across the land. On the far right is the first of these.
On our drive up to North Woods Ways, in Willimantic, I continued work on the series. The second of this series of experimental abstracts is on the right.
The first ice picture, from the Albers Foundation, is an abstraction of light by virtue of collecting it over time, while the vantage point is in motion. These photographs can be described in exactly the same way, but are nonetheless quite distinct.
Both these photographs – taken from a moving car – and the ice photograph – taken while being propelled by a moving skater – are the product of linear motion along the surface of the earth. The path of motion is relatively steady and straight, in all cases, but the important difference is that the trade route photographs capture the world at a right angle to the motion and the ice photograph captures it directly in front.
In both cases, the result is an accumulation of light. In that sense, then, these photographs are more precise than snapshots would have been. However, that accumulation of light, through its accumulation of detail, produces also a certain abstraction. More precision yields a broader perspective, images of, respectively, a place over time, and motion through time.
In April I was back in Vermont. On a walk through woods I know well, I explored a different technique for capturing a specific place in ways simultaneously abstract and precise. The result was this tetraptych of beech leaves, and trunks, and one little conifer.
These forests composed of American beech and sugar maple were once dominant throughout the northeastern part of the United States. Now, climate scientists predict that they will soon be completely displaced by more southerly tree varieties, and that the sugar maple will not be able to survive.
In May, R. and I left Brooklyn, and in June we left New York. In July we left the northeast entirely, and spent the summer and fall traveling. Now we are in southern Oregon, and I’m catching up on old photographs and other postponed work.
Over the next few months Hypsography will continue to expand and shift. I have a tremendous backlog of projects to finish, and I'm starting new ones all the time. Keep your dial locked here.
And thanks to Dalton Rooney, for the excellent photographs, and for the impetus to write this summary and thus get this new news section moving along. Happy new year.
Ashland, Oregon.
January 1, 2010.
