New Portfolio

Harmony, PA 2023. This image, from my Americana portfolio, received Editor’s Applause in the online photographic journal, Frames, on 14 September.

I wrote in last month’s blog post about a place called Harmony, in Pennsylvania, noting that the photographs I had posted in the blog were part of a larger collection of ‘Americana’ - photographs culled from various trips to the US, over a number of years.

Here then is the link to a new Americana portfolio, which includes of course the photographs from our visit to Pennsylvania, but also others taken on trips to Buffalo, NY, Detroit, Dearborn and Bay City in Michigan.

The photographs are as much a reaction to the America I felt and saw as they are representations of it. See what you make of them.

Gratifyingly, it seems I am not alone in enjoying these images, which, on the surface and at first glance, might seem quite commonplace, but reference, I hope, something deeper and perhaps darker about America - three of the photographs from my Americana portfolio have received ‘editor’s applause’ from the online photographic journal, Frames, including, in addition to the image above, these two photographs, recognised on 26 and 4 September.

Body of Work

There are days when this no longer - shall we say - youthful body of mine seems to me nonetheless the body I know well, a body I am comfortable and familiar with, old shoes that do the job, a car that might be clunky and out of date but at least still goes. You get the idea.

And then there are days when I think this body isn’t mine at all, it must be someone else’s, some old fart’s who lives in a dank and rheumy hole in the ground somewhere. This is a body - a foreign body - that seems to be off on some obscure and recalcitrant mission of its own, a mule set on some winding and steep downhill path, with a cliff at the bottom. You climb up, you fall off, and the mule kicks you in the gut.

Thoughts of the body’s expanding frailties - per the great Leonard Cohen, I ache in the places that I used to play - turns my mind to bodies of other kinds, to bodies of work.

Art is long but life is short, and flesh (I am too often reminded these days) is optimistic but weak. I am beginning to see that what we like to think of as the ability of those older than us to rise above the mundane, to a higher and more contemplative plane, is simply diligent avoidance of the decline and pain that lies below.

For all of sorts of reasons, then - high and low, sacred and profane - the idea of creating, not just individual photographs, or a portfolio or two, but a strong and cohesive body of photographic work, has growing appeal. A body that might hopefully persist, at least for a week or so, after this mortal coil is sloughed off.

From my forthcoming portfolio, *Havana Revisited*

Glasgow Gallery of Photography

I am delighted that this image, a very South African scene photographed in the Eastern Cape, en route to the Free State, has been selected by The Glasgow Gallery of Photography for their upcoming Landscape Exhibition, in January 2024.

New Photographs

Toronto Airshow

I last photographed the Toronto Airshow in 2016, from the Toronto Islands - then we were away overseas, and this year, our plates seemed too full and we didn’t quite have the motivation to head down to the Lakeshore or the Islands again. Besides (I told myself, compensating furiously) I had other ideas about the kinds of images I would like to make - more abstract, less literal; less about machinery and speed than composition and concept. So I hauled myself up the hill to Wychwood Park, behind our house, lugging the Nikon and my 200-500mm lens, only to find that the view from up there was hardly a view at all, while the damned planes were moving across the little scraps of blue sky so low and so fast that I could hardly find, let alone track them, with my humungous telephoto.

So I came away with just two images that I like - but I like them quite a lot! See what you think.

St Marys, Ontario

The little town of St Marys, Ontario lies on the Thames River - no, not that Thames, the Ontario Thames. The view across the water seems, though, a very English view, as these photographs attest.

We spent the night in St Marys recently, a more affordable option than the larger and more popular nearby town of Stratford, where we had dinner and took in a play - Les Belles Soeurs - at the Stratford Festival.

And what a pretty town St Marys is, the nineteenth century limestone buildings affording it the sobriquet ‘Stone Town’ and earning it a place on our screens as the setting for the Murdoch Mysteries TV series.

Straddling the Thames, in 1858, the Sarnia Viaduct brought the Grand Trunk Railway to the town, transforming St Marys into a bustling centre, with fine buildings and, believe it or not, an opera house. When, in 1989, the railway line was abandoned, the citizens of the town banded together in one of those displays of civic pride and energy that gives life to so many small and otherwise marginal places, and repurposed the bridge as a walkway, part of the Grand Trunk Trail leading through woodlands over the river and into the town itself.

The rather moody photograph below, with the spider web at the centre, was taken from the Sarnia bridge on a wet and overcast morning.

Last Word - A Poem

Here’s the Wind

Here’s the wind, tickling the
leaves. When the long day
slows and the light goes
and our quiet street grows
quieter still
that tickle and that silent
chuckle boom and shudder
in the deep dark shadow as
night falls and the lamps
stare out and the stranger
cycling by turns
the corner, leaning,
and is gone.
© Glen Fisher

Americana