Organic Marriages

We heard about another marital breakup today.  This news seems to be a common feature of our stage of life. To our own surprise, we woke up one metaphorical morning recently to find our marriage a much more complicated thing than we ever thought it could be.  We were the "perfect" couple, or so we were frequently told.  Maybe that was wishful thinking on someone's part, that there really is such a thing, like unicorns or great white whales.  The news would appear to be bleak, according to current figures.

We have come to learn that marriage is not a thing apart from us in which we dwell, but a living entity that demands the same nurturing, tending, and attention that a garden does in order to thrive and produce.  Leave a garden untended, and the weeds take over, the flowers go to seed, the lettuce turns bitter.  Our marriage is a good one, twenty years in the making, but we just figured out the garden analogy.  The friend of ours who just let us know his marriage ended mentioned that he and his partner had become roommates.  We'd heard that same line in the movie "Date Night."  It's an easy role to fall into.  Comfort is a great thing, but it can easily morph into numbness.   We've been making the extra effort to tend not only each other, but ourselves, even consulting a professional.  It's weeding time.

We're planting our garden and cleaning up from a stormy winter.  We're tending things outside and in.  We fell in love over 20 years ago for reasons we've recently decided to uncover and bring fully back to life, and even finding new reasons. It's spring.

A New Book

Three years ago, I came across a photograph I made  in Greece of olives on a branch.  It wasn't an image that would stand out, but it led me to take a new look at a body of work and gave me an idea for a new book.

I spent the next year editing images from dozens of trips to the country Andrea and I have been traveling to for 25 years.  Our kids have been to Greece so often that when they were younger they thought they were Greek.

My first book The Greek File / Images From a Mythic Land was published by Rizzoli in 2001 and sold well, considering it was a personal set of images done in black and white.  At the time, publishers told me that the market for a book like The Greek File was miniscule -- despite the fact that the country draws over 11 million tourists a year.   

My new book,  Hellas Photographs of Modern Greece will be published in Fall 2010 by Hudson Hills Press.  The introduction was written by Louis deBernieres, whose books include Captain Corelli's Mandolin and our favorite, Birds Without Wings.  It's common in the summer for our family to be buried reading on a quiet beach in the Aegean and usually there's one or two of deBernieres' books among the pile we carry. 

Book ideas are something I think about constantly, but most ideas briefly sizzle then fizzle for one reason or another.  For Hellas, it wasn't until Joanna Hurley, a book agent and packager, introduced me to David Skolkin, a book designer from Santa Fe, that the project became concrete.

David, Joanna, and Leslie Van Breene from Hudson Hills Press, the publisher, came to Bedford two weeks ago to discuss, review, edit and begin to sequence the images.  The advice of all three melded beautifully with my original concept for Hellas.  

Watching David pair images on the viewing board in our studio was magical -- it was like watching a musical arranger work with a score.  Moving small prints around and reviewing the flow beginning to end over and over for 8 hours was joy for me.  deBernieres, without prompting, wrote an introduction about how Greece  endured several horrendous decades of world war, civil war, military dictatorships and other crises yet went from a third world country into a proud member of the EU.  This was precisely what the book was for me and as deBernieres points out, many of the people I photographed had lived through the tumultuous birth of modern Greece.

All this effort has laid the groundwork for what will be a beautifully produced volume that started with a somewhat inconsequential image but we hope will become a substanative document of a place our whole family loves.

We'll post updates on the progress of the book as well as how you can pre-order a copy along with a one of a series of limited edition print over the next few weeks.

Advice For Parents of HS Juniors

It’s April.  By now, most high school seniors are wearing sweatpants emblazoned with the name of their future alma mater.  Juniors are sweating through their first stabs at the SATs or ACTs.  Their parents of both are sweating over the thought of paying for all those sweatpants, sweatshirts and tuitions.

We’re happily finished with our first run through the college applications gauntlet.  On December 10th, thanks to Early Decision, Zander became a Cornellian, class of 2014.

Here’s a short list of what we learned, and what can help you as you enter this fraught time.

1. You will drive yourselves crazy, no matter how many times people tell you it’s all going 
to work out fine.  We remember going to sleep obsessing and waking up still swirling.  To talk 
me down, we’d call friends who had a kid a year ahead of ours.  They’d tell us:  RELAX!  
It all works out in the end.  Even a "wrong" decision is remediable.  Transfers are fairly common!

2.  Start by looking at schools not too far from home just as practice. With every visit, you 
and your child learn something about what you'd like and what you'd not like in a school.  
You start to trust your response to a place.  Places you are sure you won't like can often 
surprise you.  Places you expect to love, you may not feel anything for. 

3.  Have your guidance counselor come up a with a list of possibilities based on your 
child’s profile.  That less subjective list is one you can cross reference against  your own 
research.

4.  Is there a Naviance program that your school subscribes to?  It is an amazing search 
engine.  You answer a long series of questions and it gives you a list of matching schools.  
Then you can plot your child on their acceptance graph to see how he/she stacks up.  It 
shows how other students from your school did in applying to a certain school, and what 
kind of profile they had.

5.  If the SATs are not a strength for your kid, consider the ACTs with writing.  It's an easier 
test for many, and most of the schools, including the top ones, accept it interchangeably 
now.  One of the benefits is you don't have to take a math SAT2, as it works as an 
achievement test.

6.  One of the things they tell you when you go to the various lectures they give to junior 
and senior parents:  don't base your judgement of a school on what it was like when you 
were in high school.  That's a really long time ago!!

7.  Decisions made as a junior can be turned over once they’re well into their senior year. 
That maturation that happened over the year can yield a whole different set of responses.

8. Every one says it so it must be true, that if your child don't get into a place, he/she didn't 
belong there.  They end up quickly forgetting that they ever did want to go there, and 
embraces the school that chooses him.

9. It's early April.  You have until next November to get applications in, and that's for early 
decision.  Keep moving towards the prize, but don't pressure yourselves to come up with a 
definite list yet.  It really has to evolve. 
 
10.  Early Decision.  It pressures you in the Fall, but boy is it nice to be done with the 
process by mid December.  You also save money by not sending out a million applications!  
If you don't get in,  you kid can have those other applications ready to go.

On Tour with Hasselblad and RETV

I was recently asked by Resource TV and Magazine
to demonstrate the newest Hasselblad camera, the H4D-40 and
The Broncolor Scoro lighting system on the NYC leg of their
Stage Three Tour at Milk Studios. 
Resource produced a video of the event which
you can view here.

Getting Personal on Shoots

Personal photographs come from a lot of places.

Most of the images in my new book (Hellas, Photographs of Modern Greece / Hudson Hills Press) came from shoots done over a 15 year period for Conde Nast Traveler.  On a commercial or editorial shoot, I'm always looking for photographs to make for myself--to complete or continue a body of portfolios that are often, ongoing, life long projects.

On a shoot I did this week for Ralph Lauren Home, I was fascinated by a crystal skull that Ralph Lauren offers.  Natalie Han, the Art Director, John Davison, the Stylist, and I collaborated on a small still life trying to make the skull work but in the end decided to use something else.

It's a great object.  Someone on the shoot said it looked like something a wealthy rock star would own.  It reminded me of a Robert Mapplethorpe self-portrait done shortly before he died as well as still lifes of his and Irving Penn's.  It reminded me of a lot of things.   After we were done with the photograph we needed to make, I decided to make the skull mine.  It might work with a series of images I'm making called Flesh+Bones.

Our Favorite Frame

We found this frame at a flea market in Paris a few years ago.   It's made of white pine and was unpainted when we bought it.  We added a few coats of white high gloss Schreuder Paint -- a paint we first noticed on the doors in Santorini.

A frame should neutralize the surrounding area and highlight the image. The wide face, rounded profile and raised moulding of this frame is a simple design but adds great dimension to a photograph.
We've just gotten a router and miter saw to see if we can build ones in various sizes using this frame as a template.  

We've collected frames for years-- loading up the car with finds at yard sales often paying as little as a dollar each.  We'll then sand and paint them in a uniformed color and hang them in a salon style.  It's a wonderfully inexpensive and beautiful way to display art that we'll talk about soon.  

Another Medium

With three children, we've recorded hours and hours of video over the last 18 years.   We only viewed it in bits until Andrea came up with a great idea.

When each of the kids turned 13, she  painstakingly edited the best clips from from the many hours compiled.  She then took those clips to the daughter of a friend who had editing experience (her dad's a director so she grew up with cameras, sound and editing tools around her).

With the addition of music (one of Andrea's many passions), well-edited sequencing and pacing, the resulting 20 minute DVDs are prized parts of the family history which we now view regularly and the kids continue to be proud of.  While it did take a lot of time and commitment to cull the clips, the hours of laughing and tears that came from Andrea as she poured through the tapes was a bonus.

I recently got Apple's I-movie and started shooting video clips with my Leica D-Lux 4.  This compact camera fits into my pocket and has allowed me to not only take stills but to record reasonably good quality video.  Granted, I'd not use the Leica on a commercial shoot but having this small camera with me allows me to make images I'd otherwise not have gotten.

Last week, on a warm spring evening, Simon and I made a short video out on our lawn.  We developed a story extemporaneously and shot ten minutes of video that was edited in a few hours over a weekend on I-movie.  You can watch the video called Boy and Bird, here.

I'm shooting video for various reasons--to keep documenting my family and for professional purposes.    The successful introduction this week of the I-pad and Conde Nast's committment to producing online editions of several of its titles is proof of a publishing revolution in progress.  Wired Magazine and Adobe recently produced a short film about the changing landscape of publishing.  It's exciting, eye-opening, and impetus to keep me working with video. 

Dominique Browning's Losing it.

On an interiors shoot, mourning changes and losses in the shelter magazine world is a continuous conversation.

No magazine's loss seems to elicit more emotion than that of House and Garden.  In this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine, former H+G editor Dominique Browning wrote a beautiful piece on her life after the publication closed.  It's an excerpt from “Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas and Found Happiness,” to be published next month by Atlas & Co.

You can read this great excerpt here.

The Family History

I've photographed each of our three kids since the first was born 18 years ago.  I don't always have a camera in hand and have on more than one occasion had to acknowledge I was sorry to miss photographing a moment but I learned to settle myself by acknowledging that I was glad to, at least, see the moment. 

Each year I take take time to continue this series of photographs and when we moved into our house in Bedford nearly 14 years ago, we started hanging the images along the walls between our and the kid's bedrooms.  There are images of each of our three children--in equal proportion--uniformly printed, matted and framed.  I use a frame by Nielsen Bainbridge called Profile 33 in contrast grey.  Because of all the changes in photographic media, there's a wide array of print types.  Some are gelatin silver with newer images made on an Epson Stylus 9800 printer on Cranes Silver Rag Museo Fine Art paper.  Museo has gelatin silver print qualities and allowing us to match the older prints not only in color but in tone.

While there's numerous ways to display images like this,  we love the uniformity along this small hallway.   There's a thrill in seeing our history every day and each year the history grows.

The Talented Ripley Swan

Between Zander's college application process and our normal work and parenting schedule, we disappeared.  

Zander got into Cornell Arts + Sciences and his great friend and Pine Island Camp Alum, Rippy, got into Tufts -- both, early decision.  Today, The New York Times did a story featuring the talented Rippy Swan's You Tube video application.   We have to say, we're not surprised.  The Swan's are great people and Pine Island's a remarkable program.  We often say that if the world's to be saved it'll come from someone who went to PIC.

Summer Photographs in January

I still shoot film.  Processing the film, making contact sheets, editing, and then scanning and printing is time consuming.  We often don't get to see the completed body of work I do during our family summer trips until mid winter.  It's a great time of year to work on our ongoing family history--the framed images that line the hallway of our home and cover the 18 years of our kid's lives.  I love the speed and ease of digital image making but this slow process is like a wonderful alchemy and the richness of these silver images cannot be matched by pixels.  Matting, framing, sequencing, and hanging the images are next and we'll show you how we do that over the next few entries.

New Year's Eve 2009

HOPE

Family To Do List

Simple and sociable things to do around a table in winter that don't involve eating:

• Cutting out paper snowflakes in all kinds of colors.
• Making orange and clove pomanders in untraditional patterns.
  
• Decoupaging bottles, plates, trays or cigar boxes with cutouts from holiday cards and magazines.
• Making bird feeders from pine cones, peanut butter and seed.
• Playing games like Boggle, Smartmouth, Scrabble, and Spit.

It's surprising how these basic pleasures can truly engage all ages, and become  the high point of a holiday at home.

Simple Homemade Gift No. 2

A jar, can, or bag of homemade granola with the recipe  It's simple to make and always well received.  

Our homemade granola recipe can be found here.

Simple Homemade Gift No. 1

A pretty cork-stoppered bottle filled with a simple vinaigrette.  My crowd pleasing recipe came via the chef at a house we stayed at on Mustique while on one of Bill's shoots for the Conde Nast Traveler.  She said she got it via the New York Times years ago.
6 TBS (or parts) Olive Oil

3 TBS (or parts) White Vinegar

1 TBS (or part) Sugar

1 TBS (or part) French’s Yellow Mustard

salt and pepper

dried basil

1 or more crushed clove garlic


I include the recipe on a hang-tag, crediting Matilda form Mustique.

Chappy Chanuka

It’s December 9, and Christmas-mania is upon us.  As a mixed-breed family (Andrea Jewish, Bill Catholic), we have forged our own holiday traditions, customizing a meaningful way to celebrate both special times with our family.  Now, truth be told, Chanuka, which begins at sunset on December 11th, just can’t compete with Christmas in terms of the decorative possibilities, the music choices, the lights and the pageantry. So, from the beginning, we’ve never tried to equate them. We intentionally set up a low-key, yet ultimately satisfying and meaningful way to celebrate the Jewish holiday of lights.

Early on, we learned that trying to make Chanuka more special by giving gifts all eight nights was a recipe for tears.  The holiday became about what they were “getting” that night.  Somehow, there was built-in disappointment, as so much rode on that one gift.  An unattractive greed seeped in, no matter how carefully we explained to the kids how things were going to work over the course of the eight nights.  So, here’s what we began to do, and it gave Chanuka its own shape and specialness, separate and distinct from Christmas.

The primary activity for each night of Chanuka was the lighting of the candles.  Each kid had his or her own menorah, whether an old family one or a homemade one.  They got to pick out their own candle color scheme, put them in themselves, and most exciting, light them.  On the first night of Chanuka, each child got a stack of gifts, big and small, but a nice pile to tear through.  And that was it for the gifts.

Aside from the menorahs, the constant for Chanuka every year was a big jar of dreidls that came down from the attic, along with a stack of Chanuka books and videos collected over the years.  After that, we had something out of the ordinary planned for each of the other seven nights.  One night we’d have a party with each child allowed to invite a friend and their family, with latkes (the smell, oh, the smell), decorations, dreidl, candles, and the exchanging of small gifts (dollar store type stuff).  Every year, we’d find some Chanuka-related crafts.  (Check the internet, there’s plenty of them!)  Another night, we’d have dinner with friends.  It didn’t matter if they were Jewish or not; the idea was to share our traditions with others.  One night we’d go ice-skating or night sleigh-riding, or to a movie.  Another night, we would do some charitable activity, whether it was to provide meals to a homeless shelter, or bring donations to a community center.

Usually, by this point, it was enough for the remaining nights to light candles and eat more latkes.  Everyone was happy and sated, and it was, for all, a Happy Chanuka!

Happy Thanksgiving

Chicken

Our children do not love our chickens like we love our chickens. They don’t share our pleasure in the beauty of these funny fowl.  They don’t find the humor in their poultriesque profile the way we do, with their oversized breasts, skinny pale white legs, and ungainly gait (the chickens, not our children). We worry about our hens in the middle of a frigid night.  We feel sorry for them when daylight runs short come late October, and think how boring it must be to be so cooped up for so many dark hours.  Pity them after a rainy day around the pen, their bright white feathers  so bedraggled, sodden, and dark with mud. 

When we insist that someone else open their hatch in the morning, we wonder if they greet the chickens with a “Good Morning, Girls!” like we do.  Or, at night, if we can compel someone else to go lock them in, do they wish the hens a “Goodnight, ladies?”  (Don’t think so)  Who else but Bill and I stand rapt as they race down their gangplank, our noses pressed up to the mesh, to study which bits and pieces of freshly dumped compost are considered the choicest morsels?  (No one else.) Doesn’t anyone else in the family get that a simple pizza crust, or the soggy remnants of their leftover cereal, or the skins from a peeled apple can brighten the day of a chicken otherwise faced with scratching around the same patch of barren dirt day after day?  And, by the way, it is not crazy to bring home a restaurant doggy bag for the chickens.  You know the saying:  one man’s leftover salad is a chicken’s feast.

Our children generally tolerate our attitude toward the chickens--except when it involves them.  The open bucket on the counter in which we collect every crumb and scraping and remnant of food is a frequent source of conflict.  “Get it out of here,” Zander commands as he eats his breakfast nearby.  “I can smell it, and I don’t want to look at it.”  Don’t you care about the chickens?  “They are low on my list of priorities right now,” he’ll say.  Sure, they’ll eat those delicious eggs everyday, but what are they willing to pay for those eggs? Too little.

These days, our children are pretty useless for closing down the coop after dark.  Having recently seen a spate of scary movies and having been introduced to the delicious terror of the Ouija board, they will not set foot out near the coop in the blackness.  So it’s me or Bill, unless the kids can be coerced to go as a team, armed with flashlights.  We just can’t risk leaving the hatch open over night.  The chickens are sitting ducks against those clever creatures of the night, the foxes and raccoons.  During the day, should the chickens make a break from their pen, which sometimes happens, it’s as good as serving them on a silver platter to the hawks that find their heads the most delectable part.  (These are some of the ways we went from an original flock of 30, down to six.)

People wonder why we keep chickens?   “Lawn art,” we’ve always said.  They’re beautiful to watch.  We’ve never given them names, as it’s just too hard to discern one from the next.  But there was once one very special chicken who stood out from the crowd.  It was easy.  She was the only one left of her crowd; they’d all been eaten somehow.  read chicken's full story here.

URGENT ADVICE FOR PARENTS OF TEENS!

OK.  This is not a scam.   It doesn’t cost anything.  It is not hard. It doesn’t involve extra time.  But it works, and it works really fast.  Take it from Bill and me.   We started this trial last Friday, and by Saturday we saw changes.  At first it was directed at one of our children who was being, shall we say, difficult.  But it was so effective, it made sense to apply it to all three of our kids, and we wonder: why we didn’t figure this out sooner?

The secret to better relations between parents and teens?  Good old fashioned “behavior mod” as psychotherapist Dr. JoAnn Magdoff calls it.  We are doing something called “LISTENING” to our kids. We are not offering unasked for opinions, positive or negative.  We do not make helpful suggestions.  We do not tell them how they can do things better than they’re already doing them. When asked for help in making a choice or a decision, we offer two or three options (all options we’d accept) just like when they were toddlers.  Remember, “Do you want to eat apple slices or carrots?”  “Do you want to wear your purple fleece or your gray sweater?”   “Do you want to take your nap on the bed or the sofa?” We put our kids in control of the decisions they make, while making all outcomes perfectly acceptable ones.

Our kids do not want to hear how we would do something.  They do not want to hear that their plan to meet at this one’s house to go to that place makes no sense.  They do not want to hear that the lunch bag you put their lunch in is more practical than the one they'd rather carry.  Get it?  “Sit on your hands,” says Magdoff.  “Keep your opinion to yourself.”  They will do stupid things.  They will make bad choices, yes, and often.  They will, however, be much more willing to tell you things, show you things, and even ask what you think if you refrain from telling them how what they’re doing is not the best way, your way, or in any way not good enough.

Our kids are opening up to us more.  They're telling us things.   They're in a better mood!  So what if they don't wear a warm enough jacket today? If they are cold, tomorrow they'll make a better choice--without us even telling them to!

How could we not have been doing this all along?

NOTE: Our kids are definitely not following this blog, so the secret of our technique seems pretty safe. Don’t give it away!