"It took place where?" he asks.
"I can''t rightly remember," I say back at him.
"How could you not? It seemed so vital at the time."
"Yes, important words were spoken there. Words like,
'Time,' the great arbitrator."
Last Wednesday in the PM
PawPaw, 2015 02 18
I open the outside door to my studio
and the door to my pants next. I
pull out my pecker and piss
into the howling zero-degree blizzard.
Could you ever, possibly feel more alive?
I make a picture. . . and close the door.
SS #2
Allie, PawPaw, 2012.
"Photography," people have said since its invention, "is no more, or no less, than painting with light."
"Ah," I thought, not so many weeks ago, "I understand that statement differently than I once did."
Concise and Coherent - I like that
SS#1
Kate and Barbara
Unquestionably the most difficult photograph I've ever made in a career that includes many emotional images. Our daughter is amazing and strong. To be with her Aunt in her last days. I am in awe. We are so very fortunate.
Kate and Barbara, San Francisco, CA, 11/17/14
At My Sister's Front Door
At My Sister's Front Door, San Francisco, CA 11/15/14
click photo to enlarge
Pink Dog Creative
I will be having an exhibit of photographs at the Pink Dog Creative Gallery at 348 Depot Street in Asheville's River Arts District. The exhibit will run from November 7, 2014 to January 11, 2015 with an opening reception on November 7 from 5-8 pm.
This is my first one-person exhibit in Asheville since my Sodom Laurel Album exhibit at the Asheville Art Museum in 2002 and I'm excited about showing new work from a new project. I want to thank Randy Shull and Hedy Fischer from Pink Dog Creative for this opportunity in their wonderful space. I also want to thank Ralph Burns, my long-time friend and mentor, for his work pulling this exhibit together. Finally, my assistant, Jamie Paul, has been his usual indispensable self who often leaves me wondering what I ever did before he came into my life.
I have included a short essay on the project. Galleries always want an artists statement, or introduction, or something explaining the work. Over the years I've responded to these requests in various and sundry ways. Today's version comes after the image.
Shu and Griffin Shaving Cheyenne, PawPaw, Madison County, NC 2012
These photographs are part of a work-in-progress titled ShatterZone, which is meant to accompany my two previous projects from Madison County – Sodom Laurel Album and The New Road.
Shatter zone is an 18th century geologic term that refers to an area of fissured or fractured rock. The phrase took on new meaning after World War II when political theorists began using it to denote borderlands. In this modern definition shatter zones become places of refuge from, and resistance to, capitalist economies, state rule, and social upheaval. Appalachia, and Madison County in particular, fit that definition.
Throughout its history, Madison has provided a haven for Native Americans, early Anglo settlers, Civil War resisters, Vietnam veterans, and refugees from the country’s cultural wars. The county’s present population includes long-term local families, young professionals, artists, retirees and back-to-the-landers. While the county is wired into the 21st century, many individuals understand it as a place where one can continue to resist modernity and be as “off the grid” as you want to be.
Madison County is not for everyone. It requires new skills, new tools, and new ways of interacting within your surroundings. It takes a rethinking of community and how one relates to it. And while that singular reason for being here – that idea of refuge – is almost universally felt throughout the county, there are also clear points of conflict. Zoning, land use, politics, religion, culture, language and many other beliefs and opinions offer potential for fracturing within the community, pitting newcomers against locals.
These photographs are not representative of the entirety of Madison County’s population or my work from the region. Most of the images are recent, while some are quite old, among my earliest from the county. These early images didn’t fit with other projects, but they are integral to this one, offering glimpses of a place that many continue to think of as unmapped, one of refuge and resistance.
These are the dynamics of ShatterZone.
A Few I Like from the 5th of July
For the last four decades, the folks at Indigo Bunting Lane Farm – Paul Gurewitz, Gary Gumz, Laurie Pedersen and Soren Gurewitz – have hosted an annual 4th of July party. Always held on the Saturday closest to the 4th, the party is the ultimate celebration of community. Paul kneads 100 pounds of pizza dough, makes sauce for 300 people and provides a wood-fired oven. Party-goers bring the toppings of their choice. Volleyball and horseshoes, walks to the river, live music for dancing, as much visiting as you can stand and fireworks always make for a truly exceptional day.
I haven’t missed many of these parties over the years. I remember the first of them in 1975. For me, it’s a time to see old friends, and meet their grandchildren, and reacquaint with folks I only see at the party.
As I age, I see more and more people I don’t know. People new to the community, or from Asheville, and some from farther away. Many young couples are there with children and I love the inter-generational sense of it all. I wonder how all these new folks make it to the party. What brings them to this hard-to-find ninety acres, set deep in the mountains? What brings them back year after year and causes some of them to stay forever?
I think about this a lot. I believe it has to do with the expansiveness of the day – the joining of disparate, yet kindred people –if only for a day, and the feeling that all is well. But also, the party offers a symbolism that speaks to our wider community. The knowledge we live in a special place – a fabric of many threads, made stronger by the singular nature of our strings.
For Paul, on his sixty-fifth Birthday on Thursday. Thank you for years of friendship and for just being you.
Paul manning the pizza oven, July 5, Anderson Branch 2014
Laurie Pedersen (left), the Keyboard Player from the Band and his son (right).
Don Gurewitz (left), Mary Eagle (right).
Untitled, Anderson Branch, July 5, 2014
Holly Cosby (left), Tommy, Holly and Matt (right).
Living Portrait Series- Kelsey Green Part 3
The Asheville Citizen-Times continues its Living Portrait Series look at my friend, Kelsey Green. Here is the link to the Citizen-Times website: This week I've included the whole piece on my blog instead of simply linking to the Asheville Citizen-Times, but that link is:
Kelsey Herding the Sheep to the Barn for Worming, PawPaw, Madison County, NC 2014
I have a strong drive. And I think my mom was a big influence in this. When you say you’re going to do something, you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to pursue it. It’s something I might be good at, but it’s also something I’ve been working on for a long time, doing the things that I say I’m going to do from start to finish. See things through. It’s something I struggle with as well. If I have a dream or a vision and I feel in my heart that’s where I’m supposed to be, that’s my destiny, then that’s what I’m going for and that’s why I am where I am.
The first time Tommy and I connected we were sitting on a rock behind his house and I thought he was so cool because he lived in the nasty Redmon house that had no electricity or running water and he was pooping in a bucket. He was considered a “dirty boy.” I thought it was really cool and I thought that’s the direction I want to go. You don’t need running water. You don’t need a flushing toilet. We sat down on a rock one day and told each other what our dreams were and what we aspired to do with our lives and they were very similar. We wanted to be able to grow our own food and be self-sustainable. Live off grid and do whatever it takes and work for it. Work for the things that you need to survive like your food and your water.
We’re both working really hard to make this dream we aspire to become real – it does cost money. The process of buying this raw land, it would almost be easier if the s___ hit the fan and we didn’t have to go to work every day and we joke about that. Sometimes we wish it would hit the fan and we could do barter and trade and work for other people and money wasn’t involved. We could actually make this thing happen more quickly, this vision. But as of right now, it is costing money so we work hard to earn what we need to not only feed ourselves and pay bills, but also to continue to put money into our place to make it so we don’t have to do that. Set ourselves up.
I think in the back of my head I had this vision and it wasn’t as clear as it is now. And going on the road trip and the lessons that I’ve learned have made that vision more clear. And now it’s a picture that I’m trying to paint and I’m in the process of painting that. It’s a twenty-year plan. It’s going to take me twenty years to paint this picture, but in twenty years I’ll get to sit on my porch and look at what I’ve created.
Kelsey Worming Sheep, PawPaw, Madison County, NC 2014
Living Portrait Series - Kelsey Green Part 1
The Asheville Citizen-Times and staff photographer, Erin Brethauer, have included my work in their weekly Living Portrait Series, published every Friday in the Arts and Entertainment Section of the newspaper. This is a wonderful opportunity for me to join other local photographers in presenting glimpses into the lives of some of our region's residents. I've chosen to portray the same person throughout the month - a family friend and young back-to-the-lander, Kelsey Green.
Kelsey, PawPaw, Madison County, NC 2012
On the Northwest Trail #4 HOH
In the HOH Rainforest, Olympic National Park, Washington.
Home Health
Home Health Nurse Susan Moore with 97-year old George Roberts and his daughter, Gertie Randall, Big Pine, Madison County, NC, 1984.
I spoke with my friends Larry and Sue Savett the other night. Larry and Sue live in St. Paul, Minnesota, where Sue was a Social Worker and Larry an Internal Medicine MD. We had gotten to know each other through a mutual friend and over the course of twenty or more years developed a solid friendship and abiding respect for each other.
In 2002, Larry published a book titled The Human Side of Medicine: Learning What it’s like to be a Patient and What it’s like to be a Physician. The book looks at the complexity of the doctor/patient relationship and offers tools to improve that interaction. Some time before the book was published he called to ask if he could use this photograph in his book. It was an image I had made in the mid-1980s for a story on rural health care initiatives for Southern Exposure Magazine. Writer Millie Buchanan and I did a story on the Hot Springs Health Program, a cutting-edge health delivery system in Madison County that became a model for rural health systems across the state.
I spent a number of days with Home Health Nurse Susan Moore as she made her rounds across the county tending to members of our community. Susan’s manner with her patients was more like a neighbor or family member – listening, open, responsive, encouraging the patient to talk about themselves. She knew, if she could build trust between herself and her patient, and the patient's family, it would benefit the patient’s health. Photographers also know this - that building trust with your subject often produces a better, more open, image.
When teaching, Larry uses this photograph as an example of The Human Side of Medicine. He shows it to his students and asks them to write an essay about what they see in the image. He has shared some of the essays with me and I’m struck by the student’s ability to understand the facts in the photograph while adding their own personal elements to the story they write.
Photography is dependent on facts, an external reality. There has to be something to photograph and photographers generally understand their role is to picture the world around them. As an image-maker I want the viewer to recognize the factual elements in a photograph - the what, why, and where in a picture. But what really excites me is when that evidence sparks the viewer’s memories: That reminds me of a time when we butchered hogs. Or, My mother used to wear her hair like that. Or, That was a hard time for my family. It’s the ability of the photograph to transcend its initial, intended meaning and create new realities that gives the medium its power and uniqueness.
Head of the Spring
At Our Spring, PawPaw, 2014 05 08
Seldom Scene - Sorely Missed
I lived in Marshall in the early 1980s on the top floor of what is now the Flow Gallery building. It was not an easy time. Newly separated, a young son, and little money and less work coming from my attempts at being a photographer/artist. It was empty warehouse space back then, not the elegant apartments there now. Unheated and unplumbed with rudimentary wiring. Just a big open space.
Main Street, Marshall, 1983.
It was a lonely time, filled with trips to the dark holes that punctuate my life. Guilt. Insecurity. Questioning. Sleepless nights spent writing or in my jury-rigged darkroom. Sometime visits from a similar searching soul would only heighten the aloneness in the morning when she left. Cold. Or hot. Never just right. I did make some nice photographs from that perch. Thank you Gene Smith.
Marshall was visibly slowing then. Boarded up buildings along the entire stretch of town. Any attempts at new businesses quickly closed. The old stores, the mainstays of the town that had been there forever, were still open, but did only a shadow of the business they once did. Court, and its ancillaries, were the only growth industries.
In the morning I’d walk to the post office along Back Street. Past the jail, train tracks and river on my right, the back ends of buildings hovering above me, like a trap ready to spring. "Why here?" I thought. An old question, never far from the surface.
George Penland, Marshall, 1983.
A few more steps and I’m at the back of Penland & Sons store. George Penland, one of the Sons, former mayor, and late husband to Barbara, was out on the stoop feeding the stray cats that lived behind the store. They served a purpose, George knew, rats and whatnot, so he kept them fed. George was cheerful - I remember him as always cheerful - and happy to see me on what was a fine spring morning. We talked, but I don’t recall what was spoken. I do remember thinking this moment of friendliness to me and kindness to cats is one answer to the question of "why here?"
ShatterZone in Shelton Laurel
Driving around the county today - a tour guide of sorts with a visiting photo friend - on a search for tobacco curing in barns. It’s an image that used to be everywhere in the county, but is now mostly gone. It takes phone calls and driving to find that important piece of our county’s history. But we do find some and my friend is happy with the outcome.
Shelton Laurel, Madison County, NC, 2013 11 22. With Kelly Culpepper.
It’s a funny thing – driving around with another photographer and seeing what attracts his eye. Often, people are looking for nostalgia and memory, a sense of days gone by, and we certainly have our fair share of that here in Madison. Our traditions take us back and often hold us in place. But, more importantly, I sense people from the outside, from cities and bigger places, are looking for what Melville would have termed a true place – a place not down on maps that has remained relatively untouched by the modern world. Madison fits that definition, too, and we seem to draw people looking for that kind of experience. I worry our place will become known as a museum and not the actual living, breathing, evolving community I’ve always known it to be.
Permanent RV, Hwy. 212, Shelton Laurel, Madison County, NC, 2013 11 22. With Kelly Culpepper.
Throughout its history, Madison County has been a place of refuge and resistance to the outside world. The Native Americans, the Anglo settlers, war resisters, and present-day refugees from urban living have all found Madison to be a receptive place for people wishing to get away from it all or living off the grid. For some people that vision of refuge is fulfilled with an image, and for others it may be a retreat to a part-time palace in the mountains that resembles their home in Florida. For others, that wish is more of an insistent need and people who are supposed to be here always find their niche.
Hwy. 212, Shelton Laurel, Madison County, NC, 2013 11 22. With Kelly Culpepper.
Blinking and Staring
Sylvester Walker's Granddaughter Playing Basketball in the Back Yard, Spivey's Corner, North Carolina 1989
I love it when photographs both stare and blink.
When they look intently, with time spent in the seeing.
Revealing detail as only a photograph can.
The background and backboard.
Chickens frolicking with tires.
Piled-up stuff you know has been there for awhile,
And will likely be there a while longer.
A freezer on the porch - so Southern.
Staring is like that – it offers us the particulars.
But there is nothing like the blink of an eye.
The instant the crux is revealed.
The Decisive Moment, the master Henri called it.
To trust eye and hand, and mostly instinct.
Knowing to push the button right Now.
With ball poised between hand and ground.
The foot in ballerina pose, anticipating the next movement.
A shoelace, attached to the shoe, but seeking its own direction.
Blinking is like that – it lets the breath of life invade our stillness.
Artist Statement
Junior and Pet, Sodom, Madison County, NC, 1978
Gesture.
Texture.
Smell and taste.
Eye and hand.
How we interact with the world around us.
Collective memory and internal reality.
I think these are the concerns of photography.
Ultimately, I make pictures for myself – a search for my own truths. To make some kind of sense of these diverse, rich with life, divisive, greedy, thoughtful, and generous people who inhabit the places we call home. When I photograph, I often think, if only common ground can be found, if I can establish a trust with the subject of my picture, then perhaps that relationship can be communicated to a viewer. And if it can, then maybe that viewer will be challenged in a long-held belief, or come away with some fresh understanding of their own world. But mostly I hope the photographs will prompt openness and encourage people to be receptive to the shared experience of being human.
Texture.
Smell and taste.
Eye and hand.
How we interact with the world around us.
Collective memory and internal reality.
I think these are the concerns of photography.
Ultimately, I make pictures for myself – a search for my own truths. To make some kind of sense of these diverse, rich with life, divisive, greedy, thoughtful, and generous people who inhabit the places we call home. When I photograph, I often think, if only common ground can be found, if I can establish a trust with the subject of my picture, then perhaps that relationship can be communicated to a viewer. And if it can, then maybe that viewer will be challenged in a long-held belief, or come away with some fresh understanding of their own world. But mostly I hope the photographs will prompt openness and encourage people to be receptive to the shared experience of being human.
Shu, Paw Paw Creek, Madison County, North Carolina, 2012
Carrboro Arts Center
Nicholson Gallery Exhibit
Madison County - Past and Present
Photographs by Rob Amberg
At Ramsey's Store, Sodom, Madison County, NC 1977
At Cricket's Birthday Party, Big Pine, Madison County, NC 2011
As a documentary photographer living and working several decades in Madison County, North Carolina, Rob Amberg has chronicled the lives and stories of people in isolated mountain areas such as Sodom. The photographs exhibited in Madison County - Past and Present include some of Amberg's oldest as well as most recent work demonstrating thechanging culture of Appalachian North Carolina.www.robamberg.com
Opening Reception: Friday, June 14, 6-8pm in the Nicholson Gallery
The exhibition runs from June 3-30.
http://www.artscenterlive.org/exhibition/exhibit
The opening reception on June 14 will feature a performance by noted Madison County ballad singer and storyteller Sheila Kay Adams. Adams was just awarded the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, which is widely considered the highest honor for the Arts in the nation.
Sheila Kay Adams, Sodom, Madison County, NC 1975
Dancing Light
Dancing Light on our living room wall.
Awakens me to the magic of the day.
And reminds me of the joys of small things,
and the gifts of the unexpected.
If only, we open ourselves to the possibilities.