General Information
Project Information
Natural Landscape
1990 – 1998
Project Concept
Made over an eight-year period, the images were exhibited as Pleasant Hill (rural Delaware, 1990 – 1992), Island Pond (Hudson Highlands, NY, 1993 – 1994), and Ocean Point (coastal Rhode Island, 1995 – 1998).
All images were made with an 8x10 view camera. The three projects are described in greater detail below.
Pleasant Hill, 1990 – 1992
In the 1940s and 50s, S. Hallock duPont purchased several small adjacent farms in Northern Delaware and consolidated them into a private game reserve. This land, surrounded by suburban sprawl, is now part of a more extensive state park. While still maintaining some farming, most of the property is being allowed to return to its natural state.
Island Pond, 1993 – 1994
The area around the Hudson River just north of New York City, known as the Hudson Highlands, was a favorite destination for mid-19th-century American landscape painters. Much of the Highlands (including Island Pond) now lies within Harriman State Park. The park was landscaped by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s as a sylvan retreat. On a clear day, the Empire State Building is visible from the park's higher plateaus.
Ocean Point, 1995 – 1998
Taken near Narragansett and Newport, Rhode Island, the photographs depict scenes like those painted by J.F. Kensett, W.T. Richards, and others in the mid-1800s. Due to the slow and deliberate nature of the 8x10 view camera, the images tend to depict the coast itself rather than the ever-moving ocean surf.
History
Pleasant Hill
1944 - 1962 – Childhood home (Rd #3, Newark Delaware – later called 1175 Pleasant Hill Road)
1990 – Began Photographing with 4x5 and 8x10 field cameras
1992 – Exhibited at Janet Borden Gallery with catalogue (essay by Robert Sobieszek).
1993 – produced a set of platinum prints (printed by Martin Axon)
Island Pond
1991 (winter) – Began photographing with 35mm camera
Made handmade books: “Three Walks,” (Bear Mountain)
1992 - 1994 – Continued photographing in Harriman State Park with 8x10 view camera
1994 - 1995 – Printed images in both gelatin silver and platinum
Made handmade platinum print books: “Summer is a Gift”
1995 – Exhibited a group of large (28x35 inches) gelatin silver prints at
Janet Borden Gallery with catalogue
2004 – Reprinted large group of images as finished 8x10 inch
gelatin silver contact prints
Ocean Point
1994 - 1996 – Rented Apartments in Wickford, RI and later in Acoaxet, MA
Started photographing seascapes with 8x10 camera
1995 – Made handmade books (Rhode Island/Delaware)
1996 - 1998 – Purchased Beavertail farmhouse in Jamestown, RI
Continued photographing seascapes
1999 – Exhibited a selection of 30x40 inch gelatin silver prints at Janet Borden Gallery with catalogue
(essay by Andy Grundberg)
Technical
Pleasant Hill
Cameras – 4x5 Wista and 8x10 Phillips field cameras
Island Pond
Cameras – 5x7 Deardorff and 8x10 Phillips field camera
Lenses – 9, 10 ¾, and 12 inch Goerz Dagor
Films – Kodak Tri-X at ASA 100
Developer – D 23 / Kodalk 2-Bath
Prints – Commercially available platinum paper (The Palladio Co.),
Kodak Ektalure and Ilford Warmtone
Ocean Point
Cameras – 8x10 Phillips field camera
Lenses – 10 ¾, and 12 inch Goerz Dagor
Films – Kodak Tri-X at ASA 100
Developer – D 23 / Kodalk 2-Bath and Rodinal
Prints – Ilford and Ilford Warmtone
Ocean Point Catalogue Essay
RAY MORTENSON: Prospecting the Coast
The attraction of contemporary photographers to water — and specifically to the sea — is a tendency so widespread as to be almost emblematic of our era. The limitless expanses of water and wave found in the recent pictures of Robert Adams and Hiroshi Sugimoto, for example, seem to signal a broad need for visual relief from the impingements of everyday life, and for escape from a materialistic world of culture into a natural, more spiritual world unsullied by human beings. Ray Mortenson’s new photographs of Rhode Island bays and coastline may to some extent address this need, but I would argue that they are distinct from most recent pictures of the sea in that they are, first and foremost, landscapes. I say this in part because of the emphasis placed in these pictures on the concept of prospect. Our attention is divided nicely between the “out there” of the water and the “here” of our position as viewers (and, by extension, of the photographer’s position as a picture maker). We are, quite literally, on the coast, caught in the tension inherent in all looking that suspends us between the known and the unknown. We stand on sand or granite and peer into a puzzling, indeterminate distance. The genre of the landscape, as it has evolved in the visual arts since Claude, conventionally has allowed a position for the viewer within the foreground of the scene itself — which is just what Mortenson has generously provided in these pictures.
I also would argue that these pictures are landscapes because they are inspired by romantic American landscape painting of the nineteenth century. Painters the likes of John F. Kensett, following on the heels of Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand, found in the mountains and coasts of New England and New York ready metaphors for the sublime. This sublime was not a calm, inviting state, but a fearsome beauty that demonstrated Nature’s provenance over Man. In Mortenson’s photographs we find the same spirit prevailing, most obviously in those in which stormy seas threaten to overwhelm the safe haven of the foreground.
One can best understand these pictures as the third and latest chapter in a series of landscape pictures that Mortenson has created during the 1990s. The first installment, Pleasant Hill, focused on the fields and woods of the photographer’s boyhood home state, Delaware. The second, Island Pond, assayed the edges of lakes in the Hudson Highlands north of New York City. Now, with these coastal pictures, the land has receded even more, although its presence still registers in the near and far distances. Mortenson’s journey has taken us to the very edge of what we might term the landscape, and in the end it reconnects us with a sense of awesome beauty that is radical precisely because it is located in tradition.
Andy Grundberg