A Lot Else, You See What I Mean

Originally, when I wrote The Path Walker Evans Took, I had this idea that I would write a post solely on what Walker Evans, if he were still alive, would take pictures of today. This post was to feature several pictures that I would take myself: a) in color, because I personally don’t think he would have continued to be bound by the confines of black and white, and b) on my iPhone, because in the latter days of his life, he had taken to the latest technology, the Polaroid instant camera.

This post will never happen.

You see, in all the research I did for this, I came across a list he wrote in 1934 a list of picture categories: things he had shot, and presumably, wanted to shoot. I had read Evans’ list before, and I had planned to make this the basis of the pictures I was going to take. It went as follows:

  • People, all classes, surrounded by bunches of the new down and out.
  • Automobiles and the automobile landscape.
  • Architecture, American Urban taste, commerce, small scale, large scale, the city atmosphere, the street smell, the hateful stuff, women’s clubs, fake culture, bad education, religion in decay.
  • The movies.
  • Evidence of what people of the city read, eat, see for amusement, do for relaxation and not get it.
  • Sex.
  • Advertising.
  • A lot else, you see what I mean.

The next logical step was to take pictures of these things, or failing that, their 2017 equivalents. I even started in on this project, when I took this shot of a person sleeping in the park.

Sleeping in the Park

Deep down, there was something wrong. Something was holding me back from writing this post, and I didn’t know what it was. I had written down the 1934 list in my notebook and I went back over it. Was there something on there I didn’t want to photograph?

I continued on until the end, and there it was: A lot else, you see what I mean.

There’s so much more than a list could hold.

Damaged
Walker Evans, Damaged, 1928-1930

Here is a picture I couldn’t get out of my head. Evans took it in the late 20s, a few years after he wrote this list. Technically, it would fall into his Advertising category I would guess, but I thought about the circumstances that brought about this picture. It was most likely unplanned. Oh, he might have followed these two guys down the road until he got to their truck, but Evans didn’t wake up that day and say to himself, “Today, I’m going to find a few fellows and take a picture of them loading a sign into a truck.” He had his camera, he was in the city, and all of a sudden, this happened. He had to be ready for it and he was. This is the result.

As much as I wanted to take shots that checked all these boxes, I knew I couldn’t. I read a quote from the great photographer Paul Strand, which underlined what I already had been feeling:

“Your photography is a record of your living – for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzche meant when he said, ‘I have just read Schopenhauer, now I have to get rid of him.’ He knew how insidious other people’s ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own personal vision.”

I can take pictures that can resemble what Walker Evans did, but in the end, I wouldn’t be true to him and I wouldn’t be true to myself. I would be following a recipe instead of becoming a chef. In the end I realized I had to come up with my own list.

The modern-day equivalent for this list, in my case, is iPhoto. Pretty much all my pictures are in one iPhoto folder or another, but it is high time I reorganized. Obviously some of these titles will be shortened, and I may name a folder “The Hateful Stuff,” just because I like the sound of it.

Coca Cola Ghost Sign, Phillipsburg, NJ1. Signs (naturally). Neon, old, broken, ghost signs, evidence of the past.

Sunflower with Cobwebs2. Flowers. Dead or alive.

Diner Sign

3. What doesn’t belong.

Lackawanna Viaduct

4. The American road.

Long Point Barn

5. Barns, farm life, the decay of the old and what it looks like now.

Zion Church

6. Churches: the buildings, outside of the building. The evidence from outside the church of what can be expected inside.

The Movies

7. The Movies

Proud to be a Trump

8. The remnants of an American election.

Skaneateles Bakery

9. The good stuff.

The Struggle is Real

10. A lot else, you see what I mean.

Death of a Flower: Protea

For this series, I’ve been trying to find flowers that stay upright as long as possible. The idea of a drooping, wilted flower is really appealing at first, until you realize that, for the most part, wilted flowers pretty much look the same. I went with sunflowers, and loved the result. I started to look for more flowers with hearty stems, and one day, while at the nursery, I found something I didn’t know existed in nature.

Pincushion Protea, day 1Behold, the pincushion protea. They had two of them, and it didn’t take a second for me to decide that this would be my next subject. I saw the hearty stems, the strange, unearthly center and the curly tendrils on the outside, and I was entranced. This one pictured above also had these wonderful ribbon-like portions woven through it. I couldn’t wait to see what results this would bring.

Pincushion Protea, day 1, TwinsAt the nursery, the woman who checked us out lamented, “I love these. We don’t get them in that often. Unfortunately, they don’t last.”

I assured her that it wouldn’t be a problem.

Pincushion Protea, day 1I took this shot on day 1, and I loved the look of it, the almost mirror-like effect. So much so, I decided that for these flowers, I would shoot a similar shot during each session.

The woman at the nursery was quite right. By day 6, the pincushion proteas had already transformed.

Pincushion Protea, day 6The color had faded and the head had dropped. The beautiful extensions had become disorganized, like unruly hair. I was a bit concerned that the entire flower might just snap off, but it held firm. I carried on with the matching mirror shot—an amazing difference between the two.

Pincushion Protea, day 6I continued on through to day 10 with the proteas. I might have continued further, but the fact was, they had already become what they were to become.

Protea, day 10

As with all of the flowers I’ve used as subjects, the human qualities stood out, and deepened as the days passed. Their heads remained high, almost proud of what they had evolved into. The leaves became arms, spread out, almost as if to say “I’m here!”

Pincushion Protea, day 10

I was so happy with this last shot that I had a large version printed and now it hangs on our wall. Despite the fact that I don’t have another picture of what this looked like on the first day, it has a fascination all its own. Even if you don’t know what a pincushion protea looks like fresh, you can imagine it in your head, looking at this picture.

But just for reference, here’s what they look like, side by side.

Pincushion Protea, day 1Pincushion Protea, day 10

Here are some of the others in the Death of a Flower series:

Found: Seriously? Another Couch

“There’s another one around the corner,” Laura said.

Every smart answer I could think of flooded into my head. In this case, though, I knew what she was talking about. As you know, Allentown has been littered with old couches waiting to be picked up for the morning trash. This was the third in a month.

I strapped the camera around my shoulder and headed up the street. Laura had spotted it out of the corner of her eye, so she didn’t see that it was not one couch, but a loveseat jammed into a couch.

Couch on Couch CrimeSo, all tolled, we have had four sightings in The Season of the Couch. Stay tuned. I’ll probably find another one tomorrow.

Summers by the Lake: Remembering John Margolies

Last week, I saw an innocent little item Mod Betty had put on her Facebook page concerning the John Margolies collection that the Library of Congress put out recently. John Margolies passed away last year, and the LOC was providing those interested with a look at over 11,000 images he had taken over the years of roadside architecture and signage. The name seemed somewhat familiar, so I did what we all do, I went to Google with a bunch of questions about John Margolies, and they provided the necessary information on who he was, and examples of his work. The picture Google put next to the name stopped me dead in my tracks.

It was 1989. I saw an ad in the newspaper for a waiter position for a resort called Scott’s Oquaga Lake House. My only previous work experience had been a summer at McDonald’s, and I wasn’t prepared to go back to that, so I called the number on the ad and set up an interview. The place I was going was in Deposit, which was over 20 miles from my house, but this was truly a case of beggars not being able to be choosers. I needed a job, any job.

Scott’s Oquaga Lake House sounded like the perfect place for me to work, and in a lot of ways, it was. It was minimum wage, no tips, and I could stay in a room on the campus (for a fee) and eat my meals in the kitchen (for another fee). I could start right away, so I started right away. My first paycheck was upwards of 50 bucks all tolled.

Scott's Dining Room
Scott’s Dining Room, John Margolies

It was still early on in the season, so the dining room was about half-full at mealtime. Most of the early season visitors were elderly folks who had come down from Canada in a bus. Only one person really stood out, the man sitting alone near the salad bar. From first glance, you could tell there was something different about this guy. At the age I am now, I would recognize him as someone who is consistently observing, but then I couldn’t tell you anything about him.

Well, not completely true. I knew he always came alone, always came to stay for weeks at a time, and was very infrequently seen outside of mealtime. It’s possible that someone said that his name was John Margolies, but I didn’t remember. Someone said he was a photographer. One of the maids told me that he always taped the drapes shut when he came. Maybe he was using his room as an impromptu dark room? I thought at the time.

I never knew what kind of a photographer he was. I was 18 and lost in my own self too much to care about anyone else, so in all the times I waited on him, I never asked him.

Scott's Casino Interior
Scott’s Casino Interior, 1978, John Margolies

Scott’s was a throwback. Actually, that’s not necessarily true, Scott’s just hadn’t changed. The picture above was taken in 1978, but it could have been 1989, because it honestly looked the same. I was there for two seasons, and I left with more stories than I could possibly relate in the space of one blog post.


It’s fairly evident from the Library of Congress collection that during the summers of 1977 and 1978, John Margolies went to great number of Catskill resorts. Most of the pictures look like they may have been taken for brochures, with men and women seated around pools in bathing suits, lobby shots, pictures of the owners.  There are quite a few people in these shots, but when I read his New York Times obituary, this was what was said:

Shooting in color with a 35-millimeter Canon FT, he strove to capture his subjects in consistent attitude: unsentimentally, against a cloudless blue sky (for which he often had to wait), devoid of the visual irritants like people and cars.

Visual irritants such as people. The phrase stuck in my head. Certainly this wasn’t true for these pictures, but over the years, especially in the 1980’s, the New York Times description was dead on. Very consistently a blue sky, no people, all taken with the same camera, with the same transparency film.

Dutch Mill Motor Court
Dutch Mill Motor Court, Malta, NY, John Margolies

That was, until I kept looking at the Scott’s collection. Yes, there were plenty of shots of the lake, of various buildings, but then there was this one, of owner Ray Scott in his old car, taken during one of the summers I worked there:

Ray Scott
Ray Scott, by John Margolies

Scott’s meant something for John. It seems fairly evident, from the frequency he stayed there and the amount of pictures he took, that the place was a refuge for him. As I looked through this massive catalog, I felt bad that I never asked him about it when I had the chance.

The second year I was there, I got to be the staff photographer for the month or so before the actual staff photographer came in from California. I had no training at all. Ray basically handed me the camera and said the film goes in there and you press the little button to make the pictures happen. I could do that. The day before the tour buses were to go, I would drive in to Binghamton to get the pictures developed, hang around for a few hours and come back. Then they would tack the pictures to a billboard and the groups would come through and order as they saw fit.

The first group of pictures I took didn’t go over so well. Not that they weren’t good pictures, but in my training session, the question of what I should take pictures of never came up. Ray saw them, curled his lip, and growled something to the effect that I had taken pictures of nothing. That wasn’t especially true, but pictures of woods and flowers around the Scott’s Campus would hardly sell to people who were buying pictures of themselves. So I shrugged my shoulders and took pictures of the Canadians as they stood in large groups, and life continued.

Oquaga Lake
Oquaga Lake, John Margolies

I was relieved of my photographer duties in late May of that year and resumed the life of a lowly waiter. John Margolies continued to show up for weeks at a time, sitting at his solitary table, and socially, this is the extent of where our paths crossed.

A few months ago, I got a book to read for our trip to Japan, but I decided it would be more interesting if I spent the flight hurling into a bag. Long story. At any rate, the book, which I eventually read after gastric distress had passed, was Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment. One of the points of this book is the intersection of themes and subjects within photography, that some photographers, although they have never met in person, meet in their pictures. So as I went through the huge catalog of images, I wondered which ones we had in common.

The answer was: surprisingly few. Although he spent a great deal of time in the Northeast, as have I, the subjects he chose were, thankfully, recordings of signs and locations that are no longer with us. But some remain.

Red Robin Diner, 1988
Red Robin Diner, 1988, John Margolies

The Red Robin Diner is still in Johnson City. When I visited it in 2012, the white panels had yellowed considerably.

Red Robin

The Clam Box in Ipswich, Massachusetts has been one of my favorites for years. My parents have visited there as long as I have memory, so whenever I’m in the area, most likely you’ll find me there. John Margolies took this shot in the 80’s:

Clam Box
Clam Box, Ipswich, MA, John Margolies

The New York Times’ statement about devoid of the visual irritants like people and cars came to mind when I saw this. However, the shot I took in 2011, is more representative of what the experience is like:

Clam Box of IpswichSchell’s in Temple, PA, north of Reading, has been a mainstay. When I saw his shot, I was sad and a little disappointed that the extra features on the sign no longer exist.

Schell's
Schell’s, 2013
Schell's
Schell’s, John Margolies

Finally, I checked the collection for Wildwood, but one of the only ones to come up was Laura’s Fudge. Again, I thought it was a cool sign now, but back then, even cooler.

Laura's Fudge, Wildwood, NJ
Laura’s Fudge, 2014
Laura's Fudge, 1978, John Margolies
Laura’s Fudge, 1978, John Margolies

I’ll be going through some more in the coming weeks, I’m sure, but if you’re curious, here’s the link to the archive: loc.gov

I got to see a time on my life I never thought I would see again. All the pictures I took at Scott’s that spring of 1990 (I’m sure) made their way to the trash-heap just as soon as the Canadians pictured made it back to Canada. I’m so grateful to be able to remember these summers once more.

Scott's Show Boat, John Margolies
Scott’s Show Boat, John Margolies
Scott's Barn, John Margolies
Scott’s Barn, John Margolies