Well, it’s happened again. For the first time in several days I forgot my little point-and-shoot Sony on my walk this morning with Bodhi, my Yellow Lab Retriever and favorite sidekick. And for the first time in as many days, all seven of the horses in the paddock down our country road lined up at the fence to pose and stare at us, their heads all perfectly parallel. Probably not a prize winner, but the first photograph worth taking in more than a week. If I hadn’t forgotten my camera, that is. Damn.
Will I never learn? Once, in Key West, where my wife Jane and I spend half the year, the day I forgot to bring a camera on my morning walk I saw a woman walking a pig on a leash – her pet, I’m guessing, all 300 plus pounds of him. (Or maybe it was a sow I saw.) Though I rarely left my camera behind on subsequent walks, sad to say porky did not pass my way again. And I still occasionally head out without it.
In summer we live in the foothills of the Berkshires. The rolling countryside is breathtakingly beautiful, with cattle and horses on both sides of the two-lane road that runs by our house. Very few vehicles. But after a few weeks—never mind the more than half a century I’ve been coming here—my morning walks turn a bit ho-hum, at least photographically.
I suspect I’m not alone in this regard, that no matter how much may be going on before our very eyes, at some point most photographers begin to crave fresh woods and pastures new. (Yes, I know: the renowned 20th century master Edward Steichen – credited, along with Alfred Stieglitz, with turning photography into an art form – spent his last years taking pictures of a single tree in all weather and seasons on his Connecticut farm, where he died a few days before his 94th birthday in March, 1973.)
As for myself, self-unemployed after a mostly exhilarating career in journalism, I am lucky enough to divide my time between my two favorite places on the planet: Key West, Florida in winter (of course), and Dutchess County, New York, about a hundred miles north of Manhattan, in summer. No matter where the morning comes, I walk and listen to books while Bodhi pulls me this way and that, sniffing the ground for anything even remotely edible. In Key West, desiccated iguanas are his snack of choice; in New York it’s anything he can get into his mouth and swallow, or try to. Labs are notorious omnivores, with the emphasis on the omni.
After so many years walking the New York route – Bodhi is 10, and, like me, showing his age – I don’t take as many pictures on it as I used to. I’ll snap a few when the weather has radically altered the landscape – the first frost, an approaching thunderstorm, snow on the ground – or when the neighbor’s horses cavort appealingly, as they did this morning. “Road photography” you might call it – street photography it isn’t.
To a purist, neither is the fox hunt that leaves, two or three Saturday mornings each summer from the field behind our house. I’m not wild about the idea of foxes being killed, whether by hounds or hunters. But I have to admit I find the riders in their “pink” coats heading out – a pack of excited beagles or basset hounds barely able to contain themselves – photographically irresistible. And most of the time, or so the hunters say, they don’t tree any foxes. (Color me skeptical.)
Summer’s weekly polo matches, open to the public, have also yielded a few shots worth keeping. And the changing colors of the autumn leaves invariably get my juices flowing. Otherwise, it’s luck, perseverance and serendipity that keeps my shutter clicking – like a neighbor rescuing a cat cowering under his house or the time the Doric columns on our church needed repair – inside as well as out.
I keep telling myself I should go to Poughkeepsie, about a 40-minute drive away, and document that city-in-decline. Street photography to be sure, and mean streets at that. But while I keep promising myself to go, I never seem to get around to it. It’s one of many things that, the older I get, the more “eminently postpone-able” they become.
Funky Key West is an entirely different story: there’s always something to shoot, whether it’s an octopus hanging from a balcony, a cat on a hot tin roof, a tiger on a truck, a panhandling dog in sunglasses or, ugh, an iguana in the city cemetery. Or people bearing parrots. Not into animals? You can pay homage to William Eggleston, take in the “scenery” at the beach, document Rosalind Brackenbury reading her latest novel, or capture a late-night reveler sleeping it off the morning after.
Walking Bodhi in Key West, I’ll usually photograph one or two Old Town houses, their flowers and pastel colors heightened by the morning sun. By altering my route a bit, I’m able to build a portfolio of “conch” houses – a mixture of New England ships’ carpentry and Bahamian architecture. (A conch, pronounced “konk” is a large edible mollusk – once pervasive, now rare, in the Florida Keys. It is also the name given to those born in the Keys as well as an adjective used to modify almost anything unique to the Keys.)
Most mornings Bodhi and I walk to the 5 Brothers Grocery & Sandwich Shop, not quite 15-minutes from our house. While Bodhi patiently waits outside, Pepe, the barrister/proprietor (and son of one of the original five brothers) plays his espresso machine like a concert pianist. Even more impressive is his knowing, by sight, just how his scores of “regulars” – perhaps hundreds – take their morning café con leche. (A man of few words or just too busy to make small talk, to him I’m probably “Medium Two Sugars.” Speaking of anonymous regulars, there’s a particularly photogenic customer – “Double Bucci” I call him – who lets me take his picture.)
The city’s main drag, Duval Street, offers opportunities galore for street photography, thanks to the endless parade of tourists in all manner of mostly inappropriate attire going in and out of the honky-tonk tee-shirt shops or overpaying for drinks and nachos at its many watering spots. My recent photographic excursions to Duval Street, which I otherwise try to avoid, include a shirtless boy window-shopping; a tableau in front of “Sloppy Joes,” the bar where Hemingway used to get pretty sloppy himself; and a “family” man, with two women and two small dogs, taking in the sights from what appears to be a glorified golf mobile.
Mallory Square, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico at the north end of Duval, is where tourists and locals alike gather each evening to watch a carnival’s worth of street performers – musicians, magicians, tightrope walking cats and dogs, jugglers on unicycles – provide the warm-up acts to the main attraction: an almost invariably spectacular sunset.
Elusive pet pigs not withstanding (and not perambulating), capturing all-too-familiar sights poses special challenges, even in Key West. For instance, my daily Bodhi walks often feature a brief encounter with Key West’s iconic Conch Train, which circumnavigates Key West’s Old Town’s points of interest several times a day. When I see it heading my way, I quick draw my camera from its belted case and ready it for action. So far, so good; but shooting the train head-on, the “conductor” ’s rear-view mirror obscures his face. And if I wait to shoot as it passes, I include only the sightseers in the first car; after it’s passed me by, the engine disappears from view.
I don’t know how many photographs I’ve taken of the Conch Train but the one in my mind’s eye – the driver unobscured and the passengers looking interested and involved (and with no parked cars cluttering the background) – remains elusive. Frustrating? Yes indeed. But challenging, too. Isn’t that what street photography is all about?
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