Producing Home and Farm News

8.5 x 11, 64 pages + covers.

My latest issue of Monochrome Mania, No. 13, is titled Home and Farm News.  Since I started Monochrome Mania, I have been producing three issues a year, until 2024.  I started working on the idea for the issue a few years ago, and kept photographing, and could not come up with a narrative I was happy with until this spring.  Home and Farm News is about my mother-in-law’s farmhouse and the farm, and stories from her about growing up and raising a family.   At first I envisioned a sort of impersonal story where the farm and farmhouse was the “universal” story about sold farms and the farmhouse.  But my initial approach was flawed.  It needed to be relatable and personal.  So, I interviewed Charlotte (my MIL) last year, and finally found a program that would convert the audio interview (90 minutes) into text. Believe me, that was a huge time-saver, and I was able to come up with text that I could weave into a narrative.  The interesting aspect of the program was that it also generated an AI summary of the interview, which was this:

The interview covers the life stories and memories of Charlotte Murphy and her family. Key topics discussed include her father's dairy farming background in New York, her parents' courtship and marriage, her childhood experiences like having pneumonia and visiting Florida, her college years at Middlebury as an English major, her work at the local bank, her marriage to Jim, the family's involvement in dairy farming, the tragic barn fire that impacted their business, her children's careers in nursing and horticulture, her fondness for baseball stemming from listening to Brooklyn Dodgers games with her father, and reflections on life lessons like financial prudence and maintaining good health.

I was actually quite impressed with that!  But worry not, no AI was used in MY writing, nor the images.  The impetus for the Home and Farm News was this, as explained in an excerpt from this issue:

“Over my many years of photography, I regret not making photos of the Murphy farmhouse back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  At that time, being a young man, I didn’t really have the conceptual framework to do documentary photography, let alone photographing to record what might someday be lost.  It wasn’t until 2000 that I started taking photography seriously as a means of expression, exploration, and self-discovery. By that time, any trips back to New York State were infrequent, and hence, more meaningful in terms of documentary work. It wasn’t until 2020 when COVID disrupted our normal ways that an awareness took hold that I SHOULD put something together to at least memorialize the farmhouse.  It’s easiest to do absolutely nothing, but then to regret that nothing was done.  So, while the effort to bring all the photos together is one aspect, so too, is the task to create some sort of narrative. I do believe that while a good photograph does not necessarily need to have any explanation, photographs do not exist in a vacuum, and removing the context from a photograph may reduce or obfuscate its intended purpose. So, creating a narrative for this work is essential in making the images speak with more clarity, even when the image itself may not be sharp or defined.”

 Of course, aside from the text, there have to be many photographs, and choosing the ones to include from the hundreds of images was certainly a task. However, it was made easier by the decision to have the images follow the text, and even when there was no caption for the image, it was obvious in what sequence it belonged.  

This was a personal project for me, as my long-time association with the family and the farm gave me a different viewpoint from the family members that grew up there.  I wanted to be able to tell Charlotte’s story, as well as how I perceived the farm.  Another impetus was wanting to finish the issue and have it printed and available in time for Charlotte’s 98th birthday - which I did.  

My instincts were correct, as I have received many heartfelt responses from the readers who are not family members. Most importantly, Charlotte loved the result.  While I didn’t cover every aspect of her life in the 64 pages — who could?— I believe that readers come away with a better appreciation of farm life, and how a house becomes the container of many memories.  Once the family no longer lives in that house, there will be little to connect it with the past, and I wanted to impart how those memories are intertwined with the physical objects.  

apologies to Wright Morris.

I used a variety of cameras, both film and digital, to make the b&w images used in the issue.  The last photos taken were done with my friend Bill Pivetta’s Hasselblad 503CX that he loaned me in 2023.  My suggestion for anyone doing a project such as this is to use every available tool that you have, as it’s the image that is important, not the camera or film that you used, or type of imaging sensor.  You can tell a story with a 6 megapixel 20 year old digicam, or with large format cameras, and everything in between.  The important thing is to document what you see.  I loved photographing the inside of the farm house early in the morning, before anyone else was up.  The peacefulness and the incoming light was always inspirational.  Also, I often used a tripod, as some exposures were around a second or two.  I never used flash, just ambient light.  

Here are some of my favorite images from the issue, and if you are interested in buying a copy, I am selling them in my Etsy store at $16 + shipping (US only).