A Wintery Mix

Goodbye winter, zine feedback, Meet the Berkshires, studio cat

Can we, shall we, dare to believe that winter is over? It’s been a doozy and everyone has been complaining about it. Windchill factor! Frostbite warnings! Collapsed structures! Endless shoveling in sub-zero temperatures! Plowed up piles of snow obscuring intersection corners – you look left, sort of look right as best you can, and then cross your fingers and hope there is no car coming from behind the big mound of snow. So often we’d have to decide between going the long way or chancing the pass over the mountain, hoping it has been plowed or salted and even if it is passable, will a tree come down right across the road? It’s all happened! And good grief, the ice dams! Those of you in warmer climes will wonder what an ice dam is and I will tell you. Imagine a build up of snow over several snowstorms just sitting on your roof, melting from underneath by heat escaping from your house, the water tries to run off the edge but there’s a huge, thick crust of ice supported by a gutter. Where is that water going to go? Answer: Into your house. Well not our house, luckily, but driving around we would see crews of people shoveling roofs (!!) and that would be the reason why.

But has winter been beautiful, you might ask? Of course it has.

Artful Barn, photograph by Diana Pappas

50 feet above the snow, photograph by Tom Bland

Winter in West Stockbridge, MA, photograph by Tom Bland

A fox changes directions, photograph by Diana Pappas

A temporary structure, photograph by Tom Bland

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Zine Feedback

Our first zine launched in January where we debuted (in print only) a project entitled First Frost / Final Bloom. This act of packaging up the printed work and sending it out, and then a week later receiving a thoughtful response was a world away from debuting the work online and getting likes and comments. Instead we got phone calls, FaceTimes, e-mails, text messages and in-person conversations from people who received their copies and simply had to spontaneously react to seeing the work. We felt real magic in these direct conversations…

“Just opened my beautiful photography zine, and took time to review the photos. They are so gorgeous. When you and Tom sent the email about this, something in the email resonated with me about holding the photos in my hand, not just scrolling through on an email. I feel like things at work are moving 1,000,000 miles a minute, and I’m trying to prioritize mindfulness around managing my time. I really appreciate how looking at beautiful art can help me do that!”

and

“The absolute magic of a frozen dahlia...I simply can’t. Thanks for sharing such a lovely slice of the world. What a salve for the soul.”

and

“Well done, a lovely well produced volume.
A very nice selection of images that are great series.

It’s always rewarding to have these in book form as you travel from page to page and image to image. It gives them a sense of pacing as you make connections, comparisons and build a visual knowledge of a place and a time. Beautiful. The images are at once fragile yet also very strong. Architecturally robust even. The delicate nature of the flower petals and the rigidity of the frozenness is such a classic juxtaposition.

There is also such delicacy in the colors. The muted dark greens (mainly) as a backdrop allows the pinks, purples, oranges etc to glow like a lantern rather than pop out.”

and

“I’m sitting here in my library, with quiet music and a candle, savoring ‘First Frost / Final Bloom’. What a wonderful work of art.”

and

“The photos themselves are wonderful but the storytelling and the overall care in how they designed and packaged it really shines.”

Thank you to those of you who bought a zine for yourself or as a gift, and for those of you who joined us as a paid subscriber to obtain a copy and support us. It was a pleasure to create the work and send the zines out to you! Is this the first you are hearing of First Frost / Final Bloom? Maybe you’d like to have a copy too? The limited edition of 30 has just sold out but we have a few open editions in stock, with a new batch on the way to us from the printer ahead of supplying a couple of shops in California and Massachusetts.

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In other news, we can barely get any work done without constant interruptions of extreme cuteness and epic mischievousness – we adopted a young cat named Stormy who has now taken over the house. She wags her tail like a dog, rips up cardboard boxes like a predator pulling meat off a carcass and purrs like a truck. She is very sweet when she isn’t tearing through the house like a chittering raccoon with her tail puffed up beyond belief. Apparently cats get ‘the zoomies’! She may or may not occasionally feature in this newsletter but just know that behind the scenes she is bringing us a lot of joy and seems to be happy in her new home.

Stormy relaxing / begging for food.

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And finally, last month we launched Meet the Berkshires, a very local publication profiling the makers, artisans, and small businesses we discover here in the Berkshires, MA.

We enjoy this work because it draws on our combined strengths as photographers and represents what we excel at: entering a new space with our cameras to capture the details that intrigue us.

Meet the Berkshires is where we’ll share work that we haven’t really covered here. It’s the kind of work that’s hard to label – workplace portraiture/visual storytelling/environmental portraits (call it what you will) – combined with our eye for detail, texture, and an appreciation of the everyday.

We’ve kept the two publications separate but if you’re curious, check it out. First up: Ann McCallum of McCallum Industrial Pottery, who brings an architect’s eye to her pottery studio in North Adams. Read the full profile at the link below. The next edition is currently in the works.

McCallum Industrial Pottery

Thanks for reading, and happy Spring.

Diana & Tom

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We don’t paywall our work here, so your support means a lot. If you’d like to show your appreciation, this page on our website gives you a few options.