To start off our new life here, we signed a lease yesterday on an apartment in this beautiful, semi-detached house, which is located deep in the woods above a beautiful rushing creek yet just five minutes from downtown Boone.

I will be transporting my historical consulting business to Boone and continuing to do historical work throughout the Southeast for the foreseeable future. Photography solutions are in the works; the full darkroom in Fairfax (at my father’s house) will still be accessible to me, and travel will take me through there on a regular basis, but I’ll also be looking for an arrangement closer to our new home–perhaps a shared darkroom space downtown. But that’s still several months out, at best.

Once we are settled, though, I look forward to sharing much more photography with all of you. And those long-term projects I’ve mentioned in the past are still on track for late this year and early next year. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you are a NOVA resident, I strongly encourage you to make it down to the Workhouse Arts Center for its annual BLOCK PARTY on September 3. During the afternoon (2 to 7pm), Teresa and I will be there selling various prints of mine from the past few years, including many of the images from the But One Man Alone… series, the few remaining images from the Eleusis series, and a handful of other works that may intrigue you. If you’ve never seen these images, you can get a sampling over there ========>. All work will be priced to sell, as we are not particularly keen on moving all of it again. (And yes, that should give you a hint about the big upcoming September announcement.) Work by other Workhouse artists will be available for sale as well, and 30% of all proceeds go directly into supporting education programs at the Workhouse.

Also that afternoon, from 5 to 7pm, is the “Friends and Family Exhibition Reception,” which features art pairings from Workhouse artists and a friend or family member of their choosing. Teresa and I entered these pieces, which were both shot on the same Agfa Click I camera. The Agfa Click I was a cheap Bakelite camera manufactured between 1958 and 1970 that takes 6×6 120 film, and this was our first time shooting with this particular camera. It’s fun, and one of Griffin’s favorites, too.

Anyway, we are delighted to make our images available for purchase, with a portion of the proceeds going to support programs at the Workhouse:

Eric Plaag, This Land Is Your Land (Seven Mile Bridge, Pigeon Key, FL), 2011

Teresa Plaag, This Land Is My Land (Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, OK), 2011

The Workhouse is a great place to visit, so make sure you wander on down for some fun in the prison yard!

Now, you may have heard the rumors, but I’m here to report that what they say is true.

I am indeed going to jail. The Workhouse, actually.

But before you freak out, I think you should sit down for a spell first and hear what I have to say.

It might be more interesting if I said this little stint in the big house had something to do with knocking the heads off parking meters, but actually, it’s all about making new art. This past month, I went through the jury process to become an Associate Artist at the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, VA. Once the site of Virginia’s infamous Lorton Reformatory (which housed DC’s criminals–go figure), the Workhouse and the rest of the prison closed in the late 1990s. In 2004, the Lorton Arts Foundation secured permission from Fairfax County to begin transforming the property into a cultural arts center, which had its grand opening in 2008.

As an Associate Artist, I am not presently maintaining studio space on site, but I am exhibiting work on a monthly basis. This month I’m featuring two pieces from my August 2010 joint show with Marshall Hodge and Tricia Hatfield, an exhibition better known as The Illusion of Truth: Three Photographers on Implicit Memory. This month’s featured pieces include Eros #8: Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Aletheia #6: Consider the Alternative.

Eros #8: Ballad of the Sad Cafe

Aletheia #6: Consider the Alternative

Both pieces will be on exhibition through June 2 and are available for sale at $300 each.

So, if I’m not keeping a studio (and therefore a darkroom) at the Workhouse, then how will I be making new work?

Relax, I’m not going digital.

Beginning this month, I’m in the process of a massive overhaul of a storage space in the basement. By the end of June, I should have a full at-home darkroom up and running, with new work to follow in the late summer months. There are several hundred rolls of shot but undeveloped film awaiting my attention, and I’m looking forward to all that comes next. Also on the way are two other projects using found negatives and diary entries. I have previously blogged about the first, Other People’s Lives, on this site (scroll down for details), and it now appears that this project will take much of the next year and a half to complete in the manner that I think is most appropriate for exhibition. The other project, tentatively titled EC Penty and the Playboy of Essex, conflates the experiences of two vastly different groups of people into one visual narrative. I will say no more about it for now, other than that I can’t wait to exhibit it, hopefully near the end of this year or early in 2012.

Stay tuned. In the meantime, I don’t care if it rains or freezes….

I am proud to announce (somewhat belatedly, I admit) the recent launch of a new film criticism blog site in partnership with my good friend Matt Smith. TheSplitScreen features new reviews, film criticism, and commentary, as well as occasional discussion of broader issues in media studies. Typically, each of us will post two or three articles each week, so there’s plenty to read about! Check it out and let us know what you think.

As a result of this development, movie reviews will no longer appear here in full, although I may occasionally post links here regarding new content at TheSplitScreen.

Recently, a Facebook “friend” posted a link to an assemblage of 50 photographs that defy explanation, which I in turn shared on my own Facebook newsfeed. After I emailed the site to my wife, she asked where the images came from–a question that, I confess, I had only briefly considered but did not research before enthusiastically passing them along.

Tracking down their most recent layer of origin, it turns out, was easy enough, and in the process, I thought I’d found my favorite new blog site of the moment. Black and WTF appears to be the brainchild of Matt Stopera, a 23-year-old New Yorker who solicits (or hunts down) weird and wacky black-and-white images from other web users. The images are fascinating and funny, and Stopera is good about citing a link with most of the images.

The only downside to this practice is that we often still don’t know–as my wife asked–where the images originally came from. The image shown above, for example, was copied from Stopera’s site, and he credits it (with a link) to “mlkshk,” a website that appears to do some image borrowing of its own, since they credit the image (with a link) to “Thrillist,” another website that appears to gank images from elsewhere and share them (this time without any credit to another image source).

Stopera isn’t to blame, of course, for the zany and labyrinthine nature of hyperlinks on blog sites, but his blog raises a question about the duty that we bloggers owe to the sources of our “borrowed” material. Is it enough to just say where we found it, or do we owe the original owner of the image something more than just giving credit to the (possible) thief who took it from him/her and posted it without permission?

I’d be interested in hearing the thoughts of my photo colleagues and other interested friends and lurkers….

Now that the insanity of the past year is finally settling down, I’m revisiting Ineffable Light and reconsidering the publisher question. Blurb has gone through several major updates, and countless reviews of late seem to reassure me that many of the problems I encountered three years ago have now been solved. In doing my research, however, I stumbled upon an outstanding, side-by-side review of POD publishers that fellow photographers might find helpful. The review dates to April 2010 but has been updated as of February 2011.

(The cover from the original, unpublished version of Ineffable Light)

So where does that leave me now? I was relieved to read that many of Blurb’s old problems didn’t surface for this guy, which echoed much of what I’ve read lately in other forums. I was also happy to learn that there’s a reliable, high-quality alternative in Inkubook, but I have to say that the pricing scheme would make my 110+ page book ridiculously expensive. So, Blurb, you’re going to get another shot from me.

Don’t screw it up this time.

For those who are keeping track, the revised version of Ineffable Light, which I hope to finish and FINALLY publish by summer, will include all images from the following series: “Eleusis,” “But One Man Alone…,” “Echoes of Narcissus,” “Eros” and “Aletheia,” and “Into the Dark.” Stay tuned….

When my wife first told me about a year ago that we were going that night to West Columbia’s New Brookland Tavern to hear what a friend had described (inaccurately) as “a retro-Confederate band” known as The Restoration, I nearly laughed out loud. I anticipated a bunch of 20-something hipsters dressed up in well-worn reenactment scrubs, playing washboards, jugs, and mouth harps, and lamenting the Lost Cause. I imagined lyrics filled with a tortured and twisted sense of nineteenth-century history sung by ill-educated young men who couldn’t find a history book in the Carolina Room at the local library.

Man, was I wrong. The crowd that night at New Brookland (and the rest of the bill, for that matter) did The Restoration no favors, but what I saw absolutely blew me away. After hearing a half dozen cuts from their then-forthcoming album Constance, I realized that something far too big and bold for Columbia was happening. At the time, I knew little about The Restoration’s grand vision, but I also knew that what lay behind these songs was a complex universe that combines local and regional history, a remarkably sophisticated amalgam of nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical styles, and a rich throughline of a story that could break the heart of the most hardened cynic.

For the past few months, the full album of Constance (which was finally unleashed upon the South last April) has played nearly non-stop in our Virginia household. The album recounts the story of Constance Owen, a white Lexington County, South Carolina, native who is both blessed and cursed with the music that “is in my mind—Every moment, all the time,” a “gift from God” whose “visions and melodies follow me into my dreams.” In 1895, while still a young woman, Constance meets a mixed-race Chicago transplant named Aaron Vale, whose musical sensibilities are much like her own. They marry in spite of local social conventions and are soon blessed with a son, Thomas. But local hatred is too much for Aaron, whose employers, the Palmers, literally work him to death, then rob his family of their due. Years later, that racial hatred “all comes back ‘round again,” when Thomas tries, with only partial success, to exact his long-overdue revenge.

Constructed from multiple narratives and points of view, Constance tells us precisely what we need to know and nothing more, which is exactly as it should be in an album. For those who want more, however, there is The Constance Compendium, a separately available booklet that contains the full lyrics and “John Gilead Palmer,” a contextualizing short story by Daniel Machado, the creative genius behind The Restoration. Punctuated with stunning photography by Amber Machado, the compendium satisfies the craving that anyone with ears to hear will have after indulging in Constance’s many rich layers. And for a historian who is easily irritated by the reckless ignorance with which so many storytellers handle the details of our past, I was impressed with Machado’s attention to such matters and the ease with which he blends such details into his lyrics without diminishing their emotional clout or the power of his music.

Take, for instance, “August 1895,” in which Constance recounts the degree to which she has fallen for Aaron, marking her book with an asterisk for each of their encounters, all of which must end achingly as “I leave you in the trees again.” Backed by violin (Lauren Garner) and country timpani (Stephen Russ), Machado beats out Constance’s loving lament with an acoustic guitar and the shoes on his feet, daring you not to swoon, yet never once veering into the cloying insipidness that most love songs bring to mind. Or consider Aaron’s plea to “Constance” two tracks later, begging her, “Don’t let my music die with me. Don’t let it go into the ground with me.” Here the simplicity of “August 1895” is traded for something bordering on the orchestral, with Machado on acoustic guitar, banjo, and violin, backed by Garner on violin, Adam Corbett on bass, Sharon Gnanashekar on piano, Eddie Lord on drums, Russ on country timpani, tambourine, and cymbal, Collin Derrick on Wurlitzer organ, Kathryn Pollock on cello, and Joshua Williams on saxophone. The album builds to Thomas Vale’s account of “Drowning Mr. and Mrs. Palmer,” a track on which Machado’s eerie string arrangement serves as precursor to the anger—and horror—of Thomas’s effort to “wash you off this earth with all the evil things you’ve done in the name of Jesus.” As the Palmers sleep with “snores that shake two lazy chins and flabby jaws that two fat necks consume,” Thomas notes that “the cricket-buzz grows to a frenzy as I bring the levee down.” Even more horrific than this is the realization that Thomas got it only half right, and that whatever frustrations his neighbors might share with Thomas about the Palmers, Thomas’s racial background trumps any such concerns, as he and Constance both are reminded in the album’s final, blistering, and terrifying track, “The Lynching.”

Masterpiece is not a term I ever use lightly, but Constance is the real McCoy. My wife maintains a theory that artists get one big moment of brilliance, and everything that follows is a vain attempt to get back there again. I am more optimistic, although I will caution Machado and his band mates that the bar is now immeasurably higher for whatever will come next. My wife also says Constance is “like reading East of Eden or Light in August, except I get to turn it up really fuckin’ loud,” a sentiment that I completely understand. Constance is indeed a ribsticker. It has been so long since an album seeped into my consciousness in the silent moments of my life in the way that Constance has, still carrying me away when I am absent from its sound. Listen for yourself, and see if you are not changed by the experience.

The Restoration – Drowning Mr. & Mrs. Palmer – Live Studio Performance from The Restoration on Vimeo.

Albert Camus once wrote that “Life is a sum of all your choices,” and while I’ve never been much of a Camus fan, Blue Valentine kept making me think about the inexorable forces put into motion at the instant when we begin to love someone. There is a great responsibility in that moment, one that requires us to choose again and again whether we will keep loving that someone. This is what we are taught, anyway, but Blue Valentine also reminded me that we too often dwell on this responsibility we have to the other, rather than on the responsibility we have to the “us” or even to ourselves.

Director Derek Cianfrance, whose past work has consisted primarily of documentaries and short films, throws Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain and Shutter Island) and Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson and Lars and the Real Girl) into a situation that has chosen Cindy and Dean far more than the other way around. Love—at least the kind that most of us live, rather than the kind Hollywood typically likes to peddle us—is usually like that. Cindy is a nurse who desperately wants to be a doctor, even though her job and her family and her baggage seem always to be in the way. Dean is a high school dropout who flits from one job to another with a carefree demeanor that masks his malaise and his need to drink before he shows up on the job. At first glance, one might not think to put these two disparate people together, and yet it is the first glance that does exactly that. For Dean, she is the “nutty-cuckoo crazy” pretty girl he swears he has known before, even though they have never met. For Cindy, he is an escape from disaster and profound unhappiness, and perhaps the only man who has ever really cared about her for her own sake.

I don’t mean to suggest here that you should look to their faults to determine who bears responsibility for what their lives become. Perhaps that’s the mastery of this story and these characters—there are no good guys and no bad guys in this relationship, just people who don’t know how they got here from there, with a daughter named Frankie trapped between them, in spite of their best and most noble intentions. It’s a rare accomplishment in movies like this to allow the audience to still love them both, even as the people around them appear to choose sides. “’Don’t let him brainwash you’?” Dean asks incredulously after a coworker warns Cindy, and the moment is as devastating to Cindy and the viewer as it is to Dean. We know with a visceral agony what each thinks in that instant, but we also know that they cannot possibly understand each other just then.

As subtle as it is immersed in the raw beauty of hand-held jaggedness, Blue Valentine moves us effortlessly between Cindy and Dean’s life together now and the moments after they met six years earlier, all without ever giving us title cards or awkward scene fades to let us know that we are changing places and times. Smart movies do this, of course, but the effect here is something like stepping into the drunken fever dream of the characters, who endure the disorientation of standing outside themselves and watching helplessly as their lives unravel, even as they replay the past, searching for the wrong turn. Cianfrance has been quoted as saying that even he does not know what went awry between them, and there is no better example of this confusion than two embraces—one in a moment of great trial near the beginning of their relationship, the other as they ponder in the film’s last moments what to do next. Dean comforts Cindy in exactly the same manner both times, and she responds physically and emotionally to him in precisely the same way, and yet something is inexplicably different. That these actors can capture so exquisitely what their director cannot explain is even greater testament to their craft. Williams’s ever-shifting facial expressions in Cindy and Dean’s first real conversation on a city bus—from timidity to anger to relief and back to guardedness, all in the space of a few seconds—are Oscar-worthy all their own.

This kind of care with the camera and the actors screams volumes about Cianfrance’s vision. Borrowing a page from Kieslowski, Blue Valentine is infused throughout with symbolic color even as its washed-out tones make Scranton look even more bleak than the real Scranton. Likewise, the film’s score—which features music by Grizzly Bear and Ryan Gosling himself—is at its best when it mimics the terrible sounds we hear in our own heads as things spin out of control. One roaring, ringing tone in particular so pervades our senses that even our vision seems impeded by its presence, and yet not for an instant is that tone obtrusive or otherwise distracting from what unfolds on the screen. Who needs 3D effects or overtly ominous soundtracks when a director can give us this and cut us to the core in the process?

To call Cianfrance’s film a love story, as the trailers all seem to imply, does it a gross disservice. When his story finishes with you without actually ending, you may find yourself questioning every small, careless moment of your own present relationship, pondering the damage you have done and hoping it’s not as grave as you fear. No, you should not expect happy endings here, because this film is not about the outcome of Cindy and Dean’s relationship but rather about the subtleties of small moments, actions, words, and even the margins between those words. “Don’t say it!” Dean screams at one point. “Don’t say something you can’t take back!” But the devastation of that scene lies not in what Cindy says but rather in what she does not say, or at least will not reveal. Much like Cindy’s reticence cripples Dean, Blue Valentine will haunt you with implication and press you to promise, as Dean does repeatedly, to be better.

5 stars out of 5

I am eager to make new connections in Virginia and to reconnect with many old friends and colleagues, as I am originally from Springfield, VA, lived for many years in Williamsburg, and worked for an additional five years in Fairfax. In many respects then, this change is sort of like returning home for me, although Northern Virginia is a very different place from the countryside I grew up in during the 1970s and 1980s.

Please feel free to follow regular updates in this space and on my main website at EricPlaag.com regarding the transition back to life in Virginia and the new projects I will be pursuing and initiating there and elsewhere in the country during the coming year. Big things are in the works, and I imagine you will find them exciting when they’re finally unveiled.

Eric

In case you missed the exhibition (or in the event you’d like to revisit it!), I have uploaded all of the digitized images of my work from that show, along with the placard text and the artist statement that accompanied it, in the “Illusion of Truth” page over there. =======>

Meanwhile, here are some photos from opening night: