EVERY DAY LIFE
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
—Walt Whitman
Pamela, Wilfredo and their daughter, Chloe
Holyoke, MA. March 16, 2024
Pictures of Places that Wouldn't Be Here,
if Not for the Connecticut River
March, 2024
THE MEADOWS
Sophie at 16
Starting with my own family members, I've begun a series of photographs of older teenagers — sixteen, seventeen, eighteen-years-old — still kids, still living at home, but almost too big for the house. I'm photographing them in the Northampton Meadows, that broad expanse of arable land where floodwaters rise every two or three years and tractors the size of small houses roll across fields of corn or potatoes. The fields are bordered by roads bearing names nearly four hundred years old — Kings Highway, Hockanum — and these roads often move or disappear entirely or become impassable due to dust or mud or snow. More than once I’ve used a chain and my pickup to lug one of these teenagers’ cars out of that mud. The expansiveness of the land, its resistance to development, its fecundity, the massive sky — all of this seems right to me as a place to photograph young people, each of them on the cusp of an adulthood that we can no longer pretend to imagine.
​
More photos to come.
Silas at 17
Hadley & Greenfield, MA, on Sunday, February 11, 2024
(an essay in captions)
Things are happening. On the windowsill.
Goose
Dudes of Northampton, early January