JOURNAL
Striving to experience new landscapes by traveling far and near; rediscovering them when writing about them, with new eyes.
One Sun Over All of Them: Kingsley Plantation in Infrared
The same infrared light that renders these historic tabby slave cabins into silver reverie once fell on the enslaved and their owners. Kingsley Plantation, Fort George Island, Florida demands our witness. Rendered with Phase One Achromatic.
These Fragments I Have Shored: St. Augustine and Vilano in Ghostlier Demarcations of Infrared.
In a Florida summer, an infrared camera turns a Fort Mose boardwalk into a winter wonderland — foliage burning snow-bright, skies drained to black — a season that does not exist, built entirely from the heat at hand. This is a black-and-white infrared photo essay from St. Augustine and Vilano Beach, made with a Phase One IQ3 100MP Achromatic back on a Cambo WRS-1600 technical camera with a B+W 830 (093) infrared filter — a system that records deep near-infrared light no living eye can hold. Low tide clears a path to the ruins of the old Vilano Bridge — I call it St. Augustine's Parthenon. A modern bridge now sweeps across the Tolomato River, and on the shore beneath it a solitary figure keeps her vigil in a three-second long exposure. Back in the oldest city in the USA, the Medici-inspired stone lions of the Bridge of Lions keep watch over the Matanzas tide, and the Castillo de San Marcos stands stoic. It has endured by yielding, outlasting the concrete that cracks. Entropy is pervasive, and the photograph is a fragment shored against it.
Architecture of erasure: Talbot Island's Boneyard Beach
I drove the old Buccaneer Trail — now the Jimmy Buffett Memorial Highway — to the edge of Little Talbot Island, where the salt marsh gives way to a beach littered with the bones of once living trees. My son and I walked among them with a Phase One IQ3 100 Achromatic back on a Cambo WRS 1600 with 40mm lens, a pocket full of sand dollars, and a quiet prayer for a sand dollar presumed dead.
TRIPTYCH and more at the Bridge of Sighs in Venice.
Bridge of Sighs in Venice evokes feelings of anguish and hopes of escape. I thought of these emotions in a tercet and communicated my interpretation via a triptych. This blog post discusses how I sketched my way to that.