ElementalManhattan / Pieper
This is my friend Richard Pieper. I took this photograph in the elevator of his building in the East Village back in January. (I think he is wearing earmuffs!) Pieper is a great friend and a very interesting fellow. Click here to see his latest project. It is truly amazing.
Willard Asylum Suitcase #2
I was back in Rotterdam last week to photograph more suitcases from Willard Asylum. Check this out for the background of the project.
I am slowly beginning to formulate a plan for how to proceed.
Even though an inventory of each case has been prepared by the museum, I prefer not to know the contents before I begin taking pictures.
There is something about being surprised by what’s inside that helps me connect with the person.
And I want the connection because I am trying to say something about the lives they lived before arriving at the asylum.
Anna’s first case contained mostly clothes.
I believe the inventory was done just as she arrived at Willard.
The museum is very careful about caring for each individual item.
Anna had some really beautiful clothes.
Just about all of her clothes had nametags, which I have to assume were sewn in before her time at Willard.
Below is the second of her cases.
This one had fewer clothes and more personal items.
For some reason, I really like the paper that the museum uses to protect the cases and their contents.
I especially like the design of this one.
When I photographed the abandoned buildings on the earlier project, I tried never to move items that I came across. This is so different for me as I need to lay the items out in order to photograph, but I don’t want to make the arrangements look too studied. I actually work very fast when I am shooting.
This case contained several hats, and an incredible pair of shoes.
There were also some indications of her life before Willard.
The hair pin packaging is beautiful.
I am not sure if the residents of Willard had access to their possessions during the time they were living there, but somehow I think not. So this letter would probably have been received before she arrived.
And since it was not addressed to Anna, I wonder about its importance to her.
Thanks so much to Craig Williams at the New York State Museum for allowing me access. As I mentioned in the earlier post, I would really appreciate any feedback. I still don’t have an outlet for this work, and no funds to jump into it in any concerted manner, but I hope to keep chipping away. There is alot of information about the people attached to these suitcases and should I go much further with the project, I would like to be able to include some biographical background to accompany the photos.
Walk-Over Bucks
I think Pieper was the first person I knew that wore Walk-Over Bucks. They were part of the uniform of a small group of us in Ithaca in the 70’s. Bucks, blue jeans, oxford shirt, and sometimes a tie if you were working or otherwise trying to fit in with people who cared about those things. I must have owned at least five pairs over the years. I have a basic wardrobe rule of thumb that you can wear pretty much anything below the belt as long as you have on a clean oxford shirt and a tie, hence the blue jean/bucks combo. This particular pair was the last I was able to find. I bought them in the early 90’s at Mathew’s Shoes (long since out of business) in downtown Amherst, and I think that Walk-Over had already ceased to be by that time. I wasn’t able to find another pair anywhere and assumed that the company was done for. / In yesterday’s Times I saw an article about how this type of shoe is making a comeback and was shocked to see a pair of Walk-Overs in a photograph. Someone has resurrected the brand and they are making them again. They are now $225.00 but still probably worth the money. I break this pair out once in a while and I think it is time to take them to the local cobbler to be resoled.
Watts Towers
John and Lynne took us on a mini tour of places of note in the LA area yesterday. It is amazing to watch John navigate around the area. He grew up out here and knows the streets very well. Lynne does the driving and John says things like “Why don’t you turn right here?” We always end up in amazing places. The Watts towers are a National Historic Landmark and worth a visit. Learn more about them here.
Whenever I think of Watts I am reminded of my great friend Alex’s tales of his time as a young man in the National Guard and being placed on a corner with live ammunition during the riots of 1965. Not having been given much in the way of guidance, he wasn’t sure what would happen, and fortunately for everyone around where he was stationed, not much did.
Yaz
Cris and I flew to California last night. JetBlue is the only airline with direct flights from Logan to Long Beach, and it was a nice flight. It was pleasant to see this life-sized Yaz at the gate. Only in Boston, I guess. To get to the airport, you drive through the Ted Williams tunnel and then just before you get on the plane you are reminded again about how big a role the Sox play in New England’s identity. I didn’t see Paul Revere anywhere, but Sam Adams was in all the bars.
Pound Netting on the Chesapeake
This is going to be a fairly picture heavy post. On a technical note, all of the pre dawn images, and most of the early morning ones were shot at an amazingly high ISO of 12,800. No flash, just the boat’s work lights.
Peter and I got to the dock at 4.00 AM to meet Robby Wilson who runs a pound net operation not far from Tilghman’s Island in the Chesapeake Bay.
We were on a scow that had been converted from an old houseboat, and his 2 crew were on a smaller skiff. We motored out of Tilghman for about 40 minutes and got to the first of 4 of his nets before 5.00 AM.
The two guys in the skiff had arrived some minutes before us, and were already hauling up the “pound”.
I asked several people where the term pound net comes from and there seems to be no consensus. It might come from the early American idea of a collection point for animals. The FAO has a pretty good description here.
The two boats work together to roll up the pound and then scoop the fish into the scow with the help of a winch.
The primary species Robby is fishing for is alewife. Many different fishes are caught in the nets, so the crew’s job is to cull most of the others, of which rockfish (striped bass) are the commonest. Some catfish and flounder are kept to sell as food fish. The alewife are sold mainly as bait for crabbers. After the first of June, the season for rockfish opens, and he is allowed to sell those.
It is wet, strenuous, and demanding work. It was unusually calm and clear yesterday, but the boat was still rocking, and water and fish scales were flying everywhere. After the cull, the crew would hop in the skiff and motor to the next set of nets.
The culling goes on until the pound is empty and then the crew moves on to the next location.
The process is repeated for each of the four sites. Travel time between them us usually less than a half hour.
Below is a good shot of system. Robby and the crew usually are out putting the stakes into the bottom around the first of March. They fell the trees and sharpen them in the off season. The depth of the water is anywhere between 7 and 15 feet.
Robby’s dad Clifford “Big Daddy” Wilson came out to help out. He is also a waterman; a few years ago Peter and I went out on his crab boat.
On the way back to the dock, the fish are shoveled into plastic baskets so they can be off-loaded into one of Robby’s trucks to be taken to Cambridge, MD to be sold.
They were nice enough to stop for a minute for a photo, but other wise they are constantly in motion.
The boats were back at the dock around 8.00 AM.
It’s about an hour to unload into the truck, and then the scow is cleaned up and made ready for the next day. It is pretty much a seven day a week job as the nets fill up pretty fast.
An amazing day. We are very fortunate to hang around with these guys and document their work. They couldn’t have been nicer or more accommodating.
Crabbing on the Chesapeake
Yesterday we were out on a crab boat with Roy and Colleen Sadler. We were on the dock by 4.30 AM, and on the Bay putting out lines by 5.oo. It is still early in the season, and when Roy started pulling up the lines, there wasn’t much action.
The sun was just coming up over the horizon, so the boat was still using the onboard lights. The technique is to attach small packets of razor clams to a line about every 10 or 15 feet. Roy and Colleen would drop the line, circle around and hope the crabs would chow down. The line would be strung over a roller, and any attached crabs would drop into the net Roy is holding above.
The crabs have to be over a certain size to be kept (I think it’s between 4 and 5 inches), or they get tossed back into the bay. Since the sun hadn’t come up, they were mostly inactive. But as the sun rose higher, more and more took the bait.
You can see the little orange packets of razor clams coming up over the roller.
Bait.
Roy and Colleen are amazing people. Roy has been working on the water his whole life, and Colleen works in a bank on the island during the week. She is usually on the boat at weekends helping out. The economics of making a living off the bay have changed so much over the years; Roy has said it would be very difficult to keep his business going without her income. A lot of what we are learning on this leg of the project has to do with the stifling regulations that the State of Maryland is forcing on the watermen (and women), and the ongoing change to the bay’s ecosystem which makes harvesting seafood such a challenge.
Peter Carroll
Peter Carroll and I are back on Tilghman’s Island to continue documenting Chesapeake Bay watermen. We were on the water by 5 this morning with Roy and Colleen Sadler.
Thank you note
A while back, I photographed my friend Virginia Westbrook as she needed some resume shots and would be in Amherst visiting her son. It was great to see her after a long while of little contact. A few weeks ago she sent an email asking if I could send a print of one of the shots to her mom for her birthday, which I was happy to do. Today I received this note in the mail from Virginia’s mom with the enclosed “reward”. It made me very happy.
Willard Asylum Suitcase
I’m not sure yet where I am going with this project, but I wanted to post some shots for feedback. / In 1995, the New York State Museum staff were moving items out of The Willard Psychiatric Center. It was being closed by the State Office of Mental Health, and would eventually become a state run drug rehabilitation center. Craig Williams was made aware of an attic full of suitcases in the pathology lab building. The cases were put into storage when their owners were admitted to Willard, and since the facility was set up to help people with chronic mental illness, these folks never left.
The Museum made arrangements to have the suitcases moved to the Rotterdam storage facility, where staff have catalogued each one, and have carefully wrapped and preserved their contents.
An exhibit of a selection of the cases was produced by the Museum and was on display in Albany in 2003 or 2004. It has also traveled around New York State. It was very moving to read the stories of these people, and to see artifacts from their lives before they became residents of the Asylum.
This particular case belonged to Freda B…..(I would really like to use her whole name here, but there is a massive debate going on as to whether people who have been at Willard and other psyc centers need to be protected by privacy laws. I come down strongly on the side that it is dehumanizing and stigmatizing to pretend that she doesn’t have a surname.)
I am so interested in these cases. I like the idea of documenting the care and energy that the Museum has put into them. And I am totally wigged out by being able to photograph a representation of the lives of people who struggled so much to make it in a very stressful and confusing world.
It is still early days, and I am struggling a bit as to how I should approach this. The cases have been photographed before, but in a totally different manner. The first hurdle seems to be cleared; I have access. The next is time, which I think I can manage. The big one is funding, which is something on which I need to work. And finally, what could come out of the project. An exhibit would be nice, or maybe a book.
I have been working on some ideas with Dr Karen Miller, a writer and psychiatrist. She has also been spending time with the cases, and doing research on the lives of people who were at Willard. We’ll see what happens.
In the meantime, feel free to send this link around to anyone who might be interested. And any feedback would be appreciated.
Jon Crispin's Notebook 
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