Image lists and text follow from:
Healing Ground
Alchemical Reconnaissance
Eagle Mountain
Early Work
Healing Ground: Walking the Farms of Vermont
Image List and Image Notes from Book (Center for American Places at Columbia College)
All photographs and sculptures were made by John Huddleston between 2000 and 2009 in Addison County, Vermont with one exception: photograph #29 was made by Rod Laursen.
1. Corn Circle Sculpture, ninety feet in diameter, James Farm, 2002 and 2003, a positive crop circle left for the gods. At the beginning of agriculture, around 6000 B.C.E., an estimated ten million people inhabited the earth. By the start of the Common Era, 200 million were alive. Rudimentary chemical and biological knowledge, along with mechanization, helped farmers accommodate one and a half billion people in 1900. More sophisticated agricultural science and machinery enabled the population to double twice by 2000, when the world census was six billion. We're headed toward nine billion by 2050, with ninety percent living in and near a city.
2. Tractor Tracks on a Manured Field. Cow dung and urine are collected into ponds from where it will be pumped into trucks and sprayed on the crop fields as fertilizer. Correct application rates and methods are critical to avoid nitrogen and phosphorus contamination of ground and surface water. With my family I once drove a little too close to a spraying truck. Before we could get the windows up, manure was flying into the car. My daughters were not happy.
3. Unharvested Corn/Snow. As we select desirable crop features by propagating only the plants with these traits, our ideas become incarnate; the physical plant is what we desired. But that plant may be unable to survive on its own. Corn is the most productive of the grasses but the one least able to propagate itself. Through the first few thousand years of domestication, farmers selected cobs with husks that protected and held the kernels onto the cob instead of discharging them to reseed, as would happen in the wild. Eventually, corn relied completely upon us for its continued existence, and we became dependent upon corn as instrumental to our own survival. We have coevolved with our most important plants in mutual dependency.
4. Car Tracks on the Snow. The transportation of food products long distance may work out in terms of dollars and cents, but it makes little sense in terms of overall energy use. On average, processing and moving one calorie of food from origin to point of sale involves the consumption of nearly forty calories of fossil fuel. (Growing that one calorie burns an additional seven to ten calories of petroleum.)
5. Maple Sugaring Line. The sap of the sugar maple runs for several weeks around the spring equinox, when daytime temperatures are above freezing and nighttime temperatures are below. A network of tubes runs from the tree taps into collection tanks. Forty to 100 gallons of sap will boil down to yield one gallon of syrup.
6. Manure Pond. Cow dung and urine are collected into ponds from where it will be pumped into trucks and sprayed on the crop fields as fertilizer (see page VI). Correct application rates and methods are critical to avoid nitrogen and phosphorus contamination of ground and surface water. With my family I once drove a little too close to a spraying truck. Before we could get the windows up, manure was flying into the car. My daughters were not happy.
7 Snow Island in a Muddy Stream. Soil erosion is a major problem that arises from agriculture. The farms of the United States lose ten times more topsoil than is replaced by natural processes, and soil cannot be made in any other way.
8. Windy Snow Parabola.
9. Snow on a Hill and Sky. For the hunter-gatherer, a god is everywhere: in animals, natural phenomena, and plants. Nature is interdependent, forces are in equilibrium. The balance of the gods keeps the earth healthy. With the rise of agriculture, the number of gods decreases, correlating to our dependence on fewer species. Hybrid gods, half-animal and half-human, appear. As our sense of control increases, gods resembling man and woman reign. Earth is female; crops are born out of her body.
10. Winter Field between Ice and Sky.
11. Bare Valley. Historically, overpopulation is relieved by warfare or mass starvation. Famines have occurred with great frequency throughout recorded history, most recently in Russia, 1921-1922 (9,000,000 people starve to death); Russia, 1933-1934 (5,000,000 starve to death), and China, 1958-1960 (30,000,000 starve to death). Hunger is still a major problem for much of the world. Farming creates the conditions for famine. Large, hungry populations have resulted from the abundant production of agriculture. Stratified social systems with impoverished lower classes originated with the ability to store grain and accumulate wealth.
12. Grass on a Farm Road. The migration from country to city, largely due to the failure of small farms and the shrinking number of agricultural jobs, has compounded urban problems of poverty, unemployment, housing, and crime. "There never has been any national recognition of what this pellmell change meant in terms of stresses on our communities, schools, governments, homes, churches, neighborhoods, and on ourselves. The result has been a national crisis of environment-the relationship between the people and the land-and from this crisis others have erupted all around us." - Orville Freeman, former Secretary of Agriculture, as quoted by A. V. Krebs, The Corporate Reapers: The Book of Agribusiness (Washington, DC: Essential Books, 1991), 63.
13. Corn Stubble. The slow movement of Mexican corn northward from 1500 B.C.E. to 1000 C.E. contributed much to the growth of Amerindian civilizations and, subsequently, to the European colonies. Since the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1994, corn from the United States has flooded southward into Mexico. Mechanized methods and government subsidies make American corn very cheap. Corn prices in Mexico have dropped seventy percent since the agreement, and struggling Mexican farmers have been driven out of business. Reliance on American corn, which is genetically similar (hybridized) and/or genetically engineered, will drastically and irreversibly simplify the diverse corn gene pool that Mexico has created over thousands of years. A reduced gene pool puts the world's third most important food at great risk to future disease. A resistant species of corn may be eliminated in the rush towards largely economic goals.
14. Grass Stubble in Hay Field.
15. Late Corn Leaves. "Corn is the only vegetable we eat that is made entirely of seeds, like a pomegranate. To eat corn on the cob is to eat life, like fish roe or caviar, in which we cannibalize the future in the instant."-Samuel Wilson, The Inquiring Gastronome (1927), as quoted in Betty Fussell, The Story of Corn (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 40.
16. Edge of the Cornfield. The dormant seed mysteriously comes to life. Rain comes or does not. Pests and blights inexplicably destroy crops. In early rituals, many people gave their lives, often willingly, in the attempt to appease the gods and control the natural cycles around agriculture. These sacrifices involve magical identification of humans with gods and, by extension, with food plants and their cycles of growth. Similar to our incorporation of the food plant into our bodies, these rites intermix human flesh with the seed or where we plant the seed. As time passed, animals became the primary sacrifice, followed by the use of effigies and the sacramental meal. Christ redeems humankind with the sacrifice of his life and the Catholic ritual of the Eucharist. "Take, eat; this is my body."-The Holy Bible (Matthew 26: 26).
17. Cornfield at Dusk.
18. Fall Leaves II. "We must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never clearly understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it."-Wendell Berry, Recollected Essays (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), 98.
19. Abandoned Apple Orchard. Through the machinations of our modern economy, apple producers from the western United States and China are able to undersell local growers here in Vermont as well as in other apple-producing states. The imported apples are often tasteless, harvested by exploited laborers, treated with harmful pesticides and preservatives, and shipped and stored with great use of fossil fuels. Productive orchards in Vermont are being cut down in order to grow grass.
20. Dark Earth/Grass/Sky. Good grassland soil contains millions of organisms per teaspoon. In total, they weigh more than what grows aboveground. Soil is the most complex ecosystem on Earth. "Art has its roots in the soil."-Jens Jensen, Siftings (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, in association with the Center for American Places, 1990), 1.
21. Tilled Field/Cloudy Sky. "Agriculture is, by its very nature, brutally reductive, simplifying nature's incomprehensible complexity to something humanly manageable; it begins, after all, with the simple act of banishing all but a tiny handful of chosen species."- Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's Eye View of the World (New York: Random House, 2001), 185.
22. Grass Quadriptych. Farming begins with grass. After hundreds of thousands of years of hunter-gatherer existence, people began to domesticate wild grasses. The resulting wheat, rice, and corn became the centers of the three major agricultural matrices. Separately developed from 10,000 to 5,000 B.C.E., these grains provided a constancy of food supply that enabled settled civilizations and began a radically new era in human history.
23. From the Bank of the Lemon Fair II. Water flowing from farms contains chemicals from fertilizers and pesticides that are beneficial to crops in the short run but not to life in surrounding waterways. The off-site costs of soil and water runoff are in the billions of dollars.
24. Eaton Silo. The establishment of agriculture fundamentally changed our relations to one another and to the earth. Cultivated grain can be stored and owned, unlike any other previous food. Wealth is now possible-and poverty. Particular pieces of land take on specific value, and owning them may be desirable. Individual possession was the Caucasian model and has become the basis for Western capitalism. Some Amerindian groups worked with the different idea of group ownership of crops and land.
25. Tarp Quadriptych. The cover is used to protect silage that is stored in the field.
26. Grass, Sky. Small farmers, with their orientation towards caring for the land to pass it on to their sons and daughters, are the natural solution to many of agriculture's ecological problems. But, when the bottom line is only the sale price of the product and consumers are unaware of, or don't care, about the way the product is produced, the small farmer has little chance of survival.
27. Stainless Steel Forest Line Sculpture (detail), 200 feet by one foot, Old Thompson Farm, 2001. A roll of stainless was installed level, winding through tree trunks from five to seven feet above the ground.
28. Tree Ice Ring Sculpture, five feet in diameter by five inches thick, 500 pounds, Old Thompson Farm, 2002. This was made by gradually adding water to a form, which was removed after the water froze; only the grip of the ice onto the bark holds it in place.
29. Ice Columns Sculpture, each thirteen feet by one foot in diameter, Claudon Farm, 2000. Four ice ages covered the upper northern hemisphere with ice as thick as one mile. The last glacier retreated from what would become Vermont 10,000 years ago. Left behind were a series of north-south mountains and valleys, thinly covered with topsoil. Photograph by Rod Laursen of San Francisco, California.
30. Three Pumpkin Totems Sculpture (detail), each eighteen feet in height, DeBisschop Farm, 2001. Pumpkins had to be added continuously as the lower pumpkins were crushed by the weight of pumpkins from above.
Vermont's Healing Ground
From the Book Foreword
The Champlain Valley of Vermont, the source of these photographs, has a grand topography, but, as you will see, I am drawn toward the quieter, anonymous places of everyday, rural life. Photographic art has always moved toward a wider embrace of the world. It has done so with an attention that is specific, present, and democratic. Everything is worthy of consideration, and within the photographic frame everything is important.
The slow pace of landscape photography encourages doubt and reflection. Contact with natural processes, albeit manipulated as on Vermont's small farms or abstracted as in these photographs, can renew the sense of our place on Earth. The infinite is manifest in the landscape, and self-involvement diminishes. A vital morality, without prescription, is in the balance.
With growing knowledge of the contexts surrounding my subject, and through attempting to stay with the commonplace, photographing Vermont became a charged meditation, broad and unpredictable. I returned to the same places over and over. I walked into large, non-descript fields and tried to stay attentive. The photographs of grass were a revelation that humbled me. Any value in this work revolves around our connection to place—where we stand right now, in separation and union.
It's sunny, around 0°F, windy. I hike through a foot of snow in the fields of a remote farm. As I enter a gully separating two flat fields, the snow rises to my waist. The camera and tripod begin to feel heavier. But I only have sixty feet to go. I can see that the furrowed field ahead has been blown almost completely free of snow.
I continue, the snow gets deeper. The gentle slope defined by the drifted snow conceals the true topography. The snow is now level with my chest and all movement becomes a struggle; I am no longer involved in any motion that can be described as walking. Lifting up, forcing forward, plunging down. Childhood nightmares of sinking in quicksand, long dismissed as pure Hollywood, suddenly seem not so funny. Despite the cold I begin sweating. I am breathing hard, growing tired. But only forty feet away is windswept, exposed dirt. I can go back, but that is now almost as far. I keep on, sure that the snow can't get any deeper. Wrong again. The snow reaches shoulder-height, and I begin to really flounder and worry. Exhausted, alone, realizing incredulously this may be the end, I throw myself to the horizontal and pull awkwardly with my arms. I am afraid, and I feel ridiculous. I am a fool who is finally not going to be forgiven. But crawling, like the first reptile out of the sea, is working. I keep up the slow, clumsy motion until I arrive on all fours at the bare, frozen earth.
Beauty stops us in a way that heightens awareness of relation, unity, and consciousness. The trees are not there without the space around them. The photograph is not there without the frame around it and the space around the frame. The components of the photograph are lost in their relation to one another and in relation to all they are not. The photographic space as a continuous field counters conventional hierarchies of form and subject. Color speaks independently, even as it modifies the perception of other colors and structures space. Color exists as associative memory and as immediate physical caress. From our relationship to these qualities consciousness arises.
Farmland almost always looks lovely, despite the struggles of making a living or practices that might be harming the place. Beauty seems to support truth and meaning but the correlation is uncertain. I was a young boy in Tarboro, North Carolina, during the late 1950s. On summer nights a truck would pass through the streets of our neighborhood spraying a cloud of insecticide. We children would run right behind the truck, enveloped in the wonderful fog.
Photography may be seen as grasping at reality, an attempt to freeze a moment in our continuously changing reality, but the photograph will only exist, like everything else, in the present. We bring to the photograph made in the past what is in our mind now, including our construction of time. Photographic reality is supported by our imagination and extension in time. The stability of the image may contrast tragically with its subject, which has no doubt changed or even disappeared.
The physical changes of the farm fields are dynamic. I am speaking of that space between the earth and sky—the space of the human body. The plants erupt from the bare ground and grow quickly into intense concentrations. The harvest reopens the space with startling abruptness. New seasons bring changes in light, color, texture, and touch that are so pronounced they challenge the veracity of our memories of the recent past.
My previous photographic series incorporated theories from modern physics (Alchemical Reconnaissance), explored the personal effects of the recent abandonment of a mining town in the Mojave Desert (Eagle Mountain), and looked at American society through the changes that have taken place on Civil War battlefields (Killing Ground). Diverse contexts of the physical, mental, and spiritual framed the pictures. Healing Ground continues this mode of working. After the agonizing Civil War project, I hoped agriculture would lead me in a restorative direction, which, for the most part, it has done. But the survival of these Vermont fields and farmers is uncertain. Add to the economic challenges the environmental dilemmas associated with farming and this wonderful land is yet another kind of battleground.
My sculpture joins the kind of land art characterized by temporality and emphasis on the local. The landscape sustains art and becomes art. Human control relaxes. Environmental forces share in the creation of the work and its evolution. The organic materials decay. Projects in the woods may last for a few years; those on crop fields can exist only from the fall harvest to spring planting. Forms are simple-circles, arcs, columns, and lines—suggestive of the cycles of life and their interruption. The sculpture is specific to the particular site and reacts to or emphasizes the topographic contours. Photographic documentation is necessitated by the transitory nature and remote setting. These photographs become part of the work and may be all that survives of the work; but the photographic frame is not relied upon to delimit the large, surrounding spaces. I try to size the work to its environs.
Many of these sculptures are based on forms that occur naturally or that have been created by farmers. I began to imagine sculpture on the farm fields from seeing hay wrapped in long, white sheets of plastic wind across the landscape and the odd lines of corn that the harvester missed. The tree ice ring derives from the freezing of river floodwaters around inundated trees. When the river recedes, the ice, often in pieces weighing hundreds of pounds, is left clinging to the bark.
I am beholden to the small farmers of Vermont, to whom I dedicate this book. They allow me to move through and use the places of their work—and not because of their love of art. They do so because of their spirit of community, their sense of responsiveness to a neighbor. Many farmers also realize that the sustenance of their land is not limited to food production. Despite unremitting financial pressure, long hours, and difficult weather, most of these men and women maintain an even, patient temperament. As I write, they can't plow or seed because of excessive spring rain, a major impact in their world of small margins. The precarious human condition is apparent in the lives of farmers, but all of our lives are no different. Perhaps the attitude towards our daily circumstance, and any grace we might muster, is what really matters.
Finally, this book is not about the art but is the art. I hope the work affirms the value of place, especially this particular landscape of human endeavor we call Vermont. For me, it is healing ground.
Alchemical Reconnaissance
Photographer’s Statement
These photographs attempt to relate the investigations of landscape photography and high energy physics. The assumptions and realizations of each point of view are both complementary and conflicting. The increasing distance and antipathy between art and science are unfortunate; photography stands uniquely poised between the two worlds, holding potential for reconciliation.
Both landscape photography and physics involve an approach to external,natural realities with some degree of objectification and scientific pursuit. As modern physics seeks new understanding of time, space, and the origins of the universe, it comes remarkably close to being a verifiable system of philosophy. Landscape photography asks many similar questions in its own contemplative and visual manner. The best of each discipline also offers the challenging paradox of arriving at a basic sense of unity after utilizing a method of isolation, selection, and analysis. While the two paths depend upon individual flashes of insight, they are also progressions based on the cumulative efforts and discourses of their practitioners. The study and use of light and form are essential ingredients of photography and physics and, as such, often result in a profound sense of beauty and truth.
Of course, the differences in approach are quite marked, also. Physics is a science, based on the rational, the mathematical, and the repeatable experiment. Landscape photography is concerned with intuition, spirit, and emotion, as well as the intellect. Modern physics does deal with unities and the search for underlying similarities, but it remains largely an analytical, dividing, and reductionist method. Photography does select and isolate, but the modus operandi is usually not purely analytic, but involves a more holistic perspective from the start. Both disciplines make use of technology to extend our senses, but the mammoth apparatus of high energy accelerators is certainly on a different order of magnitude than the 4" x 5" view camera. The languages also stand quite apart. Abstract mathematical equations and lifelike visual forms make very different appeals to our minds.
Other general issues arise in this series. The fundamental difficulty of reconciling language and imagery presents a constant challenge to the viewer. Notions of history are addressed in several ways. The prints are sequenced to parallel the development of modern physics - from the studies of light, to relativity, to quantum mechanics, to cosmology, to the entrance of consciousness into physics theory. Included in the prints concerned with the grand history of the universe, the multiple print traces an idea of the briefer evolution of the earth. Definitions of time and its progression are the focus in several other pieces.
I hope that these prints offer interesting juxtapositions of thought. The photograph and the physics tend to amplify and build on one another, while at the same time, they deconstruct the other's view of the world. The heart of the matter lies in the photograph, in the physics theory, and in their conceptual meeting. The dialetical tension and ambiguity of these texted images may provide an opportunity of bringing together parts of ourselves in these schizoid times.
Eagle Mountain
The town of Eagle Mountain existed in the Mojave Desert of Southern California from 1942 to 1982. Five thousand people lived in this classically American small community. It was a company town, producing iron ore for Kaiser Steel. Only 35% of the iron deposits had been extracted at the time of the closing. The demise of the town and mine speaks to a variety of problems in American, or capitalist society, and has resulted in an eerie scene of devastation.
From a series of forty 16" x 20" Ektacolor prints, made from 4" x 5" negatives, 1989-1991.
1. Oleander Drive
2. Sage Street
3. Juniper Drive
4. Backyard
5. Front Door
6. Living Room Wall
7. Bedrooms
8. Child's Room
9. Bathroom
10. Swimming Pool
11. Classroom
12. Beauty Shop
13. Cafe
The videotape :
EAGLE MOUNTAIN
by John Huddleston and Jeff Lipschutz. 1989.
B/W and Color
Running Time: 30 minutes
This poetic documentary describes a modern ghost town in southern California in a "home-made" style. Eagle Mountain was a Kaiser Steel company town of 5,000 inhabitants which closed in 1982. Since that time, the empty houses, stores, industrial buildings, and strip mine have steadily deteriorated through exposure to the harsh elements of the Mojave Desert. With a novel mix of reminiscence, anger, and humor, Eagle Mountain explores this evocative and surreal landscape, addressing a variety of social and economic problems in our country. The town's artifacts are discovered, examined, and re-animated in an attempt to ritually free the spirits of the departed residents. One of the video artists grew up in Eagle Mountain. The tape is a powerful elegy for the American hometown.
Early Work
Image List
People
1. Yankee Stadium
2. Prince William County, Virginia
3. Golden Gate Park
4. Jersey Shore
5. John, Pine Barrens, New Jersey
6. Jersey Shore
7. New Orleans
8. Chicago
9. Klan Rally, Danbury, Connecticut
10. New Orleans
11. Store Front
12. Stockholm
13. Stockholm
14. Coney Island
15. Detroit
16. Nursing Home, Yonkers
17. New York City
18. New York City
19. Visitation Day, New York City
20. New York City
21. New York City
22. Fritz, Erin's Rose, New York City
23. Erin's Rose, New York City
24. Paul, Erin's Rose, New York City
25. QE II, New York City
26. Suzanne, New York
27. Roberta, New York
28. New York City
29. Zelf Floor Sanding, New York City
Places
30. Motel, Tennessee
31. Bill's House, Virginia
32. Solana Beach, California
33. Atlantic City
34. Chicago
35. Airport
36. Coney Island
37. New York City
38. Art Fair, New York City
39. New York City
40. Kenosha, Wisconsin
41. Encinitas, California
42. Atlanta
43. San Francisco
44. Near Joplin, Missouri
45. Leavenworth County, Kansas
46. Golden Gate Park
47. California Coast
48. Death Valley
49. Cape Cod
50. Virginia
51. Potomac River, West Virginia
TV Jesus
52. TV Jesus, Washington, D.C.
53. TV Jesus, Washington, D.C.
54. TV Jesus, Washington, D.C.
55. TV Jesus, Washington, D.C.
56. TV Jesus, Washington, D.C.
57. TV Jesus, Washington, D.C.
58. TV D.C.