Ocean Point
1995 – 1998
Project Concept
Taken near Narragansett and Newport, Rhode Island, the photographs depict scenes like those painted by J.F. Kensett, W.T. Richards, and others in the mid-19th Century. Due to the slow and deliberate nature of the 8x10 view camera, the images tend to depict the coast itself rather than the ever-moving ocean surf.
History
1994 - 1996
After visiting the area, initially rented and worked from a small apartment in Wickford, RI. Then later from a small house in Acoaxet, MA.
Started photographing seascapes and coastal scenes with 8x10 camera.
1995
Assembled handmade books “Nine from Delaware, Sixteen from Rhode Island.”
1996 - 1998
Purchased Beavertail farmhouse in Jamestown, RI.
Continued photographing seascapes.
1999
Exhibited Ocean Point as selection of 30x40 inch gelatin silver prints at Janet Borden Gallery with catalogue (essay by Andy Grundberg).
Technical
Cameras
8x10 Phillips field camera
Lenses
10 ¾, and 12 inch Goerz Dagor
Film
Kodak Tri-X at ASA 100
Developers
D 23 / Kodalk 2-Bath and Rodinal
Prints
Ilford and Ilford Warmtone
Ocean Point Catalogue Essay
By Andy Grundberg
RAY MORTENSON: Prospecting the Coast
The attraction of contemporary photographers to water – and specifically to the sea – is a tendency so widespread as to be almost emblematic of our era. The limitless expanses of water and wave found in the recent pictures of Robert Adams and Hiroshi Sugimoto, for example, seem to signal a broad need for visual relief from the impingements of everyday life, and for escape from a materialistic world of culture into a natural, more spiritual world unsullied by human beings. Ray Mortenson’s new photographs of Rhode Island bays and coastline may to some extent address this need, but I would argue that they are distinct from most recent pictures of the sea in that they are, first and foremost, landscapes. I say this in part because of the emphasis placed in these pictures on the concept of prospect. Our attention is divided nicely between the “out there” of the water and the “here” of our position as viewers (and, by extension, of the photographer’s position as a picture maker). We are, quite literally, on the coast, caught in the tension inherent in all looking that suspends us between the known and the unknown. We stand on sand or granite and peer into a puzzling, indeterminate distance. The genre of the landscape, as it has evolved in the visual arts since Claude, conventionally has allowed a position for the viewer within the foreground of the scene itself – which is just what Mortenson has generously provided in these pictures.
I also would argue that these pictures are landscapes because they are inspired by romantic American landscape painting of the nineteenth century. Painters the likes of John F. Kensett, following on the heels of Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand, found in the mountains and coasts of New England and New York ready metaphors for the sublime. This sublime was not a calm, inviting state, but a fearsome beauty that demonstrated Nature’s provenance over Man. In Mortenson’s photographs we find the same spirit prevailing, most obviously in those in which stormy seas threaten to overwhelm the safe haven of the foreground.
One can best understand these pictures as the third and latest chapter in a series of landscape pictures that Mortenson has created during the 1990s. The first installment, Pleasant Hill, focused on the fields and woods of the photographer’s boyhood home state, Delaware. The second, Island Pond, assayed the edges of lakes in the Hudson Highlands north of New York City. Now, with these coastal pictures, the land has receded even more, although its presence still registers in the near and far distances. Mortenson’s journey has taken us to the very edge of what we might term the landscape, and in the end it reconnects us with a sense of awesome beauty that is radical precisely because it is located in tradition.
© Andy Grundberg, 1999