Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: mid-atlantic snowmageddon, pittsburgh, snowstorm 2010
We don’t have much luck with the snow, do we? Spent the morning watching Deranged, then ate leftover homemade mac and cheese, loaded up the Ansco, the lomo fish eye and documented with the Leica. I’m glad to be home for this snowstorm – it’s exciting to see our little corner of the world stop for the weekend.
last night's surprise
taking analog photos
graffiti in the snow
snow walk
snow-heavy lines
snowbound
handsome snow husband
snow street transformation
self portrait before shoveling snow
Filed under: Art Gallery | Tags: jeff schreckengost, woodwork, guitars, rebellious nature, married artists, lisa toboz photography, valentines
DATE CHANGED TO NEXT FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 12, DUE TO SNOWSTORM. Just in time for Valentine’s weekend.
Our first date was at the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh. We strolled through the art wing, both of us quiet, but it wasn’t until we reached the dimly lit rooms of Taxidermy Hall that we began to see each other’s strange side. Our love blossomed as we stood admiring a wildlife diorama. We discovered that we both loved horror films, ghost stories, dark fairy tales and traveling off the beaten path. We married three years later on Halloween, our favorite holiday. And a creepy, surreal partnership was born.
Our work reflects our shared interest in the curious and the abandoned, along with our travels together. Part of being married to another artist is recognizing when one of us needs creative space, as well as supporting one another. Jeff often stops the car without question for Lisa when she sees the perfect photo opportunity, and Lisa walks with Jeff, picking through the neighborhood trash for future projects. Our art provides each of us the solace of working alone with the comfort of knowing that our partner in crime is on the other side of the house, waiting to vent or laugh or share the love of the process or a hug to keep each other going.
Filed under: West Virginia | Tags: snowstorm 2009, West Virginia, ghent, US Route 77, cabin fever, christmas vacation, knights inn
Ghent, WV
We tried to drive to Ocala, Florida this past Christmas to visit Jeff’s family. We never made it.
I woke up December 18th and there was all this buzz on the TV about a giant snowstorm. No worries, I thought, we can beat this thing, it wouldn’t get to the Carolinas until after midnight.
So we packed everything into the car within an hour, along with a blanket and a bag full of Christmas treats and booked like hell through West Virginia.
The drive was going well until we got to Beckley. It was around 3:30 pm and the sky was gray, almost mauve, it was so swollen with precipitation. The snow was coming down in large, wet flakes. We stopped at a rest area and watched the news in the gift shop.
US Route 77, WV
“You shouldn’t keep driving,” the cashier said to us.
“It isn’t so bad, we’re from Pittsburgh, we’re used to this!” We said.
No really, we weren’t used to it. But we didn’t know this until 3 days later.
Ghent, WV, behind the Knight's Inn
We get back on Route 77 and drive about 15 miles. The snow is coming down even harder and the roads covered in snow. Where did it come from so fast? It was mind-boggling. We couldn’t see anything on either side of us, it was snowing so hard. Our life line was Bill, who I kept calling at work back in Pittsburgh so that he could update us on the weather. “You’re right in the heart of the storm,” he said.
hallway crashers
And then traffic stopped. We waited. And waited. For 7 hours, surrounded bumper-to-bumper by semis and SUVs on Route 77, nothing happened. The turns of boredom and fear were mind crushing. I didn’t know at times if we should laugh, cry or piss ourselves, we were so scared.
vending machine dreams
We stopped in traffic around 4 pm with only half a tank of gas. it takes 4 hours to burn through a quarter tank of gas (now you know), so we figured by 8 pm, we had until midnight to figure out what we should do next. Abandon our car on the road? Where would we go? It was pitch dark, and the next large town was Princeton, 20 miles away.
knee-deep
When we finally did move in the 5th hour, it was .3 miles to the middle of a bridge. All of this, to the soundtrack of Alice Cooper’s “Radio GaGa” (thank you, Alice, for getting us through).
napping grannies at the Knight's Inn
Bill had loaned us his trusty GPS for the trip. I was resistant to use it (because I am technologically challenged), but it is what saved us. It guided us to the Knight’s Inn in Ghent, WV, by way of the Adult Store sign we could see through the storm, our beacon of light.
designated smoking area at 2 am
When we got there, it was 11 pm and there were 30 people waiting in the lobby for a room. The owners passed around blankets, and travelers slept in the hallways, underneath the stairwells. I was too wired to sleep, so I read and took photos. We finally got a room around 6 am and stayed for the next two nights.
parking lot beneath our motel window
That was Friday. It didn’t stop snowing until Sunday evening, 28 inches.
a meal fit for a king at the Knight's Inn
Ghent is a ski resort town, but there isn’t much there. Both gas stations were out of power. Domino’s wouldn’t deliver, and Subway was closed. On day two, we took a walk to the Marathon station and made a meal out of microwave soup, Beanee Weenees, and the famed WV pepperoni roll. The Lion’s Den was open the entire weekend.
partner in crime
losing my mind
Jeff and I tried to make the best of the situation. We watched a lot of horrible television and took a lot of photos, and a lovely walk in the snow. It wasn’t too cold, and because most of the cars on Route 77 were abandoned, the roads were so quiet. It was like having a free pass for stopping our lives for a few days with no obligation to anyone but ourselves. We put the stress of the holidays aside and walked to the gas station, holding hands, talking about what we’d tell everyone when we made it home.
the only business open
taking in the quietness of it all
US Route 19
cabin fever
making the most of a depressing situation
Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: debence, franklin, oil city, Pennsylvania, pithole, titusville, winter blues cures
trees at dusk, Pithole
I have spent the past month recovering from holiday drama, as well as dealing with a more recent family situation that has left me zoned-out on Netflix-on-Demand to escape from it all (and a dose of Wii bowling doesn’t hurt either). All this and the general winter blues has temporarily stolen my motivation to write or take photos. Jeff and I are getting ready for our two-person art show next week, which has been super stressful. To feel productive, I organized our external hard drive and found photos from a weekend trip we had in the Oil City region of Pennsylvania.
safety phone, Oil city
I love exploring old, industrial towns and this area held promises of abandoned derricks in locals’ backyards, Victorian houses, spirits of oil barons and steam trains. When we arrived in Oil City, a storm was about to blow through, the bleak grey sky intensifying the color of the buildings around us.
Elks Club, Oil City
“What are you doing here?” A teen-aged boy hauling a couch into a local junk shop asked us as he watched me take pictures of his town. And it made me think, why are we here?
inside of an organ, Debence Antique Music World basement, Franklin
The romantic lure of a long-dead industry suddenly made me feel like a voyeur and somewhat of an ass for toting around my camera attempting to document rural town life. I could tell from the boy’s tone of voice and his look of disgust that he pretty much thought Oil City sucked and that we sucked for being there. I looked around and even on a Saturday, it was quiet. Aside from a coffee shop up the street, the library, and the junk shop workers, we could have been the only people there.
Chinese restaurant, Titusville
I’m a city girl who entertains ideas of living in a sleepy, small town where I can clear my brain. Maybe I’ll get more done, be less anxious. Oil City offers an artists’ relocation program to attract people to their region, revitalize homes and set up a creative community. The houses there are incredible and beautiful. We not only wanted to scout the area for our typical trash-hunting purposes, but also see if we could ever live there.
8 track at Debence Antique Music World, Franklin
We’re not going to live there, but we do this when we take our long drives and point to houses, “Can I have it?” The dream begins. If we lived there, we would have a spiral staircase, or a fireman’s pole leading to the second floor. A covered porch, and a mud room. Chickens in a coop out back and an old school bus converted into Jeff’s studio A giant empty room for my photography. Long hallways flooded with light. But all of this, in the city. In my search for home, I know that’s where I belong. Dreaming of a slow, quiet summer in the middle of this dark winter fills me with stories.
a view from the Caboose Motel, Titusville
a church, Oil City
Jeff and Dan, Pithole
Filed under: Ohio, Pennsylvania | Tags: 127 film, abandoned, bell & howell, east liverpool, hot dogs, new brighton, nuclear power, Ohio, Pennsylvania, pottery
Thanksgiving weekend took Jeff, Bill and me to Pottery Valley, the Ohio/West Virginia/ Pennsylvania pocket of towns that once served as the china capital of the world. We traveled Route 65 to 68, passing through Rochester, Beaver and Industry along the Ohio River.
We know this route pretty well since we go trash-hunting along it quite often. Jeff has taken some more ominous shots of the nuclear plant in Shippingport, but it was surreal to see the plant puffing out clouds in the background of this quiet rural town on such a beautiful sunny Saturday. Nobody was around and you couldn’t hear anything except for a low hum coming from the plant and our footsteps echoing in the church parking lot where we took these photos.
Our main reason for going this route was to shop at our favorite antique mall in East Liverpool. I love exploring this city full of ghosts and history and I’m trying to talk Jeff and Bill into going on one of the ghost hunting tours, mainly because we’d gain access to places we normally wouldn’t be allowed to enter, as well as satisfy my curiosity in the supernatural (they’ll give in eventually).
I didn’t buy much on this trip except for a Bell & Howell Electric Eyewww 127 camera for $5.00, still in its original leather case. Now I have to buy 127 film so I can use this little beauty (it’s sitting on the desk here as I type so I can keep looking at it).
But the treasures I found on this trip were more about photo-taking. Bill programmed his trusty GPS navigator to take us the ’shortest’ route, which took us on Ohio county back roads instead of Route 65. This view from inside the car made me beg Bill to pull over so I could capture it:
I’m disappointed that this turned out so blurry — the sun was going down, I left my tripod at home and the boys were hungry, so I felt rushed to take pictures. The factory is an abandoned chemical plant. Jeff and Bill went exploring the old offices, paint peeling from the floor in hundreds of delicate flakes. It was in disarray as if the men who worked there were called away for only a moment, not years.
While they explored, I set the timer on my camera and placed it in the middle of the road to get this self portrait. I was afraid of a car coming around the bend, which is why it caught me about to stand up. I originally wanted to lie on my stomach and look directly at the lens. The shit I do for photography!
I promised the boys we’d eat at Brighton Hot Dogs for dinner. I ate a hamburger and a dog loaded with chili, cheese and onions. I have a vegetarian friend who breaks anti-meat law once a year just to eat one of those dogs, so yes, they are that good – a perfect way to cap off the Thanksgiving weekend.
Filed under: Culinary Adventures | Tags: cookie table, new york times, pittsburgh, wedding
“Cookies are comforting in the time of cholera.” S. Lynch
When Pittsburgh hits the national media, the email forwards from resident family and friends start rolling. And since the city has been under the country’s watchful eye since the G20, as well as a curious object of wonder across the States over our perceived immunity to the current recession, it seems only natural to examine such weird-ass Steel City customs as the wedding cookie table in today’s New York Times article.
The drawback of living in one place for most of your life is that you sometimes don’t know what is native and what is not. I thought every wedding in the country had a freaking cookie table. I knew it was a bit tacky to take home a doggie-bagful of cookies and stash it in my purse, but what the hell? The bags are usually provided for you by the wedding hosts; it gives guests the go-ahead to put etiquette aside and take home a souvenir that is much tastier than pastel mints nestled in plastic martini glasses.
When Jeff and I got married, my Italian grandmother, who is 80 this year, was too fragile to bake dozens of cookies. My sister had just gone back to work full-time and I don’t bake. That left my mother, who is a gifted baker, but hasn’t really touched an oven since 1984. But bake she did, 4 dozen wedding knots coated in orange and white frosting for our Halloween wedding.
I am sad because Carrie Pierson and I had talked about researching the history of the Pittsburgh cookie table for a future article in Table, but the NYT and Gourmet beat us to it. Maybe now the cookie table will catch on at out-of-state weddings I attend because a reception isn’t complete without lady locks, thumbprints and pizzelles crumbling at the bottom of my purse.
photograph by Stephanie Foley
Filed under: Art Gallery | Tags: dioramas, erin tyner, macro photgraphy, sarah wojdylak, terrariums, thomas doyle
photo by Happy Via
Dioramas are 3D photographs or short stories. I’ve been obsessed with them ever since I was a kid. My favorite room at the Carnegie Museum was the taxidermy hall. The tableux of an Arab man riding a camel while being attacked by a lion scared the shit out of me, but I loved picking apart the details of this moment. How did the artists recreate the deep claw marks on the camel’s legs? Or the terror in its face? A diorama is one way for an audience to see or experience a story without words, however terrifying.
My friend Sarah’s latest terrariums at Mendelson Gallery, whose work explores the ‘voyeurism into empty spaces.”
The artwork of Thomas Doyle, who creates stories in miniature under glass domes:
Solitude in the diorama-esque macro photography of Erin Tyner:
Filed under: Pennsylvania | Tags: abandoned, allegheny river, bowler hat, ephemera, flea markets, industrial towns, new kensington, opera glasses, Pennsylvania
“One man’s crap is another man’s treasure.” Elston
Jeff and I are always on the search for trash, so one very early morning in mid-October, the two of us and Bill braved the damp chill to scour the Tour Ed Mine’s outdoor Flea-tique (that word is so awesome). There were a good number of vendors despite the frosty weather, but a die-hard trash hunter will brave all conditions to find that perfect object she didn’t know she even needed.
We found a bowler hat in the Alle-Kiski Historical Society booth, along with this creepy framed guilded text. Is it some sort of funeral home memorial? We aren’t sure, but it now resides in our cabinet of curiosities.
He also bought me these beautiful little opera glasses that I’ve been carrying around in my work bag for the past two months. Just in case I end up at the opera, you never know.
The morning was so sunny and beautiful, I wanted us to drive around and see what was in the area. As we drove along Route 28 through Tarentum, I asked Bill to take a right over the New Kensington bridge.
New Ken, as the locals call it, is only 20 minutes from Pittsburgh, but as most small towns in the area, it feels worlds away. There used to be radio towers there for local Pittsburgh stations. It’s the supposed birthplace of aluminum and various other industries – enameling works, glass factories, rolled steel and a brewery.
It’s a ghost town now, especially on a Sunday morning, but Habitat for Humanity has managed to station their Pittsburgh headquarters here. We mostly took pictures from inside the car, until Jeff yelled, ”Stop, now!” Holy shit, the thrift store sign was too perfect. It’s as if the whole city got up and walked away in the 80s as the industries drifted out of the region.
We walked around for a bit taking pictures, stopping to chat with a heavy metal dude who told us New Kensington wasn’t safe to be in at night. I think it was his way of telling us to get back in our car and mosey on home. I felt like such a cliche, standing there with my camera taking pictures of broken things. I wanted to record what I saw before it wasn’t there anymore.
Filed under: Art Gallery | Tags: conceptual photography, creative process, duane michals, fiction photography
“When you look at my photographs, you are looking into my mind.” Duane Michals
Most of my photography explores how I can tell a fictional story with pictures instead of words. I went to school for writing and now I find that I take more photos than write fiction. I read a great deal, but writing doesn’t fulfill me in the ways that it once did. There is something about combining the physical, mental, and technical acts of photography that allows me to lose myself creatively rather than searching for the ‘right’ words.
I’m drawn to the fantastic and surreal in fiction, which I can’t seem to do in my own writing, but I can with photography. My writing is more autobiographical, and I don’t feel ready to go to those dark places right now in my life, which writing will demand of me. But the idea that my photographs are reflections of the world in my head makes me feel less protected by my camera, more vulnerable when I share them in public.
Since I started photography a few years ago, I’ve struggled with trying to make the two mediums work together. In a habit that I borrowed from journaling while writing stories, I keep photo notes. I sketch out ideas that I have for shoots, write down places and props that I want to use. I keep track of exposure times, aperatures, shutter speeds. Once I record the ideas, I have a starting point for a project that ends up surprising me in other ways. That’s what I love so much about photography – the unexpected that you can capture in just a click, the illusion of simplicity.
I am so in love with how Duane Michals achieves this in his work. He scribbles text in the white border spaces of his photos, superimposes images on top of images, and uses long exposures that create dreamlike, sometimes frightening moments. He is not afraid to enter the dark places in his photography. I can only hope to be so brave in my own work.
“The Bogeyman” by Duane Michals
Filed under: Armchair Travel, Art Gallery | Tags: autonauts of the cosmoroute, carol dunlop, female photographer, travel literature
Jeff and I will be driving soon to Florida to visit family for the holiday break, which will have its moments of fun, amazement, frustration and daily life. Our car will be our house on wheels (which I’ve always wanted), complete with Christmas tree on the dashboard.
In the 1982 travel book Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, writer Julio Cortazar and his wife, photographer Carol Dunlop, vowed to make stops at each of the 70 rest areas along the French autoroute from Paris to Marseilles. It’s the ultimate adventure in experimental travel – how can a traveling couple make this ordinary, busy highway road a lot more like the roads less traveled?
The book is peppered with logs of camping provisions and daily menus, as well as Dunlop’s snapshot-like photography. I had never heard of her work until I found Autonauts in the Archipelago Books catalog. And while most of the book is light-hearted and whimsical, the ending is almost too sad to bear when you know that Cortazar had to finish the book alone because Carol died before she saw it to completion at the age of 36.
Her life and death are a mystery to me, as well as her work. She was born in Boston, but became a Canadian citizen during the Vietnam war. She met Cortazar in 1977, then moved with him to France. I found a blog about her written a few years ago, but it’s in Spanish, which I don’t speak. I can only read her life through these few photographs of the last journey of her life.
