Figure 1 – Hyman Wolf with the camera at The Cloisters c. 1930. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Today is Fathers’ Day; so I thought that I would share a couple of photographs with you.  The dapper young man in Figure 1 is my father Hyman Wolf around 1930.  His mother called him Hymie and his friends called him Hy.  The joke, of course, was always: “Hi Hy.” New Yorkers will probably recognize the location of the photograph as The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park.

My father took my sister and me to museums just about every weekend, and The Cloisters was one of his and our favorites.  He had an amazing encyclopedic knowledge of things especially the nature world.  He was a gifted and inspiring science teacher at Charles Sumner Junior High School 65 in Manhattan, for most of his career. Often at the American Museum of Natural History we would find that we were being followed by other families listening in to my father’s explanations.  I credit my father for teaching me to ask why.

I have to apologize for the quality of the photographs.  My father took his photographs with a beloved Ciroflex twin lens reflex camera that was 2 1/4 ” by 2 1/4 “.  He made contact prints or had contact prints made.  So they stayed that size and looking at them now, they really aren’t very sharp.

I also wanted to share Figure 2. It shows my father again as a young man here in recital on the piano.  He had a great love of music that lasted all his life.

Taken together the two figures here illustrate an important point about the role of photography as documents in our lives.  We have spoken about how they transverse time and give us a glimpse of how people were then.  But it is always significant to recognize that it is ever a construction.  We are not seeing people how they really were but as how the photographer saw them, or in some cases how the subject wanted to be seen.

I have chosen these two photographs because I think that they would have made my father smile.  They represent, I think how he would have liked to be seen, as he saw himself.

I owe a huge debt to my father. When I reached college, we would discuss physics specifically quantum mechanics and relativity theory for many hours.  My father just wouldn’t follow or accept it.  Somewhere along the way I had passed him, at least in these subjects.  It felt strange like the first time that I beat him at chess.  I never knew if I really beat him or if he allowed me to beat him.  I do know that in my father’s library there was a little John Dent edition of Ivan Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons.”  I took it down and read it when I  was in college.  Beating your father at chess is inevitable.  He does it because he loves you.  So today I plan on flavoring my meat with rosemary.

Figure 2 – Hyman Wolf in recital c. 1930. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 – Cypripedium acaule, the moccasin flower a wild lady slipper orchid, Cape Porpoise, ME. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

It was a bit of a gloomy day. Still I thought that it might be rewarding to take a short walk through the woods in Cape Porpoise, ME. This was scrubby dense forest with lots of birches and hemlocks. It drew on by the loud cacophony of birds, perhaps crows, screaming deep among the trees. Well, I was rewarded. My eye was captured by a bit of magenta which turned out to be a wild orchid, Cypripedium acaule – so-called moccasin flower. And then I started looking and realized like magical beings they were hiding all around me.

As it turns out this is precisely the ideal time to observe these beautiful pink lady’s slippers. We must admire these wild beauties with a certain respect and reverence. They are essentially impossible to cultivate and yet seem to have a fairly easy time of finding just the right soil and conditions in these northern forests. Seeing them first hand offers a kind of peaceful serenity that befits the fact that the root of lady’s slippers has historically been valued for its sedative properties and used as a remedy for nervousness, tooth pain, and muscle spasms.

The moccasin flower has a symbiotic relationship with a soil fungus called Rhizoctonia. Unlike most seed these orchid seeds do not have the fuel to grow and require the fungal threads to break them open and share food, I suppose like a mother bird feeding its fledglings. Then when the plant is older the fungus reverses the process extracting nutrients from the roots.

The other fascinating aspect of the lady slipper is that it lures bee’s to its marvelous pouch where alas poor bee finds no nectar. Hairs within the pouch direct the bees to the only exit of escape where they must brush against the stigma to be coated with pollen to carry to another flower. This is Darwinian evolution at its most magnificent.

But I digress. I retreated the forest to locate my tripod and return to these beautiful orchids which I spent some time photographing. Figure 1 is one of the results. The blah-dee-blah may be of some interest, since it was heavily overcast and drizzling at times. I wanted some sharpness of detail on the complex flower and a reasonable amount of depth of field. In this particular image I filled with light from the on camera flash. ISO 400, -1 exposure compensation, f/11.0 at 1/25^th sec, EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 140 mm.

Figure 1 – Gristmill at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn Sudbury, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2014.

Figure 1 is an image that I took last weekend of the Old Grist Mill at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn this past weekend in Sudbury, MA.  The Wayside Inn Grist Mill was commissioned by Henry Ford and designed by renowned hydraulic engineer J.B. Campbell. The Mill ground its first grain on Thanksgiving Day 1929. In 1952, the Pepperidge Farm began operating the Mill, which it continued to do until 1967.  It’s image remains the logo of the company.  The mill remains in operation today grinding grain for the Wayside Inn.

So much for history.  I am ambivalent about whether my photograph really works.  I wish, first of all, that there was water flowing over the paddle wheel.  I was also initially ambivalent about whether it should be a color or black and white photograph.  But then I realized that what I like best about the picture is that it looks like a black and white image which has been hand-painted adding very vivid red and also some green.

A second element that I am pleased with are the struts that seem to attach the wheel to the wall.  It seems a strange point to notice. But my eyes continue to be drawn to them and I think this is because they seem to ground the waterwheel’s mechanism to reality – that is to the need to obey physical law.  The image is of a real functional machine, not an artifice of the designer’s mind.