Beyond Noon Hill

Noon Hill in Medfield, Massachusetts was, for some of us who grew up there, a world of possibilities.  Those possibilities changed from elementary to high school, from sledding days to making out nights.  It was a forest reservation with rocky roads that rose steadily toward a three hundred or so foot peak.  At the top there was a pond we used to fish at and a gun club that was thankfully closed whenever we needed a place to park.  And here, when I say “park,” I mean it in the biblical sense. 

Then the cop.  There was always a cop, and his big ass headlights.  You’d have to row down your window and promise, promise, promise not to leave any litter behind before the officer would nod hello to the young lady in the passenger seat straightening her blouse, and then he would glance into the back seat before being on his way, and then you’d row the foggy window back up and slide the Stones cassette back in and get back to business.  Cops in Medfield were cool.  For the most part they let us do our thing, but weren’t afraid to give us a little tap on the shoulder whenever they sensed we were nosing down the wrong path.  So the authorities kept the blue lights down, so long as we kept the volume of our play down just below ten.   

Many of the pictures in Joe’s expansive portfolio are clearly labeled and captioned, since many of them were either included in or intended to be included in showings.   Erin and I affirm that Joe’s habit of order has made our job that much easier.  We know the place, time, and person that bring identity and familiarity to the shot.  Girl Lighting a Cigarette, Sturgis, South Dakota, 1994.  Bob and Kristen at the Cyclone Halloween Party, Boston, Massachusetts, 1993.   Still, many of the prints not intended for showings remain unlabeled.  Erin has been helpful in identifying people, subjects, places, times and overall situations.  Over the years, in pockets of time, I have sifted through boxes of Joey’s work trying to find relationships between subjects, trends in mood and angle, insights from effect.  Lately I’ve been revisiting a series I found that seems to mingle the natural world with the man-made.  Some were taken in Medfield.  Possibly even Noon Hill.  Joey loved being out in nature.  Not superficially, like some of us who saw Noon Hill as a homegrown canopy to conceal and forgive our misdeeds.  Joey experienced nature with both purpose and wonder.  For Joey the adventurist, nature was a place to catch perch or test a snowmobile or build a campfire, but for Joey the photographer the natural world was forever a place to discover the moment of transcendence, a place where our soul is registered in relation to the synthetic world from whence we came.

This selection of photos is an attempt to pictorially link one with the other.  For what it’s worth, these photos were boxed together, though the locations of them range from Medfield to Italy, both in which a stone rests in Joe’s honor.



Woods, Medfield, Massachusetts, 1996.

In the first picture we’ve come from afar to spy a spray of trees, their branches fragile and leafless, springing from a birth set deep in a marshland forest. The low sun is catching just enough water to cast shadows of narrow tree stalks that soon disappear into the enveloping darkness.  The veiny network of branches is brought into brilliant relief in the top half of the composition, while their reflections merge into mysterious shadow and austere outgrowth in the bottom half.  Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that nature reflects the moods we bring to it.  “Nature,” he says, “is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece.  In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue.  Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhileration. I am glad to the brink of fear.”  Glad to the brink of fear.  I ask my students what they think he means by that.  Glad…fear.  Their answers are laced with hesitation.  Boys tend to meet complexity with skepticism.  But then one will stand up and take a stab at it. He’ll say that Emerson is so psyched to be in the woods that he’s scared that his happiness is not real.  I like this.  This will suffice.  He has defined paradox.  So when we chance upon this place in the woods, stopped dead in our tracks by its naked truth, the effect can be sorrow or hope, despair or tranquility.  Or anything in between, depending on the place that sent us there.



Electrical Plant, Ontario, Canada, Circa 1996.

I don’t pretend to know what Joe was thinking when he took a shot.  I enjoy musing on it because that is what I enjoy about photography.  When the image holds its audience for a long moment, it has succeeded on some level.  Of course that level is always relative, depending on the scope of the photographer’s intent.  It could be as simple as capturing a mood.  The photo of the electrical plant in Ontario is alarming in its inexplicable danger.  The effect can be one of turmoil.  It speaks to nature only in the way of its absolute incongruity with it.  The feathery bouquet of branches in the first photo is promising in its intricacy, in its innocent yearning to find nourishment, whereas the ascending intricate network of cables in the second photo is menacing in its seeming non-reliance on humanity or nature. 



Spear of Wild Grass, Medfield, Massachusetts, 1996.

While the first two photos are similar only in the intricacies within their respective frames, the next two are similar in their simplicity.  The first two put the eye to work – so much to consider, infinite in its parts.  The next two give the eye a break.  We know what to consider.  As Walt Whitman loafs and examines a single spear of summer grass, we too are invited to remark on the individuality in nature’s abundance.  A shoot of wild grass has risen to prominence and, like Whitman, we must slow ourselves down and celebrate its distinctiveness, as it proudly claims its independence in the middle of the frame.  

The next photo, while suggesting confinement, is also easy on the eye, for its soft greys, faded frescoes, and primitive construct.  It was taken in Pompeii, Italy in 1995, while Joe and Erin were touring.  Erin thinks it might have been the sight of an ancient brothel.  I hope so, because that would definitely take the edge off.  From the viewer’s eye, we are dulled into a state of imprisonment.  Yet, like the single spear of grass, the flame of light descending from above calls attention to itself, and the effect in both pictures is one of affirmation.  We come to find that even in our darkest moments, there is always light available if we choose to see it.  

Ancient Brothel, Pompeii, Italy, 1995.

 

Sorrento, Italy, 1995.

These next two were taken in Pompeii and Sorrento, respectively.  In the first we see how naturally the man-made merges with nature.  Whitewashed villas nestle into this steep rocky hillside and climb as high as the mountain will permit.  In the next photo, ancient columns are encased in scaffolding for reinforcement while in the process of preservation.  Both suggest rather than show the presence of humanity.

Pompeii, Italy, 1995.

To me, as an English teacher who deals largely in the business of storytelling, these photos are scenes.  They are not stories in themselves, but present aspects of stories.  They awaken a spirit in us and move us toward something or away from something.  They can work together if we want them to, or they can work on their own.


I was in New York for the past few days – chiefly to bring our brimming six-year-old to see Annie on Broadway – and was able to find time to visit some museums.  At the International Center of Photography, there was a special exhibit called “We Went Back: Photographs from Europe 1933-1956 by Chim (born Dawid Szymin in Warsaw, and post WWII went by David Seymour).  Much of the exhibit catalogues the rebuilding of lives in Europe soon after the destruction of World War II.  One picture struck me profoundly.  The caption tells the story.  It is called “Children at Munich Zoo with Adolph, the parrot that says ‘Heil Hitler.’”  I think I lost feeling in my limbs.  When a photograph can leave a viewer without words, like a good novel, it has done its job.  The story is both contained in the frame and transcends well beyond it.

 

Since those youthful days sealed forever in the dirt and gravel of Noon Hill, where suburban kids like us cut our teeth before heading out into the world, Joey’s career and camera have journeyed wide.   Sometimes the breadth of Joe's work is a labyrinth, other times a straight path, but always a trip worth taking.