Last spring, when Alice asked if I'd like to do a talk here, my wife Tamar and I just
bought our first piece of land, a little plot in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with a 120-year-old
carriage house and a little backyard.
Our yard has some grass and this tiny trapezoid of young forest.
There's a few young maples, a slightly older oak and a sort of overgrown lilac back there.
I grew up in Decatur, Georgia, right around that red A up there.
It's a neighborhood near downtown Atlanta and our house was in a spot where suburban
street meets a sort of tiny protected pocket of forest.
The woods are completely surrounded by development, but from a child's perspective they were fast.
These woods were sort of the playground for my sister and me and our friends in the neighborhood.
The yellow line there is the trail that led from our house down to that lake.
We wandered around and hid under leaves, we climbed trees and we looked in the creeks
for crawdaddies and all of this happened to the sound of screaming monkeys because the
building that's marked with the blue A is the Yerkes National Primate Research Center,
which is part of Emory University.
They do all kinds of medical and psychological tests on monkeys there.
The monkeys' voices would come filtering through the trees, which made the woods seem to us
like this real wild jungle.
It was a pretty incredible experience, I think, to have growing up in a city.
You can see here, downtown Atlanta is on the bottom left in that red triangle or red rectangle
up there, the map you were just looking at.
We were really close to a lot of, I mean, everything was developed around us.
So I still have a sort of woodland fantasy from childhood and I'm projecting that now
into our yard and the screen.
When Alice wrote to me, I was planting rhododendrons and ferns back there.
This one I planted from this brown ball dirt, and it came up three months later.
Our oak tree dropped about 1,000 acorns last month.
We planted some blueberry bushes and got a small crop already.
Woodland ground cover that grows in shade.
I planted some grass and watched it grow.
We found out that you can propagate moss, you take a handful of it and you blend it
up in a blender with buttermilk and water and then you can paint that slurry onto a
surface and watch it grow.
It takes a couple of months.
We picked this old chunk of concrete that's probably been in the backyard since the 30s.
The limestone is deteriorating and the stone aggregate inside is slowly being released
again, sort of like watching something thaw from a deep freeze.
Scranton sits in the valley of the Lackawanna River, the river is right about here.
From what I've read, there wasn't much Native American activity here and the first real
settlers were Europeans who came here for coal.
The town spreads across the river and up the hill on both sides and the old coal mines
start on the west side of the ridge and they work the way under the river and back up the
other side.
When the mines were running, they had pumps on all day and night to keep the groundwater
out of the mines, but they shut them off when the mines shut down and now you can take a
tour of the mines and you can only go so deep until you hit water, which is pretty creepy
when you're down here.
When we bought our house, we had to sign this contract that said we don't own the coal
if there is any under our house.
Above ground in the afternoon, the sunlight comes into the valley and it's really beautiful
here.
I think that's one of the reasons that we ended up here.
This is Canada, by the way.
I decided to take the topic of land as a filter and to go through my photographs, some recent
projects and some things I've been reading and just kind of see where it would lead me.
I found a lot of photographs that I'd taken that I've never even printed or shown to anyone
that fit into this category.
This is Portugal, Utah, Pennsylvania, France, France, and the United States.
New Mexico.
This is a river that separates Hungary from the Czech Republic.
This bridge had been bombed in World War II and I took this picture in 1999 from a church
tower there on the Hungarian side.
In the newspapers that day, the governments of both countries had decided to finally get
the money together and rebuild that bridge.
This is one of the fjords in Norway.
It was sort of a mission for me to go there because I'd met this guy from Norway who grew
up around the fjords and he told me about rowing a small boat through the fjords at
night and he said that there were phosphorescent microbes in the water.
As you would paddle through, there would be these swirls of glowing swirls behind you.
Then you would go right up to the rock.
The rock almost goes straight down into the water.
You could shine a flashlight onto the surface of the rock underneath the water and you'd
find crabs clinging onto the sides of the rock.
You could just reach in and pick them up and put them into your bucket.
Then they said it's sunrise.
They would pull over, build a fire, finish their beer and eat crabs for breakfast.
This is Arizona.
I found several pictures in my archive of desire lines.
When I was growing up, my father worked for a hotel developer.
They would build hotels and then they would operate them afterwards.
He said that whenever a trail like this would appear on one of their properties, they would
always pave it.
He said that the trail was an indicator of where people really wanted to go and you couldn't
stop them so you'd make it look like it was your idea.
I mentioned these desire lines to my friend Lorenzo and he told me about a project that
was built earlier this year in the Netherlands by architect Anne Holtron.
It's in the city of Almere at a place called Site 2F7 and she describes it like this.
I'm just going to read some text from her website and show you some photographs of it.
Site 2F7 is a largely vacant and as yet unplanned site in the city center of Almere.
Everything here is temporary.
There are wild orchids, grasses, herbs, flowers and willows.
There are artificial sandhills.
There's a bridge over a ditch made out of an old mattress with a wooden pallet on top
of it.
There's a field with sorrel growing up out of the grass and in the background a rectangular
block of houses.
There are trails across the site, worn down out of vegetation with sometimes very clear
and sometimes barely visible branches, bends, forks, shifts and cut-offs.
The trails intersect and link the elements of the vacant site.
They turn it into a landscape.
Trail and site go hand in hand.
What if some of these trails formed a house?
You were walking through the landscape among all the plants, grasses and other elements
and then suddenly, without any warning, the house began as an extension of the trail.
Once inside, the space carries on with the same curvature as it had outside just a moment
ago and gradually widens.
On the left, an opening in the wall with a view of an open space and on the right a bulge
in the wall where the house divides into two parts just like a trail.
One of the parts carries on and on one sharp bend you come across the kitchen and on a
following bend a table and chairs.
You pass alternating short and long windows through which other parts of the house can
be seen among the vegetation.
This is Nevada now.
I think that we're all drawn to different places for different reasons and often I think
it's sort of the emotional associations that a place evokes in us.
Because there's a cultural or an ideological association that attracts or repels us from
a place.
I'm going to read a poem by James Loughlin, it's called Go West Young Man.
Loughlin was from Connecticut.
You may know him as the founder of the publishing company New Directions.
He was also a poet.
Yes, sir, they're all named either Ken or Stan or Don, every one of them.
And those aren't just nicknames either, no, they're really christened like that.
Just Ken or Stan or Don and you shake hands with anybody you run into no matter who the
hell it is and say glad to know you, Ken, glad to know you, Don.
And then two minutes later you may not have said ten words to the guy, you shake hands
again and say glad to have met you, Stan, glad to.
And they haven't heard much about Marx and the class struggle because they haven't had
to and by God it makes a country that is fit to live in and by God I'm glad to know you,
Don, I'm glad.
I was just reading over my notes about an hour ago and I remembered when I was out west
about ten years ago I was driving a rental car through the desert in New Mexico on a dirt
road and I hadn't seen another car or any lights for about an hour and I was starting
to get nervous as I saw the fuel gauge getting lower and lower and then eventually I had
to pee so I stopped and got out and within thirty seconds I saw tracer bullets coming
out of the desert, out of the blackness about two hundred yards away.
Just made me wonder what's going on out in this landscape.
I think my landscape pictures are better or at least they make better stories when there's
a human element interacting with the land somehow.
This is Nevada, it's a golf course.
This is about a thirty minute drive from my house in Scranton and then another twenty
minute walk through the woods.
I found it somewhere on the internet with vague directions of how to get here and it
took me two days to find it.
This is called Stone Face.
It was carved in the thirties by a local teenager who had been reading about Mount Rushmore
in Life Magazine or somewhere so he spent the summer in secret carving this thing out
there and then in the fall it was finished and he went into town and got everyone in
town to follow him into the woods where he unveiled this.
The nose has fallen off a couple of times and you can see some rebar sticking out of
it now.
These were some little stones I pulled off the beach in U.S. Florida last year that
reminded me of Jean Arp sculptures.
This is a chunk of magnetite, the naturally magnetic rock that I found at the Petrified
Creatures Museum of Natural History in Cooperstown, New York.
This is a prehistoric boulder in France called Napoleon's Hat.
Last spring a friend suggested that I read the novels of John Cowper Poise.
Poise was born into a religious Victorian family in 1872 about three hours west of London.
He married a local woman and they had a son but from what I've read about him he wasn't
very comfortable in that lifestyle.
He was a mystic and had a wanderlust so he spent about six months out of the year traveling
usually in the United States and he had a popular lecture tour that he gave where he
would channel a writer from history and then give the lecture as that writer.
They were really popular and he ended up becoming friends with Emma Goldman and Bertrand Russell,
James Joyce and others through these lectures.
This is a page from his diary.
So Poise was deeply moved and inspired by the land and specifically the land and landscape
of his hometown in the English countryside, low rolling hills, a village surrounded by
fields with paths and trees.
Here's a description of him that I read which sounds uncannily like a lot of his characters
in his books.
He walked nature to be soothed.
He imagined great long stories.
He named rocks and performed rituals surrounding them.
Building up their mystery he made connections with the inanimate.
So Poise fell in love with an American woman from New York City.
She was a born and raised New Yorker and he convinced her to move up to Hillsdale, New
York which is just about an hour and a half north of here because Hillsdale reminded him
of his hometown and they made him comfortable and that's the landscape that inspired his
writing and that's where he wrote some of his most well-known novels, Wolf's Solent
and A Glastonbury Romance which both take place in fictional villages which also resemble
his hometown.
Here's a little excerpt from Wolf's Solent.
He surveyed a patch of sun-dried cattle dung upon which the abstracted Jason had inadvertently
planted his foot and across which was slowly moving with exquisite precaution a brilliantly
green beetle.
He surveyed a group of small crimson-top daisies over which a sturdy, flowerless thistle threw
a faint and patient shadow.
He surveyed the disordered flight of a flock of starlings heading away from the pond toward
the village.
But of all of these things what arrested him most was the least obvious, the least noticeable.
It was in fact no more than a certain ridge of rough unevenness in the ground at his feet.
A nameless unevenness which assumed as the misty sunlight wavered over it, the predominant
place in this accidental pattern of impressions.
I find that a lot of authors are associated with a place.
Before I go to New Orleans I always think of Walker Percy in his novel The Movie Goer.
Tamara and I were in New Orleans this summer and we took a walking tour along the levee
with a U.S. Park Service Ranger who was explaining to us how natural levees are formed.
The river is carrying tons of silt from upstream erosion and then it deposits this silt downstream
especially when there's a sharp turn like this crescent shaped bend in the Mississippi
River.
So a natural levee formed here in New Orleans and Native Americans had settled on this high
ground long before Europeans came and named it the Crescent City.
And incidentally the floods of Katrina didn't really affect this high ground.
Natural levees and man-made levees sloped down away from the river and it was the low
lands further north that really suffered.
This is a levee I saw in the Netherlands.
I recently visited Millageville, Georgia as a sort of pilgrimage to Andalusia which is
the family home of Flannery O'Connor and it's where she wrote a lot of her books.
I found that her dark misfit characters came alive in my imagination even more so here
in her landscape.
Last year I climbed Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks with my friend David.
It's the tallest mountain in New York State.
And we were channeling William James along the way in his moments of religious ecstasy.
We were following the same trail that James hiked back in 1907.
When we got to the top we were basically inside a cloud and it was really cold and windy.
And then all of the other people we saw up there were all hiding behind boulders.
When I first went to Rome I couldn't wait to get out of the center of town and out into
the weedy suburbs where Pasolini filmed Mama Roma and it still looks like this.
Passing through the Dordogne in France I remembered this passage from Henry Miller's
book The Colossus of Marussi.
To me this river, this country belonged to the poet Rilke.
It's not French, not Austrian, not European even.
It is the country of enchantment which the poets have staked out and which they alone
may lay claim to.
It's the nearest thing to paradise this side of Greece.
Actually it must have been a paradise for many thousands of years.
I believe it must have been so for the Cro-Magnon man.
Despite the fossilized evidences of the great caves which point to a condition of life for
out of bewildering and terrifying.
I believe that the Cro-Magnon man settled here because he was extremely intelligent and
had a highly developed sense of beauty.
The French writer Raymond Roussel died in 1933 with very little positive reaction to his
work.
He was rediscovered, I guess, a couple of decades later by Alain Rogrier and the experimental
writing group Woolipo.
Roussel was a wealthy eccentric who loved to travel and in fact he owned one of the
world's first RVs.
George Perrec describes this car in his book Species of Spaces.
The vehicle is a veritable small house, thanks to the ingenuity of its arrangement.
It contains a sitting room, a bedroom, a studio, a bathroom, even a small dormitory for a staff
of three men, few chauffeurs and a man-servant.
The very elegant coach work is by Lacoste, an excellent wireless set that enables one
to pick up all of the European stations.
As soon as it was built the caravan left to affect a 3,000-kilometer excursion through
Switzerland and Alsace.
Mr. Roussel was able to enjoy a fresh horizon each morning.
Sometimes Roussel traveled with his mother, who from what I've read wasn't as hardy a
traveler as he was.
This is a photograph I took in India on the west coast looking out at the sea.
Once Roussel and his mother sailed together to India and she brought along a coffin on
the ship, just in case she happened to dial in the way.
The story goes that as they approached India from the sea, his mother looked at the land
through a spyglass and said, there it is, let's go home.
In Robert Kara's biography of Lyndon Johnson, he talks about the Texas landscape west of
Austin, the hill country where Johnson's ancestors settled.
He says when the first white settlers arrived here on 1870, they found endless hills of
knee-high grass.
He says that the land was a trap that was baited with grass.
They put tons of cattle on this land, they overgrazed the land and they didn't realize
that the topsoil was only a few feet deep, and underneath that it was solid limestone.
So they would have terrific rainstorms, they called them gully washers, and sometimes a
farmer would wake up and see a hill of solid rock where the day before the herd didn't
appeal.
So slowly brush and then mesquite and cedar trees moved into this landscape.
Here has really strong roots that can break through rock to find water.
And so in about 30 years from roughly 1870 to 1900, this whole landscape completely changed
from grassland to forest.
And incidentally, it's also one of the reasons that we have barbecue now, as we know it.
I was down in Lockhart, Texas earlier this year, this is just a picture from an iPhone,
but I came across this lot full of cut and skeet.
And then I got a whiff of some meat, and around the corner was a place called Smitty's, where
I had, I think, the best barbecue on the planet.
On the left there, the sunrise over the Atlantic from New Jersey, and on the right is a sunset
over the Gulf of Mexico.
I'm working with designer Paul Sear on a series of new editions of Ernest Hemingway's books.
And I wanted to show you these because I think they're a good illustration of an issue that
often comes up with photography.
That is, when is it that the actual location of the photograph matters?
For the old man in the sea, I actually went out to sea with two old men.
But we were in Cuba, we were in Long Island Sound.
This book takes place in the Alps that separate Italy and Austria.
And I happen to have this photograph in my archive that was taken almost exactly where
the book takes place.
And we thought it fit well because the clouds going over the Alps in this context also felt
like smoke from a fight.
This book takes place on a safari in Kenya, true at first light, so it's a sunrise over
the desert.
But in fact, this was the sunset over the sea.
I think it's hard to fake Venice, so I actually went there to shoot this picture.
This was Hemingway's first novel, and it's a satire, and it takes place in the upper
peninsula of Michigan.
The Torrents of Spring, the book takes place in late winter, snow everywhere, and everyone's
sort of guessing when the spring is going to come.
So the Torrents of Spring refers to when all the creeks rise as all the snow melts.
So in the spirit of exaggeration with the book, this is a waterfall that I photographed
year before in the Azores.
The Azores is an archipelago of nine islands here in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
I ended up there a couple of years ago while I was working on a book for J&L.
I sent a couple of copies ahead of time, so some of you may have had a chance to look
at this book.
The artist was French photographer Bertrand Florey, I call him Bert.
He lived in Berlin at the time, and I lived in New York, and for about a year, Bert and
I tried to edit this book through the mail.
We sent each other postcards, packages, CDs, and letters, and the progress was really slow.
We realized that we had to meet in person to make this thing happen.
We decided to meet halfway.
So Bert flew from Berlin to Portugal to the Azores.
I couldn't find a direct flight from New York, so I had to go New York to Portugal to the
Azores.
I got the raw deal.
The Azores are a tropical volcanic island.
They're famous for whale hunting, which doesn't happen there anymore, and orange groves.
They're governed by Portugal, and over the years, different governments have fought over
the islands.
Here's an account I read of a battle in 1851, when Spain was trying to take them.
July 5th, 1581, Azores, by 9 a.m., the fighting was heavy, the Spaniards swept the coast with
their artillery, which made the task of the defenders more difficult.
On midday, when the outcome of the battle was still indecisive, an Augustan named Friar
Pedro, who was taking an active part in the struggle, thought of a stratagem of driving
wild cattle against the Spaniards, so as to scatter them.
Over a thousand head of cattle were quickly gathered, and by means of shouts and musket
shots driven against the enemy positions, the terrified Spaniards fell back and were
pursued to the shore, where almost all of them lost their lives, in the fighting or
drowned while trying to reach their votes.
Pretty peaceful there now, old men and wolf sweaters tending to sheep.
So Bert and I spent a week island hopping, taking pictures and working on this book.
I find that photographers are often either collectors or sculptors.
They just sort of set up a scene created from scratch and then make a picture of it, where
the collector types wander, bringing things home that they find out in the world.
I think often the collector types have a sort of vague idea in their head or a kind of personal
fantasy that they look for out in the world, and most of the times I think this is subconscious,
and it's easier for an outsider to kind of pick up or point it out exactly what that
fantasy is.
Bert travels about as much as I do, and his vision I think is pretty consistent.
You see it clearly in this edit of pictures that were all shot in different locations
all over the world, and all of those various locations come together in this book to create
a one fictional landscape.
These are some spreads from the book, it's a sort of a science fiction journey, you're
flying over the land and you're dropped into the water.
Then you're on a train entering a city at night, which is my favorite way to enter this
city, any city by the way, at night.
The pictures take on the quality of film stills, so now you're inside the city walls, you see
people and plants and buildings, you find an empty building, and then finally you go
back outside and find a garden, and you end up back at sea.
Bert had a lot of influences for this book, from graphic, formal influences to content,
mood, and tone, and he's actually really generous about giving these influences credit.
This is the book cover, and this sort of wormy shape on the cover was inspired by two things,
one is photograph that's in the book, and also the work of Japanese designer Yusaku Kamekura.
This is a book some of you may know, it's Michael Schmidt's Unity, it was published
right around the time the Berlin Wall came down.
Anyway, this book had the physical feel that we wanted our book to have, so that was sort
of our model in picking a lot of things.
We sent it to our printer, who then sent us swatches of different linen cloth for the
cover.
We printed the book in Winnipeg last January, it's freezing.
This was the week before they opened up the river for ice skating, kind of bummed about,
we stayed in this crazy castle hotel, this is our press operator Rich, and the viewing
booth on press.
While we were there Bert cut his finger with an X-Acto blade and we had to go to the emergency
room.
This is him later that day with the owner of the printing company, Al.
Since Bert lived in Berlin they thought he was German, we didn't say anything.
So here are some of the other influences that Bert was thinking both as he was making the
pictures and making the edit later, this is Dikiriko's melancholy of departure.
Some stills from Chris Markers film San Soleil, stills from Tarkovsky Solaris, Sunrise album
Monorails and Satellites, Elaine Robegrie, I wanted to read a couple of passages from
the voyeur.
This is one of my favorite books and I was really happy that it was one of Bert's influences
here too.
I have a lot of editions of this book, these are all different covers.
One thing about Robegrie is he often writes almost as if he's a camera lens.
A rectangular shadow less than a foot wide crossed the white dust of the road, it lay
at a slight angle from the perpendicular without quite reaching the opposite side, it's rounded
almost flat, extremity did not protrude beyond the middle of the road, of which the left
side remained unshaded, between this extremity and the close cropped weeds bordering the
road had been crushed, the corpse of a little frog, its legs open, its arms crossed, forming
a slightly darker gray spot on the dust of the road.
The creature's body had lost all thickness, as if nothing but the skin were left, hard
desiccated and henceforth invulnerable, clinging to the ground as closely as the shadow of
an animal about to leap, limbs extended but somehow immobilized in air.
To the right the real shadow, which was much darker, gradually became paler, disappearing
all together after a few seconds.
It plays a lot of games where, you're not sure sometimes, if what you're hearing is
true or if it's a picture of something, or if it's a memory of something, but the descriptions
are so precise, in broad outline there was little to describe again, the sheds, the garden
fence, the grey house with its clumps of mohonya, the arrangement of windows and the wide expanse
of bare stone above the door, the whole picture corresponded almost perfectly to reality.
So here you think you're hearing a description, but is it a picture that he's describing
or is it the real landscape that he's describing?
The path came out onto the central section of a horseshoe-shaped ridge facing the open
sea, enclosing between its two arms a kind of elongated basin, which extended to the
very edge of the cliff, its dimensions not exceeding 20 by 30 yards, a bright speck attracted
the salesman's notice.
He was appended in a few strides and leaned over to pick it up.
It was only a tiny pebble, cylindrical, smooth and white, shaped deceptively like a cigarette.
Extended of the apes, suddenly last summer, the Tennessee Williams story and the film
with Audrey, or Katherine Hepburn, Bruegel's Tower of Babel, Major Fetal.
In the book itself, there are only a few hints at some of these inspirations.
There's a quote at the beginning of the book from Paul Bull's autobiography, where he
says, Soon I invented a planet with land masses and seas.
The continents were Ferncauland, Lantan, Zaganok World, and Aura Plana.
I drew maps of each and gave them mountain ranges, rivers, cities, and railways.
And then we made a little letter-pressed card that's sort of shrink-wrapped into the book
with the description that I wrote in the letter-press out in Scranton.
So this brings up again a similar question as the Hemingway covers.
When does the actual location of the photograph matter?
This is a picture I took in Germany.
It was in southern Germany, the town called Nordlingen.
The town sits in a sort of a bowl in the landscape.
And we found out that 30 million years ago, a meteor hit the earth right here and created
a huge crater.
This is a weather forecasting school I visited in Oklahoma.
It sits right in the middle of the tornado alley, storm chasers and all.
And so the school is mostly underground.
This is a rock out on Long Island, and from what I've read, the heads of the various Native
American tribes of Long Island used to meet here once a year and sit around this rock
and discuss matters of the day.
This is the island that Odysseus left to go to the Trojan War.
The last group of pictures I'm going to show you are some pictures that I took in one of
the strangest places I've ever been in the world.
I was there a couple of years ago when real estate speculation was in full force.
There were building projects everywhere.
Most of them were still hypothetical at that point.
That's a billboard, actually.
These projects all promise the sort of fantasy existence.
Still your wildest dreams, maybe not my wildest dreams, but somebodies.
Many of these projects were underway, so there were thousands of construction workers
there.
The heat was brutal, I think it's the hottest I've ever been, also.
So they would find shade wherever they could.
At night, the workers would meet outside restaurant.
This restaurant had a television bolted to the wall, and they would meet and watch cricket
games here.
About 45 minutes away, there was a huge mountain that they were blasting to pieces.
There was a dynamite fuse.
The pieces of this mountain were then loaded onto dump trucks, onto barges, and sent out
to sea, where the boulders were placed one by one into the water.
Huge ships were out in the sea, where they had sucked the sand from the bottom of deep
sea, and now they were spitting it back out into shallow areas, creating new land, sort
of desert islands.
In the desert, though, sand particles are round, but the sand at the bottom of the sea
is angular, so it's able to be compacted, which you can't do with actual desert sand.
So boulders and backhoes were brought onto the islands to refine their shapes.
Here's a view from a helicopter, and this was the highest that we could get in a helicopter.
Over there is one of those barges full of boulders that I mentioned.
And here's a view that you can only get from outer space.
This is a project I'm sure you guys have heard about.
This is the coastline of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
They realized that waterfront property was a lot more valuable than landlocked property,
so the coastline is only about, I think, five miles long, or ten miles long or something.
So they figured, well, we'll just create more waterfront property.
The project is called The World, and each mini archipelago represents a different country.
I met this man.
He was an Egyptian guy about my age.
He had a pretty good sense of humor about his business, and I took a few of them.
When we were in the helicopter, I noticed a small billboard on one of the islands.
So I was curious about it, and when we landed, we took a boat out two miles from shore.
We took a boat out to the project, and to that island, and it turned out to be the
mini version of the United Arab Emirates, right there on the coast.
Here's a developer's model of how they envision the final landscape-built environments.
But for now, they remain desert islands.
The only inhabitants are crabs.
Thank you.
Thank you.
