For me to produce an image, I carry my 40-pound camera—which I prop over my shoulder, like an old musket—through the landscape until I find something that seems relevant to me. I then set up the camera, and focus it with a dark cloth over my head. I calculate an exposure based on the available light, and then shoot, exposing a single sheet of film, which I eventually develop by hand in trays of chemicals in my darkroom. After the negative is produced, it has to be printed, which involves several hours in the darkroom. I also perform several campaigns of hand-work on each print, first with a solution of reducer (or “bleach”) applied with watercolor brushes in order to lighten areas of the print, and then with neutral watercolor to add tone and texture to areas of the image that I still feel need adjustment. Creating a single print involves at least 8 hours of my time, and sometimes considerably more. This whole lengthy process is always in my mind as I look for my next photograph, and it forces me to make choices, to decide what I think is really important and what is really worth capturing.

In this day and age, when one can take a photograph with an iPhone and moments later post it to an online album or print it out on a desktop inkjet, spending 8 hours to create a photographic image may seem like an absurd difficulty. But I feel that this difficulty adds something fundamental to my work. Things that have been labored over for a long time express the care and attention given them, even if not always in an overt manner.

An image from Zimmermann's "Ways to Lexington" series.

It’s less a question of perfection than of character— think of a chair handmade by a woodworker, or a bowl hand-thrown by a ceramist. In many ways these objects are less perfect, less seamless, than plastic chairs or bowls cast at a factory in China and sold by the millions at Wal-Mart, and yet they are so much more alive! I choose the big camera and the long process because for me, the difficulty of working with this equipment and these materials parallels the difficulty of struggling to truly see—and truly appreciate—the world around me.

I recently completed a series called “Ways to Lexington”, which is a group of landscapes of the Shenandoah Valley made more or less in response to the recent decline and death of my grandparents, who lived in Lexington, VA since before I was born. I had initially intended the work to portray my bright recollections of the landscape around my grandparents’ old farmhouse, but the events taking place in my life at the time ended up seeping into the work and coloring it in somewhat darker tones.

I am engaged in the physical and technical photographic process because through it I am able to share a part of myself that really sees with whoever cares to look. Every series is different, but they are bound together by an attempt to look at the landscape and find something in it that is both particular to me and engaging to others.

Andrew Zimmermann is an Arlington, Virgina based photographer who works with large format cameras. His work has been widely exhibited around the Washington, DC area and in numerous venues throughout the United States. He recently received a Professional Fellowship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for his body of work “Common Place”, which documents the landscape within one mile of his suburban home in Arlington.

To see more of the artist’s work, check out his website: www.andrewzphotographs.com

“Do unto others” didn’t balance like a see-saw when you heard it?
You were playing with fire while others sang about whose land this is?

Sunday mornings the others gaped at visions of camels and needles, but no image came to you? Sad.

In history class you forgot Eleanor’s 4 freedoms, but spurred on the 4 horsemen, knowing they would never ride up your gated street. You heard “pursuit of happiness,” but missed “created equal”? Heard Reagan’s siren voice and quoted “Greed is good” on dates? How’d that work for you?

Oh God. Not really? You shrugged along with a pedantic Ayn Rand, but couldn’t see the stars sparkling over the heads of two guys floating down a river? Others might be wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, but you headed for the cafeteria, right?

Even that old man who’s heart was breaking for those poor wretches in the storm? You felt no pelting rain, no pity, no poetry?

Oh yeah, you heard the workers throwing off their chains all right. The clank scared you to death, didn’t it? But you never hummed the Marseillaise, how does it go, “Allons enfants de la da dah dhadedah?”

Your favorite was those Valkyries riding with a whiff of napalm? Of course it was.

Art museums. Ever stare in shock and awe at that big painting of a small town in Spain? At Whole Foods, Millet’s stoop labor never comes between you and the arugula?

You stay involved, do you? You cheer choleric campaigns in October, but even by January miss . . . what? You think out there somewhere there’s a green light on the end of a dock beckoning you and the rest of America? That’s because you never felt the force of some half-naked Indian’s truth and love. You never woke up to dreams of justice rolling down like a blue river from purple mountains.

I guess that’s it, a deaf ear for poetry.

Tim Butterworth, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, is a former teacher, union negotiator and New Hampshire state representative. His life revolves around family, politics, arts, literature and writing, gardening, timber harvest and making maple syrup. This year he is immersed in the political-cultural mash-up in DC – www.ips-dc.org

Image from Gotham Gazette

Gregory Luce is the author of the chapbooks Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications) and Drinking Weather (Finishing Line Press). His poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, including Kansas Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Innisfree Poetry Review, If, Northern Virginia Review, Juke Jar, Praxilla, Buffalo Creek Review, and in the anthology Living in Storms (Eastern Washington University Press). He lives in Washington, D.C. where he works as Production Specialist for the National Geographic Society.

Drinking Weather by Gregory Luce (c) Copyright Gregory Luce; printed by permission of the author. Photo also courtesy of Gregory Luce.