HISTORY AS AN ARTIST, page 2

The Cornell years. 1973-1999.

Arriving in Ithaca in the fall of 1973 I faced the immediate task of settling myself and my family in a brand new and unfamiliar environment. But it was also a fascinating new location with landscape completely different from either California or the deserts of New Mexico. Upon my arrival I was told by photo colleagues at Cornell that Ithaca was second only to Seattle in number of overcast days in a year. Others told me I would love the summers and hate the winters. Moving into an older 1880's remodeled farmhouse I began to anticipate the coming of a cold winter with a fair amount of snow, something I had never known either in California or New Mexico. It seemed to offer both an unsettling and exciting change from what I had known previously.

Moving to a new environment as a photographer offers the creative opportunity to explore other imagery. Upstate New York and the Finger Lakes for half the year is green and dense with many trees and foliage. The five Finger Lakes are long narrow lakes that were formed by depressions of land, with hills pushed up between them. They are bowels of water, and to get to the next lake one needs to drive up and over the hill which separates it from the adjoining lake. Ithaca lies at the bottom of Lake Cayuga, between the larger cities of Syracuse and Binghamton. This area is also rural New York with many farms spread out among small rural towns. Ithaca, however is one of the larger towns with over 50,000 people, although many of these are students attending Cornell and Ithaca College.

Now one might expect that a photographer arriving in such a place would naturally gravitate towards making landscape pictures to come to terms with the new environment. But this did not happen for several reasons. On one hand adjusting to my new role as university professor and to the task of learning to participate on a university faculty proved a big challenge, one which kept me on campus most of the time. Perhaps as the result of this my first photo project in Ithaca was directed toward creating a "at home" self portrait which was both easier to accomplish and also necessary for me to find my place in this new location and life style. This group of images was my way of finding a new voice while I focused on my experiences at that time of my life. This resulted in a group of twenty images that were exhibited at several locations in the US.

In 1980 I moved into a new phase at Cornell, as I was granted tenure and shortly thereafter became the Chair of the Art Department for a five year term. One would think that with new administrative duties I would have even less time for my photographic work, but in fact the opposite happened. I experienced one of my most productive growth periods as an artist.

Two things happened to help move me along. On one hand I had been exploring color photography for several years and had started to teach it in my classes. My interest in color imagery grew and blossomed and I began to experience the excitement of color. But also as I was even more confined on campus due to my administrative duties I put my attention to finding a way to expand my work into new and uncharted areas in my campus studio. This took the form of setting up a copy stand in my studio just down the hall from my Chair's office which would allow me to more easily continue my personal work.

It started innocuously enough with me buying some vegetables at the local farmers market intending to photograph them in the studio underneath a 4x5 camera attached to the copy stand. I put the vegetables in the frig in my studio and forgot about them. One day remembering they were still there I got them out and found them in various stages of decay. Looking at them, I found they were even more interesting in their changes than when fresh. Also I had the sudden impulse to "enhance" this deterioration so I picked up hardware tools, a hammer, pliers, screwdrivers, etc., and worked over the vegetables, pounding, squeezing, etc.They became even more interesting to me. Moreover the colors seemed to expand their range of feelings. Then I arranged these vegetables but also added in the tools themselves used to shape the organic objects. At first these were arranged freeform, but then later in careful patterns, drawing on my strong design training from architecture. The result was quite pleasing. The use of the 4x5 camera and color film also meant I could achieve crisp and excellent detail for the final images. These were then printed as 16x20 color prints in my darkroom on campus.

Learning about the possibility of a residency at Cite Des Arts International in Paris I applied and was accepted in the spring of 1987. Being on sabbatical leave from Cornell, I traveled to Paris and moved into an efficiency studio apartment in the Cite building which was located in the heart of Paris adjacent to the Seine River and just opposite Notre Dame Cathedral. Now I had been to France before to attend photographic conferences but had never stayed for a longer period of time to photograph. I found like many other artists before me that I was lost at first regarding what I might photograph. I had taken the 8x10 field camera with me and started lugging this around Paris taking pictures. I really enjoyed setting up the camera and frequently had a group of Parisians around me, all curious about what I was doing. My intention was to make both color and black and white film exposures, develop the black and white negatives there in my Paris studio, but take the color negatives back to Ithaca to process.

I had arrived in April but found that by the end of July I really did not have any sort of satisfying body of images. In August, with four weeks left of my residency, I suddenly realized what it was that was attracting my attention and what I wished to photograph. During my stay in Paris as I walked around I saw a mixture of all sorts of ads for various products or services on wall or display surfaces, movie announcements, ads for sexual phone connections, etc. What struck me most was the stark contrast of this advertising with the classical character and architecture of Paris. Suddenly I realized what I wanted to do, make images with my 8x10 camera which expressed this contrast.

Then in 1989 I was offered the opportunity to spend the fall semester teaching in the Cornell program in Rome. located in the Palazzo Massimo not far away from the Piazza Navona in the heart of Rome. The location was a historic palazzo that appears in most of the current architecture history books about Rome including the classic text by the noted historian Banister Fletcher. Thinking that this would offer me the opportunity to also photograph this amazing major urban city, I took with me a 4x5 field camera and both color negative and black and white sheet film. My plan was to do the same as when I was in Paris, process the black and white there and bring the color film back to Ithaca for processing afterwards.

Rome was an incredible experience and I was able to get out and photograph throughout the entire city. Amazing scenes are everywhere. Rome is a contrast, being a mix of the ancient Roman ruins, classic Italian medieval and Renaissance churches and buildings, and yet also being a large modern urban city. One is almost not sure what to photograph as everywhere one goes there are things to picture. Finally I began to realize that again it was contrasts of ancient and modern that was fascinating me, the montage of the unexpected, the fantastic mix of the classic with modern Rome street life.

When I returned to Ithaca I processed my exposed color films and thought about how I might picture this experience. Since it was the contrasting mix of objects that held my attention I decided to montage my pictures. I made many prints of scenes, cut out objects from the prints with a sharp knife. and layered these back together on a copy stand and re-photographed them with my 4x5 camera to create a single image. This resulted in a series of some 16 images, all printed on Kodak color paper.

What is most signifigant about the Rome series may be that it was the last group of images that I printed in a photo darkroom. Soon after I dismantled my home darkroom and converted it into a computer room in which I could pursue my growing interest in computer technology. This series is also interesting because in that I began to more fully explore the montage of objects in a picture space, a process that transferred over to the computer as I found I could do it much more easily that way and with even much more possibilities for control and manipulation.

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