Meadowland
1978 – 1983
Project Concept
Meadowland consists of 37 images taken between 1978 and 1981 of the industrial landscape of Northeastern New Jersey. They were published in book form by Lustrum Press (1983). Printed in high contrast and carefully sequenced, the series examines the formal aesthetic qualities of this empty yet sometimes simultaneously visually dense landscape. The project continued in 1982 with a small group of images made with a 4x5 view camera.
History
1978 - 1980
Photographed in New Jersey Meadowlands with 6x4.5 cm camera.
1982
Continued photographing with 4x5 inch field camera.
1980 - 1983
Worked with Ralph Gibson, Sid Rapoport and Jonathan Williams published Meadowland (Lustrum Press, 1983)
1990
Exhibited a selection of images in The New Pastoral. Whitney Museum of American Art, Equitable Building, New York, NY.
Work traveled to George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.
2007
Exhibited vintage prints in Ralph Gibson and Lustrum Press, 1970-1985. curated by Britt Salvesen. Center for Creative Photography Gallery, Tucson, AZ.
2016
Exhibited vintage prints in Ray Mortenson: Meadowland, at L. Parker Stephenson Photographs, New York, NY.
Technical
Cameras
6x4.5 cm Mamiya 645, 4x5 Wista field camera
Lenses
80mm Mamiya, 135 mm Rodenstock
Films
Kodak Tri-X (6x4.5) at ASA 200 and Tech-Pan (4x5) at ASA 25
Developers
Edwal Super 20 (Tri-X), Rodinal 1:100 (Tech-Pan)
Prints
AGFA Brovira
Meadowland Essay – Jonathan Williams
You can take the PATH tube at Christopher Street and Sixth Avenue: under the Hudson, into Hoboken, over the Palisades and through Jersey City on Conrail (Erie/Lackawanna), past the cemeteries and power houses and bulk-mail facilities and the Croxton Yards. After Penhorn Creek and Amtrak and the Jersey Turnpike, get out at New County Road. You are within phantom whiffing distance of Secaucus and its long-gone piggeries. Close by to the southwest is what is now Laurel Hill but what used to be Snake Hill. Secaucus is an Indian word for ‘where the snake hides.’ An editor of the BAYONNE EVENING NEWS recalls that in the late 19th century, if you went fishing down the Hackensack River, the shore line on the west side of Snake Hill was “alive with huge snakes, some of them actually scintillating with bronze-like blackness...” There’s an image.
But, when Ray Mortenson takes PATH from the hard, steel, vertical World Trade Center out to soft, squishy, horizontal Secaucus these days, the snakes are gone, apparent victims of a scheme of mosquito-ditching accomplished several generations back. What is left are 30,000 acres of tidal marshes called the Jersey Meadowlands, filled with foxtails and cattails, muskrats, factories, rail yards, chemical effluvia. I (and almost any citizen over forty who has approached Manhattan Island from the south or west on the Pennsylvania Railroad or the New Jersey Turnpike) can well remember the reeds, the sinister institutional buildings on Snake Hill, and the sign that once proclaimed BROMO-SELTZER. I know nothing else about the Meadowlands except what I have read in a 1957 profile in the NEW YORKER by John Brooks. I have met Ray Mortenson only once. I am thus as uniquely equipped to write about his prints as almost anyone who picks up this book cold. High boots, quick eyes, and a certain stealth are required. Let’s try it. . .
When Ray and I talked in Manhattan, two or three miles east of the Meadowlands, I made a few notes. These are things he said:
“This particular landscape is open, horizontal and deserted, yet it is only two miles from one of the most closed, vertical and densely populated cities in the world. It functions as a major transportation center and i power supply for the city. . . a huge machine with no one l there to run it.”
“In spite of the desolate and death-like appearance of the place, there is an amazing amount of life there. I saw ducks, geese, pheasants, rabbits and more.”
“I photographed there for a year. I have always liked industrial shapes. l had a childhood fantasy of living in a spherical oil tank transformed on the inside into a kind of James Bond luxury hideout. It was multilevelled and air-conditioned. There were giant curved windows of one-way mirror overlooking the industrial wilderness. I think that I still have this fantasy.”
“When I am out there photographing, I am at ease. There is tranquility. . .space, peace and quiet. The place has a dreamlike, almost other worldly quality for me. When I was a kid I used to climb a tree on a hill that overlooked a long valley. I would sit there for hours and daydream or think or just stare. Being in New Jersey is like being in that tree.”
“A friend of mine was looking at the New Jersey photographs and made a comment that becomes more and more interesting to me. He said: ‘Wow, there’s almost more stuff in there than I can see.’”
Now back to J. Williams, your fellow-explorer. He says: Ray Mortenson’s photographs are all about Alignment, the location of things in relation to each other from the point of view of the camera. “I like to close one eye and move my head.” They are about Frontality. The camera is at eye-level, perched on a monopod. They are about Flat-Space. . . RM likes things two-dimensional. They are about Texture (surface) and Detail (information). “I like the contrast of compact, densely-detailed middlegrounds against empty and ambiguous foregrounds and backgrounds.” And they are about Light: soft, flat, diffused light that is general and atmospheric in nature. . . All of which is so obvious that we need not go on about it, as though the means of camera-work were the hottest thing since the wheel or since John Travolta (who?) came out of Englewood.
Yet, one stupidly always wants to ‘know’ why the photographer took the picture, pursued the project, ‘just what he had in mind.’ Someone had the temerity to ask Ansel Adams only the other day: “Now, at the precise moment of taking the picture, just what were you thinking of?” To which the great man sighed in disbelief: “IT’S ON THE WALL! IT’S RIGHT THERE ON THE WALL!”
Literary man that I am, I had to ask Ray Mortenson what he thought of Charles Olson’s statement: “ONE LOVES ONLY FORM!” And he agreed: “The New Jersey pictures have much more to do with form than they have with New Jersey.” And so did those poems that Dr. William Carlos Williams snapped, just to the west of the Meadowlands in Rutherford, N.J. Yep, said Doc Williams in a famous poem: you can do a lot, if you know what’s around you. Dr. Freud called it Besetzung, the set of things, the positioning of things. . . what turns you on. . . whether it’s telephone poles set above marshlands or seemingly more carnal matters. Art isn’t always so complicated as some think.
Jake Kraft, one of the meadow rats from Carlstadt, N.J., told John Brooks back in the fifties:
YOUR ORDINARY COMMUTER,
HE CROSSES THE MEADOWS TWICE A DAY,
FIVE DAYS A WEEK,
AND HE SAYS
“WHAT A HOLE!
NOTHING BUT REEDS AND BURNING GARBAGE.”
ALL RIGHT,
TO THEM IT’S A HOLE.
BUT I CAN SEE THE BIRDS’ NESTS
IN THOSE REEDS,
AND I KNOW WHERE TO FIND
TURTLE EGGS AND MUSKRAT RUNS
IN THE CREEKS.
I WATCH THE CARS AND BUSES AND TRAINS
GOING BY—
HEADING EAST IN THE MORNING, WEST AT NIGHT"
AND I LOOK AT THE PEOPLE IN THEM AND THINK,
I’VE GOT THE EDGE ON YOU.
I CAN SEE THINGS HERE
THAT YOU CAN’T.
WELL, GOODBYE.
JONATHAN WILLIAMS, HIGHLANDS, NORTH CAROLINA
DECEMBER 15, 1982