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Rangefinder
Magazine
December 2002
Our Town Today:
by Shawn Macomber
A Living History of a New Hampshire Town
IN FARMINGTON, New Hampshire, a
New England town of 6500, the future is now, as photographer Jane Wingate
sets out with her Sony Mavica CD1000 to chart the thus far uncharted days
and nights of her town.
The fruit of this fusion of community, history and technology is the 1500-picture
strong “Our Town Today,” a digital photo documentation of
the life and times of Farmington collected for posterity on CD-ROM. But
while the tools for Wingate’s project are modern, the spirit behind
it is one of preserving the heritage of one small town.
What began as a chronicle of some of the old buildings around town quickly
spiraled into the massive “Our Town Today.” Wingate’s
beautiful photos—or as she calls them, “sketches”—give
equal attention to both the transcendental and the ordinary. Wingate envisions
two more full volumes to follow, with a potential total of nearly 5000
pictures.
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| Above: 9/16/2001—Plenty of flags |
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“I always loved the town’s
architecture, so I began photographing the old buildings to capture them
before they’re all gone,” Wingate explains. “When I
started poking around downtown, I remembered that I really loved photographing
people, so I started doing that. Before I knew it I was shooting everything
that moved. That’s when this project started to come together.”
Wingate’s love of photography spans decades. She was quick to embrace
digital photography early on, and is making the most of it with this project,
exploring realms of possibility thus far uncharted. “Our Town Today”
goes beyond the CD format, or the sheer volume of photos. It has taken
the concept of the photo essay and broken all the barriers, creating a
coherent narrative that moves forward with each picture like a sentence,
and with those sentences collected in chapters. Just like the chapters
of a book-in-print, the titles of Wingate’s digital chapters hint
at what’s to come. “Central Street, Sunday Morning,”
“Girl’s Day Out: No Guys Allowed,” “Workday, Downtown,”
and “9/16—Plenty of Flags” are a few of the 15 chapters
in “Our Town Today.”
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| Babe’s car and Vinnie’s Pizza; |
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Here’s how it works. Buy
the CD. Put it in your computer’s CD drive, and follow directions
for opening it. (“Our Town Today” has been programmed to run
on Windows, MAC, Linus and UNIX operating systems.) When the title page
comes up, a click of the mouse on “Table of Contents” begins
the journey. Read the “Preface” and the next three brief texts,
then select a chapter and read the short text which sets the tone of the
chapter. Then click on “Start” and the photos begin to appear
on your screen like a slide show, each photo lingering for five seconds,
twelve photos a minute. See something you fancy a longer look at? Click
on the image and the show pauses; click again when you’re ready
to continue. You can get out of the program at any time, or return to
the Table of Contents.
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| Where the town’s future is decided. |
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Wingate likes the fact that embedded
in every one of the digital images is the exact day, hour, minute and
second the image was taken, making “Our Town Today” an archive
of precise ephemeral moments in the ongoing life of the town. As you watch,
the story of the town is moving forward, even as each second ties the
the image more securely in the past.
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| Hay Day belt sander race. |
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Wingate says, “Digital technology
is not only what made the whole project possible, it also gave us a way
to get such a large project out there intact, reasonably priced and accessible.”
Wingate’s first camera, given to her when she was 10, was a Kodak
Brownie. “I got that Brownie and I was in love,” Wingate said.
“There was just a magic to it all. I wanted to shoot everything
in sight, living or not. That was when I developed an abiding love of
nature.” In college, Wingate studied American literature and education.
After college the Massachusetts native took a job teaching English in—as
fate would have it—Farmington. She taught for four years, and then
for various reasons left and came back to the area several times.
“Each time I swore I’d never come back, but I always did,”
Wingate said. “When my husband and I came back the last time, we
came for the duration. We’re not going anywhere. We’re really
drawn to small-town New England, and especially love the New Hampshire
landscape.” And Wingate had another love: writing. After leaving
teaching, she spent spent years writing novels and essays. Her work has
appeared The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, the
Concord Monitor, NH Magazine, Ararat magazine, Outdoor Photographer, and
of course, Rangefinder, to name a few. More recently she has written a
screenplay called “The Luckiest One,” a story of the 1915
genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as witnessed and experienced
by a young girl who survived.
Writing would have made a respectable
career on its own, but there was something else Wingate wanted to do:
take pictures. In the 1980s she began to shoot in earnest. “When
you pick up a tripod,” Wingate says, “that means you’re
getting serious.” In November 2000 Wingate’s Brownie was long
gone, and the Nikons and tripod set aside, replaced by a state-of-the-art
digital camera that stores 200 pictures on a 185MB CD. For a classically-trained
photographer used to creating fine art, “Our Town Today” called
for a new approach.
“The photos on ‘Our Town Today’ are all handheld,”
Wingate says. “I would not live long enough to finish this project
if I set up the tripod for every one of these shots. Though I do bring
all the years of classical training to bear on what I’m doing today.
In a way I’ve come full circle, clicking the pictures as fast as
I see them.”
Ask Wingate what makes a great picture and she shuns an extended meandering
through the terminology and politics of the modern art scene. She is clearly
no fan of “artists’ statements.”
Instead, she prefers to point to
something Eliot Porter said: “The rare photograph, the work of art,
is the conscious product of personality, the expression of individuality,
of vision and understanding of truth. But before all else a work of art
is the creation of love, love for the subject first and for the medium
second. Love is the fundamental necessity underlying the need to create,
underlying the emotion that gives it form, and from which grows the finished
product that is presented to the world.”
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| Sporting Hay Day tattoos; |
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Wingate adds, “Many things
go into the brew in varying degrees. Obviously there are form and composition
and all that stuff. You approach each subject the appropriate way. I set
up a photograph of a building very differently from how I set up a photo
of girls clogging in the street on Hay Day. My training helps me work
with what I’ve got and put together the best photo I can get.”
“Our Town Today” is a source of great pride for Wingate, and
she has eagerly thrown herself into the production of the second volume,
even while planning a 1000-photo special Christmas release, “Hay
Day, 2002: Miles o’ Smiles.”
People around Farmington are getting
used to her running around and taking pictures of everything. As word
spreads about the first volume of her trilogy, one might be worried that
Wingate’s subjects might not be so willing to put up with her incessant
shooting. Maybe the town would fear a paparazzi-type environment when
all of their everythings become someone else’s.
But instead, the town has embraced the project. At the town’s annual
street festival, “Hay Day,” people played for the camera,
looking to become a part of the next volume, eager to be captured for
the town’s unofficial digital history.
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| Babe inside Vinnie’s Pizza |
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Perhaps they are pleased to be
getting this recognition. The decision to take a picture is, after all,
a validation of the subject. It is saying, “You know, you may just
be sitting on a bench in a small town in New Hampshire, but you and the
bench and the moment are all beautiful and meaningful and worth remembering.”
And who doesn’t want to be remembered? Who doesn’t want to
have left a mark on the town where he lived out his days?
“This ongoing project is great fun,” Wingate says. “In
photography, as in writing, you do your best work when you focus on what
you know. The most important thing is to have a genuine love for the subject.
Our own backyards have the meatiest subjects in them. I’ve focused
on New England for many years now. This is what I love and this is what
I’m going to keep on doing.” To order Wingate’s CD,
visit her web site: www.janewingate.com
Shawn Macomber is a freelance writer from New Hampshire. His
work has appeared in Foster’s Daily Democrat, The Union Leader,
The Exeter Newsletter, and The Portsmouth Herald. A recent graduate of
the University of New Hampshire, Macomber is currently working on a novel
and pursuing a master's degree in political philosophy.
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