Category Archives: Parks

The Affair With Montpelier Mansion, Laurel, Maryland

Posted by commart on

I find with the shade-of-gray theme that it’s generally more beguiling to post pictures without interpretive rigmarole.

However, most pictures don’t tell their own stories.

I lived in Laurel, Maryland for 15 years, a crossroads perhaps as significant in American history as Greenwich Village’s Washington Square but more easily overlooked.  Those who know — Fort Meade, National Security Agency, National Agricultural Center, central to Baltimore and Washington, D.C., University of Maryland, etc., and home to the Pin Del Motel — know.

A building fire on a February morning in 2006 plus high rent at the height of the real estate boom forced the move that led to my hop over the Appalachians and into the Cumberland Valley of western Maryland.

However, back to back when the Internet developed its still early social forums, including “model-photographer culture”,  and I had gear, accumulated over time, albeit with some acceleration attending the predictable change in generational status, I had just the space for faux fashion photography, not to mention romantic open space, just two miles, if that, from my apartment.

Laurel also hosted a major regional camera store — Penn Camera — and a still operating custom lab (“United Photo” in Beltsville).

Good times!

I’ve held onto my film gear, including a medium format system, but film, for all the obsessing — if no other post gathers comment, this one might for hitting a well known nerve — requires a comparatively long basic shepherding process from exposure to lab to scan to scan cleaning and then, finally, the same editing as any other digital image file.

It’s just easier working with the D2x or D200 and Lightroom (and it’s going to be very painful here sorting, culling, scanning, and preparing old slides — sufficiently stunning (often enough) for the labor involved — from three or four or more decades back.

This was scanned from film, probably Plus-X or a very good Tri-X (I miss my old walk-in closet of a lab too):

I’ve better pictures of “Jessica”, a model — for the above, one on the “Time for Prints / CD / DVD” plan — but it serves for why I miss the old (shooting) space, the babes (not so many), the empty and open — for me and my purposes, miraculously underutilized — park grounds.

Here she is again.


And one last look at this location that contained many locations and sustained many moods.

To cap off the post —

Gizmo, Montpelier Mansion, Laurel, Maryland.

The Mansion Inside a Cabin Inside an Apartment . . . .

Posted by commart on

Exterior detail, clerestory, Quarters Building, State Arboretum of Virginia At the University of Virginia, October 24, 2012.

Mine is a mansion inside a cabin inside an apartment by woods on the eastern edge of western Maryland, ninety minutes northwest of Washington, D.C. as the Mustang flies.

It’s library contains 2,000 volumes; its home theater sports 7.1 surround sound; its bar: generously stocked.

Absent: family.

Present: funds.

Computer: home-built 2007 XP box.

Monitor: LaCie 320.

Printer: an HP hulk I call “Bertha” (B9180, Vivera inks, A3+ sheets).

Facade, Quarters Building, State Arboretum of Virginia, Boyce, October 24, 2012.

No writer — or photographer or musician or composer or painter — has ever enjoyed for “base camp” so basically good a setup.

As much as I may think of my home — and of myself, an entertaining peacock, or so I hope — the situation’s actually modest and, perhaps, fragile: Communicating Arts, my long nurtured baby,  needs to shoot a few more weddings or pick up editorial assignments or other projects to meet the costs of carrying itself, not to mention myself (champagne tastes — beer money, so far).

At this point as regards the business, I really don’t know how to get out of it, nor do I really wish to.

I have found my happy place and am living in it!

As perhaps did also the woeful Higgins, my bachelor scene wants for company, but let’s set that aside for a moment.

II have reached an age (one still too young — and less than spectacularly successful —  to cast it with the snootier “attained”) where I prefer a tattersall to a t-shirt, chinos to jeans, a sport coat or leather jacket to denim, and still . . . I love old buildings, gardens, dirt tracks, open rural country.

I have a selfish dream: I want to photograph old private gardens and estates, the vestiges of the 19th Century romance that birthed Town & Country.

Why did I shoot the facade of the research center, the “Quarters Building”, so aligned?

To avoid public building signage and a big red fire extinguisher mounted on the wall just inside the building’s portal.

So God, I pray thee, help me wander through gardens bereft of name tags and interpretive plaques!

On the western flank of the State Arboretum of Virginia lays an old estate — The Tuleyries.

Signed (and posted), worthy of a Wikipedia entry, the private property is the bookmatch, which as a bequest it really is, to the accessible public research center’s acreage.

In my Hollywood-in-Maryland spirit, I have my carefully matured, if crowded, digs, which is a more comfortable version of what I’ve had in quarters for decades.  Said I to my backpacking buddies back when, “As long as my friends have mansions, hot tubs, and sailboats, I’ll be fine.”

It was true back then.

Today, still ambitious, less suffocated, more spirited — and altogether more free in the ownership of my calendar than I have ever been — I may look in the mirror and ask myself: “Jimbo — where is your mansion, hot tub, and sailboat?”

It may be too late to get there — one never knows — but there are some things I may do yet to lift my “digs” into, say, a rancher with a basement and a garage (and beams and posts capable of withstanding — this before I am finished accumulating it —  12,000 pounds or more of books).

I’m ready to settle down, free-write, turn my older and wiser horse toward fiction, continue with photography, reprogram whatever it may be that I do with music.

All things considered, and considering what I have kept and kept preserved in intangibles and tanbiles, I am a lucky man.

From the road, the gatehouse of The Tuleyries.

However, I am not Gatsby or Gatsby’s friend or even the acquaintance of a reveler: that lane may as well be a bridge drawn up with a moat beneath it.

Nonetheless, I still enjoy a drive in the country  now and then and the treat for the eyes of a stretch of pristine rural America.  If I’m to make lovely pictures — or fashion compelling short stories, novels, and screenplays — there is no other now quite like now.

Conditions are very good.

From the road, a patch of The Tuleyries in the sunset period still a part of the afternoon’s “sweet light”.