Park Walks: Lakewood Park

Waterbury, Connecticut

Lakewood Park, at the south end of the Great Brook Reservoir, is a quiet place in winter. I get the impression that it's quite old and may have had more activity in years past. A bit of looking around online shows that it's still a popular spot for swimming from the small beach in hot weather. Still an interesting place to explore on a cold December morning.

Holiday Bazaar, III

Waterbury, CT

Holiday Bazaar, II

Waterbury, CT

"Your husband called..."

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Holiday Bazaar, I

Waterbury, CT

In the basement of the Shrine of St. Anne.

Zombie Recruitment

Waterbury, CT

Congress on Your Corner

Waterbury, CT, 9/1/09

Democratic Congressman Chris Murphy, from Connecticut's Fifth Congressional District, is holding open-access meetings with constituents for an hour each morning this week, while Congress is in recess. I thought this might make for interesting pictures of democracy in action, and I wasn't disappointed. Today he was at Library Park in Waterbury. A crowd of about seventy-five came out.




It was clear that health care and related budget/deficit issues were the primary, nearly the only, things constituents wanted to talk about. It was also clear that in this group sentiments were running about two to one against reform, or against Obama administration policies in general. Murphy is a second term Congressman who won the Fifth District seat in 2006 in an upset, unseating long-time Republican Congresswoman Nancy Johnson. Pro-reform and anti-reform groups had signs and slogans, but the anti signs were bigger and more plentiful.




Feelings were running high and there was some shouting, but there were no incidents of screaming or shouting down as have happened at more formal Town Hall meetings held across the country. The format was wide-open "ask your Congressman." Some people were more interested in stating their position, or reading it from computer printouts, than in asking a question so the Congressman sometimes prompted them to get to the point and make it a question. A couple times he had to intervene to keep questioning directed to himself instead of letting it drift into crosstalk and shouting between pro and anti proponents. At one point two gentlemen standing in front of me repeatedly told each other, "shut up, I came here to listen to him, not you."



The questions were varied. Some repeated familiar talking points but others were very personal. One man said that his private health insurance, with an insurer that has about half of such policies in the state, had informed him it would not cover his 18 year old son when he left to attend college in another state. What could the Congressman do about situations like that? A woman said she had just adopted a special needs child, how would health care reform affect her family?



Toward the end of the event, one woman went on at length and Murphy, to clarify, asked her if she meant she was against all government involvement in health care, to which she gave a resounding, "Yes!" So then he asked if she wanted to do away with Medicare, to which she said "Oh, no, I don't!" That brought a loud round of mixed guffaws and groans from pro-reform people in the group.

Scheduled to last from 8:00 to 9:00 AM, Murphy's aides finally pulled him away at 9:15 to head for his next appointment. The New Haven ABC news affiliate station had a reporter and videographer there and ran a short segment on their noontime broadcast. I didn't recognize any other press at the event.

Memorial Day Seven

Post parade ceremonies on the Waterbury Green.

Memorial Day Six

A drum and drill team performs an extended routine in front of the reviewing stand.

Memorial Day Five

As always, the action along the sidelines was at least as interesting as the parade itself.

Memorial Day Four

Families of the parade marchers gathered on Freight Street,


while parade participants got in last minute practice sessions.


Cell phone communication helps coordinate parade organization. How did they manage in the old days?

Memorial Day Three

Saturday, bands, cheerleaders, drum and drill corps, scout troops, all preparing for the noon start of the parade in Waterbury, CT.

Memorial Day One

Waterville, CT

On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, the Waterbury Veterans Committee held a ceremony honoring Civil War dead buried in the Fort Hill cemetery. An impersonator read the Gettysburg Address as Abraham Lincoln.

Waterville, CT

The March Project at WPII

This building is in pretty good condition, but it's been unoccupied for as long as I can remember, and I've lived in this part of the state and driven past from time to time for more than thirty years. It may have come to life, briefly, a few times without my noticing, then gone back into hibernation.

As I shot this, the "gentle light" that is the theme of this series of pictures was fading away. There were snowflakes in the air, though they don't show in this one. By the time the snow was thick enough to photograph, the light had died—a sullen, leaden presence.

So just a few words about this experiment of March postings. I love to travel and find new places to photograph. When I get to do that though, I spend an awful lot of time driving while finding only a few places that inspire me to get out and look for pictures. Luckily, there are a few places right near where I live that are just the sort I would stop and shoot if I found them a thousand miles from home. Returning to these places repeatedly over literally decades, walking the same shopping districts and residential areas, I often make very few exposures because I don't see anything I haven't already done. Light that may have seemed promising when I left the house may be gone half an hour later. No new curiosities, no dramatic changes in the scene.

Sometimes though, a day works out perfectly. The light and weather are exactly the kind I like and the conditions continue for hours on end. Since I know the locations intimately, the perfect conditions unveil a whole crop of new pictures. I may jump back in the truck and move to another familiar spot as the light changes. On a day like this I may get a remarkable harvest of pictures that strike me as successful. Payback for all those hours invested looking and searching while little or nothing quite comes together.

February 18, 2009 was one of those days. A storm was forecast, but in the late morning there was high cloud cover and beautiful, luminous light. From just after eleven till just before two, when the snow began to swirl around the green block building, things just seemed to fall into place. Later, when I looked over the day's shoot and began a preliminary edit I realized it had been one of those really nice harvests. For no reason I can think of, it occurred to me to arbitrarily limit my edit of the 357 captures to 31, the number of days in a month, and post them as a series here. When I thought about sequencing the pictures, my first thought was to make it simply chronological. First thought, best thought. So there's the March experiment. The pictures are the most interesting things I saw as I walked through several neighborhoods of Waterbury over the course of several hours in my favorite kind of light. Minus, of course, the 326 captures that weren't as good.

PS: For the technically interested, the pictures were all made with a Pentax K20D equipped with a 31mm FA Limited (normal focal length) lens.

Love

I seldom make "close up" photographs. Maybe because I've done too many thousands of them as commercial illustrations. But also, my general thought is that "the significant detail"...isn't.

But this one got my attention, and I couldn't resist making the picture.

Yellow SUV

So something extra came along. There are things I like about both versions of this and I'm not really sure which one I prefer.

Green Block Building

Over years of working with large format view cameras I got into the habit of setting up the camera when I found '90% of a picture'—a scene that almost worked, and just might come together if some other element came into play. Working with a hand held digital camera and the "free film" of digital capture files I find myself actually shooting a lot of things that seem to be almost, but not quite, a picture. Partly because some of them turn out to be better than I'd thought, and also because sometimes that extra added element comes along.

Shrine

I see these roadside memorials frequently on highways and country roads—often just past a sharp curve—but it's unusual to find one in the middle of a city.

Billboard II

Back when I used to spend a fair amount of time at advertising agencies I learned that the number of public service announcements outdoor advertising companies post on billboards in high-traffic locations was a reliable indicator of the state of the economy. There are a lot of public service billboards all around Waterbury, and that ain't a good sign for the economy, though it's nice for the organizations getting their word out.