Prom

Spring is officially here. The leaves are out, it's getting warmer and I'm noticing more limos everywhere... Proms are here. 

I thought I would post this photograph in honor of all the high school students out there who are attending proms in the up coming weeks. 

This photo was taken of Chuck in 1961 getting ready for what only could have been Prom. Judging by the box in his hand, he must have been brining a corsage to a date. Unfortunately there was no photo of them together.  

While Chuck is awkwardly frozen in time (thinking Mom, please put the camera away, and Dad, where are the car keys) - time and technology has changed the way teenage guys everywhere are asking girls to prom. 

Check out this story on abc news. 

... back to blogging

During the past year, while my blog has sat inactive I have been finishing graduate school, trying to squeeze in some adventure and keeping up with my collecting of places, photographs, stories and dirt! As a result I have a stockpile of these that I am interested in investigating more in depth. With that in mind I am going to attempt to blog at least twice a month (ideally once a week). The hope being that this will keep me from watching more tv then my brain can handle AND read more… out of school I’m finding while there are tons of books I want to read and photographs I want to make, but I tend to just look at the pile of books on my coffee table and my cameras are beginning to gather dust. It’s time to brush of the dust and get things going again. 

 So here goes…

 In Memoriam of Lois the Oldsmobile

 The last six years have been filled with the sounds of my car tires on the pavement and Casey Kasem spilling out of the speakers as my eyes rapidly follow the passing landscape. The Oldsmobile 88LS was a gift from my Grandfather and dubbed Lois in the summer of 2004. To me Lois had a bit of a duel life the one in the summer with people piled in as we set off on weekend adventures away from camp, and they were always Grand Adventures. To beaches, parks, tattoo parlors, malls and movie theaters, dance music turned way up to sing along with. She once even journeyed out to Oklahoma and Kansas and back to visit dear friends.

 However during the fall, winter and spring she was quiet company all though my undergraduate years – a companion in hunting photographs. Comfortable and warm, filled with empty hot cocoa cups, sketchbooks with address jotted down and contact prints. Her back seat the perfect cradle for my 4 x 5 on the tri pod, her low to the road vantage point great for scanning out all the windows as I wobbled along back roads, often driving in circles until I found just the right spot. She made countless trips around Connecticut and had a long stay in Maine in the winter of 2004 visiting relatives, old family homes, lobsterman and frozen bays. 

 I knew her every sound, when there was this low sort of repetitive hum, I had to take my foot of the gas for second before putting it back on. When Cds started to skip, I had to take them out and find a way to cool them down (which was often holding them out the window). She had personality and character that only comes from knowing a car for a long time.

 Lois met her tragic demise a couple of months ago on a dark snowy road early in the morning, when she collided with a large deer. Her interior brought comfort on days that were long and joyless, and was a place of celebration on ones that worth the fuss. There will be more photographs, many more adventures, and eventually a new car, but no car could fill the void Lois has left on the back roads, and driveways of friends. 

Grandma's Window

This Polaroid is from about a year ago. The light just reminded me of the lovely weather we've been having so I thought it was appropriate to post it today. 

Grandma's Window © Amanda Kilton 2008 

Chuck and Bill at Palisade Park

Here is the long awaited return of my other family! This slide is from the their 1955 visit to Palisade Park New Jersey. This photo of brothers Chuck (age 11) and Bill I believe was taken by their father EJR, a family tree and what I have been able to figure out about their past can be seen in these  older posts. 

"... ceases to grow and, with us, heads toward oblivion"

I Recently was reading a wonderful article about the demise of Polaroid to digital photography in The New York Times that got to the root of what many of us love about Polaroid so much. You can read it in it's entirety here. I especially enjoy this quote, "... that was part of the beauty of the Polaroid. Mystery clung to each impending image as it took shape, the camera conjuring up pictures of what was right before one's eyes, right before one's eye. The miracle of photography, which Polaroids instantly exposed, never lost its primitive magic. And what resulted, as so many sentimentalists today lament, was a memory coming into focus on a small rectangle of film." 

This past fall I was on a mini adventure to Cape Cod when we pulled off the road to make a photograph of two wonderful plastic chairs in a stand of trees. After I snapped a few and was getting ready to head back to the car I spotted this jaw bone stuck in one of trees. It clearly had been placed there by someone, very carefully wedged in. I really enjoy the way that people interact with their landscape creating markers of their home. The human interruption of nature, when their touch is connected and calculated, that is what makes it so wonderful. 

Jaw Tree © Amanda Kilton 2008

Melainotype, Ferrotype or Tintype?

Actually all three names describe the same process. I picked up this tintype at the flea market last summer. The tintype is a wet plate photographic process, in which a piece black enameled or varnished tin (in some cases iron) is coated in a liquid collodion to make an exposure. The image is technically a negative but because of the dark background it appears to be a positive. This technique for image making was first described in France in 1853 and patented in the United States in 1856, however with the development of the amateure camera it began fading in popularity by the end of the 19th century.

 

Further information on the tintype can be found on this web page.

Endless Landscape

Just after Thanksgiving when I returned to Boston I was passing time in Coolidge Corner at Eureka . It's a tiny little shop fantastically packed full of all kinds of puzzles and board games. I had been in there before under similar circumstances of just waiting for another store to open. So I went in thinking I was just going to tinker around when I spotted this tiny box on a table in the center of the store. 

Obviously my attention was grabbed by the the title! What a treasure I can now create an endless number of landscapes in my house, at my desk or on my coffee table seeing all kinds of wonderful history in the land and people with out ever going out side! I purchased them with out much thought. 

When I got it back to my apartment and started to play around with the tiny cards, shuffling them about, I wanted to know more about them. So I turned to the trusty google and Wikipedia. As it turns out these little cards have quite the history. The Endless Landscape is also known as a polyorama or myriorama which means multi view, and was a popular 18th and 19th century storytelling game. They are made of a series of paintings that are pieces of a panorama and can be rearranged over and over again because the edge of each card has a horizon and a landscape element that will match up with any other card in the set. 

According to Wikipedia the creation of the endless landscape games was "... all part of a wider interest in viewing landscape as panorama, and in new ways presenting 'spectacular' scenes."

Wikipedia also describes the early card sets as being made up of "people, buildings and other compatible backgrounds" that could be laid out in many different arrangements "allowing a child to create a variety of imaginary landscapes." Some early ones that the cite specifically depicted English and Italian landscapes. 

Here is one example of the many landscapes I created over the last few weeks. 

Polaroid for Shelby

                                                      

 

My Friend Shelby recently made a lovely post on her blog  about Food & Books Restaurant that made reference to me and my Polaroidness. So I thought I would post it. I've been working on a Polaroid series since last spring and hopefully will be posting some more of that work as I get back into the blogging. 

Food & Books dinning room © Amanda Kilton 2008 

Bringing Back the Blog.

I've been on a mission to have an experience that was worthy of bringing back the blog. It's been so long since the last post that I thought it really needed to be something good. 

So here it goes! 

On my latest visit home I took the train into New London and then took a cab to meet my father at his work. He wasn't quite ready so I loaded my things into his pick up truck and waited around for a bit. Once he was all set we were heading to town to pick up the turkey and other tid bits for Thanksgiving. He came out of the shop, hopped into the truck and turned the key. Nothing happened not even a click. He did this a few more times and still nothing. He popped the hood and got out of the truck stared in for a second and then disappeared behind the truck only to return with a wrench. I thought this was to turn something. No. He slid under the truck and it sounded like he was just hitting something. When he re appeared from under the truck he tossed the wrench into the back and climbed back in and turned the key. Nothing. At this point he could have gotten mad but really what was the point so we were just laughing. 

He opened up the door and got out of the truck placed one of his hands against the back side of the frame and the other still on the steering wheel and pushed the truck backwards. Then pushed it forward a tiny bit, jumped in and turned the key. He was trying to pick up just enough speed that it would pop start. On the first try nothing. So he did it again, at this point it became clear that it was going to take the two of us. 

So I jumped out and positioned my self the same way he was and we pushed the car back and changed the direction we were pointed so we were oriented over a tiny hill thinking if we could pick up a bit more speed that we would get it going. One last time we pushed it back and then forward, first I jumped in and then my Dad, and we were on our way. 

Halloween

Chuck and Bill Halloween 1951

Hay!

Haystacks at Giverny Claude Monet (pencil on paper)

Driving around any country landscape, big fields everywhere are dotted with a large variety of haystacks. Hay is grown for many reasons, it’s most prominent uses is as animal feed, particularly for grazing. According to the site Mother Earth News, you can expect a cow to eat about 35 pounds of hay a day during cold weather and a horse will eat 44 while sheep and goats will get by on a little over five. The intricate history of hay can be found on Wikipedia, but basically early on in farming's history it was noticed that in the spring fields produced more hay then could be consumed by the animals, so by cutting it, drying and storing it for the winter saved the domesticated animals from digging though the snow to feed and provided them better nutrition.
Haystacks, Evany Gruwald Bela

This all was to be done by hand cutting the hay by scythe and then gathered up into large bundles called sheafs with the development of technologies, this was latter done by horse drawn implements and then latter with machinery such as the tractor and the baler. Large rectangle bails or more commonly huge rolls of hay we see drying in the fields; they are markers of the places we inhabit and part of our landscape. Artist for years have been examining them and their function in our space. Harvest in Provence, Vincent van Gogh

This brings to mind the a quote from John Huddleston, “A photograph that appears almost ordinary and yet evokes a sense of truth and beauty is all the more meaningful. The mundane makes up most of ones life and it is to everyday life that we need to feel more connected.” Perhaps that is why artists such as Monet, (who painted and sketched many versions of the same stacks though out his career), and countless others including Van Gogh and Bela felt compelled to produce work featuring the haystack. This past weekend when I was home photographing I was visiting a local farm down the street from my grandmothers house the owner showed me several stacks of hay that her husband and children had done using traditional methods.

East Street, Hebron CT © Amanda Kilton 2007

EJR, Ruth and Chuck's Visit

In looking though these hundreds of slides over the last few weeks I come to a dead end, I’m at loss for what to do. I’ve become very attached to these characters and just as abruptly as the series of images begins it ends, with no real resolution. At some point ‘possible family trees’ and timelines of events just fizzle out. I’m working on doing some research to see what I can come up with, for now however I will continue to do my best to present these images in as much truth as I can imagine.
This image was taken in 1946, Chuck was just 2 and EJR and Ruth had been married for just over four years, they were beginning to think of moving east, EJR wanted to pursue getting his doctorate. Here they are just getting ready to depart Ruth’s sisters house, after visiting for a few days, her son just had his fourth birthday and based the photos it seems to have been quite a rambunctious weekend.

Family Tree

So as it turns out sorting though 40 years of slides while trying to get to know the family inhabiting the world in cased in those metal boxes, takes a lot of time. More then I originally thought. I’ve been working on a time line of events and a family tree, but there are a few people that I’ve come across that seem to not be friends but don’t really fit into the tree neatly, any way I thought I would put up what I’ve got so far.
The photo is of who I think is Chuck’s Father’s (EJR) sister Helen and Chuck, it was taken in 1945. If Helen isn’t a relative she must have been a dear family friend because thus far she seems to be around a great deal and was in one slide labeled Family

Brownells

Part of what makes up place is how it changes over time. Last winter when I was out photographing with my Father we happened to be in Moodus. He and my Mother use to work at a factory called Brownell co. and hadn’t seen it in years so we set out in that direction. Brownell was Founded in 1825 to supply twisted line and fiber ropes, cords and nets to commercial fisherman; now they produce everything from archery chord, tennis nets to cargo nets for helicopters. When we first turned into the ice covered driveway just in front of us on the left was two strange metal structures covered in brittle vines. As it turns out these structures were built by my Father to test cargo nets. After a little digging Dad found photo of them in their hay day being used.

Going Home

My favorite thing about photographing in the area around where I grew up, which happens to be a small town, so I’m sure this is similar for any one who frequents those types of towns, are the people and their stories. Their personalities and hearts that are part of making up the landscape in which they inhabit. Every time I get in my car and just drive in circles around dirt roads that I’ve seen for years but never driven down before searching, when ever I stop I meet some of the most kind spirited, and interesting people. If it were not for them and their consistent reworking of their land, and desire to hold onto the life that they have always known in this place as it is rapidly changing and more houses and roads are being built, I would have no one to go home to.
This particular photo of the wood stacked on the front porch, belonged to an older gentleman, who grew up in this house. He now lives there with his elderly mother and a nurse who helps him care for her, both of which only speak polish. When his mother, who was just a child and his grand parents emigrated here from Poland they bought this farmhouse in the mid 1900 (it was built in 1812). He told me that it is built of chestnut, and will never have to be rebuilt, because, it’s the strongest wood there is and it will never rot. The farm is still in operation and he hays the land and sells firewood; he also keeps a beehive.
Photo: Route 207, Lebanon CT © 2007 Amanda Kilton

Flea Market Find

My Other Family
Every Sunday Morning from May though November there is a flea market at the Mansfield Drive In Theater & Marketplace. Being my Mother’s daughter (and my Grandmother’s granddaughter and my Aunt’s niece for that matter) I can’t resist a little treasure hunt. So whenever I’m in the area I drive over a little after 8 with my Mother (the key is not getting there too early because the venders won’t be set up, but if you get there late they’re breaking down their stations). Amongst the old belt buckles, teapots, car parts, costume jewelry, designer bags and jeans, dollar store bargains, and postcards there’s the occasional photographic treasure. Typically they are buried at the bottom of a box of 649 curled up and torn black and white photos from some estate sale or busted but beautiful old Brownie or Polaroid cameras. One Sunday last June just as we were getting ready to head home, there they were, stacked ever so neatly on a blue tarp. Seven shining metal boxes packed full of slides, organized, labeled and dated from around 1945 though the mid seventies. Little Chuck and Bill, growing though nearly 40 years in these tiny boxes. My Other Family, I thought I would introduce them – not really in any chronological order, they will appear from time to time. This one is Labeled on the slide “Chevy 1955” it also happens to be of Chuck (on the right) and Bill (left).

Unknown Photographer © 1955

In The Car with Pop K

Just for a little background info, I photograph in southeastern Connecticut – around the area I grew up in. I’m really interested in history and the impact it has on place excreta. Any way that’s not the point, more often then not when I go out photographing, my father comes along with me. He’s good company and always helps me cart all my equipment (occasionally on long hikes and often though the woods). We chat about this and that, I like to hear his opinions on locations. This week I had him bring along a digital camera to take some photos of his own. Among other various planned stops, I had been thinking about going to this area of route 11, a CT. state highway between Hartford and New London (via route 2). The thing about route 11 is that it is about only half completed and it currently ends in Salem, construction began in 1966 but was halted due to funding and the half – finished express way opened in 1972. So there we were on these odd bridges that were built and never used for their intended purpose, but more for people off roading, quading or partying, and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to photograph. That’s when Pop K came out with this weeks featured bit of advice… Shot what’s not there. Cheesy or corny or whatever it maybe – I thought it was rather great advice especially in this case, I was in such a no where place, why try and find something to make it look more then what It was. So these are his photos.
photos: Untitled Route 11 © 2007 Kevin Kilton