“Photography is not like painting. There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture.  Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

Henri Cartier-Besson (1908-2004)

It was in this way that Henri Cartier-Bresson described capturing the decisive moment in photography.  And we have all been brought up on the myth of Ansel Adams’ “Moonrise Hernandez, NM, 1941”  Actually, I like Adams’ description of that creative moment, of how he almost bungled the whole scene.  I like it because I can relate to it.  More often than not, I do something wrong.  Nowadays, it’s more often than not that I’ve got the camera on power-save off.

Still using a camera has certainly gotten a lot easier.  In the “good?” old days, I used to go out and assess the light, set my camera to a likely exposure and set my focus to an appropriate likely depth-of-field range.  Today you might not even know what I am talking about.  Still I was ready – ready to bungle it all again!

But of course, what you remember best are not your mistakes but your successes.  It was the summer of 1970 and I happened to be standing on a bridge over a canal in Amsterdam, NL.  My Leica M3 was in my supposed preordained state of readiness.  In an instant, and for an instant, I was transported into the threatening, inky-blue, vaporous light of Giorgione’s “The Tempest, 1508.”  I had time for a single exposure.  It was the greatest success of my analogue days.

Figure 1 – Amsterdam, 1970, digitized from an Ektachrome transparency. (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – View of the Dorset Quarry, Dorset, VT (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Vermont is marble!  Indeed the old part of Manchester Village, opposite the Equinox Resort, is actually paved with marble blocks.  So on my recent trip to Vermont, I had one destination in mind, ahead of time, and that was the Dorset Quarry in Dorset, Vermont.  I had been there before and knew that it was an ideal location for the kind of geometric images that I love.

Dorset Quarry was the first commercial marble quarry in the United States.  It was opened in South Dorset by Isaac Underhill in 1785 and continued to produce marble for the next 130 years.  There were ultimately at least  two dozen quarries located on Mts.  Dorset Mountain and Aeolus. Dorset marble was widely used for headstones, hearths, and mantels as well as for sculpture.  This marble was used for several major architectural masterpieces including:the New York Public Library, the library of Brown University, and Memorial Continental Hall of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Washington, D.C. as well several of the stately mansions on Fifth Avenue in New York City.Figure 1 is just a snapshot to give you a sense of the location.

It is the usual black as night water filled town swimming holes.  It conjures up nightmares of accidental drowning deaths.  However, I am assured that the actual safety record of the quarry is much better and that there have not been any fatal incidents at the Dorset Quarry.  Still it seems the perfect setting for a Stephen King novel or M. Night Shyamalan movie.

There are huge blocks of graffiti covered quarried marble blocks which decorate the site.  These form abstract designs ideal for photography.  I have several successful photographs from this trip, which I will publish over the next few weeks.  Figure 2 is an example.   I find that the man-made bore holes enhance the majesty of the marble.  Marble is an interesting substance to photograph.  It comes in many varieties.  Dorset marble is know for its blueness.  However, a given image seems to call out fro its own intrinsic toning.  I have chosen a cold blueish tone for Figure 1 but a warmer sepia tone for Figure 2.

Figure 2 – Dorset Quarry #1, Dorset, VT, (c) DE Wolf 2013.

Figure 1 – Tree, Norwich, VT, (c) DE Wolf 2013

We have been taking a short vacation to Manchester, Vermont – which is a very beautiful valley set in the Green Mountains.  Reminiscent of our vacation last year to Maine, the beautiful weather ended the day we left – but sunshine is where you make it. So once again it was time to be creative with my camera and to continue to learn about the subjects that I like to photograph.

Vermont is, of course famous for its fall colors.  But spring too has its own magnificent shades, starting with the perfect chartreuse  greens of the newly born spring leaves, emergent everywhere.  The flowering trees are magnificent, and even the lilacs are starting to come out in abundance.

On the way up, we stopped first in Norwich at the King Arthur Flour Bakery and Bakery School Campus.  I saw a trail that led into a pine forest and couldn’t resist.  The colors inside were very subtle shades of reddish brown.  A golden retriever greeted me, anxious to be my friend  and play.  The forest went through a wetland, and a little flat board bridge took me across a bog, where I found the remains of an old tree, covered in moss, and still raising what was left of its branches in a mock spooky greeting.  I paused to photograph it using my monopod and experimented a bit to determine whether augmenting the subdued light with flash would improve the scene.  In the end, I settled on the subtlety of the natural light.

Figure 2 – Vermont Flannel, Woodstock, VT, (c) 2013 DE Wolf.

From Norwich we drove to historic Woodstock, where we discovered, or rediscovered, the brilliant color of Vermont Flannel.  This little narrow shop is  a Vermont mainstay.  It is famous for the three children (manikins) that sit outside, dressed in colorful flannel regardless of the weather, and is stuffed with brightly colored reminders that winter is never far behind in this part of New England. I had trouble framing pictures because the shop was so long and narrow, but did manage a few images that I liked in the end.  Picking up on the same theme, we stopped later in the day at the Vermont Country Store in Weston, VT where I found a pair of women’s rain boots that matched the enthusiasm of all the flannel.  So despite the rain I marked it up as a very colorful day in the end.

Figure 3 – Boots at the Vermont Country Sore. (c) 2013 DE Wolf.

It is curious how within one’s lifetime, one can witness the connotation of an image or word change by 180 degrees.  For me the classical example of this is contained in a poem by English poet Robert Graves (1895-1985), “The Naked and the Nude.”  I think that to us today, the word naked refers to the lustful, the lascivious, and the sinful – something that you would see on a billboard at an adult movie theater.  In contrast, I think that the word nude describes the artful, the beautiful, the epitome of humanness – something that you would see in an art museum or gallery.  But here’s what Robert Graves said, scarce half a century ago (first published in 1961).

“For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.

Lovers without reproach will gaze
On bodies naked and ablaze;
The Hippocratic eye will see
In nakedness, anatomy;
And naked shines the Goddess when
She mounts her lion among men.

The nude are bold, the nude are sly
To hold each treasonable eye.
While draping by a showman’s trick
Their dishabille in rhetoric,
They grin a mock-religious grin
Of scorn at those of naked skin.

The naked, therefore, who compete
Against the nude may know defeat;
Yet when they both together tread
The briary pastures of the dead,
By Gorgons with long whips pursued,
How naked go the sometimes nude!”

It is as if the two words have totally switched and interchanged their meaning.

Back in 1968, I took a set of three Kodak Transparency images of the Consolidated Edison Steam Power Plant on the lower East Side of Manhattan.  Before that day, in the fifties and early sixties such an image would most certainly have been a meme for industrial power, strength, and national growth.  By 1968 the meme was undergoing metamorphosis.  Such an image was coming to mean industrial pollution, global warming, and national putrification.  These images were taken right on the cusp of the transition – so much so that my friend and I were chased away by overzealous security guards at the power plant.

Figure 1 – Consolidated Edison #1, 1968, digitized from a Kodachrome transparency. (c) DE Wolf