Autie, my blue heeler pup

Resolutions

1. Listen to the Dead more. Here’s my fav, Jack Straw Paris 72
2. Kill my web site replace with simple code running on MIT’s server, served on jekyll. Master terminal and Git. Simple text and images, links, footnote sources. If you are reading this its dead.
3. Technology makes my life complicated creativity is lost and more time consumed so reclaim that time and use it to focus on photography.
4. Know more, need less, repeat…know more, need less.
5. My strength (if I have one) is images, so focus on the meaning and making of images.
6. distill interests.
7. sell camera gear! I love Fuji but return to Leica. Fixed lens, optics that are the best made, editing to a minimum. No photoshop. Stay grounded in basics, shoot manual, aperture, exposure, and use hyperfocal distance .

This made me go back to when I got turned on to photography while studying architecture at Auburn University, I had a professor named Michael Robinson.

He was the catalyst; the courses demanding, which sometimes made him unpopular with less dedicated students. He taught a series of graduate seminars where he discussed cultural geographer J.B. Jackson which I still reread and study to this day. Michael’s devil’s advocate was Jack Wiliams who chaired my thesis committee was also a former Harvard grad and professor. Being at Auburn’s graduate program in the school of architecture during this time was a rare moment. You had two former Harvard professors that ended up at Auburn due to their connection to Sambo Mockbee. It escapes recognition of the faculty to this day that Auburn itself could not have gotten them to come there. The depth of Mockbee Willaims and Robinson teaching design has not been repeated by the program. Williams views landscape through an ever changing urbanistic (made up word)view documenting how and why cities and form evolve in a series of books -see links below. Williams taught me how to question externally, Robinson taught me how to question internally, and Mockbee how to see what to question.

JB Jackson focused on the American landscape post 1945. Contrary to how architectural history was studied previously he examined larger patterns of settlement that differed across America’s landscapes. Discussing trailer parks, strip malls and interstate exits, his essays read more like short stories and travelogues with simple explanatory ink sketches.

He connected the idea of place and shared ideas of how place informed form, not the previous direction of form and human ideas creating place. The landscape was ever changing and a quiltwork of influences we often choose to ignore.

My medium(s) of choice are image and sketch and one of my former jobs, an alpine guide, was in places like the images below. Above the treeline, no cell service this required you understand light and how to use a camera in challenging weather conditions. For some reason I convinced myself to leave these mountains and use my education to have a “real job” as a city and county planner for Wyoming. Big mistake in many ways but this led to a series of events that put me where I am which enables me to study photography and document place.
I miss these mountains every day, every minute, and second of my life.

Below is a link to one of my favorite places to pitch my tent and spend nights watching the stars beneath Canby Mountain @ 37°48’04°N 108°32’51°W

Hopefully one day soon I will get to return to these mountains. In the mean time I’m going to learn to use my camera better ask more questions and pursue what James Agee called “the cruel radiance of what is.” happy new years !

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Landscapes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970).
The Necessity for Ruins (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980).
Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
East 40 Degrees, An Interpetive Atlas (Univeristy of Virgina Press, 2007).
Easy On, Easy Off, The Urban Pathology of America's Small Towns(Univeristy of Virgina Press, 2016).
Harvard Design Magazine: Selected Books by J. B. Jackson, https://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/6/selected-books-by-j-b-jackson.