PORTLAND MAINE – Well a lot is going on. Maria has left for Tanzania where she’s joining a group of alpha women who are climbing Kilimanjaro. No kidding. She’s not the least bit crunchy and is more at home in Pucci than SEI, but she’s taken this on as a challenge and we’re very proud of her. Francesca and I went to Portland Maine for a wedding. I captured “1904 Workingmen’s Club,” which is now the home of a credit union, with my Panasonic GH2. I brought my Alpa but failed to put a CD card in the bag – I need to put together a checklist for it.
1904 Workingmen's Club
WEST CORNWALL CONNECTICUT – We had dinner at the Wandering Moose cafe here in West Cornwall. Alexander, my son, observed that West Cornwall feels more like New York state than Connecticut – it has a slightly funky Adirondack vibe. This with my Leica M9 and a 28mm Summicron lens. Local businesses consist of the Wandering Moose Cafe, a simple place that we rather like, Ian Ingersoll, a brilliant cabinet maker who specializes in Shaker-inspired designs, and RSVP, a restaurant that offers French bistro food – Zagat gives the food a 28 but that’s nowhere near correct – we’ve been fairly underwhelmed there.
Wandering Moose Cafe
KENT CONNECTICUT – I felt that yesterday’s photograph of the wooden gothic church in Cornwall Bridge was a success, so I drove to Kent to shoot the gothic Congregational Church there. According to the Church’s website it was founded 1740 with the present building dates to 1849. They’ve fallen onto slightly hard times with 200 members and a bunch of peeling paint. But at least they have some attitude. According to the website the Kent Congregational Church was ” first to ordain an African-American pastor (1785), a woman (1853), an openly gay person (1972) and the first to affirm same-gender marriage equality (2005). ” “First” out of what universe isn’t clear. Anyway, here’s the picture, taken with my Alpa Max, a 60 meg Hasselblad digital back and a Schneider 48mm Digitar lens.
Congregational Church Kent Connecticut
CORNWALL BRIDGE, CONNECTICUT – The bridge in Cornwall Bridge is actually a highway flyover. A few miles north in Cornwall there is a famous covered bridge. Anyway down under the flyover in Cornwall Bridge, near the Housatonic River, is a lovely wooden gothic church. I’ve photographed it before but never well. Many of the churches that I’ve photographed are in poor condition. St Bridget Church is beautifully maintained. There is a new addition to a long stone wall and an impeccably kept graveyard. I shot the church full frontal with my Alpa Max, Schneider 48mm Digitar and a Hasselblad 60 meg digital back, using the movements on the Max to control perspective.
St. Bridget Church, Cornwall Bridge Connecticut
NEW MILFORD, CONNECTICUT – A bad day in the one photo every day world. We drove up to Connecticut on Saturday morning (the weather was terrible on Friday night, our usual drive time). I packed my Hasselblad and Alpa and couple of lenses. On arriving in Connecticut I discovered that I had left the CompactFlash memory card in the computer in New York. I couldn’t shoot the Hasselblad or Alpa because I didn’t have any digital film. I didn’t have another camera with me, not even an iPhone. Warren Connecticut is rural and quite isolated – there’s really no place close by that carries memory cards.
So what to do? I drove south the New Milford Connecticut because there’s a Radio Shack in a shopping center there. The drive took 45 minutes because of road construction (it’s usually 25 minutes). This gave me plenty of time to think about how stupid I am and to plot a route back that avoided the construction. When I arrived at the Radio Shack they didn’t have a CompactFlash card. The salesman tried to sell me a memory stick card saying it’s exactly the same (where does Radio Shack get these people?). I went to the Walmart in the same shopping center and found a single 8 meg CompactFlash card hanging at ankle level on one of those displays that retailers use for the small electronic doodads that are sold in impossible-to-open plastic packages. I bought it and painfully broke a fingernail opening the packaging; installed it in the Hasselblad; formatted it and voilà I was good to go. But irritable and out of sorts. This isn’t how I had planned on spending Saturday.
New Milford is kind of a sad place. I’ve commented on this before. It’s a commercial stretch on Route 202 consisting mainly of strip malls. One of my favorite books on life in England is Crap Towns, a listing of the 100 worst towns in England. New Milford would deserve a place in an American edition. There is a village center with large Congregational and Episcopal churches, a library, a town hall and a World War I era tank – reminders of a time when the town projected greater grandeur. I’ve taken quite a few of my daily pictures in New Milford. If you search for New Milford in the search box to the right you will find them.
I was too distracted to get back into the moment so I shot the first thing that came to hand: St. Johns Episcopal Church. The light wasn’t that interesting. The church building was built starting in 1881 sort of gothic HH Richardson – the congregation is 250 years old. Shot with my Alpa Max, a 47mm Rodenstock lens and my newly-purchased 8 meg CompactFlash card.
KENT CONNECTICUT – This is Presidents Day so we spent the day in Connecticut. We drove over to Kent, a good-sized village that’s a 20 minute or so drive from Warren. The name “Kent” is an example of the lack of imagination of the English settlers in this area. Not even “New Kent”. Perhaps “Kent-On-The-Tundra” would have been better, recognizing the colder climate here.
My sister in law, Francesca Barra, was with me and I wanted to show her Belgique, a remarkable chocolate and pastry shop owned by a former White House chef and his wife. We bought chocolate truffles and chocolate covered candied ginger. I have no idea of why or how this guy ended up here; his work is world class; he would be highly popular in New York or even Paris.
I took a lot of pictures in the village – this is my favorite for the day. It’s a caboose that houses an art gallery called, fittingly, the Kent Caboose Gallery. It was previously called the Paris-New-York-Kent Gallery (1984 – 2006), a rather grand name given its lilliputian size. I suspect that it was intended ironically. It was the first gallery in Kent. Photographed with my Alpa TC, a 35mm APO Schneider lens and a 60 meg Hasselblad digital back.
NEW PRESTON CONNECTICUT – A really gray day. New Preston is a small village near us just off of Route 202. Politically it’s part of Washington Connecticut. The Congregational parish has two church buildings: a traditional neo-classical wooden structure where the congregation meets for most of the year, and a stone church where they meet in August. New Preston doesn’t have a green so both buildings are sited awkwardly – the stone church s literally 6 feet from the edge of the road. Taken with my Alpa TC.
New Preston Stone Church
