BRATTLEBORO — Photographer Brett Simison took some time away from his busy career as a commercial photographer to study the works of Robert Frost and to make a series of photos of the cabin and surrounding landscape where the New England poet lived during the summers while teaching at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in Ripton.
“I've tried to create a portfolio of photographs that conveys the natural beauty of the farm and the surrounding lands that the famous poet explored and served to inspire him, while simultaneously communicating a little of the darkness I found in those empty rooms in Ripton,” says Simison, whose show “The Pane in Empty Rooms” runs through January at the Vermont Center for Photography (VCP) on 49 Flat St.
VCP Manager Joshua Farr believes that this series of large black-and-white photographs might be some of the most exquisitely crafted prints to be featured at the gallery. This is the first time the images have been given a solo gallery exhibition.
On Sunday, Feb. 2, from 4 to 6 p.m, VCP will be hosting the closing reception for the exhibition. Simison will be there for a meet-and-greet and to answer any questions about his work.
Art and commerce
Although acclaimed for his photography of Vermont landscapes, Simison's commercial specialty is editorial portraiture.
“The secret of portraits is learning to work fast,” he says. “Taking the photo of busy men like our governor or some celebrity, you have to get to know them quickly and do your job.”
A native of Citronelle, Ala. who now lives Vergennes, Simison's work assignments have taken him all over the globe. He has a variety of commercial, advertising, and editorial clients throughout the United States, Mexico, and Central America, ranging from studio product photography, to assignments in the jungles of Guatemala, to teaching photography at the college level.
After receiving a degree in zoology from the University of Florida, he trained as an assistant under National Geographic wildlife photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols. His photography has appeared in a number of publications, including The New York Times, Backpacker, Time's Asia edition, Skiing Magazine, and Outdoor Traveler, as well as in works published by Harcourt Houghton-Mifflin.
He has taught at the University of Virginia, Middlebury College, the State University of New York, and other institutions of higher learning.
And every now and then, Simison takes a break from his commercial career to refocus himself on his own work.
“I find relief in no longer following someone else's orders and doing a personal project,” he says.
Frost's inspiration
“The Pane in Empty Rooms” was not originally his idea. After seeing one of Simison's black-and-white landscape photographs of Vermont, a friend suggested that he should check out the Robert Frost cabin at Bread Loaf.
“Since Homer Noble Farm, where the cabin is located, is owned by Middlebury College where I teach, I was able to go the school and tell them what I wanted, and they gave me a key to the place,” says Simison in his artist's statement.
“I made many visits over the course of a couple of years when weather conditions created the kind of light and scenes I wanted to capture,” he says. “After covering the cabin and farm grounds, I fanned out to the surrounding forests and trails, looking for spaces that Frost likely visited and used for inspiration.”
Detail on film
The 30-in.-by-40-in. photographs in the exhibition were taken with a large-format camera from 2010 until 2013.
“Using a 4 x 5 and a 8 x 10 camera, you can get incredible detail from these large-format images,” Simison says. “The closer you detail the image of the negative, the more they give. For example, as you move closer in on a long shot of Frost's cabin, you can actually see the texture of the wood shingles on the structure.”
Simison sticks to film when taking black-and-white photography.
“It's only recently that I have found, with the improved technology of digital filmmaking, it is feasible to make a reasonably good black-and-white photo in digital,” he says.
“Of course, the Frost photos required much more time to make than with a digital camera, or even a regular film camera,” he adds. “With a large-format camera you have to carefully consider what you want to shoot. To achieve the effect you want, you need a tripod and a dark cloth over your head like in those old-fashioned images of 19th-century photography.”
But the process isn't entirely analog. After shooting on film, Simison then scanned the negatives into his computer.
“The digital image is easier to control, and of course process,” he says. “Besides that, the size of photos in the show would be far too expensive to reproduce in my darkroom.”
Of the hundreds of images that Simison took, he ended up with 21 prints for the portfolio, 18 of which are hanging in the gallery. A companion book features the full set.
A complicated poet
Simison admits that he started out with only the most superficial knowledge of Robert Frost.
“When I began this project, what I knew about Frost came from the poems I was assigned to read in high school literature class: 'The Road Not Taken,' 'Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,' 'Mending Wall,' and 'Birches,' among others. Poet Laureate of the United States, a consummate New Englander, Frost was a man who exercised an economy of words with the folksy common sense of an agrarian perspective. That was the extent of my knowledge of the man.”
Simison began to dig deeper.
“I read as much of his work as I could find to get something that I could use as a starting point to create my images,” he writes. “What I found surprised me. Yes, the Frost I remembered from high school was still there, but I also sensed a more forbidding current, something lonely and disconsolate.”
Simison thinks that far too often Frost is accepted only as a cliché, but the more he discovered about the man and his personality, “what I found was a dark guy.”
“He was a man preoccupied with loneliness and gloom, obsessed by death and was weary of the ignorance and uncaring of his fellow man,” he says.
“When he taught at Bread Loaf, he stayed in this cabin in the woods, to get away from it all, but then the reason he was there in the first place was to teach others. There was a dichotomy in the man, in that he both yearned for and spurned the closeness of his fellow man.”