FRAGMENTS OF A SONATA

Archival Ink Jet Prints. 2009

These photographs take their cue from classic works of fiction set in New England, specifically stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Mosses from an Old Manse) and Herman Melville (The Piazza Tales) and from the music of Charles Ives. Ives (1874 - 1954) composed his unfinished Concord Sonata in four movements, each named after a New England author (1. Emerson 2. Hawthorne 3. The Alcotts 4. Thoreau)

I am interested in the legacy of these writers and in how their ideas on landscape and Nature set a foundation for how we consider the natural environment today.

The words beneath the images are culled from Ives score and represent the indications given to the musicians on how to play a particular passage. I have been seeking for ways to make text and image interact and found that introducing sound and tempo to the image through words made the experience of looking at these photographs closer to the one I have when walking in these spaces to make them.