Basket maker

 

Among Grace Lo's activities is basket making. Last week she turned up at our house and took away some vines of one of the plants that infests our garden and the woods around: bittersweet. But if the entire population of Garrison and Cold Spring took up basket making and turned up at our house for supplies of vines, I don't think you would notice much difference, such is the proliferation of the plant strangling trees and shrubs.

 

Grace is the proprietor of the art store Supplies for Creative Living in Cold Spring, NY. She used to come to Cold Spring on the train from NYC to hike. One day she thought how really nice the place was. She left her landscape architecture business in the city and opened a shop on Main Street.  

 

 

Young man and his fiancé

"I'll bring you 50 dollars tomorrow," he shouted as he left his sisters who had been such a rich source of subjects for me. He used to live in their house, the only male amongst seven or eight women and girls. "I moved out as soon as I could afford it, to get a bit of peace and quiet."

He has a job with a moving company in New Windsor, NY and told me that his father had drummed into him the necessity to leave no stone unturned to find work. This included going to every party there was, because that is how you meet people who can help you find a job. And that was indeed how he found this one, through a friend at a party who told him that his company needed people.

 

Comfortably seated

Looking at this picture I think how comfortable she looks. But I wonder if she is, considering the edge of the pillar is pressing into her temple.

The love of horses

Every year during Memorial Day weekend Sandy Saunders, who farms 150 acres in Garrison, New York, invites Leona Dushin, seen here on the right, to bring her horses and young riders to spend two days and nights in the ring, jumping and dressage in the fields, and sleeping in the hayloft of the stable barn. The photograph is of Caroline and others watching a demonstration, given by Hope Turino of Equine Assisted Growth Learning Association, of how we can overcome troubles and develop skills through studying a horse's reaction to our behaviour with them.

Leona is 88 years old, and many of her horses are Morgans which she has bred herself. "When I started these pony camps just after World War II we were all boys. Then the boys became interested in masculine sports like lacrosse, and now I do not have a single boy."

I was a boy who had always ridden and who never took to masculine sports. As a child in England, I was first taught by Miss Rogers in Crockham Hill, Kent. She had all of the discipline and loud voice of Leona without her humour and gentleness. When I was in my early teens I was taught by Sam Marsh, a former Olympic rider.

Then, for a number of years in the 50s and 60s, I rode in the early mornings in Richmond Park in London, exercising polo ponies with my friends Tatyana and Marina Orloff, who were sisters and also half Russian. It cost nothing — you went out once with the head lad of the stable and if he saw you were all right with his ponies, you could come as often as you liked at 7:30 in the morning and walk and canter for an hour across the rough grass and bracken in the park.

Sandy Saunders more or less runs the farm single-handed. For ten years he has had help from Shelley Scott, a 28 year-old recently qualified nurse. She loves the farm and the work, lives over one of Sandy's barns, and arranges her nursing schedule so that she can still be there for the horses and haymaking. Now that she has steady work as a nurse she wants to buy a horse herself. "You can buy a racehorse for a dollar. If they don't win races they are useless to their owners."

I am filming Sandy and his life on the farm. Here is a sequence I made last autumn.

Garrison Golf Club

Unforgettable mild winter days.

Lost saw

Earlier this week I bought a hand saw at the Home Depot. When I got home I could not find it in the car and thought that probably I had left it behind at the store. It took me an hour to be put through to the person who deals with this kind of absent-mindedness. After giving the person who finally came on the line the item number on my receipt she told me that they had found a saw, but just a minute... this one was a Stanley; mine was a Dewalt. Then she said, "I remember you, I recognize your accent. I'll put the details in the book. Just come in and show your receipt and pick up another." 

Speaking with an archaic English accent, and at least, not looking like a crook, surely helped. But encountering an angel was the luckiest part.

In spite of the large amount of time taken up with printing, mounting, installing and fundraising for my Newburgh Exhibition, there is time left for domestic bliss in the form of stewed red currents, as done by Mrs. Beaton, accompanied by a glass of Sauternes. The dog belongs to Sandy Saunders and is a friend of our dog Louis. He comes for visits at the week-ends. His name is Hansel.   

Celebratory spirit

As promised, here is the celebratory spirit I said I would find. We reached our goal on Kickstarter and are going ahead with the proposed exhibition. But the smile we see here is also a very natural vivacity, unrelated to a specific event. Here is a greeting that Latoiya would give to those who greeted her, whatever the occasion. We met her today in the heat of the afternoon, taking her three year old nephew to basketball practice.

Ruth Claiborne

Listen to Juanita talking about Ruth, the Newburgh bar owner, who spent her retirement visiting the sick.

Please visit Kickstarter to consider a pledge for the proposed outdoor exhibition of my Newburgh photographs.

It's dark inside

What, I thought, goes on inside this pair of garages, nothing to do with cars surely. Outside, ivy falls like icicles, flag stones have sunk but are not yet buckled or cracked, weeds are fairly under control and there are signs that two cars have recently been parked there fairly regularly. A dark mystery inside. Of course, I could have looked.

Please, if you have given this photograph a moment's pause, go to Kickstarter where you will find details of the planned outdoor exhibition of pictures like this to commemorate a time when nobody took any notice of this lovely place. We need your financial help to make and install the mural size prints.

A smile on Broadway

I do not take many smiling pictures but this was irresistible.

She is featured in my proposed outdoor exhibition of the people of Newburgh. This exhibition can only take place with your support. Please go to Kickstarter if you think you can make a pledge. 

Kathryn Schulz

Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.
She writes standing up at her Mac which lies on a bench exactly the right height for her comfort. She likes everything in place before she starts work. Disorder prevents words flowing. 

Everything was in place when I arrived and I felt quite at home. She is very good at sketching and has a floor to ceiling blackboard on which she has drawn a family of leaping frogs. The cat has her own chair placed in front of a window.  

Yunus, Kaan, Annette and Kemal

Annette is Swedish and Kemal is Turkish. They live here in Garrison. I asked Annette if the children were trilingual. "The children are American—they speak a little bit of everything." 

In 1964 I spent some time in Turkey photographing for the Turkish Tourist Bureau. One day I was on a beach of silver sand at Kizkalesi looking at the Crusader castle that lies 200 yards out in the Mediterranean sea. There was no-one on the beach except a fisherman with his rowing boat who had just landed his catch. He grilled me a sea bass. I have judged every fish I have eaten by this one. None has quite equaled it.

Kemal and his family recently spent eight months in Turkey. "The fish in Istanbul is still excellent," Kemal told me.

"The fish here in Garrison tastes of nothing." His eldest son Kaan added.

Beacon shop keeper

Main Street, Beacon, NY. Store owner takes a break to fix her hair and have a smoke.

Girl with short hair

A fine day with a clear blue sky. We hear the sound of a light aircraft approaching. It comes into view at about 2000ft. Three bodies tumble from the plane. Three parachutes open and steer towards our field. They land, gather up their 'chutes and walk towards us.  We recognize two adults and a girl of about fifteen. The woman is clutching two bottles of Bordeaux, and the girl a skateboard. Before we made lunch and opened the bottles I took this picture.

Matt Alexander

Mayor of Wappingers Falls, NY, Democratic Congressional candidate for 2012. When asked where his favourite view of the Hudson River was he replied, "From a place in Cornwall, the classic view... they all painted from there in the 19th century... I grew up in Cornwall... You can see Anthony's Nose and Storm King."

Felicity and Anna

As we were chatting about my temporary studio—the potting shed at the Garrison Institute that was probably once a carriage house, I looked towards the place where I wanted my subjects to stand. A toad sat there. We stared at him for half a minute and he then lazily hopped on to the bricks and disappeared under one. He did not reappear so we got on with the photography.

Leader of the pack

I was photographing a friend sitting outside a gallery in Beacon, NY where his work is on display when Caroline noticed Megan. She was locked in a kiss with a boy but they eventually released each other and I was able to ask if I could photograph them. Her boy friend did not want to but Megan and her sister and friend agreed to it.

Same girl, different chicken

Same girl eighteen months older, different chicken in new location. Daylight from windows down the entire side of an old carriage house: my studio until my fingers freeze to the camera.

The shot I missed was of her father carrying the chicken in a cage covered with a scarlet cloth across a wide lawn in the rain.

Young chef

I sat in my studio of the day (a 40ft potting shed lit by a bank of windows down one entire side), waiting for Laura to finish preparing cucumbers in the kitchen where she works at the Garrison Institute. She walked in and stood in front of me. "Where do you want me?"

"There, by that pile of bricks. Stand there, just the way you are standing now."