The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025

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A reconsideration of Appalachia 55 years later in this dedicated project series: #Photography #DigitalCollage #ArtYear A PhotoEssay Substack by Tom Ogburn on the Great Smoky Mountains NP, Blue Ridge, Skyline Drive & Shenandoah NP

"Nine tenths of wisdom is being wise in time." Theodore Roosevelt 🦉🌙 If ever I could conjure a person back to life in their prime, in his case say around 31 years of age; it would be now, and it would be this man. The conjuring performed in the attic of the White House. Which his daughter Alice claimed as her own when told there was to be "No smoking in the White House." Not a ghostly conjure, but in the corporeal state, each and every day for the next 1004 days, to strap on his favorite boxing gloves and spend each and every of those nights looking for a sparring partner. "It is a good thing to look back upon what has been said and compare it with the record of what has actually been done." Theodore Roosevelt Roosevelt was speaking of looking back and self-assessing your own words, your own promises, compared to your own actions to fulfill them. This Roosevelt did not need fact checkers. 🦬 Sigh 🌒💫
This is a very large work in progress, around 80-85% finished. I keep subtracting percentages as I keep adding subtle layer into it. I'm posting this on April 21st, 2026. From the original post, on Mar 14, 2026: "The Digital Hybrids are primarily linked directly to the Hybrid Works. Think of them as siblings... When finished, it will be one of the first five or six of my large Digital Hybrids to be available in print form. It's about 65% done as you see it here. Stay tuned, the Sea Oats are coming (far less dangerous than "the Sand Snakes of GoT), plus a few less recognizable architectural features! I'll be finishing this work up in a few weeks, and when done I'll do a Work in Progress string. The composition is built of three primary photographs. The central one an interior view, the outer views worked into place as a digital collage puzzle, in a way. Based on a place I've loved for years and years and years, yet, I've not seen it since these photos were shot there in March of 2023. The Ghosts Forests at Huntington Beach State Park have been growing faster (according to SCPRT signage) and I'm curious to get back there to see just how the salt water levels are settling. It's an eerie thing to behold. The composition is done, so far, in muted avocado greens and natural clay color, with rich deep reds in the bricks. Other elements are about to be added, almost as scrim layers on a stage, which will be foliage, trees, perhaps some of those scary sea oats!" The scary sea oats are in (more on the way) are now in the sky to the top of the walls, to the right of the woman's eyes. Ghost forests are forming at a faster rate these days, the salt water sinks can be seen lower right. More weaving and melding is just around the left corners, the sky, ground, and in the face to a degree. This work will be 48 by 24 inches inches at the largest scale. There will be four smaller sizes too.
A beautiful, sprawling oak tree, long a most natural resident of that magical region along the Southern Atlantic coastal zone, spreads its limbs, bark darkened by years of ocean spray, over a small alligator territorial spit at Huntington Beach State Park in South Carolina. Alligators are not saltwater fans. This is a very horizontal image. The sky is a soft grayish blue with faint white clouds in the distant background, the middle distant coast of the other side of the park a thin horizontal line is just below center of the image. The tree is rooted in a small knoll just three feet above the waterline; not nearly enough height to provide a barricade to the waves of an ocean storm any longer. I've been shooting the ghosts forests, the ghost trees, all over, salt marsh tidal pools moving further and further inland. This is one BIG tree, which if you were to approach it, you'd be awed by is sheer audacity to survive no matter the declining odds. In a few years, it too will be a ghost tree.
The Digital Hybrids are primarily linked directly to the Hybrid Works. Think of them as siblings... When finished, it will be one of the first five or six of my large Digital Hybrids to be available in print form. It's about 65% done as you see it here. Stay tuned, the Sea Oats are coming (far less dangerous than "the Sand Snakes of GoT), plus a few less recognizable architectural features! I'll be finishing this work up in a few weeks, and when done I'll do a Work in Progress string. The composition is built of three primary photographs. The central one an interior view, the outer views worked into place as a digital collage puzzle, in a way. Based on a place I've loved for years and years and years, yet, I've not seen it since these photos were shot there in March of 2023. The Ghosts Forests at Huntington Beach State Park have been growing faster (according to SCPRT signage) and I'm curious to get back there to see just how the salt water levels are settling. It's an eerie thing to behold. The composition is done, so far, in muted avocado greens and natural clay color, with rich deep reds in the bricks. Other elements are about to be added, almost as scrim layers on a stage, which will be foliage, trees, perhaps some of those scary sea oats!
This is a fairly decent example of what I've found online when conducting searches through the last decade for a higher quality scan, made from a much higher quality original Thiollier print. Which I have yet to see, sadly. It is only 72 pixels per inch ( I made a copy from a file I found to the same specs) 600x600 pixels. The contrast is far too dark, the trees in the distance too pale and washed out, and the digital artifacts are the same as almost every other scanned image I have ever seen online. Some have been attempted recoveries or restorations, but when starting from a badly artifacted older digital scan. My guess is that most all I have seen are replications derived from a single, older poor quality scan from the late 1980's-early 1990's. If you look closely at his daughter's arms and hands, her right foot and the left tail of her coat, you'll see the digital halo artifacting. And this is an example of one which has had a lot of effort put into removing those artifacts. If anyone does know a source for his works, an archive of his photographic prints in France where the works by his own hand exist, please do let me know. Especially if a better image of this photograph is in that collection.
January 11th 2024. My friend Bill Heustess and I decided to wander over to the Smokies and hike the four miles into the Walker Sisters old home place on what turned out to be a very cold Winters day. Who knew? This cabin, built in 1861 from hand-hewn tulip-poplars, is one of the toughest woods to work even when green. A small six panel window reveals nothing on the inside of the cabin, but reflects as a mirror that which is directly across from it, a large tree standing just 20 feet away. And in the lowest left pane the haint form of a very cold photographer trying to diminish himself unsuccessfully. The chimney is mud-daubed hand laid split stone, relatively flat. The width of the fireplace centered in the interior living room is about eight feet. The stillness and beauty of being here on a cold winters day was surreal. Reflections in glass panes are the bane of a photographer. When here are six of hem, each skewed at different angles of placement in the lights of the window frame it feels as though you've fallen into an old-world kaleidoscope.
This image, a digital collage created to illustrate a very pronounced and prolonged dream sequence I've been having for years now, involves many vibrant assemblages of descriptions, memories and stories shared over generations in the two larger of the eight extended families I emerged from by some random happenstance. It’s packed to the gills with visuals. It’s made to look like an old Brownie photo. They are all interwoven, to look as though projected towards the viewer or that you are diving into them, similar to the original opening sequence of the old "Twilight Zone" television series in 1959. It's hard to describe, but here's a try at it: there are three main elements, a young woman's photo circa 1952, a large face of a man with a goatee receding, disappearing in places. A playing card, an Ace of Hearts with a Southern Nettle tree displayed. The colors are muted tans, bronze to gold browns and blacks. The colors of opthalmic migraine-induced vision, at least as experienced by me. The photograph, to us all, is a bridge to a quiet and deeply spiritual memory which shears away from the science of the image. And the deep memory resides in that maelstrom of a universe of mind which I believe comprises a collective consciousness of all things, a great body of atmosphere in various modes and forms which serves as a stage for its performance within the realm of our own very fluid memory. A relegated space, but always malleable. Then, we imputed once a science of photographing moments and called the resulting images “proof.” An evasive thing. What is visible "proof" to the eye? For eyes need no proof. yes are fleet. Photos are a much more spiritual, essence driven nature of the human spirit made static. The photograph, as Roland Barthes mentioned, just serves to say "We were here." I was so touched by that observation when I read it. It made all the sense in the world to me. Even the photo border is nebulous, emerging from the left as nothing, into die cut edges.
A very industrial-looking silver steel bridge spans a new creek flow in Sesquicentennial State Park in South Carolina. These trees were heavily damaged ten years ago, and now, the verdant pine forest is recovering still, yet again we have a beautiful terrain. River cane has returned, and a promising blue sky covers far behind the trees. This is what we now call the FEMA Bridge, all who frequent the Park. For it represents a bond between the people and a Government Agency which once care for all in need. This is a photograph of when things work, when needs are met and the people of a Nation are visited by relief and repair after such devastation. Here is what for a few years, through a number of tropical storms and hurricanes between January 2015 to January 2021 that through flood and fire, hurricane, tornado and cyclone, deluge of snow, an incredibly large swath of landscape in Sesquicentennial State Park, just outside of Columbia, South Carolina was altered forever. But we all knew that relief would come. In State Parks we are seeing fires and floods decimate the timber, the lands, even the waterways. In 2015 Sesqui was a disaster zone. South Carolina has had flooding now for ten long years, with prolonged seasons of record setting flooding many times. This is climate change, and FEMA was always there to help individuals, communities, counties and states recoup. Until now. Western North Carolina is still reeling from Hurricane Helene, encumbered by lack of bridges and road repair which never came. Even when our Nation had FEMA fully operational, it often was the precursor, as in the case of Sesquicentennial, a tremendous outpouring of funds and volunteers, workers from other states and even some countries who sent help in as a welcome tide of support. When will it return to us?
A scene, a little bit ominous, depending upon your point of view, perhaps. It is the lowlands, just below & adjacent to the remnant white sands of the Carolinas Sandhills region. It is a South Carolina State Park. It is where in many ways, my love of Parks & America's Recreation Areas began, although at the age of three to seven years old, I would never have been allowed to wander into these arenas, for this is a tributary to a swamp. It is the portal some of us adhere to in our reveries, our visualizations. It is to others a threatening place, full of danger & omnipresent latent fears; somewhat founded trepidations, for there are more folks today Nature considers a threat than they do her. They should be the wiser but there is no indication of such at hand. I place my bet on Nature, for our world is trying to shake us off like a dog would rid themself of fleas. When this Earth finally shakes in earnest, we will be gone. At the same time, we will always haunt the Earth's surface, no matter it's configuration & we will be stymied by loss of orientation, for I doubt we will recognize even our own homes & birthplaces. We will be lucky to recognize the wake of our own immediately trailing currents, our passages, our departures. If you were to be standing here on this spot, at the same time of year of this photo being made, you would be seeing an emergence of spring, new grayish-green leaves in the softness of their velvety bloom. A sonorous enclave of otherwise quiet & subdued beauty, until you inch closer to the waters. Then you see & hear the Life teeming beneath the reflection of blue skies above, leaves & sky providing camouflage of faded shades of the brown spectrum & the darkness of the water where the gray bark turns to black, mirroring your face as you wonder at the beauty of such existence. A black mirror indeed. This is a panoramic image of three blackwater tributary streams converging within Poinsett State Park, between Sumter and Santee, SC.
A portrait meme of AJ Muste, a Dutch-born American clergyman and pacifist who protested against the Vietnam War. A reporter once asked him, "Do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night in front of the White House with a candle?" Muste replied, "Oh I don't do this to change the country. I do this so the country won' change me."
A timeless square shot, of a bridge crossing the Little Pee Dee River in northeastern-most South Carolina. The day is still, white clouds calmly abiding ahead of blue sky. The blackwater mirrors darkly the sky above. Still water, currents only underneath, carrying secrets within its deeper recesses. The underside of this bridge is mirrored, casting a near-black shadow. It seems suspended through ebony reversal. To read the full story: https://theparkwaysprojects.substack.com/p/a-bridge-too-far Just over a year ago, I began to wander my Jeep into the deep Carolina Bays region of the two states as part of 'The Parkways Projects.' Where the two states conjoin. It is not a place of ease, no matter your constitution nor your mindset. It’s an eerie place of separatist belonging, for I felt I belonged there by birthright but was excluded by today's currents. In these Carolina Bays, it is the crows which sound the back and forth of present participles versus past tense. These murders of crows were out in abundance on this trip into the swamp basins of the Carolina Bays crossings between Little Pee Dee State Park (South Carolina) and one of the newest North Carolina State Parks, Lumber River. It's an old bridge but with a new and shiny guard rail assembly. Nothing like an allegory there, for we are not about that, no, especially not in Carolina Bay territory. Lumbees. Witches. Panthers—or paints. Others. Neithers. Amalgams from the in-betweens. Dark, light, good, evil, all exist within these swamps. Along with the fish curiously trying to consider the humans above the surface of their waters. I walked this bridge four times, shooting each time something caught my eye. There’s no stopping the sounds, the caws, the currents and eddies, the blackwater abundance in shallow layers hiding just what we do not wish to know is under there. But things which the hackles tell us are under there. Like today. Then I made my way into the swamp to shoot it from this vantage point.
"Pan's brief eternity" The colors are largely a duotone composition of a slightly reddish sepia & cream color. To finish off the piece with a little more edge to it, a deep golden ocher is introduced as a large translucent pane over the model’s shoulder and a small rectangle, a reflection from underneath her chin. Pan is very pale and ghostlike and stares at you intently from their only visible eye, the other deep within shadows. Their pupil is heavily dilated, as Pan was known for excess, often killing many human trespassers who entered their realm. Pan was neither male nor female, but a shape-shifter. You’re under the gaze of the trickster god of old, one who existed in almost every mythic pantheon of the gods around the world. They are not amused by your presence but highly intrigued in your having the courage to drop in for a visit. You’re likely to never see home again, but to be lured by this feral creature of mists into an eternity all too brief for the gods, but very long and drawn out for humans. I’ve posted many words on this work over the years, largely about the method, mode and manner of the art I do inside Photoshop to create them. Here’s a few more, for there’s a story inside the story of Pan, for all riddlers are such folk. Since 1996, when I started building my first digital collages inside Photoshop by using the more painterly methods of additive/reductive, I started referring to the final images as digital composite builds. I'm also emulating older photographic methods and techniques. Like Ansel Adams employed long ago. After two decades he’d forgotten his method’s complexities, and thanks to not keeping recipes (at times losing those he did record) coupled with the advent of chemical changes in modern photography, Ansel never could return to those former methods he’d hoped to recover. The photos he made and developed were (after that time) less dense in tonalities, the blacks less rich & velvety. This made me realize recipes are good.
Here is the interior of a very small stone cabin crafted by young men in training as members of the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930's. It is a very skilled build, with both the greyish-golden native stone and the deep reddish browns of old wooden rafters, beams and planks hand cut and crafted, the wood probably made of spruce. It's a beautiful remnant of an era fading from view in many parts of America. An old vintage mountain rescue sled, made of steel and oak, hangs horizontally, high above the floor. This is a room steeped in lore. It is in this place of being we may find our anchor beneath the waters which might drown us should we spill over into the deep. We are witnessing the Sun's existence. Between two chairs. I can only consider, what was that difference between the origin of these chairs? One a standard ladderback, the other created by an artisan crafter plying a skilled sense of local aesthetic. Both were most likely crafted by mountain hands. It's of no matter, really, save for just igniting wonder in the mind of the viewer as the entire building, exterior and interior, stem from the old ways. They derive from the past the skills the people of Appalachia knew, and carried in their being all through the course of their lives. That chair on the left, made by hands long ago buried in a grave marked by their surviving family members in hopes that their descendants would remember them. Such is the care some are willing to devote to places where we as visitors might go to reconnoiter, to reclaim our sense of self. It is a certain clarity which has been bequeathed to us by a living being, a young mind who wishes to share an interpretation of just what might have been, oh so long ago. A mighty vote of thanks to Ranger Josh Powell at Big Ridge, for your efforts to maintain, curate and equip this small but well-preserved slice of history.
It is in this place of being we may find our anchor beneath the waters which might drown us should we spill over into the deep./ We are witnessing the Sun's existence. Between two chairs. I can only consider, what is that difference between these chairs? One a standard ladderback, one crafted by mountain hands. The latter may be made by a person only 45 years old today; perhaps 30 years of age. It's of no matter as they stem from the old, they derive from the past the skills they have learned. Then again, that chair on the left may just be made by hands long ago buried and marked for their descendants. Such is the care some are willing to give to places where we might go to reconnoiter, to reclaim our sense of self. It is a certain clarity which has been bequeathed to us by a living being, a young mind who wishes to share an interpretation of just what might have been, oh so long ago. A mighty vote of thanks to Ranger Josh Powell at Big Ridge.
Ranger Josh Powell is a unique person. He has a vision. He has a grasp of the past. You are viewing his art, his vision, both into the Past and onto our Futures in these lean years to come. We are born from memories, all of us. Some of us know from where our memories come; we are the lucky ones, for we have a heritage of words from those who came before us. Josh has prepared this cabin, which rests to this day in the same place it always resided, at the entry to Big Ridge State park in Tennessee. The only anomalies are due to the vagaries of time, for they are brochures, maps and promotionals from years past, angling up from the depths of their own history, and they are then perfectly placed for all to see, to feel, to observe. We are witnessing Time's passage. There is power in this little cabin. In this little cabin resides love for one's profession, and for all those whose professions preceded you. Look closely at the lay of these stones. Realize they stem from the tired fingers and sore forearms of 20 year old men soon to be called to service on December 8th, 1941. You are standing upon history. You are hovering above souls long buried. You are in a finger's grasp of knowing those who came before you and gave their lives for the freedoms you once had.
There is a wall, I presume it is still standing in Seattle. I struggle still to this day to remember which bridge it was; more a viaduct structure, a wall made beautiful by human hands who has clearly evidenced by their touch so many years go the love they held for their craft. This bridge, this abutment, this wall was a place she chose to have her photographs made that year for her first solo album, which would be a CD, not an LP. There was a huge tree across from it that she leaned against as I photographed her, in a simple sheer black dress & leather boots. She laughed & the sky listened. We had gone to the tree first, for this was her first idea. I kept looking at this wall. When done we walked to the wall & I shot a sequence of her looking directly into the lens, then to the left, to the right. I loved her profile. We'd joked & tossed around ideas for the World to come in the next few years. This was 1988 & 89. I'd flown out on tickets bumped on each trip back to Seattle from South Carolina, always scheduling my trips alongside holidays so that I could volunteer my seat to those who had family to see, dates to make. On one 3 week trip, I landed 9 cross country flights from Charlotte NC to Seattle WA. And in this way we began our friendship, me with a place I could crash at anytime when in Seattle, on Whitman. Her with a wish to just walk, talk & listen, to swap & exchange ideas & dreams & art. A few years later it suddenly ceased. Every 100 years it awakens & allows an entrance. Only of you love someone dearly are you allowed to stay, for if one person leaves, then all would dissipate. Brigadoon. "Just off I-25 is an exit to Rowe and Pecos. Rowe seems to me a high desert Brigadoon. There is age there; there is living in an amorphous act of Time." "So I stayed a third night, considering that this town hidden in sort if a high vale alongside the Arkansas River was beginning to feel as though I'd wandered into Brigadoon in the Rockies."
Ahhh, South Carolina. Exhales. Here indeed is a very vibrant sunset cascading across Interstate 95 at that perfect point just in between New York City, New York and Miami, Florida. The 2.4 mile long causeway is a source of constant traffic twenty-four seven, 365 days a year. Imagine that. Except around mealtimes. There is a brilliant orange-gold sunset lying flat, just above the two and one half-mile causeway, casting its dying breath of light upwards while issuing a deafening deep blue roar downwards to the waters' surface. In just three minutes, all will be dark save for the headlights of travelers. Lake Marion, a lake my Grandfather helped build for six years far below the levels of these waters today, sprawls across a low horizon, the deep midnight blue sky pressing down upon the last glower of the Sun as he drops into darkness just before the gloaming. He already knows he has lost to Nightfall. The Sun is a creature of Habit, as we are to him. I call this a Victorian sunset due to just the abject beauty of it, predating the hubbub of the sounds I heard as I shot this image. Yet quiet enough to qualify as the Victorians did love to glom about and inebriate themselves quietly while watching such events occur. Just 350 miles from here, there will be 20 to 50 hardy Americans sitting in their lawn chairs where the Blue Ridge Parkway meets the Skyline Drive, at one of the finest vistas to the West in America, no matter the season. In the summer, you will not find parking, so, you may as well be traveling south to Miami, crossing his causeway. This is the Victorian view. Just six days before, I shot the postmodernist sunset from this same location, give or take a thousand yards. I'm about to pass that one around 11:15pm, just 25 minutes away from now. A sunset with teeth. I've launched "The Parkways Projects' Substack just last week, a newsletter/blog with various modes of writing and visual art. I hope y'all will visit every so often!
Water laden gray clouds scroll over a pale and overcast silver sky. It had been 50 years since my family had embarked on the third year of traveling up both parkways. In 1969, we were pulling a new Coleman Pop-up camper towed by our aging 1963 Chevrolet Impala, with no air conditioning. That was the reason for the Coleman, for in 1968 we discovered just what brakes could not withstand barreling down the mountain grades with too much weight behind us. During both years, my Mom, who was ostensibly the navigator on such trips, was busy journaling. I'm thankful she wrote in longhand, for she was an excellent shorthand stenographer. That would have been nearly criminal as I doubt I could find a shorthand reader these days. Due to those journals in 1968 and 1969, I was able to follow the exact same route, stop in the same National Park campgrounds, for both Parkways were the first two such National Parks in America, and even in seven cases she wrote down the campsite number as well. I stayed overnight in five of them in August 2019. I do have a thing for ritual, revisiting that which can never really be regained, or even really be understood. But we can try. For the Appalachians were my havens. It was the days when even on faraway junkets, we were allowed to run free, explore thickets of mountain laurel, follow bears, wander about while the parentals were doing siesta time, for after all, the purpose was to do as we all pleased. There's far more to this story, and that's going to be the challenge as it progresses, for I have many folders of shots I never intended to take. Then images I had planned but turned out to become something else, for 50 years is a short time for trees, while a long time for us. The first thing I noticed was the old vistas had often disappeared. Although it's a National scenic parkway and modern practices of allowing the flora to do as Nature intended has resulted in a lot of 40 to 50 year growth at overlooks built between 1933 to 1948.
"What you need, above all else, is a love for your subject, whatever it is. You've got to be so deeply in love with your subject that when curve balls are thrown, when hurdles are put in place, you've got the energy to overcome them." ≈ Neil DeGrasse Tyson The simplest palette of natural colors explodes at your feet. Orange clay, pale grayish-yellow spagnum mosses, silver gray twigs, deep charcoal grays and blacks, vestiges of a fire sprinkled with various tones of winter's leaves. This grill has not been used in some time. "Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy - your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself." ≈ Annie Leibovitz
A misty mountain scene of an unpeopled picnic ground in a late August day in 2019. Cold, damp, and foggy up on the Skyline Drive Parkway in Northern Virginia. The colors echo the environment, brilliant green mosses reflecting their color onto the soaked bark of the trees, with the moisture darkened 1940's vintage Civilian Conservation Corps Picnic tables and the ubiquitous heavy 1943 vintage Campground Grills installed during the WPA era. Mists abound with ghosts...
Two stately trees recede into shadows as the Sun outlines a fisherman in the distance. An orange to gold to turquoise sky in the far distance across the placid waters.
A cabin built circa 1855 by the Walker family. The walls of hewn logs and hand-planed wooden planks are aged, warm dove-gray and faded golden tans. The colors of the past, tints of the ages. "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down." ≈ Robert Frost It's been very different this week, working on 'The Parkways Projects.' I keep stopping to write thoughts down. But today my iPhone is blinking in and out a lot and seems not able to hold to a signal. So I decided to add the most relevant two sentences in Robert Frost's poem, "Mending Wall," for these are the key words that most never remember these days. It seems the peaceful thing to do, to offer peace and care to all remaining in Helene's wake.
A rather large flat-topped boulder stands on a promontory point near the top of Mount Mitchell. It's about 14 feet wide and around 9 feet deep. Mostly darker brown and dark gray tones with a section of pale tan and reddish ochre hues. It's about 4 feet above the ground to the top of the boulder. And over the years, it's probably hosted over about 11 million persons standing atop it since 1933. Simply to have their photo made. From Wkipedia, for this is interesting: “Appalachian Mountains and the highest peak in mainland North America east of the Mississippi River. It is located in Yancey County, North Carolina in the Black Mountain subrange of the Appalachians about 19 miles northeast of Asheville. It’s within Mount Mitchell State Park and surrounded by the Pisgah National Forest. Mount Mitchell's elevation is 6,684 feet above sea level.  The peak is the highest mountain in the United States east of the Mississippi River and the highest in all of eastern North America. The Cherokee people, who long occupied this area as part of their homeland, called the mountain Attakulla. It was later named after Elisha Mitchell, a professor at the University of North Carolina, who first explored the Black Mountain region in 1835. He determined that the height of the range exceeded by several hundred feet that of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Elisha Mitchell fell to his death at nearby Mitchell Falls in 1857, having returned to verify his earlier measurements, which had been challenged by state senator Thomas Clingman, a former student of Mitchell's. Clingman's favorite for the highest peak was "Smoky Dome," now Kuwohi. Mitchell was originally buried in Asheville, but was reinterred in a tomb on the mountain in 1858. In 1881–82 the U.S. Geological Survey upheld Mitchell's measurements and officially named his peak Mt. Mitchell. At 6,684 feet high, Mt. Mitchell is the highest point east of the Mississippi River.”
🦞 This is the high resolution image scan on file at Clemson University's Open Park Networks. It's a black & white image of a relatively fresh cutting back of forest understory brush near the pinnacle of Mount Mitchell. The understory is even more broad trimmed back today as I'm almost certain this is the trailhead for four of the most popular, and steep, highest cited points on the Appalachian Trail. Today, at least 30 years sense I think this photograph was made, possibly as much as 50 years ago, much of the topsoil has worn away down to rocky & shallow six inch to 14 inch deep trail. The Blacks Beyond 6000, billed these days as "Six Summits in Seven Miles," Black Mountain Crest, South Toe, Deep Gap Trail, Balsam Nature Trail, etc... are all part of the Pisgah National Forest, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and Mount Mitchell State Park convergence. I'm adding a link in the next comment to the Mount Mitchell State Park website, which sadly all trails are still closed as of May10th due to North Carolina not receiving the necessary funds to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Helene, as North Carolina's families, businesses, National & State Forests and many State Roads are still impassable; bridges still being out in many locations as well. When you get to the bottom you can go back to the top, or start from the top to go helter skelter down down down down...Rock Lobster 🦞 Original Photograph Info: Open Parks Network (OPN) Clemson University ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPH: Photographer Unknown TITLE: Trail worn by use COLLECTIONS: Negatives of Great Smoky Mountains National Park TOPICS: Trails
Black balsam firs are very odd looking trees, because they are ancient, evolving at higher altitudes. A very dense bark, often covered in green moss & lichen create a display of dark needles & bark set off by brilliant electric green moss, yet this image in black & white & toned sepia by me. Archival Librarians working very much in their own high tech universe derived from our own past the incremental moments when those who have come & gone long before us in their race to record a world lost to Time, now being recovered by a very skilled & dedicated team of very creative folk. As soon as I saw this image I noticed first the moss. It looks like it envelopes all of the tree trunks, even the smaller foreground ones. It was then I noticed the curve of the trail, the pitch—then the limbs, all close to each other & the 90º angle as they grow out from the trunk. I'm pretty sure I know where this trail lies. It's likely near the pinnacle of Mount Mitchell just off the main asphalt trail to the observation structure. I'll hike down it again soon & see it I can get a read on which part of that trail it is. The info listed by the NPS assigns it within The Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Mount Mitchell & the Parkway overlap at the place I'm almost certain is this location. In titling this work, I used the NPS title at front, then "burnished in time" to align or pair with another image soon to be worked up & titled in an inverted way. The other clue that's evident here seems to be the work of a motorized chopper or trimmer. Not the slingblades, machetes or bush axes of earlier years, which left a more controlled looking cut—but rather the the mangled cuts so indicative of motorized trimmers. Based on that observation I think this to be no earlier than from the late 1960s; more likely 1985 to 1995. If it is a later photo, then the odds are even better I'm correct on where this original image was made. The mysteries of the Clemson OPN system are just mind-boggling.
A picnic table my family ate at on August 9th 1969, 50 years to the day before this photo was made. It's a 1940 vintage steel tubular legged frame with poplar top & benches. A small leaf, spotted green, yellow & brown on one plank, a red rock from Moab, Utah on another. "Someone & someone were down by the pond Looking for something to plant in the lawn Out in the fields they were turning the soil I'm sitting here hoping this water will boil When I look through the window & out on the road They're bringing me presents & saying hello Singing words, words between the lines of age Words, words between the lines of age If I was a junkman selling you cars Washing your windows & shining your stars Thinking your mind was my own in a dream What would you wonder & how would it seem? Living in castles a bit at a time The king started laughing & talking in rhyme Singing words, words between the lines of age Words, words between the lines of age" ≈ Neil Young From posts I made along the way while tracing the journey my family made in 1969, as Neil Young's star was rising. The trace based on Mom's journals she always kept along the way. The images will be divided into 11 correlated sequences of works, each addressing a different facet of the changes I've observed. There are some very different scenarios up there these days & places, almost haunted, brought forward by the entropy & abandoned areas—once large & resplendent picnic grounds. The thing is, the 5 or 6 interwoven narratives that are still extant, are winnowing away pretty fast along the parkways due to all the funding & infrastructure cuts. These old picnic tables being pushed up out of the earth are just plain eerie, considering the number of instances this is occurring. I finally learned what’s causing it, after drilling down on it for a week or so last year. Permafrost changes. Not like in the arctic of course but still around to enough of a degree to do what it’s doing to memories & concrete up there.
"In a world where vows are worthless. Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power." ≈ Chuck Palahniuk At Norris Dam State Park in Eastern Tennessee, a number of 1933 CCC built small wooden cabins are in the second cabin vacation area. All of them were relocated to the park years ago from one of the TVA project towns about 20 miles away, thus becoming some of the oldest CCC constructed homes in the state. On this visit (2023, 90 years from the date they were built) I learned that these little cabins are all about to go through major renovations this winter. This was the only one I could see undergoing work on that day, so I made this image through an older window, four-paned like the window here on the left. I'll be stopping by to see if I can visit and photograph the interior renovations this spring, 2025. The original use for these small homes was for housing TVA workers, actual location unknown to me at the moment but I'm guessing they were probably moved from the dam site area workers' camp up the mountain to the State Park, just on the eastern side of the road over the dam. "CCC 1933 TVA worker's cabin," Norris State Park, Tennessee. It's become the norm for me to flatten out and down into the State Parks surrounding my main four subjects. It's also looking more and more like another Parkway is about to be added to my Parkways Project. The Tennessee Foothills Parkway. As for this parkway? It's construction is still happening, in sections, in real time...and, it dates all the way back to the start of the Blue Ridge Parkway. There is a story as to why the origination dates are so aligned to the beginning start dates of the Blue Ridge and Skyline Drive parkways. It has to do with politics, prestige and power. Imagine. That story will be unveiled in my Substack newsletter and blogs, whch I've not quite started myself.
"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." ≈ William Butler Yeats A very Spartan composition of two leaves of different trees, both violently whipped and buffeted by high winds until they detached from their respective limbs to fall beside each other to the asphalt streets of Melrose Heights. A small sprig of deep emerald green weed is tenaciously clinging to the earth inside a crack in the asphalt. The larger leaf is a pale green, the smaller upper one a pale golden brown. Both were run over by tire treads, both thoroughly flattened and pierced by the smaller, sharper rocks embedded by the long-cured tar. Life is hard on the streets.
A photograph of a parking lot, with an odd staggered usage of very old hand cast-poured concrete wheel stops. Circa 1936-45. I need to do some research on these. The tarmac is an aggregate concrete blend to match the color of the natural gravel and stone on the area. It seems to be rivaling the ancient recipe for Roman concrete, in terms of longevity, if I'm right about the dates of creation. The two predominate colors are a brilliant chartreuse green and light gray, with some dark charcoal brown pines intermingled with silver barked, lichen festooned oaks. This is the entry to Big Creek Campground and Picnic Grounds, located on the north end of The Great Smoky Mountains on the Tennessee side of things. The nearest town is Cosby, Tennessee. I'm not sure if these poured stops are CCC or WPA builds, but they're intriguing for what they represent. I'm writing a number of substack pieces (whether blog or newsletter isn't certain on this image) and will be starting to publish a variety of views into The Parkways Projects. This image, and a few others made around this view, will be illustrating what I hope to find as to who actually chose to make these particular style of stops. Until then, here's to a very subtle minimalist area of the Smokies, and the memory of workers who gave us a little more than the norm to rest our weary tires upon. Photographs from September 2023.
One of the very standard historical place marker signs, in August 2019 was bathed in very cold gray mists and camouflaged by lichen-covered fir branches. One could almost walk past it without notice, save for the scratching of he branched on the steel. The sky is a pale silver gray with black border and letterforms raised in the cast steel, with pale ghostly gray-green silhouettes of more firs far in the distance. Atop Mount Mitchell lies a story. This one is for another day, another format, but currently in the works. Soon to be a substack short, transmitted through the ether here, into #Bluesky. Stories like his are ones worth delving into, for the entire story of the Parkway lands being acquired by the federal government are deeply human and eloquent within the range of emotional effect upon the peoples of the Appalachians. Mitchell of course died long before the parkways were a dream, and I'm gathering many of these dreams and memories along the way and throughout the lifetime of this project and my own. Ancient mountains yield ancient stories of geology, of archaeology. Anthropology and genealogy. Always, always fascination of place and time by someone once somewhere amid all those sciences. "Elisha," from the Parkways Project photographs.
Willis. Cathy. Jean. Dad, my sister, and my Mom. Standing on a rock I've yet to find, but I will. It's just a matter of Time. Isn't everything? 1968. Now there is only me. Three persons I loved through the years, and a photograph of them made by me, to allow my father (the family photographer) to appear in a family grouping. The fall colors are faded in this print, made on a Kodak Instamatic they gave me for Christmas 1967. in the lower right corner you can see the camper trailer my father designed. He hired a welder from Camden, South Carolina to build a frame he designed, Then all else was completed with three-quarters plywood and heavy canvas, resulting in a tongue weight grossly over the towing capacity of our 1963 Chevrolet Impala. This photo is a rarity. For we are in he mountains during the fall. Dad wanted to test out his camper, which was essentially a rolling kitchen, not really a camping unit. We still slept on our large Gottlieb's blue tent, but the trailer granted us more room for stuff. After burning out the brakes twice and nearly killing the engine of the Impala, Dad decided we needed a real pop-up camper, and we began a routine which resulted in purchasing a 1969 model Coleman camper not long after this photograph was made. It still exists, but in deplorable condition behind my grandmother's old home. It is entrapped within trees that grew up around it, and never have I looked at it without a sense of sorrow that it was allowed to just fall into ruin, then, to be imprisoned by trees. Yet, each time I've seen it, my thoughts have been to photograph it in it's current state, and I have, to try to make a work of art from its demise. A paean of sorts. As to this photo? At times there would be tensions, and I remember hoping that maybe a photograph would somehow ease the stress of that day. Instead it is one of the few vacation photos where frustrations of that day were captured. Unique, in a manner of speaking. And very human.
A collage of old historic National Park Service photographs circa 1935 in Mammoth Hot Springs Yellowstone, where they were training young photographers out West. Another area which was training photographers was the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, back East. The Humans of Bluesky exist on many planes. They stem from many different times. Photography has granted us a way to look into the past of our own existences, for better or worse. In this digital collage made from three different photographs at Mammoth Hot Springs CCC camp, I'm drawing a human long gone from this Earth back into our view. I'll be telling the story of the young man in these photos, and his compatriot, although it's fairly likely they ever knew each other, or ever met, for his compatriot was a much older man, who was an Appalachian farmer in his forties when he first saw a photographer in the field. It was then he decided to apply to learn to be a CCC photographer. His story is heartwarming, as is his peer's story above. For as best as I can tell at present, they both survived WWII. The dynamics of the Four National Parks that make up Great Smoky Mountains National Park & Shenandoah National Park & how an impromptu meeting over drinks & cigars initiated a dream to link the East's two largest National Parks by two scenic parkways in the clouds...it all began here, in two different locations. The image above is a gold and tan representation of multiple older photographs from the 1930's, representing the dawning of outdoor scenic photography, even though it began as a rather staid process of recording structures. Over time, the new photographers began to learn aesthetics, composition and the eye for the sublime, as only they could see it. For they were of these areas.
1st Hybrid Landscape Primary piece. What you are seeing here is a digital composite image, my first hybrid landscape primary work, although at this point it was all digitally crafted from a photograph made in the Town of Whittier, North Carolina. It's an abstracted landscape collage of an old church in gold, charcoal, sienna red & lavender, flooded by the French Broad River. It’s the first time I actually called something “a primary hybrid piece” rather than a digital composite image. I began the hybrid paintings & hybrid collages in traditional form October 5th 2017 at a small farmstead out side of Norway, South Carolina. By January 2018, I had created 23 collages combined with painting. I was building them as alternate ideas & as “starts” for the first wave of actual hybridized works crossing in & out of analog & digital modes. On return to Santa Fe December 2019 I was reconsidering the Carolinas as early as 2020. The likeliest locations were to be somewhere between Saluda, Whittier & Black Mountain, North Carolina. Whittier was different however, for I was introduced to it by my niece, a fellow artist & author. It was where she lived for 15 years while working as a Great Smoky Mountains National Park Ranger. Our family was avidly outdoorsy. Between 2011 & 2023, I metamorphosed from being a drawer & painter to an amalgamated creative. Whether one calls it interdisciplinary spectral media chameleon or post-modernist artist jumping back & forth between traditional & digital arts, I ended up finding out I loved being a shape-shifting creative. I never really had such a plan. It just happened. Like the 1980’s film “Altered States,” which brings into play my other great love, which is visual anthropology. There are times I think a plan was in the works, but whether crafted in my mind or rather some acceptance of creative osmosis, I've been able to coast currents which all seem to come back to one land. One locale. The place of self. Just being; mere knowing.
This home. I used to stand beneath it at times too long. I'm fairly certain it was a duplex. A very old one at that. One day I'll run it down to be sure but I'd bet it dates back to around 1830-40. I always wanted to live in both, but as of present have yet to achieve that bemusement. It's likely a single-walled construction white clapboard home, just off Colonial Lake & had a deep blue sky behind it once. Like me it changed. This is a very old home in the Colonial Lake district of the Holy City, called that by most of its wholly-owned subsidiary denizens in a similar manner of obfuscation as one certain Seattle Times curmudgeon & writer, Emmett Watson, wryly named his most successful attempt to keep people away from Seattle that it worked for 37 years straight. I met Watson twice, both times under odd circumstances. I liked him. He reminded me of my Uncle Bill Adams. But that's another microstory for yet another short jab of conversation made here in the etherversal-years of no conversation being allowed to breathe for longer than 55 minutes. Like Jimmy Carter's 55 mile per hour speed castration of lead-footed people in 1977. I should have made a practice out of shooting the old wires over & above & wrapping around Colonial Lake back when I lived there, before they were mostly all replaced. We think we know beauty. We really don't notice the beauty of past whispers, glimpses & currents carried which allowed us to speak by a long outmoded cradle phone, to friends far away & crackling in the bell by our ear. Or the warmth or the golden flickering light from the old clear General Electric bulbs when Santee Cooper kicked its turbines on so long ago. I have to apologize to my old hood for never having realized it until too late. And then move on to the visual memories of them all. “My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery—always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?” ≈ Virginia Woolf
My two very first HO scale slot racers. From 1966. '66 Mustang notchtop versus a '66 Jag XkE. Not 100% sure that was the right designation, and, I think it may have been a 1965 model of the Jag. This panel was shot to be worked up into a Hybrid painting, blending the photo beside it of me and Dad duking it out Christmas morning!
A series of concrete walls lay before you & extend further to the left & the right beyond the frame of this photograph. The classic fortress style hewn granite wall abutments quarried from the land around Greenwood have single-cut larger stones every 9 to 10 feet for boaters to moor their boats in place for a brief meal or visit to the State Park’s dining room & gift shop. The stone is now weathered buff & tan colors. A green lawn surrounds the old CCC building which is out of the frame, the gentle rippling waves reflecting the brilliant azure sky in deeper tones of blue. In the distance you can see the shore across the water which is forested in an old stand of loblolly pines. Greenwood State Park was still under construction, as many of our National Parks, State Parks & some Forest Service buildings were still being built in all three Parks Systems up until December 7th, 1941. On December 8th, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt decommissioned the Civilian Conservation Corps, a very successful public works program. With weeks these young men were enlisted as America entered that war. For a little more information on how that day of decommissioning affected Lake Greenwood, visit this link, here in ‘The Parkways Projects’, located underneath the photo (as it is here) in the ALT text. https://bsky.app/profile/parkwaysprojects.bsky.social/post/3liss4sdsmc2i I'll post this link in the first comment below to make it a simpler jump from here to there!
This is an illustration, by me for an opening blog or newsletter post (possibly both) about the engineers of the Blue Ridge Parkways who are nowadays somewhat forgotten. It is also an engineer’s elevation drawing for one of the tunnels near Craggy Garden section of the that Parkway. The colors were chosen to represent the greens of spring & the dark gold of the remaining leaves of winter, when Craggy Garden is coming into full bloom. What you are seeing are the trees at the top of a promontory there, overlaid by two elevation schematics of the face of a rock tunnel. The inner drawing represents the interior darkness of the tunnel. The lines are black. The outer one, larger than the black rendering, implies the outer face of the tunnel in sunlight. There are two shadowy figures representing the engineers. The top & bottom border mimics the cog slots on traditional 35mm film rolls. These are very subtle visual distinctions which I had great fun in developing over these last six weeks. Creating it has often informed me of other topics for discussion in future articles in ‘The Parkways Projects,’ which will launch soon in Substack form. If you’re interested in reading about the history & the amount of wrangling involved in seeing the Blue Ridge & the Skyline Drive Parkways sections successfully opened by 1939 and 1934, respectively—please do follow my #ParkwaysProjects here at #Bluesky. I’ll be writing about the families who lived there, the 1960’s unfolding as we traveled & many changes along the way. I’ll be recovering very faint & many very good historical negatives from the Open Parks Network, a collaborative project between Clemson University & The National Park Service. As many of you may know, the NPS has been defunded by the current administration, this leaving our treasured National Parks unable to be maintained; many beautiful historic builds are deteriorating from the cutbacks in 2016-2020 & are now fully defunded by this new version of government.
"A long shadow of a red leaf trapped," a raw photo while walking November 11th 2024, six days after the election. The next to last day I've walked since then, for three days later I learned of Bluesky. A single red leaf has fallen & caught, wind-curled over onto itself in the wide crack of a sidewalk. It's casting a long but frail shadow. The red leaf, left side of screen, stands apart from the grainy gray of the concrete sidewalk poured circa 1972. Not that long ago, probably around the time of another grayer election. On looking for photographs of documents I've been backing up on my iPhone this year, I found this quickly forgotten sequence of photographs, three groups of which were made before this past election of November 5th, 2024. On the morning of the 6th I walked about 12 miles around & around the neighborhood, sorting out thoughts while recording leaves on the streets & sidewalks. It was more of a way to clear my head. The same pattern followed on November 7th, then the 9th, 10th, 11th & finally the 14th although memory is prodding me that I transferred one sequence of shots from November 17th. On that day I was breaking away from doomscrolling. There is something about the frailty of leaves, the last gasp of which occurs in the fall as colors evade the reality of dying; when photosynthesis has ended. Soon they become flatter imprints upon the grain of tarmac & pavement. Embossed onto the concrete & sand. As thoughts also inevitably must do. On finding them again, I realized these recordings mark a ribbon of time consisting of 30 days. Omne trium perfectum failed in a great gasp & collapse. The substrate of concrete, asphalt & sand is a ground for watching flickering wisps of leaves erode away finally into one unobserved instance, the leavings as traceries of their veins along these streets.
1963 Impala, 1969 Camper at campsite D16, Julian Price State Park. This Kodak Instamatic photograph is of a car & pop-up camper against a dark olive-black forest made at the start of a rain soaked weekend. It’s why the canvas is sagging, for it was saturated by the time I took this photograph. I was a 13 year old agnostic of two years, formerly Methodist & thoroughly soaked to the skin on a cold August gloaming off the Blue Ridge Parkway. I considered this its baptism—would it welcome me back inside? Before this drenching, I would swear it had no religion. The cardinal rule was to not touch the inner surface of the canvas. Or the great flood would come. It may seem I have a theme but not by plan. Nor any commandment to the best of my recollection. It’s easy to remember what three full days & nights plus a few extra hours of drenching rains does to the spirit when camping. 1963 Chevrolet Impala. Dark metallic brown. White top, painted, not vinyl. 1969 Coleman pop-up tent camper. A beautiful golden maple brown. 1969 at Julian Price State Park, North Carolina. Campsite D16. I’ve since camped in that site four more times over 54 years of my life. On the last trip to the Parkway in October of 2023 I learned it was slated for retirement due to the narrow pullout space & steep walk down into the campsite. Due to Fate, fortune & climate change, I still don’t know if D-16 still exists. If no, then a part of myself will not exist. Even under brilliant sunlight, even if 6,000 miles away from this place. In August 2019, August & October 2023, it rained during, but not throughout my stays there. In 1972 I remember being in this site for a full week. It was only me, the first year of no more family vacations. It did not rain once. I was there two nights in 2019; gone at daybreak. Two nights in 2022. sne night in October 2023. In all my dreams, I would never have considered this site, this campground, this Parkway to ever become decommissioned.
Just inside the great barn is a large window, for a barn, and just between you and that very large window is an even larger great white spectral form, reaching out to touch you with her very large bony fingers. Only then do you see the host of other smaller ghosts huddled behind their protector, bu they are eyeing you. You feel their eyes upon you! You begin to panic & then you awaken from your reverie to find it is only a large paper maché figure. Perhaps. In the summer of 2008 I was visiting a grad school friend, Heather Gray, who's an incredibly gifted photographer living in northern Vermont, after I had been by our alma mater Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier. Heather told me I should stop in to see a puppet theater group stationed in a huge old classic three-story New England barn at Glover. On arriving in the sleepy little village, I found a mega-barn bigger than any I had ever experienced, which was a cross between a museum of the puppets they have crafted since the mid-1960's, and a mausoleum of forms which were frozen in dust and Time. It was definitely a haunting place. It definitely holds your attention. It held mine for three hours that day, shooting the whole time. And that barn, along with its residents, goes on forever, probably to infinity's door. "Local tales and superstitions thrive best in these sheltered, long settled retreats; but are trampled under foot, by the shifting throng that forms the population of most of our country places. Besides, there is no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages, for they have scarce had time to finish their first nap, and turn themselves in their graves, before their surviving friends have traveled away from the neighborhood, so that when they turn out of a night to walk the rounds, they have no acquaintance left to call upon. This is perhaps the reason why we so seldom hear of ghosts except in our long established Dutch communities." ≈ Washington Irving, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"
As you roam through his great cavernous three story barn, you wonder at its age. On the third floor, its sturdiness. Each tableau is a stage. The first figure which looms out at you has a beige head, on his cheek two words. We Trust. His hair, horns and jutting beard for all the world bring to mind the famous painting of John Brown the abolitionist. His robes are brown. He may be a judge, he has that air about him. He’s surrounded by many dark and sinister spirit puppet forms. In the summer of 2008 I was visiting a grad school friend, Heather Gray, who's an incredibly gifted photographer living in northern Vermont, after I had been by our alma mater Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier. Heather told me I should stop in to see a puppet theater group stationed in a New England barn at Glover, Vermont. On arriving in the sleepy little village, I found a mega-barn bigger than any I had ever experienced, which was a cross between a museum of the puppets they have crafted since the mid-1960's, and a mausoleum of forms which were frozen in dust and Time. It was definitely a haunting place. It definitely holds your attention. It held mine for three hours that day, shooting the whole time. That barn, along with its residents, goes on forever, probably to infinity's door. "Local tales and superstitions thrive best in these sheltered, long settled retreats; but are trampled under foot, by the shifting throng that forms the population of most of our country places. Besides, there is no encouragement for ghosts in most of our villages, for they have scarce had time to finish their first nap, and turn themselves in their graves, before their surviving friends have traveled away from the neighborhood, so that when they turn out of a night to walk the rounds, they have no acquaintance left to call upon. This is perhaps the reason why we so seldom hear of ghosts except in our long established Dutch communities." ≈ Washington Irving, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"
"Tupelo sky & water," a photograph made in the Richards Road Swamp basin, which I've often wondered would it qualify as a Carolina Bay? It's in the right fall zone & I think it also is within the southernmost tail end of the fall? The image is of a swamp in the South Carolina lowcountry of Clarendon county. The sky is a pale azure blue with thin clouds barely visible through the tops of the spring-green tree canopy in the background. You're gazing out over a mirror-smooth swamp, its surface reflecting the entire scene in the deeper hues of azure & a mirror-images of the long tupelo gum tree trunks. Cedars & pines are on the right side, framing the water & sky in a brilliant dark lime green color. In the foreground is a single tupelo gum limb, bent over from the weight of its deep green leaves, touching the water. This site is located just off State Road 261. “To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised. And sometimes its invisibility is a blessing. Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.” ≈ Barbara Hurd
Lying on the ground, staring up into the sky when the thunderclouds rolled in was another favorite past time. Something about storms drew me, and they always have. My parents never could quite fathom my peculiarity being "some unnatural affinity to lightning storms," as Mom would put it, or "just a lack of good sense," as Dad declared it to be. So the chance to see the lake storms form up and roll over me in South Carolina was a welcome back home unlike any other a few years back. Some were epic in size, scope, and nature. They were like great banshees with howling winds, water coming in nearly perpendicular to the ground and the water they rode in over. Yes, that was a nod to the horse you rode in on, storms. But in a respectful, brotherly way, for the storms are my sisters. Whether by birth, adoption or natural selection I'll never know. And yes, I would lay on the grass at the lake and do the same thing, for if we honor our childhood, we find more of us still in there than we often think is left from the days of childhood. There was no one to call me in. No remonstrations of my purpose, no worries expressed that I was about to be struck by lightning, which is generally not going to happen if you are laying down on lower ground than the highest point nearby. In a way, this was a response in and of the absence of voices. In a way, it would have been cheerily eerie to hear the sound of a far off woman's voice in the far distance over the lake, but I expect where she now is, a deep and abiding understanding of storms and their rejuvenating qualities are part of her now too.
I've been going to Estes Park for one reason or another since 1979. This is a view from Prospect Mountain, high above the town proper, safe from flooding but not from fire. If I could have figured out a way to live there early on I would have, and in 2004, I almost did. A teaching position opened up at a college back East though, so I left there in August of 2004. I love this town. Resilience stems from Estes, in my imagination. Windswept pines over a hundred years old cling to the rocky outcroppings of Prospect Mountain. Two of them are framing the town of Estes Park below. Colors are all muted buffs, grays, and browns save for the tree in the foreground and the needles of the tree on the right. Those have deeper, richer greens and the bark is a strong deep reddish brown. MacGregor Ridge is in the far distance, about two miles away as the crow flies. From my notebooks; a post: "Between a fire just a few years ago which took out much of the historic district of Estes Park, and the recent massive flooding, the high mountain town has experienced much devastation . My best wishes and prayers to all my friends who are there, working to rebuild and to reclaim their land, homes, businesses, and hearts." ≈ to my friends in Estes Park, 2013
A photograph of a woman seated, working her fingers together as she pondered a conversation across a room. A room where she was sitting for a scene in which she was to be the personification of Peace, arguing with the personification of War, whom she’d grown up knowing since the dawn of Time. I began this particular piece about a week after I returned from Colorado early August, 2004. I had taught four classes as an adjunct for two semesters in Charleston, South Carolina. I’d been making art full time by then for just over ten years, after 17 years as an illustrator, graphic designer, then adding advertising and marketing while in Seattle for eight years. On returning to South Carolina from the Northwest in 1998, with a couple of years going back and forth back to Seattle doing album design work for musician friends. Here’s something I’ve shared before, but now there’s more people reading and likely to be hearing this for the first time. In 1988 I started sharing with friends and peers I’d worked with in commercial art that “I’ll quit when I’m 40.” In hindsight, I’ve always asked myself why I decided to wait. These days, I’d like to go back and yank that idea out of my 34 year-old head. For I should have quit as soon as I realized I was going to quit. I say this as an introduction to something, for we all come to cruxes in our lives. Often more than once. Sometimes more often than we can imagine.
Something new from a border region, of something very old. I'm at Walters Dam here, in Tennessee, one of the original TVA Dam Projects. The scene is an old road sign "SLOW," in the immediate foreground. It's probably one of the very first aluminum ready-made signs, possibly from the 1960's. The chrome yellow paint has faded to a very pale butter yellow. The paint has crazed mightily, separating in places a quarter of an inch apart. The old WPA built Walters Power House is in the background. A main electrical array, made of steel trussworks, recedes on the right. Above it all looms the lush green mountainside of the Great Smoky Mountains State Park.
"Winds Take the Words" at the top of a few mountains in Stanley, Idaho (really, it's just one but whose counting) for we can all see as many mountains as we need from here. Two of many other prayer flags are whipping in the strong wind. A group of mountains in the Sawtooth Range are before you. I can't tell you the name of the mountains you see before you. Were I to be standing here in 1804 I would not know that either, but I'm sure my quill pen & ink bottle would be rushed to apply names to them. For that is what we do, for somewhere, at some point along the way, someone convinced some few of us that we had that inalienable right to do so. With great and reckless abandon even. But I can tell you that two sisters have a couple of businesses up there where winds might lift you and where Buddhist prayer flags fly. Where word are released & take flight on the winds. “We say that time passes, time goes by & time flows. Those are metaphors. We also think of time as a medium in which we exist.” ≈ James Gleick Regrets are delicate & dangerous things. Remorse is a good thing, for it allows us to grow beyond that person we were before whatever event caused the remorse, from whatever direction. It seems a loss of self & of time to harbor regrets. So, as I often do when reading, or just scanning quotes, I replace words. In this case, I would replace regrets with remorse. “After so many years even the fire of passion dies & with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust & ashes?” ≈ Umberto Eco “Four days will quickly steep themselves in nights; Four nights will quickly dream away the time.” ≈ William Shakespeare Notice that dreams were worked back into the stream. "Winds take the words," for our World needs all the kindness we can muster now.
There's to be a separate tier of "Post Modern Square" format photos inside the Parkways Projects. They'll be accompanied by many of the archival Kodak Instamatic squares. Many of those have faded over time. In some cases the emulsion has gone rogue, aging into colors never really planned in the annals of photo-processing. I'm planning The Parkways Projects to be stacked tiers of smaller exhibits. The Post-Modern beside the 50+ aged original Kodak prints. The photographs made by the CCC trained photographer squads sent out to record nearly everything they could find as documentary evidence. No, as Proof of Life. I'll be showing these alongside the restoration and larger full composite builds I've made from the older archival images from the Clemson University OPN Archives. So far, I have 11 tiers planned for Patreon. 7-9 Tiers of exhibits made to travel, just like the original family traveled so long ago. Like the original settlers moved from their Appalachian homes to enable these National Parks to be born. Those stories are also tiers; as well they are tears.
Here's the original raw shot. Small dried golden brown chamisa petals in sharp midrange focus while being buffeted by 25mph November chill winds. This made for a great introduction if me to chamisa, hard and dry little tough flowers pelting my lens, swirling and twisting. A dance. In the post copy above I mentioned there being three images, all originate from this one. The previous post is the megaladon digital composite build, which has been used in two much more complex digital collage builds. The one in between this raw shot and the opening build uses Photoshop to craft it into a midway stage. I guess what I'm trying to impart here is how my Hybrid works all continue to grow upwards in levels, layers, collage and montage, digital and analog in more complexity until...I end up with a much larger story, and a larger landscape. At the same time, I keep wanting to pull "Until the morning comes" up and out of its digital cocoon and start shredding various scaled prints of it to create a larger painting/collage just to create a 40" x 30" work just of it on a larger scale. I swear, one can have too much fun when you're weaving and welding from the brick & mortar analog to the digital ethereal planes. Some of the startup analog painting/colleges on cradled wood panel are getting really thick. They're taking on the weight and feel & look—of early era fiberglass boat hulls.
In the late summer of 2011, I walked for days through fields & along the roadway by my home, one of the remaining small sections of Route 66. I was collecting the tiny dried brown blossoms of the chamisa flower. I had in mind to use them in some handmade papers, made by my niece who is a wonderful hand-crafted book artist. It took almost three weeks with a Croghan folding camp saw, used as a thresher collecting the petals & some twigs to fall into large freezer bags. Needless to say, there were a lot of people along old Route 66 craning their necks trying to figure out what I was doing as they sped by in Time. This image was made November 2011 to accompany the actual suspended petals in an assemblage/collage. I was working on a series of digital composite images at the time called “Vestiges.” It was the most fun in years for I could use most any imagery I wanted that was in the public domain. It was in the realm of photo-montage & in actuality was all digital. I began with a base idea of using film negatives from all eras of photographic and filmic history, welded into a mindstream, a nearly visible “current” which was streaming the small image past you. As a paired series forms in my mind, I planned to use handmade paper as both a substrate & torn materials combined with many of the film images in the digitally produced “vestiges” works. The chamisa flowers were meant for that purpose. While I did ship some large bags to Birmingham to my niece & a few weeks later received about 40 sheets of incredibly intriguing chamisa paper back, I only now gone forward with the sandwiched collages. A move to Arizona detoured me for all things began to gravitate in that direction. The “Vestiges” works gave birth to the Hybrid series, as did the “Chamisa Collage” works, which both are still on the idea planks of my mind for weaving together in a similar fashion in a year or so.
A Santa Fe Railroad sign rises from this side of the tracks, a narrow dirt service road between it and the crushed rock trackbed. Closer to you is a medium-sized chamisa swaying in the cold, brisk wind. Its colors are fading as it's late fall, to pale green. Its blooms are beginning to turn clay yellow. The earth is the deep red of the Pecos region, and in the distance are some homes from the 1970's. The sky in the far distance is a rich azure, clouds above you are light gray. Just off I-25 is an exit to Rowe and Pecos. Rowe seems to me a high desert Brigadoon. There is age there; there is a sense of living in an amorphous act of Time. There was a day when I took over 800 photographs there, pretty much in one yard, a couple of close friends. This is one of five photographs I've published from that day's shoot. New Mexico has these eddies that you can drive into and need to decompress from 2025, so that you don't get the bends from the altered state of being. Seriously, you can see very old things here, still touch things that existed far before your presence on the Earth, and the Earth will call of things for you to experience, to see, to hear. It's small, and real, and very, very beautiful.
A very old, circa 1910 era simple gap fence for people to easily walk through, but never the cattle to pass. The photograph is of a very verdant field of green, rolling over a slight hillock and down, then up a whit into the darker foliage of a deciduous forest covered hogback ridge. In the distance a small mountain peak is shrouded in a cloud. Just Zoso! This is to be found just south of Julian Price Lake. There is wonder to what I'm doing, with each instance of having located something I distinctly remember having seen in 1967. 1968, '69 or '70. i know that I made a couple of shots of this old access gap on my Kodak Instamatic. The question often was, "Did they take? Dad was telling me that we used to have one of these on our family homestead farm outside of Kershaw, South Carolina. One of the last things he and I built together was one of these, just to have replaced together the one he said had rotted when he was a teenager. Which would have been around 1941-1945.
"This time, a monumental feature on the landscape, occluded. I think this series just got it's name, as they are all occlusions by the time I'm done with them." In my family, visual occlusion has been a fairly common thing for many of us to contend with, sooner or later. I was recording my grandmother one year, asking her about family history. She mentioned her eyesight. We entered a conversation in which I asked her to describe what she saw, colors & all. I found a short transcription in a file folder one day years later & made some notes, also using some pastels to try to render it. In time I began experimenting on Photoshop with the layers tool, which eventually led me into a realm of creating from images overlap upon others, textures and planes of colors. The scene was an overlook where some fairly tall grass had turned a deep golden tan, which seemed odd enough. But the great gray-black vertical cloud formation was heightening all the colors. In the original photo the sky is a pale washed-out blue, then the strong grays, the odd ochre grass cover blowing in the wind, with the faded asphalt king rather ungainly in the foreground. "Darkstorm Overlook," from mid-September, 2019 on the upper part of the Blue Ridge Parkway. A huge vertical wall of a dark cloud formation had loomed above a great granite cliff wall underneath it. It didn't turn out well as a standalone photograph so it was shelved until I saw it in a file folder a few months back. I was looking for images suitable for "occlusion-training," something I’ve really become taken by lately. It’s becoming kind of a multi-color field minimalist technique for me. Being a painter, I keep applying painterly processes within this mode of digital art-making, primarily additive/reductive, along with emulating traditional underpainting, glazing & scumbling methodologies. Really—it’s intriguing.
"Pan's brief eternity" emerged from another work I was making in 2011. It’s a lighter work as tones usually go in my digital images. The colors are largely a duotone composition of a slightly reddish sepia & cream color. To finish off the piece with a little more edge to it, a deep golden ocher is introduced as a large translucent pane over the model’s shoulder & a small rectangle, a reflection from underneath her chin. Pan is very pale & ghostlike & stares at you intently from their only visible eye, the other deep within shadows. Their pupil is heavily dilated, as Pan was known for excess, as well as killing many human trespassers who entered his realm. You’re under the gaze of the trickster god of old, one who existed in almost every mythic pantheon of the gods around the world. They are not amused by your presence but highly intrigued. You’re likely to never see home again, to be lured by this feral creature of mists into an eternity all to brief for the gods but very long and drawn out for humans. By 2023 I’d published more words on this work, which were largely about the method, mode & manner of the art I do inside Photoshop to create my digital composite images. Here’s a few, for there’s a story inside the story of Pan, for all riddlers are such folk. Since 1996, when I started building my first digital collages inside Photoshop by using the more painterly methods of additive/reductive, I started referring to the final images as digital composite builds. I'm also using older photographic methods & techniques. Like Ansel Adams employed long ago. After two decades he’d forgotten his method’s complexities & thanks to not keeping recipes (or losing those he did record) coupled with the advent of chemical changes in modern photography, Ansel never could return to those former methods he’d hoped to recover. The photos he made & developed were (after that time) less dense in tonalities, the blacks less rich & velvety. This made me realize recipes are good.
Up on the Sandflats, 900 feet high above the already high-desert town of Moab, Utah, if you drive all the way back to its southernmost border and then follow the bend in the road out of the Sandflats and into Manti la-Sal, you will see these three small but impressive redrock pinnacles. Small means about 40-60 feet tall, a bit above you if you are standing there. They are so indicative of the area, their orange to sienna red hues, shrouded at the base by the deep grayish to dark indigo-bluish Lebanon cedars and juniper trees. Far in the background, on the right, through the atmosphere are the variegated earthtone walls of Castle Valley. All that is left for me to describe to you is that great intense blue sky so prevalent in and around all the Four Corners regions. Which I have taken the liberty of besmirching by grunging it up with the chemically induced patterns of a very old but never processed Daguerreotype metal plate, for this image is one of the 'America: Lost & Found' series of works. One in which I have dedicated myself to making so since 2010, fully finding a muse at rest within it by June of 2011 while living at Glorieta Pass, a 'burb of Santa Fe, unlikely as that may seem. From my notes: "The Sandflats above Moab, my surrogate Utah town. Actually, almost in Manti la-Sal. I painted them for three days, and wondered, what have they seen? What great human drama have they seen come and go in all its grand insignificance? Sometimes I grin from ear to ear when alone among the rocks and the trees." I think it was June 2021 when the Pack Creek Fire broke out on Manti la-Sal. It charred a mammoth part of the landscape coal black, causing the waters to run deep grimy black with soot and ashes; recoveries always arrive. In the years to come, Aspen may take hold of the scarred over area, and a brilliant field of gold may emerge.
I’d stopped to make something of an odd blemish on a newly blacktopped road in the low country swamps of SC. I have a few workups of an up-top scene of the roadbed itself within my prep folders awaiting some thoughts, but Nosferatu comes to mind more often as its ultimate resolution. No kidding. Yes, that Nosferatu. And Jimmy Hoffa's final resting place. What? In South Carolina? You'd be surprised. I’d stopped to make something of an odd blemish on a newly blacktopped road in the low country swamps of SC. Which is what I’d come to borrow for images on that day. As I finished with the blemish I noticed an odd absinthe-colored tinge to the light reflected on the blackwater, underneath the bridge. I wandered down below. Happenstance is often an invitation to old worlds and new encounters if one follows their gut instincts, curiosity and intuition. A brilliant celadon green, which always grabs my attention, has coated the under-structure of a bridge in South Carolina. Time of day was also at play, for the afternoon light was bouncing off the creek, illuminating the strange green element, which had to be either some kind of mold, or possibly a sprayed-on treatment by the state roads commission. The case-hardened concrete, new steel girders and best yet, all the dirt dauber and regular wasps have a real nursery down here. And yes, they were all flying about as I was walking through the brackish water to get some good angles of view, buzzing around me as if I had invaded their Celadon Hallows. For I had done just that. The things we do for Love. And Art, not to mention when the two come in recombinant forms. Ars longa, vita brevis, indeed.