Phillip Simmons, Master Blacksmith

This was one of Phillip Simmons’ favorite sayings.  Simmons, a Charleston hero, artist and National Folk Treasure, passed away recently yet his rich legacy continues.  

At the age of eight Simmons took an interest in the blacksmiths he saw working in his neighborhood in East Charleston. When he was 13 he was hired by Peter Simmons, no relation, and trained in the art of ironwork.  In 1952 Peter left the shop to Phillip who went on to build and design gates and rod iron works that grace the homes and churches of Charleston and locations around the world, including the Smithsonian. All of his work was done in the shop at the back of his home on Blake Street.  The only modernizing he ever did was to put in a concrete slab floor. After the age of 94 he stopped working at the forge, but trained his nephew and several others in the craft and continued to design until his death at the age of 97.  

Simmon's nephew continues the tradtion.

The workshop and home have become a foundation to honor this man, not just for his artistry, but also for his resourcefulness and importance in the community.  In this photo of his bedroom, the red and gold crown says it all.  It was given to him by children who considered him the King of the neighborhood.  

Simmons not only put his three children and all of his grandchildren through college, but 15 other neighborhood kids as well.  He supported the boy scouts, church groups, trained and helped people too numerous to count.

Ben Ham

Looking through the tourist info about Charleston I saw an article about a gallery that had just opened and decided this was the one place I didn’t want to miss -- and boy was I glad.  I knew nothing about Ben Hamm until I read the article.  

Ben Ham Gallery, 416 King Street, Charleston, SC

Everything about the gallery space is simple and elemental. Scrubbed brick walls and gray fabric backdrops are nothing new in the gallery world.  But here, each backdrop was mounted on richly stained 4x4 columns that complemented the color of the olive wood frames used throughout.  The images on display were all large prints in sepia or black and white.  Hamm, like Ansel Adams, uses an 8x10 view camera, and develops his negatives in the darkroom.  But he then scans the negative and prints it digitally, allowing him to make huge prints up to 74 inches wide on fine art papers that show the detail and drama in ways that Ansel Adams could not do.  These images took my breath away.  The composition, the way he sees line, texture and form in the natural world is one that I aspire to.  It was exhilarating!

Low Country by Ben Hamm

Ham's work is only sold as numbered, framed fine art pieces that start at $1800 so the only thing I could consider was his $75 book.  After hemming and hawing, I left without it, but inspired nonetheless.

The next morning while I was out wandering around Charleston, I thought about going back to buy it, but went back to the hotel instead.  There sitting on the bed was a beautifully wrapped copy of Ham’s book. David went back to the gallery and bought the book for me as a birthday present, making the curator promise not to sell me a copy if I should return on my own.  

A wonderful epilog indeed.

Bridges

My love affair with bridges started in the backseat of my dad’s station wagon.  Every time we went over one of the Cape Cod bridges my mother, who was afraid of heights, closed her eyes and held onto to the dashboard with clenched fingers, while I pressed my nose against the window, thrilled to be able to see the world from above like a bird.

The freedom of big vistas, water and graceful man-made forms became a part of my daily life when I moved to Oakland, California in my mid twenties. My personal rating system for hikes in the East Bay hills and Marin Headlands was based on the vista and the bridge count. To go to the beach on a weekend, I would sometimes make a three bridge loop just so I could see the world from each span-the Bay Bridge, Golden Gate and finally the Richmond Bridge.

The Golden Gate Bridge was my favorite. It is accessible from above, below, and afar.  From Baker Beach I sat and watched ships, submarines go under her arches, watched hundreds of sunsets behind her.  For the first years after returning to the east coast, I could be heard uttering a plaintive and wistful cry of “my bridge” every time there was a picture of the Golden Gate bridge on TV.

On Mother’s Day in 2002 my son and I, along with several thousand other people, waited in line for what seemed like hours to have a chance to walk across the Zakim bridge in Boston before it was opened to traffic.  It is the widest cable-stayed bridge in North America with 10 lanes.  In the very middle of the bridge is a fish lane – huge diamond shaped cut-outs in the deck. These are to let light shine through onto the river below and break up the bridge’s shadow so that the alewife fish swimming upriver to spawn will not get confused.  Fraulein Bosch does not offer her services to alewives.

Both Charleston and Savannah have beautiful cable stayed bridges – the Ravenel and Talmadge respectively. There are wonderful photos of these bridges taken by photographers far better than I, but still I couldn’t help myself.  How can you not admire this geometry?  

And of course when you turn around, there is more geometry hidden in the sand – an attempt to keep the beach from washing away.

Not Bubble gum...

Offbeat...
On my way to a walking tour of Charleston to get an overview of the city’s history and architecture, this closed key shop just tickled my fancy. 

What I thought were wads of dried gum on the sidewalk turned out to be locks and keys embedded in the cement - a perfectly charming, creative, permanent, low-cost advertising gimmick….

On the road with Fraulein Bosch...

With car packed with books, clothes for warm and cool weather, we set off for our winter snowbird sojourn – a road trip through the South and up through Texas Santa Fe, New Mexico.

We planned a general route and have made the technological switch from road maps to Google maps on our phones.  I was trying to come up with a good name for our “road guide”- Gertrude just wasn’t feeling right, and it wasn’t until Fayetteville, North Carolina that we discovered a proper name for our Google voice.  

Two block away from our dinner stop at a delightful Turkish restaurant the road was blocked by a train – not a train crossing an intersection, but a really long train on tracks that ran straight down the middle of the street. When the train came to a dead stop and everyone else around us started making u-turns in the road, we followed suit.  Well “Madam Google” was not having it and tried valiantly, and insistently, to get us to drive through the parked train.  It was then that David realized her true name is Fräulein Bosch and that she is a close cousin to Herr Bosch, our highly scheduled and persistent dishwasher.  

When our last Maytag died, we really wanted a quiet dishwasher and went with a Bosch.  While washing this appliance is indeed very quiet, but when it is done, it beeps incessantly. Please komm sofort! Ze dishes are done. Schnell!

David dubbed the tyrannical dishwasher Herr Bosch. Little did I know that my iphone held such a Germanic persona…  

We are not yet on a first name basis. 

Ocean Mist at Minus 6 Degrees

Yesterday at sunrise, when my weather app said it was -6 degrees, staying under the covers seemed like a good idea...until I looked out the window and saw hundreds of plumes of mist rising off the ocean.  Mist over the saltmarsh is pretty common, but not over open water like this.  But then, it isn't everyday that the ocean here on the southcoast is 45 degrees warmer than the air. 

Off I went to beach with only my iphone and tried to capture the magic until my fingers got numb - which wasn't long.  The high tide line was a wall of cascading ice forms and little crystals of ice formed briefly as low tide laps of water hit the shore.

Brrrrrr........

Out in the early morning snow...but not for long.

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MOMA Moments

It still takes me aback, how many people are snapping photos in museums. Recently  at the Sargent Watercolor Exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts there was a woman religiously taking a photo of every painting with her ipad.   She appeared to be on a mission to photograph all 90+ paintings in the show.  It struck me as almost tragic that  while she was so busy concentrating on framing images with her ipad, she never directly experienced Sargent's rich, lush colors, marks or textures. 

But earlier this week, I confess I fell prey to the impulse to whip out my iphone camera in the Museum of Modert Art in New York.  No, I wasn't photographing the art hanging on the wall - just this priceless Frida moment:

Where is your eyebrow pencil when you need it?

And then there was this view across the atrium of a staircase - framed like a painting, an abstract still life.  God...I love my iphone....

Grassiela Gigantus 2.0

It was three years ago this November that I bought my first digital SLR and made a commitment to seriously reenter the world of photography.  What spurred me to finally plunk down the big bucks for the camera, extra lens and all the requisite doodads was Grassiela.  She is not a graceful muse with a lovely Spanish lilt to her voice, or even a photographer.  Grassiela is an obsession, a six-foot hummingbird.  

It all started with a trip to the DeCordova Museum Sculpture Garden. Up 25 feet in the trees was a school of 3-foot long metal fish, swimming in a circle.  These fish took up residence in my imagination and would not leave.

"I have tall trees in my yard," I said to myself.  "They need some creatures. How had I not noticed this before?"  The fact that I had never made a piece of sculpture in my life was totally irrelevant.  I bought a bag of pipe cleaners and started thinking about armatures.

Seedheads

And then I broke my foot in several places. So I spent a good part of the summer, watching hummingbirds flit about and through the ornamental grasses around my deck.  When the seed heads on the miscanthus emerge, their soft forms hold delicate patterns of maroon, grey and brown tones that make me think of gorgeously rich Italian wool suiting fabric.  This is what I wanted on my bird, on my obsession.  I wanted her clothed in beautiful warm tones of autumn grass.

So I began gathering grasses of many types, colors and textures and letting them dry.  A cardboard prototype was created and after many hours of cruising the aisles at Home Depot I decided to build the armature out of sheet rock lathing.  It is sturdy, flexible and cheap.  My smart husband made me buy a good pair of gloves and wire cutters and I was off and running. 

Cars were banished from the garage, which became my studio.  With all of my old rock and roll albums playing loudly on my iPod, I was in a state of complete happiness with a look David coined as Debby Demento. Each day I was figuring out how to solve new problems.  And each day, my grasses continued their natural progression from smooth sweet patterns to wild "poofiness" so they could fly away.  But I was not deterred. Thousands of feet of fishing line later; we hoisted her in the trees.  And while she didn't look much like my original idea, I was proud of my first attempt.

In the intervening years, I did the research I should have done and learned how to dry grasses so they maintain their soft shape and part of their lovely color patterns.  I learned how to use floral dyes so I could create a ruby throat of miscanthus.  This November, Grassiela 2.0 took flight.  She has a warm brown undercoat of burlap and her color and texture more closely approximate my dream.  The top and underside of the wings have different patterns and textures that utilize the seed heads and the stalks and there is still much to learn.

Ruby Throat

But what does this all have to do with photography?  How did a giant grass hummingbird propel me into photography? At different points in time cameras had been an important part of my life and work.  But they were always tools used for documenting. Photography was an adjunct to storytelling, a journalist's tool. Grassiela was strictly a creative impulse, about making art, something I had never done outside of a required school project.  Once she took flight I knew I could pick up a camera again and use it to make something very different.  Grassiela gave me the courage to believe that with time, patience, practice and study I could learn to make art with a camera.

Grassiela Gigantus 2.0

Nature's Paintbrushes

When I go into the studios of my painter friends, my eye always goes to those buckets, coffee cans and bins filled with paintbrushes.  I love the many sizes, shapes and colors – the spatters of color on the handles hinting at the magic these brushes have been part of.

As a photographer, my "paintbrushes" are not nearly so sleek, seductive or varied. My tools are a black box of glass and plastic, a carbon fiber tripod that my serious photographer friends laugh at and call “cute” because it is so small, and a virtual paintbox, AKA my MacBook.  But in the last few days of autumn’s glory I have been foraging in my yard collecting branches of vermillion colored Japanese maples,  golden amber giant hosta leaves, miscanthus stocks and more. They are the paintbrushes for my winter portfolio project – a study of form and reflections in Destruction Brook.

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Paintbrushes gathered from my garden .

Sitting alongside the brook I look a bit like a crazy woman as I make little rock weights and attach fishing line to my garden trove of branches. But it allows me to attempt to secure my leaves and branches in the middle of standing ripples or where the light is best without the current making off with them.  For all the attempts that don't work, there are still a few moments of magic that make it worthwhile.  Here is a sneak peek of what is to come.

First Frost

Along the river's edge, a gift...
First frost
With an autumn blaze border.

Westport Island, Maine

The surface of the water at dawn and dusk is a never ending palette of mystery and delight. 

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All of that  Maine coast beauty doesn't keep the lost history and sad dignity of broken down sheds and tired-roofs from calling to me.

Cottonwood Canyon

When my son invited me to visit Salt Lake and see the aspens turning in the mountains I thought "OK- I can give up one weekend of New England's fall glory."  What I didn't expect was to arrive just in time  to see the yellow pop the autumn color against the backdrop of an early snow. I may a head full of gray hair, but that first snow still brings all the giddy excitement I felt as a kid.

Our Saturday our adventure started at 9,050 feet with the temperature somewhere between 27 and 32 degrees.  Ben and I started climbing up the trail towards Mary's Lake at the end of Big Cottonwood Canyon.  We didn't make it all that far, partly because my lungs are not used to that elevation, but also because the sun was coming up fast and I knew this little cluster of aspens would be soon be dramatically lit, or so I thought.  On my turf I know the patterns and movement of light, but here I didn't realize that a peak I couldn't see meant we would be waiting... and waiting... and waiting.  But all that foot stomping to stay warm was worth it.  These pictures only give you a taste of the magic.

Autumn Mists

Day after day of glorious autumn weather has me out before sunrise watching the complex interplay of light, mist and tides.  Some days I come home with no pictures, but always with a sense peace. This gift of time to observe, listen, and just "be" in the day's awakening lightens my heart and makes hope possible.