Last

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Where do you go when every place else has tossed you out?

Here...

2007 Award Winner: Rocco's Adventurel

Note: Accepted as one of theworld's finest Nature Images of 2007 for Canon POTN Book to be published in the Fall of 2008.

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My little buddy saw Fall down the pathway and scampered his furry body to meet it.

You ever think that we've lost the color, sound, and odor of the past? Start drilling down into history and pretty soon you're left only with the art collections of the rich. They're what pass along whatever lined the tunnels you dug. They were the windows that let you look through any level. The deeper you dig, the fewer windows remain. What did the average guy, walking home on the first evenings of Fall smell? Hear? What colors bathed the walkways and what colors did those rays mix together in the facades on either side?

If you walked down a decaying pathway behind a furry friend on a night like tonight in say 1007, in oh... Belfast, or Florence... Well, you have no way of knowing what was there. Will pictures like this survive so that in 3007 someone will have a window to peer into as he digs through my layer of his history? What will he make of our time as he watches Rocco prance into Fall?

Masters' Control

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You're raised on a farm, frolicking with your friends and family. Years pass filled with great food, quiet... pastoral bliss.

Until one morning... herded... crammed into a dank loud truck... all dark... terror. Jammed up ramps. Bleating, screaming... Panic... Along some sort of corridor, past this place, inside people.. Not farmers. Cold eyes. Not there with food and warmth. You're somewhere that's all turmoil and clatter. A chugging. Air blasts. Bells clanging. So loud. So ghastly... Where is this place? What is it? Home... want to go home...

----

It's still now. Crumbling. The remains of a great shed that covered the sorting area for new arrivals. Off to pens according to type, class, destination. Slaughter... somewhere. But not here. No, here was a station beside the railhead that loaded the trains off to the great city centers. Here was an in between place of what? Can you imagine what went through their minds?

Rocco and I walked through the stockyard ruins, and he sensed what I couldn't hear, smell, or see. My little friend was not happy. There's something inside this place... Silent echoes. You are on edge here.

Does it show?

Last Path Of Summer

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Summer ends sometime during the day tomorrow. Rocco and I watched the 2007 summer sun set for the last time this evening. It's probable that the Lancaster Stockyards will finally be demolished this Fall and Winter. So tonight's may be the last summer sun set ever on this back pathway of what was once the largest stockyard east of Chicago.

I'm guessing that a photographer aiming from this spot will soon see acres of asphalt surrounding another shopping mall,or maybe a gordo Wal-Mart. And this scene, once so busy and now caught up in soon-to-be-overcome litigation will fade into memory... like the last sunset of summer.

GEEK STUFF: Canon EOS 20D, 09/22/07:6:06 pm: Lens 10-22mm, Focal Length: 10mm, Exp 1/200@f/8, ISO 400, Metering Mode: pattern, Expoure bias -1, Camera RAW

Gas Savings - Guaranteed!

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Got this last Thursday. My home is quite near to my magazine offices. You've seen my Beetle. Question: with less than a two mile commute, why use the VW, especially during summer's sunny days? Well, because I am a big deal executive with meetings all over the region. Because we have different Business2Business Magazines in four large counties here in Pennsylvania. Because as a member of the media elite, I am invited to all the important, decision-making, hidden rooms filled with the people who make every important thing happen. And besides, the company limo and driver are at my call, so why even think of driving?

NOT!

In fact, most days are spent in front of a my office Mac with a headset talking and writing to folks all over the footprint which our publications cover. I am virtually everywhere yet actually stuck in my office. So... I got this guaranteed-to-get me more miles to the week device which just might also get me back into shape for the European trip we're planning in the Fall (they tell me that people actually walk in Europe - yikes!).
Pretty thing, huh? And so far.. terrific fun. I haven't had a working bike for about twenty years. Wind whipping through my hair - I feel ten years old again. Wheeeeee!

Window To Nothing

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Here's a memory. Well it will be quite soon when the one guy on a mini bulldozer finally gets around to tearing this part of the Lancaster Stockyard down. Only rot demolishes things slower than this guy. Maybe it's already a memory in a way. It's what's left of a shell around this building. For the moment it's like a fossil, an imprint in space which looks sort of like what the painted and bustling place must have appeared fifty or eighty years ago.
I crank awareness up in my images. In fact that's what happens when each of us frames things. The choice we make in moving the borders makes for memory boxes. In this case, nothing outside of these borders will exist soon. Only what I've imagined in this cubicle. There's a difference between art and life. It has to do, I think, with the way life passes through memory to become the image. Just like this window, which is now not what it was, and might even be as you read this, no longer anything.

Locked In

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In the stockyard I'm, like, hunting. Maybe that's too strong... I like beef stew, especially when the meat is cooked really tender, and the sauce is so thick it almost needs to be chewed. And as I fork through, I'm careful to mix things. You know, carrot and onion for one mouthful, maybe meat and potato for another. It's not a big deal, I'm not manic about it, but the jumbled mixtures add to the dining. Every taste is different.

I think that's what happens to me at the stockyard. i want to mix textures and colors, shapes and shadows. Like the stew, the platter is always the same but each lensful is different. Each time I go back there seem to be new hues, the wreckers are slowly revealing new layers. They are demolishing the place in such slow motion - since I started visiting last summer, they've pulled down about half of the structures and torn up most of the roads. The patterns of utility are disappearing. Leaving behind onions, carrots, and hunks of well cooked meat. Soon there will be little left but unintelligible rubble. Meantime there are locked doors to no place... or empty place... or...

Remnants

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Everyday places become symbolic when they lose their purpose. And the esteem in which we hold their symbolism has to do with what?

We stick old cannons on park pedestals. There’s a Congressman’s office lovingly restored in Baton Rouge and the guy’s not near dead. We slavishly reconstruct churches, theaters, even privies. I’ve seen historic markers outside of taverns, barns, gas stations, and a farm that grew the world’s largest geranium! Allegories all.

And then there are places like this. It employed thousands over a century or so. And as the largest stockyard east of Chicago it fed millions. But now it’s a decomposing dump. How come it has no constituency?

Look, I’m not proposing anything – this isn’t a weepy poem – I’m merely probing at the meaning of acres of decaying structures which are crammed with garbage strewn by night-time bozos who are too cheap to buy a pass to the county landfill. And of course I am looting the ruins for meaning – or at least a pattern.

Is this decaying place a symbol of anything? A metaphor? Is there something noble in the memories or lessons that it might pass to us? Or is the expanse just as much trash as the trash that’s coating it?

Nothing lasts forever and I guess this is neither a sad nor strange moment of transition– merely puzzling and a tad grim.

Patterned Data

Okay, time for some of my infernal wonderings. Get ready for this... deep stuff coming....

If information is data arranged into a recognizable pattern then... then... what are facts? Aren't they a subset of information? I mean there's factual information which I guess we can call truth, and there're un-factual informations. But those are not necessarily lies. I mean, opinion can be un-factual, right? Yet opinion happens in information-land somewhere between factual and un-factual. A theory for example is an opinion until proven. But if theory has internal consistency and predictive capacity, then we can apply theory to create predictable results...even though theory isn't necessarily truth. Okay.. okay... there's a lot here. Now, take a look at today's extension of yesterday's discussion of what may be ancient blocks.

The Lancaster Stock yard had streets paved in what probably was debris recycled from the ballast piles nearby to seaports. Now these same blocks are being carefully mined from the streets and piled for sale. They have more value today then when their only cost was in transporting them from their ballast piles.

What gave them their original value? I look at this pile of data and try to impose a pattern. Half of their value comes from their eventual use in walkways or facades. Another half comes from the meticulous value that quarry-people carved into them. The pattern comes from a sort of handshake between long dead minds and perhaps not yet born designers who will re-cycle them into another life.

Does the value of human creation ever go away? is it like some law of thermodynamics which says we do, therefore some part of our imaginations go on and on? Is this a pile of cobblestone, or a mound of facts - fodder for potential information ready to be fit into the pattern of some not yet introduced intelligence?

Or is it just a cool picture? Wuddever...

Forelorn & AWARD #2!!!

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Stopped by the stockyards again late this afternoon and in the 5:45 light there was a sense of hopeless fading. Even the color painted it grim. I came away depressed. Does it show?

BREAKING NEWS!!!

Last night I told you that the Canon Digital Photography Forums accepted one of my submissions to include in an upcoming book in the Transportation Category. Well now I've learned that a second image of mine has also won acceptance in the very competitive Travel & Landscape Category. Whoa... As I explained yesterday, candidates were invited to submit up to two entries into a number of categories. No more than one of those submissions could be accepted by the juries for each category. Well the judges tell me that the image you will see if you click here has won inclusion in the book along with my Transportation submission that I referenced last night.

This image posted last October 9th was taken on Corporation Beach in E. Denis, MA at sunrise. Although it has some trappings of the HDR process, it isn't one at all. Rather the image took advantage of the wide exposure latitude inherent in a RAW photograph captured by my Canon 20D. That was the actual sky that morning in the south east at around 7:30. Fall came late to New England last year and the foliage still had much of the lushness of summer while the sky was filled with Autumn. This was the first morning following three days of storming which produced a dramatic sunrise.

I'm quite flattered to have two of my submissions accepted for publication by the Canon Forums in a compilation of the best photo images of 2006. This is reeeeeeely great.

Possibilities

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Lunchtime today - stopped at the decaying Lancaster Stockyards. Took away this image. It nags at me. I wonder why?

Power OutAge

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Question: Can we find art? Is it just a matter of framing something... Anything... That results in art? And, oh by the way, does art have to be beautiful? Is beauty even necessary?

Look at this old rusting truck. I think it's a Ford from the early 50s that sits along the decaying Lancaster stockyards. Suppose it was a work of art when it rolled off the assembly line. If I photograph it, am I merely replicating someone else's art? Or have I brought something else to the frame here? Maybe the streaks of snow? Maybe the tight composition? Maybe my interpretation of the tonal and color ranges? Can you or I make something we see through the lens into art?

If I bring you a bucket of water from the ocean, is that water art? If I photograph that bucket filled with ocean water, what then? Maybe there's a difference between good taste and art? I mean, what most of us... any group of us consider movingly beautiful will probably be in good taste. If it shocks us by it's astonishing ugliness, if it is innately vapid, if it is a mere reproduction of what is somewhere in nature... is the photographer who takes the picture an artist... or some sort of taker-of-visual-dictation?

I have manipulated this truck image. It is not true to the moment. By adding or subtracting, by shifting or recomposing... by any number of techniques including wholesale creation of parts of this truck... Is the whole greater than the sum?

If the photographer brings nothing more than astonishing craft to accurately capture great beauty in a moment, has he committed art, or is he a plagiarist of nature?

I wonder if art doesn't demand some subjective alteration that manipulates the original moment in order to do photographic art. I wonder if the "unaltered" image can ever lay claim to being art? Is there imagination in tedious replication through the photographic process? Or is there merely great craft?

I wonder if it's the alterations that make my truck here into art (not necessarily good art, or bad art) rather than the original digital capture.

I wonder... at the power this old truck once had... and now it sits there... Out in the elements... Out of power. Power left out and worn out... Power Outage as a double entendre. Are visual entendres, art? Hmmmmm......

The Lads Are Gone

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Old man bought new lumber
Two years back.
He knows the rot.
Maybe come spring
He'll fix what can be
. Or never again
. Not ever.
Last of his line.
The lads are gone.
Nature heals itself.

Weight-Less

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After a century, the last animal bustled through the narrow room behind that window on the left. And the guy slid a final weight along the manual scale's bar. He jotted down the numbers, handed one carbon copy to a farmer to the other side of that low partition behind his chair, another to the shipper at the farmer's side. The weighman pushed his original into a folder, grabbed it, pushed back his chair and left for the main office some distance outside. He shut that door, picked up his check, and never returned.

The once-largest stockyard east of Chicago closed that day. See the last calendar on the right? The manuals, pencils and sharpeners, all sit the way they were left for a century of days at closing time. The man forgot his sweater,along with some personal stuff, it's still hanging in that closet back on the left. Since then, only dust has come each day to an office that's waiting... waiting for farmers, shippers and its weighman.

The office is patient.

The Love Shack

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Is that an egg? A great big egg there to the right of the step? Who's Hank? Did he find love here? If not love, then what?

Do you wonder at all wha't inside of Hank's Love Shack? That door was open. Yeah, I went in. Would you believe it is an entire dimensional shift? That inside of that door is a wonderworld of bizzaro habits that would make a field rodent blush? Would you believe that the inside is in fact a vast space crammed full up with the product of Hank's libidinous fantasies?

Maybe.... maybe. I'd tell you what I found behind that door, but maybe your ideas are richer than that... or meaner... or fuller... and who am I to deny you? Odd isn't it, how the next guy's fantasies seem suspiciously like perversions?

Long day... I'm bushed. Signing off. Perhaps I'll take you inside some other time. Or tell you about that great big egg.

Thing!

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Beside the rotting slaughterhouse's walls a wind-burst swirled dust around this device. Once someone poured that concrete base, and built… I don’t know? A ramp? Yet there is nothing behind it. It’s an unyielding step into an eerie gap. To where?

And those boards across the portal. Did they force climbing necks to bend? Things to crouch? Did they enforce some macabre final bow before… before… What? Once this place in Lancaster was the largest stockyard east of Chicago, now it’s ruins, posing for conjecture. Now it is food for the imagination to digest.