About

My parents took pictures, narrow prints on paper with deckled edges. I learned to take pictures with their old Kodak Monitor folding camera after they moved up to a 35 mm Pony. I was born in '46, and I had a darkroom built under the cellar stairs before we had a black-and-white television. At the height of the Cuban missile crisis my darkroom doubled as a bomb shelter, with cans of beans stashed alongside my Kodak chemicals. I took photos of family events and my dog.

Over decades I have pressed my passion for photography onto fields as far afield as archaeology, theology, environmental conservation, and family snapshots. However, for the most part I worked in conservation and put photography away in a small corner where it remained stored, smelling slightly of hypo. Now in my sixties I'm doing what I want.

For 20 years I had held onto two photographs made around 1900 on Pawtuckaway Mountain in southeastern New Hampshire. One of the pictures shows the family homestead of the photographer himself, George W. Goodrich, the barefoot farmer who was also a diarist, fiddler, and large landowner with a respectable bank account. I recognized that homestead. I knew the foundation stones of the workshop, the smaller cellar under the house, the graveyard out back. The road follows almost the same track as it did 100 years ago, but the old fields have grown up to large trees in today's Pawtuckaway State Park. I found the boulder where he had to have set up his camera and I set up my tripod.

I collected as many Goodrich images as I could find and searched through some local historical societies, finding other photographers of the period. I studied the exact camera locations of the originals and re-photographed the scenes in a variety of lights and seasons.

Over time I have become less literal about searching out the original tripod holes. The past is the frame for the present, wherever it is seen. The discoveries, the surprises, are in how they come together.