A New Project…
When I closed my social media accounts, I hoped to post more regularly to this blog. That has not happened. I hope to change that, but time will tell. Over the months since my last post, there have been several things I have told myself would make a good topic for a blog post. In no particular order, here are those topics I remember:
- I attended a workshop with the photographer Phil Penman in NYC.
- We traveled to Italy to attend a friend's life celebration. While there, we hiked from city to city in the Umbria region for a few days.
- My Worn, Wild, Weird, Wonderful Warwick project has started to take form with a foundation to build off of.
- I have finally gone full frame with my camera kit. My journey back into photography started with the iPhone—have I gone too far?
- I continue to be fascinated with Japanese photography, particularly the work of Diado Moriyama. As a result, I have discovered an iPhone app called Provoke.
- Five images from my Worn, Wild, Weird, Wonderful Warwick project have been accepted for the Fifth Annual Spotlight Member exhibition at the Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, which will open on August 15th.
In the past, I would have attempted to incorporate all those subjects into a single post—a post of rambling encyclopedic length. This post will stick to one subject—my Worn, Wild, Weird, Wonderful Warwick project, but as to its length, I make no promises—it will probably be too long.
The project has had a long genesis. Its roots go back to before the pandemic. My partner and I had decided to sell one of our cars (mine) and become a one-car family. I soon discovered that my days of heading out to make images were over. The number of times the car was available, the weather was favorable for making images, and my having a plan for where to go and what to photograph were few and far between. Ultimately, I began to walk and bicycle around my neighborhood and beyond. Slowly, over time, and through several iterations, the project started to form into something that had interest and substance.
Worn, Wild, Weird, Wonderful Warwick has several potential sub-titles:* A Photographic Love Poem to My Home* or A Stranger in a Strange Land. While Warwick is now my home, my roots are on the West Coast. Except for driving through Rhode Island on business trips from New York to Boston, I had never been in the state or Warwick before we moved here. It seemed like everything was different and strange to me. I distinctly remember driving around Warwick as we searched for a rental and thinking of the quote from The Wizard of Oz, "Toto, I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore."
As the body of work developed, I was reminded of how different Warwick, Rhode Island, and the greater New England area were and how strange it seemed to me during those first couple of years. I mean the sun rises out of the ocean instead of setting into the ocean! Cone On, that is truely weird. The project continues to develop as I work to shape the narrative with new images.
The images below are taken with my iPhone using the Provoke app. There are images here from Warwick, Pawtucket, and Providence, RI. Oh, and one is the Roman gate to the city of Brevagna, Italy.
