Author: johntodaro

Souvenirs

Souvenirs

Whenever I’m shooting as much as I do on a trip, I think of my lenses something like musical instruments. Each has their own way of “playing” the scene, and each has their own sound.

The wide-angled music of the previous two images is replaced here with the more sedate feel of the normal focal length.

Thompson Springs UT
Click for larger/sharper version.

Abandoned Gas Station, Interstate 15

Abandoned Gas Station, I 15

I’m back in town after a two week journey through Utah– an in-state trip which included forays into the Arizona Strip and Idaho. Evenings were spent in small-town motels or cabins, and days were spent hiking in National Parks or BLM and Forest Service areas. I have no anxiety about what to photograph or what to avoid. It’s all fair game. With some luck, my pictures will reflect my experience.

I should mention that I spent a soggy night camping in Kodachrome Basin State Park. As most of you know, the film is now history. Happily, this wonderfully-named State Park is still available.

Anyway, the goal over the next few months is to post the pictures. I’ll be loading ’em up “one-a-day” and hopefully they’ll go down like a good box of vitamins.

Click for largest/sharpest image.

At Port With Charles Todd

About twelve years ago we took a trip in June to Bar Harbor and the northeast coast of Maine. June is the foggiest month of the year and we were visiting a state that pretty much wrote the book on the stuff. On the morning of our flight home from Bangor I took a series of pictures of the Margaret Todd.

My wife waited back at the motel with our three year old while I put the Hasselblad through its paces. She’s always had more patience than me.

“Todd” is a name that strikes a chord because long before I was born it was the name that three of my uncles adopted. Seventy five years ago, they were running from something that no longer matters to Italian Americans. When I was a kid growing up in Florida, none of that concerned me. My uncles were strangers with no children who lived in other places. The only one we’d hear about was the one who’d send us a Christmas card.

Every year it was signed “Charlie”.

Charles Todd, my uncle, came with an interesting story. I grew up aware that he was a portrait painter and that he’d studied at the Art Students League in Manhattan. Years later I realized that he had been there at the same time as Jackson Pollock.  Many other artists were present including Thomas Hart Benton who was on the faculty.  Whether my uncle studied with Benton is unknown and his training at the Art Student’s League remains a mystery. Once, during the 1980’s, I ran into a woman at an art show who had modeled for my uncle at the Art Student’s League. Her memories of my him were laced with emotion.

Sadly, my uncle’s artistic aspirations were derailed by the Great Depression. For a short time, he was employed by the WPA to paint murals in Post Offices and other public buildings. But my uncle wasn’t destined to be a career artist. He spent the rest of his life delivering mail in New York City (the irony of which he must’ve appreciated). Over the years, he picked up his brushes on weekends, or when he received occasional commissions for portraits.

My uncle’s mystique grew as I arrived in my middle school years. Sometime around 1968 he won a city-wide art contest held by the Postal Service for its many employees. He made the cover of The Daily News. I own a copy of that newspaper along with the two paintings which were featured on the cover. It’s all down in my basement in storage.

In the mid ’60’s when we spent two summers on Long Island, I discovered that my uncle didn’t have much interest in bygones. We’d sometimes meet him at Sheepshead Bay where he kept a boat. The man I got to know was a droll, quiet guy who who sported a pencil-thin mustache. There was a likable sense of weariness about him, a quality which I found in no other relative. He had a wife (whom I never met), and she was not the woman he loved. One day he showed up with Eleanor, a sexy woman in her late fifites who knew how to lose her past. Later, it became fairly obvious that the woman in shorts leaning against the dock had been modeling for him for years.

She was also my aunt’s best friend.

After that, his affairs were discussed in hushed tones by my parents. I now know that there were many complexities in his relationship with his wife, but because of my youth I formed a mental picture of a lonely and beautiful woman which I carry with me to this day.

My uncle loved the sea. Despite the advancing years, he bore a striking resemblance to the wiry guy in the black and white Navy photograph which we kept in the box with the pictures. One afternoon when I was about ten or eleven he invited us out on his boat. My brother, father and I drove to the marina in Brooklyn. Eleanor was there, and everyone was a little tense. We climbed onboard, assembling awkwardly in the cabin. My uncle slowly guided us out of the harbor and then leaned into the throttle taking us swiftly to the middle of the bay. He idled the engine; it was breezy, a little choppy–and no one had much to say. With a cigarette between two fingers, Eleanor opened a cooler and handed us cans of soda. My uncle, who had no patience for small talk, placed me at the wheel. We took off. In amazement, I steered the boat for several miles. I felt like I’d been granted an unexpected right of passage.

I only saw my uncle a few times after that. Once during my late teens he visited us on a frigid autumn weekend. I hadn’t seen him in a while, and because of my advancing interest in art I was really looking forward to a chat. In retrospect, it was a memorable day. My uncle and I had a one-one-one: a short but satisfying conversation under a pallid florescent light. We were in the basement in the room that my father filled up with second hand furniture. It was the only time I ever heard my uncle talk about the old masters.

The last time I saw him was in a musty hospital somewhere in New York City. He was dying, but I can’t remember why and was too overwhelmed to inquire about it at the time. He was in pain and waved us off because he wanted no visitors. I’ll never forget that day.

It was another thirty years before I’d photograph the Margaret Todd. I have a hard time imagining my uncle with any interest in color photography. He would’ve been polite enough to critique my images because I was his nephew. He was a well-trained colorist during a time when other things mattered to artists. In another sense, I can easily envision him admiring the Margaret Todd because for him, she would’ve evoked the sea. What I’ll never know is whether the graceful lines and soft colors of my photograph would have had any further meaning.

Red Shack in Marsh

red shack in marsh

I took this picture on my honeymoon in October 1988. The location is Metompkin Island Virginia, a remote place with isolated fishing shacks. In order to get there, we needed a canoe.

Over the years, it’s been a popular photograph, having gone through a series of incarnations. The original was shot on 120 negative film with a Fuji 645 W.

Initially, I sold a few C Prints straight from that negative, but soon became unhappy with the low contrast. A friend who owned a lab suggested we copy the original onto an 8 x 10 negative. We did this with the expectation that the copy would increase contrast. It worked. I preferred the amped-up version, although the earlier one had its merits too. Between 1990 and 2001 I made a number of C prints from that copy, which required an 8 x 10 enlarger in order to make the prints.

With the advent of digital imaging, this was one of the first film photographs that I archived. At that time, all my scans were drum scans.

With my hybrid-digital file, I began a new edition of prints. The first few were “digital C’s”, but I soon preferred the look of Epson fine art papers and that’s where the picture has remained ever since.

These days, the image is printed onto a roll of Epson UltraSmooth Fine Art Paper with the Epson Pro 3880. The photograph is approximately 11″ x 30″, matted in a 22″ x 40″ white rag mat. All my work is framed in white wood. The edition of 100 prints is about two-thirds complete.