Old World Considerations

If we seem to be rummaging around my image closet looking for something, that's because we are. The images in this post are all from 4x5 transparency film exposed to natural light, speaking of old world.

At least now the subject matter draws us ever closer toward home...

Once upon  time, I frequented the heritage architecture theme park Old World Wisconsin.

Like most of the docents I've met at historic preservation sites everywhere, the folk then in charge of OWW were kind to me. Due to their generosity of spirit, under controlled circumstances I finally learned how to really wield the Linhof. That later served me exceptionally well when working wreckage in the uncontrollable wild.

For two years and a bit I danced in light mostly planned for in advance…

…and when not that, then at complete liberty to take a chance on the passing happy accident:

Being as it's a theme park, the work I did at OWW falls outside my portfolio's core purpose and is little seen.

Except there I'd the luxury of shooting everything and anything just the way I saw it, while remaining physically safe. At OWW I exposed large format film in crazy bad light and shot what the hell I pleased, regardless of technical or aesthetic odds. My time there allowed me to dare without consequence and that taught me sometimes we might succeed beyond all reason to expect, should we creatively dare.

I'd been working my way through the image library for a project and came to think about creative community. Upon revisiting the Old World Wisconsin work, I recalled that when the winds of political change came to OWW, they swept away my last best chance to thank the devoted, previous caretakers for helping enable me to be the large format shooter I later became.

Many, many things go into creative success. There's vision and drive and purpose. Certainly, pigheadedness. Talent's a factor. Thankfully, craft can be studied and learned. Critically, there's also opportunity. That never comes to many (most?) creatives. The absence of opportunity is a hard wall before which folk's notion of any brass ring fails.

I believe that above all, the generosity of spirit that's met me on the long way to here proved instrumental. Barring the kindness of devoted if woefully undervalued docents and myriad others -- most of whom never knew me from Adam but sensed we shared common cause -- I'd never have been who I am, nor done what I have.

Plainly, the only way for any culture to develop good will into an operative asset is to nurture, protect and value common cause, whether through art or in life. I creatively executed common cause with those bygone docents at Old World Wisconsin, only because they first cared to recognize it in me.

The carefully reconstructed and preserved narrative delivered on the fields of Old World Wisconsin explicitly belongs to successive waves of immigrants who once emigrated from mostly shithole countries to then mostly shithole true blue American Wisconsin. In common cause they took to the task of hacking national vision from wilderness, even if/when they didn't know it and/or that wasn't at all the intention.

Some might say this immigrant's tale together with these images of old world tools looking every bit still capable of sweeping all kinds of shit clean is just a happy accident.

But they'd be wrong.