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Home Ground #4
Bozeman, Montana
2024

Home Ground #3
Bozeman, Montana
2024

I bought this old iron bed frame in 1970 at a garage sale (for $3 as I recall) the first time I moved away from home when I was starting college. It came with an open spring foundation and ratty mattress which were immediately discarded in favor of a cast-off mattress and box springs from my parents. It’s been with me ever since. At some point I converted it to hold a queen-size rather than full mattress, but is otherwise unchanged. It was quite old in 1970 so is really old now. The light (great for reading in bed) is also old although we’ve only had it for some 40 years after purchasing it at one of those sales I referred to in yesterday’s post.

Home Ground #2
Bozeman, Montana
2024

Many of the fixtures in our house, such as the glass doorknob seen here, were purchased at farm sales and estate auctions around this part of Montana in the 80s as we were building the home. These items, besides generally being cheap, also  thus adding instant cred to the antique feel we were going for in the home. The 40 years since then has added to their antique qualities.

Home Ground #1
Bozeman, Montana
2024

I’ve always admired the photographs and writings of Wright Morris, who took quiet photos of the objects and environs in people’s day to day lives back in the 1940s and 50s that, while only rarely showing actual people in them, revealed compelling vignettes of those people’s lives. He also wrote extensively about life in those times (fiction and nonfiction), but to me it is the photos themselves that have the greatest impact.

The Fashion Queen and I spent 20 years designing and building our own home in the mountains and twice that long filling it with things that have made it a home to us. It occurred to me recently that our house and contents are old enough now to certainly be considered interesting in the sense that it has that patina of age and use that may lend itself to interesting visual storytelling. That is perhaps especially true given we built the house to begin with features reminiscent of homes from the Victorian Age.

It’s not in my wheelhouse to write the kind of prose that Morris did to go along with his photos, but I can make a good stab at the photography end of such storytelling. So recently I started working on a series of images of our house, documenting various architectural details and the still life tableaus to be found just about anywhere you look in the place. It’s a work in progress and will be presented in no particular order. I’m expecting many “do-overs” in regard to some of the images that may not be quite right the first time around.

In the years leading up to designing and building our house, I tried my hand at furniture. The bookcase in this photo was one of those projects.

River Oak
Mt. Lemmon, Arizona
2023

It’s not much of a river, when it hasn’t been raining anyway, but it’s a heck of a desert oak tree.

Weather Round the Bend
Deschutes River, Oregon
2024

River Road
Deschutes River, Oregon
2024

Gleaming Between the Lines
Ajo, Arizona
2024

Lately, I’ve been thinking about our time in Ajo last January. Some early anticipation of returning there in January, 2025 I guess. It just so happened that I’ve had this photo of a new moon and a “nearby” planet (I don’t remember which) sitting in my potential POTD image folder on my computer since returning home last winter, so it seemed right to to post it now.

Cool Morning
Bozeman, Montana
2024

If you live in one place long enough your appreciation of the surrounding views can become a little jaded after a while. For me that’s somewhat the case in regard to our mountain home. In theory I appreciate the views all the time but in practice I don’t always pay much attention to them; it takes some special circumstances to make me stop while I’m out doing whatever the chores of the day are to just appreciate my surroundings. This was the case just the other day. It was a cool morning after a string of hot days, enhanced by partly cloudy skies and a slight breeze. The trees and greenery looked lush despite the heat, and the distant Absaroka mountains looked mysteriously alluring in the morning haze that was actually haze due to moisture in the air rather than the forest fire smoke that has plagued us off and on for a number of weeks.

Bare Tree #131
Bozeman, Montana
2024

I’ve photographed this downed and decaying tree on our property more than once before but I’m taken by its character every time I walk by it so couldn’t help but take just  one more (maybe) photo of it.