Hardwick: Preservation of a Way of Life

Moving from rural Texas to Boston in the summer of 2020I was searching for a link to home, having been away from city life for over 20 years. I found it at a local outdoor farmer’s market, leading to friendships with several of the farmers from the village of Hardwick, Massachusetts.

Hardwick, a township in central Massachusetts was established in 1739 and consists predominantly of the village of Hardwick, and Gilbertville, which began as a mill town in the 1860s. At first, the visitor sees a New England common of colonial era homes, buildings and churches, begging to be on a Christmas card. The surrounding small family farms, pastures, and greenhouses stand in contrast to the larger scale industrial farms of the Midwest. The village of Gilbertville, with its depression era mills, evoke memories of long departed New England textile manufacturing.

Hardwick has become dear to this Texan’s heart. It’s a place where the residents tell the stories of local villagers who founded the town in the aftermath of King Philip’s War that opened central Massachusetts to European settlement. Stories of those who fought in the “French War”, of those who were the patriots and who were the Tories at the out break of the “Rev War”-all of which inform the conversations after a day of planting, or harvesting, or rebuilding a rock wall or repairing a tractor. Shay’s rebellion is discussed with respect. A place where the local farmers sell their produce in farmer’s markets, preserving a way of life inherited from colonial days.

This ongoing photo project begins with what it means to love where you live and what you do. Yet, along side the resilience of the farmers, Gilbertville struggles yet with the poverty, crime, and joblessness left behind by the departure of manufacturing. Understanding this community requires an appreciation of these tensions, without which the narrative of the small farming community would be incomplete.

At 17 time stops. You have forever briefly in your grasp. You remember, don’t you? Anything was possible and nothing mattered. The future is a beautiful dream, never approaching.

Trouble has no meaning and boundaries are meant to be pushed. To learn when to stop, you have to go too far. And you are a lucky one if you don’t write your future on an unfortunate incident.

This time in my life has been deeply etched in my memory andI can’t let it go. It haunts me. AndI think I somehow always knew it would. The photographs are visual journals, I kept a meticulous record of this time. It was the only way to cope with the change I knew was coming.

These photographs are the last of time before the internet became a place. We wandered aimless as kids. Our flip phones, always dying and being charged on the go, gave us a way to connect-“where u at?” and that was it. Life was outside the phone.

Now phones are an extension of ourselves. When the phone and the camera fused with smartphones photographs stopped being memories and started becoming content. Our photos weren’t personal documents anymore, they were public.

When the camera turns on people now there is a new awareness-where will that photo go? Who will see it? And what will they think of me? I see a freedom in these images that is of that age, yes, but that is also of the time. We were living on the cusp of change, the very last of a free world.

Blueprint

Benita Mayo

Memory is unreliable, and time has a way of bending the truth. I have always been on a journey to unearth and examine the stories that live within me—some through my own experience, but most through inheritance.

When Daddy suddenly passed in 2020, the tectonic plates of my life forever shifted. In an instant, I knew life would never be the same. As I find myself longing to understand the past, the impermanence of memory is palpable. I feel as if I’m racing toward an invisible finish line.

My parents were born in Virginia, a state with an indelible imprint on America’s most painful and pivotal chapters: the rise of slavery, the Civil War, and the long struggle for civil rights. Over 350,000 men, women, and children were sold from Richmond’s auction block. Virginia was the capital of the Confederacy, and the Fall of Richmond marked the end of the Civil War. Later, during a time of “massive resistance,” a neighboring county chose to close its public schools rather than integrate them. This was the Virginia into which my father was born.

History and politics shaped my family’s story. They directly influenced how we were raised.The most pervasive feelings I remember from childhood were fear and loneliness. We livedwith trauma, sorrow, silence, and deep wounding. But at the heart of it all, there was love—and a steadfast hope that tomorrow could be better than today.

Toni Morrison, in *The Bluest Eye*, urges us not to “forgive and forget,” but to “remember and do better.” Too often, shame and embarrassment silence truth. But only through declaration and revelation can truth and insight rise. Only then can the cracks begin to mend, and healing begin.

Much of what I have struggled with throughout my life has roots in collective trauma. In my search to understand what happened to me, I’ve spent 1,571 hours in therapy. It has taken decades to identify the cycles, to stop the bleeding, to clean the wound, and to begin the work of healing. For any wound to heal, this must come first. Then, in time, new tissue forms—a foundation for new skin that is stronger, more resilient.

Through words and pictures, I recount the fierce determination of a man caught in the web of history. The deck was stacked against him. But he made a way out of no way. The calmness of the landscape conceals the quiet outrage, the mourning, and the sacred commemoration.

 When I Am Here, I Yearn for There

I move between two remembered landscapes. The upper Midwest, where I was born,is wide blue and green, with clear light and few shadows,mostly from passing clouds.This world is aware of the sky, air,and especially the spare, unbroken horizon. My other, now familiar landscape is my adopted home, New England. Here the land enfolds and encloses,with changeable light,pale, then warm, hard, then soft. Form draws attention, rather than space: the twist of a tree trunk or a shadow stippled on a rock. Colors are nuanced: the undulating greys of tree bark,moss green, fern, laurel.

These two landscapes converge and blur in this series of composite images. Hidden among the differences are commonalities. They linger on the edges, in the natural world’s liminal zones. A sentinel tree marks a New England field;like a solitary cottonwood punctuates the prairie sky with an exclamation point. Beach grass grasps the sand and holds back the sea; at a kindred margin, cattail slows the prairie wetland’s water and makes room for life.These echoes are (in the romantic or pictorial sense) as much about my inner as my outer experience. When I am here, I yearn for there–my childhood lakes and grasslands. And I am quite sure that if I return, I will do the same for here–nostalgic for the New England mountains, the woods,and sea.

Prick of a Pin

As in dreams, in a world illuminated only through the prick of a pin questions abound. During the fall of 2023, I made a stack of pinhole cameras from duct tape and cardboard boxes and began to use them to explore the subject of dreams, never sure what would happen when a ray of light seared a fragment of memory. I didn’t know how thrilling those surprises could be when I started.

Artifacts from my life and environs take on new meaning for me in these pictures. Through the tiniest of portals, a slower world reveals itself, smudged and speckled, with a person in its midst. She lingers—on a beach, bundled in a chair, by the side of a beast—holding onto time. Can she really do that? In dreams, yes, long enough to make connections that are impossible to forge during the frenzy of a day.

I find solace in the lilt of that slowed time, past and present rocking together, even as some of the pictures that emerge surprise me by their darkness. Perhaps they shouldn’t: Dreams shed light on truths we can’t always see, and may not want to.

So does play. In these photographs I don wigs, belted coats, and strange hats. Costumed, I become a woodsman, a gamekeeper, a countrywoman anchored by a circle of chairs. But they’re empty. Why?

While the answer may still elude me, I have found deep satisfaction in the mechanics of making images with these simplest of tools. Long minutes for each exposure tick by: The wind blows and shakes my box; a cloud swallows the sun; my feet grow cold. I day dream. Through a pinhole, I have traveled to a place of new possibilities.

Darkness at Noon

What do you see in darkness?

At first glance, this work is an exploration of the shape and texture of common objects in the urban environment. To emphasize their visual characteristics, I have detached the objects from their surroundings, darkened their backgrounds, and removed their coloration. Severed from their underlying identity, I seek to accentuate the geometries of the objects I’ve photographed while eliminating reference to their use, location, or scale.

What began as an exploration of forms grew into a conceptual study of abstraction. What I choose to reveal and to conceal can elicit an emotional response that is untethered from the true nature of the subject, and the response may differ from one viewer to the next. That is the magic of darkness.

As you look longer, do the objects you see remain purely abstract? Do you view them as simple shapes or do you try to guess their origin? Does your mind, accustomed as it is to making connections, seek to impose a contextual framework? If so, what do the shadows foreshadow? What stories do you create?

The project title, Darkness at Noon, is a double entendre. While these may have the appearance of nighttime photos, they were captured in full midday sunlight. It is also the title of a 1940 novel by Arthur Koestler, a book that vividly describes the torments of mid-20^th century totalitarianism. How might the feelings that the photographs evoke echo those in the novel? It depends upon what you see in the darkness.

-Michael Burka

Hidden Treasure

Homework saved me during the pandemic. I signed up for a photography class after years of longing and two decades of raising children, guiding Girl Scouts, and serving on non-profit boards. Finally, I had a moment to myself.

The pandemic shut down everything after two lessons, but Zoom kept us going, and homework provided a lifeline during this dark time. I’m lucky to live in a town abounding with fields, wetlands, and woodlands. Escaping the near constant anxiety of Covid and social unrest, I explored my local terrain, discovering the joy of sunrise as a life-long night owl, capturing the way a root draped over a boulder, and marveling at Spring’s emergence while the world woke up from its long winter. That class started my journey toward Hidden Treasure.

Whenever I set out to photograph, I embark on a walking meditation. I am completely in the moment as I inhale and listen, inviting some sight to call me. Venturing into brambles or wading into water’s edge, I frame the shot while holding some impossible pose, scrambling to get my tripod supports in place. Back in the studio, Lightroom is useful for fine-tuning, but I shy away from making hyperreal images. Instead, I aim to create a sense of that place and maybe inspire a longing to be somewhere that you, too, can find if you set out for a meander. Sometimes the single image is enough. At others, I use multiple panels to create a more expanded view of place. An occasional figure in the frame invites you to imagine yourself there.

In all my work about nature, my intention is to share those moments of peace I find in the hidden treasures and quiet beauty of New England’s landscape, offering respite from our anxious times.

 

Folding Time

What happens when a two-dimensional photograph becomes a three-dimensional object in space? How does physically interacting with a printed photograph reshape the experience it originally captured? These questions flow through my mind as I create dodecahedrons — 12-sided solids — that echo the sense of wonder I experience when immersed in the natural world.

I begin by choosing fragments of photographs from places that have moved me: surfaces layered by time, changing  skies, huge glaciers, deep waters. I then join these pieces, connecting different times and places.  As I work, I feel as if I’m traveling again, and moving backward and forward in time. And I marvel at the unexpected relationships that emerge among far-flung locations. Stone surfaces from Patagonia, Iceland, Utah, Maine, New Zealand, and Scotland intersect to form one 12-sided paper “stone”; waters from Canada, Alaska, Cape Cod, Botswana, and New Jersey flow into each other.

My dodecahedrons invite viewers to engage with photographs in novel ways. You can’t perceive one image without also seeing the others. There are many sides, but no end, no top or bottom, no left or right. You can view them from multiple perspectives, or interact with them in a tactile way — holding a weightless rock, flowing water, or endless sky in your hand.

When I use the dodecahedrons as building blocks for more complex objects or scenes, I add another layer to the tension between familiar and unfamiliar.  And when they are suspended, the suggestive forms and gentle movements bring an interactive energy that echoes the ever-changing nature of memory, and the ebb and flow of experience.

In designing, folding, manipulating, and hanging these forms, I feel the intersections between what was, what is, and what might be. I am reminded of the beauty and fragility of our planet, and how delicate the balance between humans and our environment.

The endless expanse of sky over us all, with its infinite nuances

The compressed millennia layered into rock

The shrinking glaciers, melting drip by drip

The power of the rising sea

The vanishing forests of old growth trees

How precious and precarious it all is.

link to video of Precarious Balance