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Month: May 2009

Tunnels of Love, part II

Published May 31, 2009

stairs steps

Battery Stoddard Complex, May 2009

The rest of the shots from Thursday evening, in no particular order. The vertical shot of the doorway I cropped on the bottom due to a shadow racing across the sidewalk and threatening to start up the building. I was in a hurry and was trying to collapse the tripod legs to get lower in the vertical space, which is a litle difficult with the camera mounted in vertical orientation- sort of top heavy. A tripod leg shot out and I shouted a mild Jesus! just as a jogger was passing by and she glared and muttered Perv. Perhaps thinking I still had time during my minor disaster to ogle her. Some people are so self absorbed, lol.

Tunnels of Love

Published May 30, 2009

Battery Underground, May 2009

I went back to Fort Worden after work on Thursday. Our crew was working in Irondale this week, just up the hill from the old steel mill site, and I drove to work myself that day to give myself a break from the regimented inmate aspects of the group commute/caravan.  Plus, it’s the only way I can take all my camera gear with me. I left work in a sort of Friday evening daze- Thursday is my Friday, we work 4/10 hr days- not entirely sure what to do with myself.

Irondale segues to Port Hadlock and then to Port Townsend in a crescendo of affluenza. It would be very funny to see it in time elapse- see someone emerge from the crawlspace under a beat-to-hell trailer and end up walking around some of the palatial Victorian mansions in PT, but instead I just reflexively ended up at Fort Worden. Something about the place on a gorgeous spring evening- the white of the clapboards and the gray slate of the rooftops and the sweeping green of the commons- like a place where parades go to die.

The Stoddard artillery battery is quite inconspicuous off the end of the grounds, low and oddly small atop the eastern bluffs over Admiralty Inlet. It gives off an bruised glow in the growing dusk, it’s the perfect time to set up and take some shots. A natural symbiosis of desertion and flagging museum budgets.

These Ft Worden shots are a minor scope creep from original project, but I’m realizing that I have to connect themes as I uncover them in awkward ways to keep myself involved in my own projects.  No doubt eveything will eventually come up crisscrossed and confused by a network of aesthetic escape routes. But I do want  to involve more history. And this theme of abandonment does keep cropping up.

Open in the event of calm

Published May 22, 2009

Creek, Beach 1, February 2009

This one has festered into a vicious little twitch…I took it back in February and bring it out to work on it occasionally when things are going well and I’m feeling good about myself.  No compromise of contrast or tone circumvents the dust storm of hairpulling and pacing around my tiny darkroom and muttering. Even my most sedate Mendelssohn is no buffer against it. But something about the opposable trees and folds of the creek in the bluffs keep me coming back for more punishment.

Narrowing

Published May 22, 2009

The walk home, May 2009

Went behind the house last weekend and tried a few vertical shots with the new camera. I’m always startled by the feature descent of this short walk. With it’s usual lack of warning the silence and darkness clamps shut, and it’s a little spooky under the darkcloth.
And notice that nowhere are the firs spared a thorough limbing, the work of some mad lopper determined to stymie the silver fir where ever he finds it, no matter how abandoned the trail. Now that I’m working again, photography is again pushed to the margins, but the parallels keep finding there way into compositions nicely.

A thrill in thinning

Published May 8, 2009

Snow, December 2008

I’m working again, this first week out of the holiday club is a little sobering. I joined a weatherization crew in a community action program, reinsulating low income housing. It is good steady work, and a great service besides. Yet, the anxiety somehow increases. It’s reliable thrill to see those less fortunate than yourself, seeing all the ways a life can go wrong. My heart races in some of these places, but I can’t tell if it’s in sympathy or general dread. Anyway, it reminded my of some of the winter scenes still festering in the print piles.