FYI, we brought home a variety of products from the Ironworks Distillery, to include an rather incredible rum and an very unusual rhubarb liqueur.

iPhone Photography ~ Lunenburg, Nova Scotia / Canada • click to embiggen

Photo gallery / shop ~ Lunenburg, Nova Scotia / Canada • click to embiggen

The story/gallery was closed but, as luck would have it, a man came down some stairs and I knocked on the window and he let me in. After a very brief explanation of my interest in square pictures, he stated that he was not the picture maker. In fact the picture maker was a woman (his wife, I believe) named Mariette Roodenburg.

I was escorted up to the second floor where a gallery occupied the entire very large space. Most of the works on display were of Mariette's making and in short order she came down from her third floor studio (more of a print making studio than a picture making studio), introduced herself and we proceeded to have a nice long chat. Our chat focused on art/aesthetics and nary a word about cameras / gear or technique with the exception of a brief explanation about how she was able to print - with exquisite detail, tone and color - some of her Land Squares pictures on uncoated Japanese rice paper (she pre-treated the paper with an ink-retaining coating).

When all was said and done, it was a real treat to see the work of fellow-traveler, square picture wise.

However (or, that written), there are, in fact, vast stretches of inland Nova Scotia which are remarkably similar to the Adirondacks (without the mountains) and parts of central NYS. Those similarities have caused the wife to remark on several occasions, "We've traveled 850 miles so we can vacation where we live" ... then we arrive at the seaside and it ain't anything like where we live.

Featured Comment: John Linn wrote: ".... Not sure what the attraction is for you in Nova Scotia. Seems a lot like the Adirondacks but without mountains... only ocean.?"

my response: Well, there's 1)lobster fresh from the sea, 2)mussels,fresh from the sea @ $5.00CAN/lb, 3)seascapes, and 4) quaint fishing villages to name just a few "attractions".

Apparently, RON wants you to add a RON deck chair to your life.

We're currently staying in Lunenberg but I'm also hoping to see Sidney Crosby's mom's dryer (in Halifax).

Today's picture is a down and dirty iPad processed picture. I'll post the highlight blended final when I get back home.

the audience reaction to the idea/concept was a resounding and/or collective shrug, or so the absence of comments would seem to indicate.

Which in turn instigated this response from Paul Bradforth:

Have you considered that they might not have understood any of it, as I didn't? I read those words that you put together with your pictures and couldn't for the life of me see any association OR dissociation. And I have to say that I find your second paragraph* above to be opaque

I don't mean to judge too harshly, but when you write (a paragraph) like that, I don't think you can expect to be understood too widely ....

my response: As a matter of fact, while I was hoping for a few comments / questions about the concept / idea, I have entered into this pictures+words project knowing full well that it will not be easily understood much less appreciated (much like my pictures as well). The undertaking is not meant to be "easy" or "understood" (in the definitive sense). Rather, it is meant to be a lyrical exercise from which many meanings / understandings / experiences might be gleaned or intuited.

Some will "get it", most will not. My intention is not to pander, preach, or pleasure. Instead, it is to proffer a concept / idea comprised of pictures and words which I hope, for those who "get it" (or want to try to get it), will engender thoughtful and imaginative contemplation which extends beyond the visual and literal document.

All of that written (sorry, Paul), as I develop and refine my approach to the pictures+words project, I have considered this from James Agee (from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men):

As a matter of fact, nothing I might write (picture) could make any difference whatever. It would only be a “book” ("picture") at best. If it were a safely dangerous one it would be “scientific” or “political” or “revolutionary.” If it were really dangerous it would be “literature” or “religion” or “mysticism” or “art,” and under one such name or another might in time achieve the emasculation of acceptance. If it were dangerous enough to be of any remote use to the human race it would be merely “frivolous” or “pathological,” and that would be the end of that. Wiser and more capable men than I shall ever be have put their findings before you, findings so rich and so full of anger, serenity, murder, healing, truth, and love that it seems incredible the world were not destroyed and fulfilled in the instant, but you are too much for them: .... one by one, you have absorbed and have captured and dishonored, and have distilled of your deliverers the most ruinous of all your poisons; people hear Beethoven in concert halls, or over a bridge game, or to relax; Cézannes are hung on walls, reproduced, in natural wood frames; van Gogh is the man who cut off his ear and whose yellows became recently popular in window decoration; Swift loved individuals but hated the human race; Kafka is a fad; Blake is in the Modern Library: Freud is a Modern Library Giant; Dovschenko's Frontier is disliked by those who demand that it fit the Eisenstein esthetic; nobody reads Joyce any more; Céline is a madman who has incurred the hearty dislike of Alfred Kazin, reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune book section, and is, moreover, a fascist; I hope I need not mention Jesus Christ, of whom you have managed to make a dirty gentile. (ed., I have added the parenthesized word "picture")

Now, to be perfectly clear, my humble little project is not undertaken with the aspiration of achieving either the importance or the notoriety of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Evans+Agee's picture+words critically praised opus. Nevertheless, my project - much like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men - does aspire to combine factual / true pictures with passages of lyrical / poetic beauty.

Whether or not it achieves the "emasculation of acceptance" is anyone's guess.

*As a clue to what my intentions were, re: putting those words with my picture(s), I titled the entry associative disassociation, which on hindsight should have read (or maybe not) as disassociated association. In either case, what I was driving at was the idea that the words and picture(s) were simultaneously connected yet seemingly not - while the words were literally disassociated (to separate) from the picture(s), in fact (to my eye and sensibilities), figuratively speaking they are associated (the connection or relation of ideas, feelings, sensations, etc.).

As a clue to what my intentions were, re: putting those words with my picture(s), I titled the entry associative disassociation, which on hindsight should have read (or maybe not) as disassociated association. In either case, what I was driving at was the idea that the words and picture(s) were simultaneously connected yet seemingly not - while the words were literally disassociated (to separate) from the picture(s), in fact (to my eye and sensibilities), figuratively speaking they are associated (the connection or relation of ideas, feelings, sensations, etc.).

In any event, the audience reaction to the idea/concept was a resounding and/or collective shrug, or so the absence of comments would seem to indicate. Nevertheless, the last entry and this explanatory followup entry are an indication of what is to come, both on this blog and as the focus of a joint project involving me and the writer of those words.

That project is based on the words of James Agee taken from his preface in his and Walker Evans' collaborative book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ...

The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are co-equal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative. By their fewness, and by the impotence of the viewer's eye, this will be misunderstood by most of that minority which does not wholly ignore it. In the interests, however, of the history and future of photography, that risk seems irrelevant, and this flat statement necessary.

I had a moment with the sand last week when I was walking to work. There were weeds in the wind with their unpretentious grace, and grass, and thinning grass, and sand and road, and humans in car suits. And I thought of the sand creeping blindly from the balding grass, as if to stretch itself to the surf, and how it almost looked as if it could span that unknown distance if only I could block out the road. Then I thought about reading at the beach. And then I thought about reading in the sand a foot from the highway.

Think about it.

Tatertots ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack Park • click to embiggen