Evidence of Ewes Unseen

With thanks to Marianne Wiggins and Jamie Paul

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Two images depicting the same scene – one done digitally in color, the other made with medium format film (2.25” x 2.25”) in black and white. The scene – pieces of sheep wool caught on a barbwire fence surrounding a pasture. The sheep use the fence as a scratching post. Both images are sharp with the wool and wire isolated against an out-of-focus background. Both pictures are about time, which is represented by the slight movement of the wool in the wind. Neither image reveals any noise – pixels in the case of the digital picture or grain in the film print. The questions for this photographer are: is the black and white image, because it’s made with the more labor-intensive, hands-on medium of film, more a photograph than the electronically produced color picture? Or are they simply different approaches to the same scene that contain the same photographic properties – an external reality, attention to detail, a concern with time, or the unique way photography frames its subjects?

For me, a photographer with forty years experience with film, who was never enamored with the darkroom experience, the difference matters little. The content of the picture has always been more important than how I get there. 

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Filiss Wedding

Last weekend I went to Jemima Filiss’s wedding to Matt Cook. I don’t know Matt, but have known Jemima since she was a baby. She was a significant child in that she was her parent’s last child and the only daughter among eight sons. I made this photograph of Jemima and her father, Lionell, a few months after she was born in 1983. Lionell birthed all of the children in their small cabin on Foster Creek. I’ve always liked the photograph, as seemingly did Lionell and Mary who had it framed on their mantel for many years; but I’ve never had the opportunity to publish it.

The image spoke to me about relationships between fathers and daughters, which can be decidedly different than those between men and their sons. More protective perhaps, tender, and soft in ways we might not be with male offspring. Like most pictures it also spoke to me about time and place. Madison County in 1983 was a place alternative people had gravitated to for over a decade. It was a time and a place to get away from the mainstream, where you could live life according to your own rules, obeying your own values, following your own instincts. Lionell and Mary, and many others of us, were part of that subculture that moved in and stayed – raising families, buying land, becoming part of the community.

One of the beautiful things about photography is the opportunity it offers to revisit those earlier times and places – to see precisely how people and locales have changed, and how they haven’t. At the wedding reception, I was struck by this anomaly as Lionell glided his daughter through the traditional dance, laughing, talking, holding her tight. It was the same relaxed, protective grip as years ago, but instead of holding a four-month old infant, this time he was holding the confident, secure, radiant adult his grip helped produce.  

Walk 1

Most days, I walk. Often, I’m in the woods – hiking up to our spring to flush silt from the water pipe and springbox, or to clear brush on the trail to the top of the mountain behind our house. Usually though, I walk the unpaved road that fronts our land – down the driveway and to the right, across the one-lane bridge that links Anderson Branch with Paw Paw Road, stopping usually at Robert and Jane’s driveway. There, I do some stretching, Yoga poses, before heading back along the same route.

It’s not a particularly difficult route – long enough and with enough elevation change to benefit my heart and increase my stamina. I feel better when I’m regular about it. I walk when it's hot and when it's cold. I walk in the wet and in the dry. A morning walk clears my head for the day ahead; in the evening, it flushes my brain of the day just past. In winter, I often walk in the dark with a headlamp, or by the light of the moon.

Mostly, my walk has to do with knowing the place where I live and my own sensory responses to it. It’s the same walk, over and over, although it changes endlessly. The light in the trees, so harsh and brittle in the middle of a summer day, becomes soft and textured during a fall rain. The smell, one moment clean and crisp, the next stagnant and decaying from a dead possum in the ditchline. The feel of the road itself on the soles of my feet – soft and muddy after a downpour, slick with ice or snow, dusty in a dry spell, rough when freshly scraped and graveled. The sounds – an occasional vehicle, a distant chainsaw, the sharp crack of a rifle during deer season, an airplane high above are the only man-made punctuations to the sounds that never change – the wind in the trees, the flow of the creek, the birds overhead, the same sounds heard for millennia by people who always walked and intimately knew the place. 

Joe Galeano

I think about my grandfather a lot even though I never really knew the man. Joe Galeano from Sicily. I have this one picture of the two of us together, taken on the front stoop of the house in the Maryland suburbs he and my grandmother had just bought. The house was not only an improvement in their living space, but a symbol of upward mobility for these southern Italian immigrants.

He worked for my grandmother’s brothers who did stuccdatore – ornamental plastering – and they had contracts to work on new government buildings in downtown Washington. My grandmother was a gifted seamstress who made suits for Franklin Roosevelt and robes for the Supreme Court Justices. Her boss, Jimmy Bello, ran numbers out of the tailor shop.

My grandfather died from Rocky Mountain spotted fever he’d contracted from a tick bite. It was late July, 1948; two or three months after the photograph was made. I was his first grandson, the only one he ever knew, and I love how the photograph communicates protectiveness and pride through his gesture and pose.

I’ve read that a tick can live twenty years waiting for a warm-blooded host and that one in a thousand carry the infection. That means this particular lethal tick could have hatched when my grandfather was in his thirties - working with his in-laws, raising his children, moving out of the city to the suburbs, and sending money back to the old country.

His family had been in Sicily forever, through centuries of invasions, poverty, and lack of opportunity. It’s why he and his brother, and millions like them, left - never again seeing their families or homelands. In my grandfather’s case, just as he was experiencing success, represented by a new home and new grandson, he convulsed for four days and died. He was buried in Arlington Cemetery in a land he had only known for thirty-five short years, barely enough time to know a place.