An invitation to view my ‘Americana’ portfolio and other new photographs

This set of images is of the historic village of Harmony, PA. Led by George Rapp, leader of the Harmony Society of Lutheran Separatists, a party of German settlers established the town in 1804; in 1815, the town and 6000 acres were sold to the ‘second founder,’ Abraham Ziegler, a Mennonite blacksmith, and it was the Mennonites who shaped the development of the town thereafter.

This series forms the first part of a collection of photographs scattered over time and place that I have called ‘Americana’ - images of a country that has been written about, photographed, studied and commented upon from many perspectives - think Robert Frank, Robert Adams, Walker Evans - yet remains (to the outsider at least) elusive: strangely familiar, yet often alien.

It’s the not-so-merry month of March, and here in Toronto we march on, through the grey detritus of a winter that has hung about too long….

But, as I mentioned last month and mention again in this blog, we will soon be out of here, and on our way to sunnier climes - Cape Town, South Africa, with a homeward swing at the end of April and into the beginning of May through Amsterdam and Germany.

Also in this post, some thoughts on style in photography, a guest piece by Rob on her fabulous collages, and updates on exhibitions, my upcoming portfolios and, of course, our travel plans.

What I remember first when I think about Etosha is the vastness, the scale, the sky’s blue dome fused with the land, the heat, the bone-dry air heavy with dust. The light bright yet diffused, the heat haze shimmering, and on the line of the horizon the blinding white sea of the salt pan. And I remember flying over this northern stretch of Namibia, and seeing the pan like a giant mirror, reflecting back the light to our aircraft 30,000 feet above.

Only then do I remember the wildlife - the herds of zebra, slogging up the dusty roads, irritable and quarrelsome in the heat; the springbok in waves flowing across the veld; the statuesque geometric beauty of gemsbok and the dour, stubborn battle of the rhinos at the Halali Camp for control of the waterhole….

Well, 2022 is finally behind us - do I hear you say, and thank goodness for that?! From rising inflation and the ever-increasing cost of living, to the downturn in the markets affecting our pensions if we have them and our retirement savings; from the continuing whack-a-mole battle with Covid variants to the climate emergency and the risible yet sinister lies and fabulations of the right-wing populists and alt-news media and on, most tragically and visibly, to Russia’s savage and unforgivable war of choice in Ukraine, last year was a year that many of us would prefer not to remember, a year we are happy to shut the door on.

Yet, at a personal, individual scale, 2022 was also, for us at least, a year of more positive changes and developments….

I’ve been taking photographs for most of my life, but I feel like I’ve only just begun…

As 2022 draws to a close, I’ve been asking myself about the amount of time I spend posting photographs to Flickr and Instagram, assembling portfolios for my website, posting blogs that possibly no-one - you, Dear Reader, excepted! - reads, and posing not just the obvious question - is it worth it? - but the rather more basic interrogative: what the hell am I trying to achieve here?

On a hazy autumn morning in Hertfordshire you can just about picture the exhaust trails from Spitfires and Messerschmitts looping about the skies - I say just about, because really what you see and feel, as a traveler from Canada, visiting friends and family, with no job to hurry to and nothing in particular to do or get done, is the peace and tranquillity of gentle hills and tidy villages, the softly diffused light of Keats’s ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ and of course the drizzle and damp.

Toronto! I have been trawling my metaphorical box of photographs, looking to retrieve images of the city I have been absent from too long. Armed with my camera, I have been stalking new prey. So, do please  take a look at my portfolio - an ongoing work-in-progress - here.

Fall in Toronto sends me foraging through the archives, a slow process of sifting through photographs made over the past five years and more, searching for images that are worth working on and, I hope, worth sharing with you.

So, for my September offering, here is a portfolio of black-and-white images of basking hippopotami, calm and at ease in the murky waters of the St Lucia Wetlands, a World Heritage site on the the north-east coast of South Africa.

Rob and I were down there on holiday…

This post introduces three new photographic portfolios, and additions to a fourth. It’s been a busy month, working through my back catalogue, editing and refining my images, make initial selections and then culling, culling, to the point where I feel I have a collection of images that is coherent, of sufficiently high quality, and hopefully of interest to others - meaning, you.

Some birders take photographs, and some photographers specialise in photographing birds. I am neither a skilled birder nor a specialised bird photographer, but over the years and across many different places and spaces I have accumulated a good many bird images, and this portfolio represents I think the best of them, or at least the most interesting - selected, as a photographer selects, with no pretence at representivity, but simply for their quality as images.

From the ubiquitous and pervasive ‘selfie’ to the great works of art, we are obsessed with our own image - the images of ourselves, of the rich and powerful, of the man or woman in the street - and just as obsessed with the notion of watching ourselves being watched, ourselves watching others.

Canada Day seems just the right day to introduce ‘Shorelines,’ a new portfolio of photographs, the photographic product of a recent visit to Vancouver and Vancouver Island.