Tag Archives: Isolation

I’m a real nowhere man…

27 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by in Discovery, Geography, Newfoundland, Observations, Photography, Sea

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Let me say it right up front – I like being “nowhere.” No, not just sitting around doing nothing, but being somewhere that doesn’t look or feel like anything else and has no particular name. In other words, nowhere.

In Newfoundland, there is plenty of nowhere and that’s a really good thing. There is so much good stuff there that if it were named or claimed, it wouldn’t be nowhere. That said, what does it mean?

Simply stated, there is so much land between formal towns and/or outports that is not settled or built upon, that is virtually untouched and untrod. It is glorious in it’s natural state. No malls, no convenient stores, nothing. As I said, glorious. And glorious in its isolation.

And where I’m going on this second trip to Newfoundland, I’ll be traveling through a lot of nowhere before I get somewhere and I couldn’t be happier. As a photographer, it’s very rare that we get to visit land unsullied by power lines, billboards, and visitor centers. This is land one doesn’t so much visit as experience. Nothing can prepare you for it. It is not postcard pretty in the traditional sense. Rather, it has a raw, vital beauty. Not the beauty say of a New England fall, but the unyielding beauty of a land defying commerce and compromise.

In the west, there are mountains, lakes, fjords, and caribou. Everywhere, there are bogs, moose, streams, and birches. And everything, every thing is informed by the sea. Oh, the sea. It is the lifeblood of the island even though its bounty has long been gone. It is in the DNA of the people and the culture. It is that that has helped me to decide where to go.

In a song by the Newfoundland group Great Big Sea, they sing: “There is no place quite like this place…”. They got that right.

Newfoundland is an island, about the same size as the state of Tennessee. But where I’ll be going to photograph this time are two islands off the coasts of Newfoundland – Fogo Island and Ramea: two very different islands sharing a similar story but ultimately with dissimilar outcomes: almost nowhere on the map, but home for a few hopeful and determined people.

Damn… oh, well.

20 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by in Discovery, Observations, Photography

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One of the nice things about being a photographer is that as you develop your film and make proof sheets, you get to relive the entire experience… but from afar in time and distance. Photographs you don’t remember taking (hopefully this is not an age-related issue) are revealed and you now see for real what you thought you originally saw.

So, with many rolls of film to process and proof, I set about to see if any of it made sense.  (Sidebar – as I write this, Kodak, who helped out tremendously with a generous grant of film for this book, has sadly filed for bankruptcy.) This was going to take some time, but as it progressed, I would be able to see it taking shape or so I had hoped. This would be interesting. From the negatives I developed, I could see that my cameras all worked flawlessly. That’s a plus. From the proof sheets, I could see all were in focus. Plus #2. We’re on a roll now.

Several months and a lot of hours later and many gallons of photo chemicals and numerous sheets of photographic paper, I saw the results. My intention was to go up there and find and photograph a culture isolated by geography but still connected to the world. Got that and in spades. Plus #3. But, it wasn’t right.

The pictures were good. They conveyed the isolation I was seeking. But as I looked at them repeatedly, I came to the realization that there was no core to them, no story, no reason for being. They could be little more than Bruce’s Wonderful Trip to Newfoundland. If there was a story to be told, this didn’t do it. All the planning, research, and actual work had not produced what I wanted.

However, not seeing what you were after can often lead to learning what you need. These photographs were good and could be used… along with others yet to be taken. I needed to go back.

What I really, really wanted…

05 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Discovery, Observations, Photography, Travel

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At this point, I’d been on the not-so-tropical island of Newfoundland photographing for nearly two weeks and traveling well-over 3,500 miles while doing so. Yet, laying underneath in the psychic morass known as my mind was the small, festering question as to whether or not I had achieved that for which I had come. If I didn’t, I could not simply return and re-photograph it; I would never see it again with the freshness and the mystery first experienced. I could only hope that I did it honestly and the project justice. These are just some of the fears photographers have while attempting such an endeavor as this.

Shooting it on film meant that I was not going to know what I had until all the film, some 3,000 exposures in all, was processed and proofed. There was no deadline imposed other than the urgency I felt wanting to see what was there. Many hours in the darkroom awaited me. This is not like waiting for the envelope to be read at an awards banquet and the outcome announced quickly. It would only be revealed in multiples of 12-36 exposures at a time. In this case, it was to be like 3,000 cliff-hangers in a Saturday morning serial. Does Pauline get rescued from the railroad tracks? Probably. Does Flash escape the clutches of the evil Ming the Merciless? Oh, we hope so. Yes, that was what it was like. I was going to have to keep processing the film and proofing it before I was able to see exactly what was there. There were going to be many moments of truth before me.

I had gone up to Newfoundland to explore, photograph, learn, and understand isolation in a Western culture. There aren’t too many inhabited places in the western hemisphere that fill that bill, but Newfoundland did. So I got that part right. But it was far from certain if I had succeeded with the photography. There were still a few more days in which I’d be photographing before I left for home and the work now in front of me. The really lame photographers joke fits perfectly here: I was going to have to see what developed.