Here are a handful of photographs from an abortive trip I took into eastern Ohio on Christmas Eve in 2014. I am afraid I do not remember what caused me to have to cut this trip short, so I don’t have much of a story to accompany these photographs. If I am not otherwise engaged, I like going on photography trips on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, because everything is usually so quiet and deserted.
Even when I was a child, I always wanted to “go down in history” in some fashion—hoping that some part of me would live on, even if only as part of people’s memories. Today, many years later and pretty much in the throes of a mid-life crisis of sorts, it seems obvious to me that my chances of being remembered will be slim. But it is interesting how people are memorialized and how they are chosen to be remembered. We’ll see an example of what I mean, bye and bye. The photos here are from the second half of an excursion that my friend Tsuki and I took on a bleak day in late November 2014. Continue reading
Photography is, I am learning in my own novice way, in many ways the study of light. But it is more than that, too. It is also the study of color and of texture. I can’t help but think that this is somehow a metaphor for living life. Light is the world we live in, the ocean in which we swim. Color represents those things around us, the things we see, the things we notice, the things we react to. Sometimes these colors of life are bright and superficial, sometimes darker and more soulful. But perhaps most important of all is texture. Texture is richer, deeper. No matter what the color, it is the texture that reveals the truth of something. Texture is not so much life as how you live your life—the choices you make, the way the world wears on you—etching grooves deep into your surface. Colors can change, but texture abides. And as we live our life, the texture of that life defines us more and more.
Ohio is a state with four seasons and, arguably, three of them suck. But even the grumpiest Buckeye would admit that Ohio is wonderful in the fall. This is the Ohio of the Calvin and Hobbes Sunday strips. Cool, comfortable weather; the exciting smell of that first true fall day; the leaves, oh, those glorious leaves. Couple all that with the human excitement of back to school, football season, Halloween and Thanksgiving, and you just have a swell old time.
Each October I spend a lot of time in the Cleveland area, on my other money-wasting hobby. These past few years I have not driven straight back to Columbus, but rather used the fact of being in Cleveland to launch an excursion into some area of northeast Ohio. That is what I did in October 2014 as I began my 40th formal photographic excursion across my beloved home state.
In early October of every year, I travel to the tourist mecca of Cleveland, Ohio, to participate in a strategy tournament for a favorite game of mine. As I did in 2013, in 2014 I took a meandering back-roads route to the Cleve. This, time, however, I decided to leave in the late afternoon/early evening, to try to expand my horizons a little bit by taking some low-light photographs in the twilight hours. My journey was thus something of an experiment.
I discovered that my camera, if one exposes the image long enough, can take a very dark twilight scene and make it seem much brighter. That was the case with all of the images here. I had anticipated working with a much darker set of images that I actually ended up having. This wasn’t bad or good, just unexpected, and something I need to take into account in the future—I should take photographs of the same scene at different exposures to get a better sense of what exposure at the same ISO and aperture will produce what level of light.
Anyway, the eight images below (seven different images, but one processed in both color and black and white) are the photographs from this little experimental trip that I thought worth sharing. It is a tiny little blog entry, so if you don’t like it, it is over quick. Continue reading
This is the continuation of my recounting of my 38th excursion across Ohio in September 2014. The first half of my trip consisted primarily of an exploration of the southern Ohio town of Chillicothe. After I had my fill of the Chill, I headed southeast out of town into the rural Appalachian woods of Ohio, always a treat for me.
We humans are a social species, which I guess why one of the most comforting feelings we can experience is the feeling of belonging. I’ll give you an example of what I mean. I was born in northeastern Pennsylvania, where my father is from, but my parents moved our family to El Paso, Texas, where my mother is from, when I was only four years old.
From the time I was four until the time I was sixteen years old, I never saw any of my father’s family: my grandmother, my aunt and various uncles, their spouses and children, not to mention a variety of cousins, great-uncles and great-aunts, godparents, and the like. We simply couldn’t afford a cross-country trip like that. But when I was a teenager, I had an opportunity to go to West Point, New York, for what was essentially a week-long attempt by the USMA to recruit national merit scholars. We arranged the trip so that I could travel first to Wilkes-Barre and spend time with the family there.
I was nervous about that, as my only contact with any of these folks was through scratchy long-distance phone calls and the occasional holiday card. But to my relief, surprise, joy, call it what you will, from the moment I landed and reconnected with these long-lost relatives, I felt like they were family. I felt like I belonged. Is that DNA? Luck? Maybe we Pitcavages simply have charisma oozing out of our pores. In any case, it was a wonderful feeling.
In 2014, I made many trips to Chicago for work and, when possible, tried to bring along a camera in order to take photographs during the Ohio portion of the trip. In early September 2014, I made one such trip. Time pressures allowed me little time for back-roads journeying on the trip, but I did manage to take a precious few shots, most centered around an interesting abandoned homestead. I present them here, without any thematic or pseudo-philosophic commentary. Count your blessings.
One of the easiest ways to spot when a historian does not know something is to look for the language they use to try to hide that fact. For example, the sentence “Undoubtedly, George Washington was angry when he got the letter” actually means “I have no idea whatsoever how Washington felt, but I’m going with ‘mad.’” Undoubtedly is one of the most common ways historian admit ignorance, but they have many similar stock phrases, all of which basically boil down to “this is my guess.” The fact is, though, that it is hard to know stuff. Any historian worth his or her salt will be painfully aware of all the little (or not so little) gaps of knowledge in anything they write. Sometimes the line beyond the gaps goes pretty straight, so it is not too hard to leap the gap and still be on the right path. But sometimes you just fall into the gap.
I’ve always been interested in foreign words that have no equivalent in English—unless English decides to appropriate them, such as schadenfreude. If you think about it, without a word to express a concept, we don’t even really have that concept, do we? Our culture is the poorer for it, in most cases. Take the French concept of esprit de l’escalier—literally, “wit of the staircase.” Imagine leaving the apartment of your significant other after he or she has just cruelly broken up with you. As you trudge down the stairs, you suddenly begin to think of all the retorts and responses you should have made—only you didn’t think of them until just now. That is the wit of the staircase. It is a perfect concept—why is there no English word for it?
Unearthed Ohio 