Since 2006, I have published a blog called Working
Pictures . This exhibition shows the best of that
blog’s content that came from locations in Pennsylvania.
The Working
Pictures blog deals with my reactions to simple everyday
things I encounter, either at home or on travel for other
projects, when some little strange thing clicks over and makes
for an interesting photograph. Quite a few of the pictures
published on the blog came from work made in Pennsylvania
on trips connected to my 2007 Camerawork exhibition, “Coal
Country.” Another trip to Pennsylvania in 2009, primarily
concerned with drive-in theaters, also turned up pictures
for the blog. When the Camerawork staff invited me to do a
second exhibition, the idea quickly formed to reify the ephemeral
blog postings into a Pennsylvania Suite of the Working Pictures
Blog. Ink on paper prints rather than pixels on a screen.
Editing the Suite down to 30 pictures that I thought would
go together well as small prints in an intimate space took
the reification exercise to another interesting level.
~ Carl Weese
Carl Weese grew up in New Jersey, began work as a freelance
photographer in 1972 in the Philadelphia area, then moved to
western Connecticut in 1975. Parallel to his commercial career
in photo-illustration for editorial and commercial clients in
New York and nationwide, Weese has produced personal photographic
projects on subjects ranging from life in a traveling carnival
to the effect of an underground coal fire on a small Pennsylvania
town; from landscapes of the eastern United States to studies
of the American drive-in movie theater and the vernacular architecture
of country churches.
He is co-author of the 1998 book The New Platinum Print, an
instruction manual on modern approaches to the classic platinum
process of photographic printing. He has been a contributing
editor to ProPhoto magazine and PhotoTechniques magazine. He
teaches workshops in photographic technique at his own facility
in Connecticut and at workshop centers including The Center
for Alternative Photography, New York, NY.
