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Erik Gould 5/9/15 Erik Gould 5/9/15

Bucket Week - Day Six

Here lies memory. I guess it has to be buried somewhere, and where better than in a photograph.

Memory.

This week in honor of the city of my residence and my daughter's home town, I have been featuring Pawtucket, Rhode Island, aka the 'Bucket'. This is this the last installment in this series.

I made this picture in 1994 on Sabin Street in Pawtucket. A sales yard for grave markers and headstones sits back from the corner, separated from the entrance to the Oak Grove Cemetery by a used car lot. With a large-format camera, knowing it can pick up lots of detail, I like to compose busy pictures and filling the frame from corner to corner. Here, I'm looking across an assortment of used cars to the monument yard and the old fashioned billboard for this family business. Oddly, even though the Grahams are no longer authorized dealers for Rock of Ages, they left the sign and just made an attempt to paint out the name.

I often place a key detail at or near the very center, but I keep it small. It might be a word, a bit of text, or some other element that functions as a visual joke or pun. I did so here: the painted headstone with the word "Memory" on it is likely what prompted me to stop and get the camera set up in the first place. Here lies memory. It has to be buried somewhere, and where better than in a photograph.

Below is an image I made 20 years later, in 2014. I wasn't attempting to recreate the scene, but many of the elements repeat. The family monument business continues as does the used car lot. The banners are gone, as is the Rock of Ages sign. The central billboard has been renewed and done over in reverse typography. The headstone of memory remains, now in a stylish and contemporary black granite. The lot is emptier, and the vines are overtaking the crane, but the scene continues. Perpetually, the telephone poles run akimbo down Sabin Street.

Erik Gould 5/8/15 Erik Gould 5/8/15

Bucket Week - Day Five

Confusion and mystery are great motivators.

Archive finds - Pawtucket in the '90s

This week in honor of the city of my residence and my daughter's home town, I will be featuring Pawtucket, Rhode Island, aka the 'Bucket'.

Gas Holder and Apartments, Pawtucket, 1992.

This picture from 1992 has always been among my personal favorites. I was very new to Rhode Island, hadn't even found a job yet and I was living with my girlfriend on Hope street. She had a job in Pawtucket and i would drive her there in the morning and pick her up in the afternoon. I didn't know anything about Pawtucket. I knew one way to get to her workplace. I would go up Hope street, pass my favorite intersection of Ridge and Pidge, pass the Almacs where we shopped. Before the days of wayfinding tools and geolocational support you could get lost. These things are great aids to personal navigation but the feeling of being lost and stumbling upon some place new and unexpected can be a great stimulant for a photographer. I think that always knowing exactly where I am with the help of an app is not the most conducive state of mind if I wish to be receptive to a new place. Confusion and mystery are great motivators. Curiosity is king.

On this day I wasn't entirely lost, but I was exploring. On my way up Hope street there was a little sign shortly after Hope became East Ave. that said 'downtown' with an arrow pointing right. So poor then was my notion of the relationship between spaces I wasn't totally sure what downtown this was. Was there more of Pawtucket that I hadn't seen yet? Did this circle around somehow to downtown Providence? I went right and then down a steep hill.

I came upon two of those great giant trash can like structures that were used to hold natural gas. These things have intrigued me since childhood and these two seemed to be sitting right within a residential neighborhood. On Taft street (was there a Pawtucket connection to our largest President?) I saw the gasometers looming over a house and a row of apartments which sat glowing in the afternoon light. I found my spot, planted the tripod and rushed to focus, afraid somehow that something with fly away. It can be really hard sometimes to slow down and take a good look at the groundglass image. I wanted that truck, I wanted that child's bike on the right, I didn't want the shadows to climb much higher. Quick with the film holder, exposure, flip, exposure and that was that. Couldn't afford to shoot more film but I knew I didn't need to.

I didn't find my way to 'downtown' that afternoon but i'd forgotten that anyway.

Andrew Wertz found this on Shorpy. A Kodachrome from 1941.

Erik Gould 5/7/15 Erik Gould 5/7/15

Bucket Week - Day Four

Downtown in winter.

This week in honor of the city of my residence and my daughter's home town, I will be featuring Pawtucket, Rhode Island, aka the 'Bucket'.

At Summer St. and North Union, downtown Pawtucket, 1994

Today's pair represents something that I rarely do, which is to say something that I do all the time. That is take multiple, slightly different views at one location. I do that often, what I usually don't do is promote more than one view as the work goes forward. Normally I will make a choice, or feel the choice has been made for me, one is usually clearly the "best", or the best I could do. With these I've continued to like both variants. Although I don't remember I believe they are shown here in the order I made them. I framed up the first and then moved forward for the second. I think the shadows agree with that. There is one thing here that shows something that I do rarely do: photograph snow. My guess is this is late winter. Made with a 4x5 camera on Tri-X film.

Erik Gould 5/6/15 Erik Gould 5/6/15

Bucket Week - Day Three

In Oak Grove.

This week in honor of the city of my residence and my daughter's home town, I will be featuring Pawtucket, Rhode Island, aka the 'Bucket'.

Some people are put off by pictures of cemeteries. Some people are put off by cemeteries in general. Not me. I find they are great places to explore, full of interesting names and fragments of interesting stories. They are usually relaxing places to photograph in as well. No traffic, often no people at all (above ground anyway) so you can mess about with your gear and not feel stressed. There are exceptions. Swan Point in Providence has a strict policy regarding photography and they will chase you out. Hasn't stopped me though, you just need to be quick(ish). In cemeteries within urban environments I find I'm drawn to the ways that the city of the living relates visually to the city of the dead, how the streets line up or how a row of headstones is echoed by a row of houses. This is very likely something else that Walker Evans has taught us to see. These two photographs are almost back to back from each other. I love the detail of the little lamb (a child's grave) in the lower right of the second image. These were made with a 4x5 camera on Tri-X film.

Erik Gould 5/5/15 Erik Gould 5/5/15

Bucket Week - Day Two

US Route 1.

This week in honor of the city of my residence and my daughter's home town, I will be featuring Pawtucket, Rhode Island, aka the 'Bucket'.

Broadway, Pawtucket, looking south, 1995

This picture was made in 1995. I had an idea to photograph Route 1 in Rhode Island from north to south. This is almost as far as I got. It did lead to other projects: the intersection set and a walk down RI route 2. This is a 4x5 camera image on HP-5 film.

Erik Gould 5/3/15 Erik Gould 5/3/15

Bucket Week - Day One

On the W.E. trail.

This week in honor of the city of my residence and my daughter's home town, I will be featuring Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Pawtucket will be kicking off it's campaign for the 2015 Pawtucket Arts Festival on Thursday. A worthy effort.

I made this image in 1993, not too long after I arrived in Rhode Island from upstate NY. I was working then exclusively with a 4x5 camera and I had just begun the work that became the Rhode Island Photographs project. This image is an homage of sorts to Walker Evans, and it is fair to say that almost everything I was doing then was an homage to Evans. Evans did a great series on war monuments during his time with the FSA. He was responding to photographs made of monuments during the Civil War, photographs he attributed to Mathew Brady, although we now know them to be made by others in Brady's employ. The Evans photographs inspired Lee Friedlander to make a series on monuments. I was thinking both of Friedlander and Evans when I made this.

Erik Gould 10/8/14 Erik Gould 10/8/14

Photos from a can

We replaced the regular camera in this photographer's bike bag with one made from a decaf coffee can. Let's see what happens:

The camera has my preferred 3 pinhole set up. I drill holes in the can and spray paint the inside flat black. I make pinholes in cinefoil which is just black aluminum foil, and then taped those in on the inside. Black tape for a shutter and all done. It's just that easy.

I use photo paper to make paper negatives. This time out I've been trying different ways to reduce contrast so i can get some better tonality in the images. Photo paper is made to be exposed to lamps in the 3200K range. This is multigrade paper and in normal printing you manipulate the contrast by exposing through colored filters, altering the color of light over a range from magenta to yellow. So I taped some yellow filtration behind the pinholes to cut down on the blue (high contrast) light reaching the paper. I had some success.

I also diluted the paper developer by half to slow the process down and give lighter tones a chance to develop, which is only fair.