New England - The Four Seasons [antikvár]

Photographer's PreviewThis is your armchair trip through New England's Four Seasons, with some of the foremost writers of this unique area translating my color photographs into words. Each writer was given a print and requested to record such emotion or reaction as the print might arouse, or any comments that lovers of New England would enjoy reading. There are fifty-five individual scenes which show dramatically that all seasons in New England are photogenic. They present in full character the most historic and beautiful section of America.Friends have asked me how in the world I could ever afford to have all these important writers in one book. Well, I just couldn't if I paid them their usual fees. It's really quite simple: all of them are New Englanders who love one or more or all of the six states.Furthermore, I had the pleasure of knowing many of them from previous assignments for national magazines. Among them Henry Morgan, Arthur Schlesinger, and Maria von Trapp. My first volume included about a dozen of these writers. The ones with whom I didn't have a personal relationship, I secured through Herbert A. Kenny, David McCord, or Houghton Mifflin. It was flattering to me that many busy writers offered to write a characteristic essay.Now it's a difficult task to select fifty-five pictures from the many thousands I have taken over half a century. I'm a squirrel at heart, for I never throw a transparency away. The most difficult part of selecting these pictures was that every day I thought of yet another print that should be included. I doubt if any photographer could catch New England properly, beautifully, and dramatically in its four seasons, in the space of only ayear or two. I visited and revisited some of these locations many times before capturing the values shown in the pictures. In this volume most of the scenes are quite recent, a few old, and some made just in time to squeeze in. Also modern progress has ruined certain subjects. Take Louisburg Square on page 105. Could one ever capture that tranquil scene again without an automobile showing? You'll find in my camera notes that some of these photographs have appeared in national magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. My camera notes also tell of the difficulties I actually experienced in getting the pictures. It's not all wine and roses; but if you love photography, you just take the good with the bad, happy that you are in a profession that beats the outright pursuit of pleasure and is rewarding physically, mentally, and spiritually, and can even be profitable.I know New England like a book: all the back roads and almost all the inlets and islands along the coast. Over the years I have built up a tremendous file of color transparencies. I've tried to convey the cold, the heat, the beauty, and the uniqueness of New England. The samples in this book are just that interesting color studies of almost every phase of New England scenery. You can spend a lifetime in the northeast corner of the United States and never photograph as many as you want. All the photographs were enlarged without any retouching, and only a few were slightly cropped. The black and white photographs were made by my dear late wife, Claire. She accompanied me on all my picture-taking assignments over most of the world and was a great help in seeing picture possibilities that I had overlooked. We were a perfect team. Our daughter6