Kai Franz - Squam Lake, NH. 2012.

This is the day of the storm. I had written you about it. It came with a furry, and left. It made its point. There was chatter that it was the tail-end of a hurricane from another place (a couple days prior) - that it was just passing through. I never took the time to fact-check that information, but it is the kind of thing people like to talk about in corner stores and places like that.

This image was made earlier in the evening, before dark settled. When I went back out there alone, in the pitch of the black and the bottem of the night, not even the moon was visible through that bed of clouds. There was the lightest of rain. I left the flashlight on the dock and waded out into the black of the air and the black of the water. The temperature merged, I was very interested in that. And I floated out, and I was scared, and I was calm, and I just let all that dark have its way with me for a bit.

You others were too tired to join, but it is the kind of thing you realize, in happening - that you were meant to do alone.  

How had I missed this one?
T. V O. + summer sun, August 2012. 

Vicky, sur le lac-plage. NH, 2012.
(vickysabourin.tumblr.com)

I wonder if she was aware of her contrapposto stance, or the kink in her ankle, or the slight separation in her fingers, or the way her palm rested on her thigh, or the weightiness of her gaze. I wonder if she knew all that, and decided to give it to me, or the camera, anyway - Or maybe she had no idea about all that, and the consequence of the after-ripples of her grace. 

Mimi Cabell - NH, 2012.
www.mimicabell.com

I am not so sure you can tell what a person is thinking, just by looking at them while they are in a state of thinking. There are cues, or hints - but not exacts. I used to ask almost every stranger, while working retail, what is the best thing that happened to you today? It would always throw them off for a slight moment, they’d pause, think (I’d try to read their thoughts), and they’d usually say something fairly interesting, or interesting enough to keep this experiment going. Since I was trapped inside, working a job I loathed, I wanted to live vicariously through all their best moments. It was often all I had. I think if it were now, and I was the person I now am, I would instead ask: What are you looking forward to most?

My past and future is starting to reverse.
I think this will only help my photographs.  

Kai Franz, upstairs room, moments before we left. NH, 2012.
www.kaifranz.de

He was the only one there without formal training in photography. I don’t even think he had a camera, and I don’t think he took a single photograph. He, I assume, didn’t have a need to. He was, after all, there and experiencing it. What is the point, right?

Maybe that was why I took so many photographs of him? Not because he is German, and exotic, and has a noticeably nice moustache and blue-blue eyes - but because he was the only one resolved with the simplicities of the medium. He had other art forms to cause him worry.

Johanna Warwick (www.johannawarwick.com) NH, 2012.  

There is something so exhilarating about the obnoxiousness of a Metz flash. It makes you hold your camera differently, and think differently, and be a bit more risky in your exposure control. I really like it. It changes me. Sometimes the beauty is in the subtleness of a fill-flash, other times its all about its nauseating presence. 

Mimi + Kai(senberg), Rattlesnake Hill, NH. 2012.

I’d climbed this summit before, maybe circa 2008, or 2009 - dates are never that important to me.  With the exception of Mimi, it was with entirely different people. The circumstances were different. The mood too. That time there was three Hasselblads, this time just one. But additionally, there was three separate field 4x5’s of the same make (Chamonix), a Mamiya 7, a metz flash, a Nikon Fm2, an olympus stylus epic, four or five Iphones, two cannon 5d’s, some digi point and shoot and maybe some others that I failed to note because I was too busy making this image. 

Seven of us old time friends spent the weekend in Centre Harbour, New Hampshire. We set up camp in a Cabell Family cottage, situated directly on Squam Lake. It is a place I have tremendous sentiment for. In the next week, or so, I will introduce you to some moments I managed to snag. 

Starting with this, Chris “the snake bite” Boyne, in the Kellerhaus - after, or before, or maybe during his five or six scoop ice cream Sundae (that is how big I remember it to be anyway).

Thank you, Le Journal de la Photographie (France). 

A. in the good old, and gone, studio.

This is my second instalment of, Summer feild-recordings and small happenings.

These are both pretty and simple moments, that I usually would have ignored. 

I found this on a roll of film. A. Corsini took this frame of me, in Niagara Falls - in the backyard of my Nonna. I think I was in search of my very best self, in this moment?

Today is Vicky S.’s Birthday.
She is vent-neuf.  

I hope it is a nice one, and year.

Recent scans of new and old, before-and-after, frames.

1) The best woman I know under an apple tree. 
2) Mark Peckmezian, doing Mark Peckmezian type things.
3) The first time I met Airin m.
4) Pizza lessons.
5) Half way to Hamilton.
6) A wild beast in the night greeted me after I went to the theatre alone. 

Zeus & Luna -
A couple Niagara Falls sweeties.  

I made it back from my end of summer escape to New Hampshire, via Montreal.

This image is before all that, before I woke up and realized summer had ended.