My new books

I recently published a series of photographic magazines titled Photographique A Journal.

In the mid-70s I was a professional photographer and this past summer I started looking through boxes and boxes of old contact sheets and negatives that I had put away on the top shelf of a storage cabinet far out of reach. I dug out the old 35mm black and white negatives, got a scanner, and went to work. 

The first magazine I did is called Ghostly Mansions of the Hudson Valley. I took these photographs when I was in my 20s living at home in the Hudson Valley. At that time, there were a number of empty abandoned mansions nearby and I spent days wandering around photographing them. 

The second magazine Erie Canal are photographs I took when I worked on a tugboat that hauled empty sand barges from New York Harbor to Buffalo along the Erie Canal which celebrates it’s 200th anniversary this year. I was the cook and made three trips, each one took over three weeks to complete. 

The next magazine is titled Wabi with photographs that describe the Japanese term Wabi an over used word that I’ve described in a startling new way. 

Each magazine is from 64 – 78 pages and you can preview them by clicking on the images above. This winter I’ll be working on a 4th in the series. I’m not sure yet what it will be called, but it will have images from my time in Aspen, Colorado when I lived there as a ski bum in the mid-70s. 

I’d love to know what you think of these magazines. They are being sold at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, NY and here online. Please write me any critique to bettina [at] teahouspress.com

Enjoy!

Zen Sand

Bamboo shadows sweep the stairs

The dust does not move

Moonlight pierces to the pool’s bottom

The water is unmarked.

Because there is

I picked up a little book of poems titled The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy. After months of looking at Instagram and Pinterest and reading very little, it was a joy to discover these poems.

Lighthouse

Its vision sweeps its one path
like an aged monk raking a garden,
his question long ago answered or moved on.
Far off, night-grazing horses,
breath scented with oatgrass and fennel,
step through it, disappear, step through it,
disappear.

– Jane Hirshfield

The distant mountains
are reflected in the eye
of the Dragonfly

– Kobayashi Issa

The ink dark moon

It’s true, the wind blows terribly here.

But moonlight also leaks

between the roof planks

of this ruined house.

– Izumi Shikibu (translated by Jane Hirshfield)