My family often goes to Lake Superior, the place that Longfellow called the “shining Big-Sea-Water”
in his Hiawatha poem. We grew up next to the big
lake, and it’s colors and patterns are imprinted on our minds. Like birds returning to their favored nesting grounds or salmon fighting their
way upstream, we are drawn to it shores. Well, okay, for me it’s just a connecting flight from Brooklyn via
Minneapolis, but with plane delays and the Duluth airport often cloaked in fog
drifting up from the lake sometimes I feel like one of those salmon leaping up
stepped locks next to giant dams...
A while ago my sister and niece called their getaway weekend
“Crystal Blue Persuasion,” a perfect name for a Lake
Superior trip. With that single act, they began a tradition in our family
of naming vacations after songs, forcing me to come up with
something as good or better for our August, 2015 family gathering. I considered
“Spirit in the Sky” and also “Stone Soul Picnic,” but when “Summer
of ‘69” flashed through my head, it was Eureka all the way.
The word went out, and in August, in the dunes and on
the shores of Gitche Gumee, we gathered to commune with the ancient and awesome spirit of the shining waters, which I duly photographed. Later, while processing the pictures, I had a hard time deciding whether to push the
color in a psychedelic way, or to be more laid back. The question was answered when I fell in love with the soft and subtle blacks and whites of the
sky, dunes and water, and the drama of the people shining through the monotonal
framework. And really, black and white photos are quite true to the spirit of
1969 when color photography was around but by no means ubiquitous.
But I just couldn’t give up color altogether, so I put a
little back, just a little, and now the pictures look a bit like early 20th
century portraits, when photographers added hints of color to black and white
prints. These tinted pictures have become a lasting record of our joyful experience
and a tribute to to the spirit of the truly "great" lake, our family’s spiritual
center.
PS: The "grass" depicted in a few photos is simply that - a frond of beach grass! We were all on a natural high, man.
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