somewhere between a handshake and two kisses

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about

Paige Green is a documentary and portrait photographer, whose storytelling approach to photography frequently addresses issues involving agriculture, land use, and food. Her work is featured in nine books and has been published in Glamour, National Geographic Traveler, New York Times Magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, GQ, Country Living, House Beautiful, and Culture. Paige lives in Petaluma, CA with a house full of boys.

  • rapunzel with a camera

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    I am locked in the searles tower of south london, in the castle without elephants this weekend….I think my body is actually conforming to the shape of the brown leather chair and my eyes are turning into lifeless glowing cubes from staring at my computer for way more hours than the recommended daily dosage….I have chosen the livingless room of my apartment to be my prison. The blue room is filled with random neglected belongings from the ghosts of christmas past: games (with titles: mid-life crisis, pass-out and dingbats), an easter basket peculiarly hung on the wall, broken bed-frames and books (with titles: viagra, grub on a grant, posh nosh and manhunting.)

    The reason for my self-inflicted incarceration is that I have two months worth of interviews that I recorded this summer, that I have to transcribe and try and assemble into some coherent order by wednesday, the day I told my designer that I would be finished with the copy for my book (my book?) I have decided to see what it is like to work with a designer, because this is the time to experiment….I have always done my own graphics in the past, but I realize that there are people who make professions out of designing, so I wanted to see what someone else could do with my pile of creative mess.

    And in my designer search, I found Yumi Kohsaka. She graduated from LCC last year and has done some good work for previous LCC’ers, so I decided to give her a call. I liked her immediately, and the layouts she has come up with so far, and the fact that she comes to our meetings with a calender and tells me we are running out of time so I need to get my rear in gear…..which brings me back to the searles tower of London…….but in my wallowing tonight, I heard a delightful noise….laughing and crunching and more laughing and more crunching…..

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    ….as 6 toddlers discovered fall in the gigantic pile of leaves in front of my house. Unfortunately, I felt a bit like a stalker so I didn’t get a better photo than this….but the photo is good enough to make me smile and anything is helpful this weekend……as the editing continues.

  • breakfast on searles with vito and benny

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    pancakes or eggs?

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    eggs….soft boiled, with soldiers.

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    the eggs were cooked too long, and there’s not enough bread for soldiers.

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    yes, but the real question remains…..what is art?

  • 15

    This summer for my project I spent approximately:

    2 months on

    85 photoshoots…..focusing on about

    60 different main characters…….and took about

    100 rolls of 120 film with 15 images per roll=

    1500 photographs……$3.45 per roll = $400 (plus shipping and tax)

    plus tripod, plus processing and developing and scanning = $1,000, so I probably spent about $1,500-$2,000 on this project….not including my hours and hours of interviewing, editing, driving, sitting in church services, drag races, town hall meetings, teacher meetings, football games, hot dog restaurants…….

    And what does it amount to?

    13 images selected by my tutor plus 2 that he will not argue if I include……

    15 images.

    15.

    These 15 are art worthy, gallery quality photos? art book?…….functional? Who is this project for? What am I doing it for? The community will not be excited about these 15 images…..a magazine won’t be excited about these 15 images…….and 15 is not quite enough for a book…..and we have learned books are a big waste of money, in today’s publishing world…..So it is just hard to wrap my brain around right now……the purpose, the meaning, the expenses, was it worth it?……

    We shall see.

    15.

  • Nervous

    So now I am back in London…..with a box of prints and a stomach full of nerves. While I was in the US, I had thoughts that maybe I didn’t even need to come back, because I had already learned what I needed to learn.

    I learned how to photograph with a medium format camera, I learned how to tackle a big project, I learned how to put myself out there, I learned how to make mistakes and fix them….so why should I come back to London where it is so expensive and far away from my loved ones.

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    But to be honest, I was not looking forward to sitting down and showing my work. I was dreading it. I was insecure that my work wasn’t good enough. That my portrayal of a small American town would be insignificant and dull next to my classmates’ worldly adventures and documentation of major current events. I would try to remind myself that it doesn’t matter what other people think, this is the type of work that interests me, so that is the most important thing……but still the nerves twitched. So I knew that this was yet another lesson that I needed to face and learn….

    I was happy and relieved when my first tutorial with Oliver went well. He was complimentary; he said I had some good images and that I had mastered medium format…..(which means I did a really good job editing and he didn’t see the mountains of out of focus or flared images). So that day I felt good…..but then we had our group presentation…..and now, in our third term, I know how this goes, and I know what to expect….

    It means, a long day of seeing other people’s work, which is good…..but because there are so many people in the class, it is kind of pointless as far as getting feedback from the other students or our tutor, who may or may not be paying attention, and therefore it generally leaves me feeling pretty unsatisfied and frustrated…..and this term was just the same…..maybe even worse, because I am much more fragile and desperately craving feedback.

    I don’t need someone to tell me everything is good and I am the best photographer in the world, I need someone to be thoughtful and look at the images and make critiques and tell me their honest opinion….it is called constructive criticism. In my opinion, that has been a huge gaping hole in this program.

    So after the group presentation, the confidence roller coaster dipped down again….until I had a great meeting with Homer Sykes. Luckily the person who signed up after me didn’t show up, so I got a longer time with him than the meager 30 minutes allotted and during that time he filled me with hope again. Homer told me the things that didn’t work, but then we looked through other photos that I had not selected. The process was so helpful and when it was over I actually smiled, which he was relieved to finally see.

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    Homer chose this one from my pile of extras……and because he was choosing more of my atmospheric photos, it sent me back to my original files to search for others that I may have skipped in my initial edits, and I found this one of the fire house, it makes me smile too……

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    And the roller coaster goes up again.

  • The Grand Reidville Finale

    My last Friday in Reidville, my favorite fireman Tim Brady took me out to lunch at Joe’s Lake. And I am so glad he did because besides being a local favorite hang out, it was another good lesson.

    I was feeling pretty confident after having a 99% success rate of gaining permission to photograph everyone who I wanted to photograph. So I thought I had this one in the bag, especially because I was coming in with a local, but as I was setting up to take a photo of a woman talking with Tim, she said, “no,” and then her husband, the owner, who I wanted to photograph next said, “no,” and the man at the counter said, “no”…….and all of a sudden I was back at square one…..

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    So I realized that all those hours I spent talking with people before photographing, was essential. For each person I photographed this summer, I spent between 1-2 hours asking questions and listening, so when I eventually asked to take a photograph, they said, “yes”…….and now I was sauntering in assuming these people would love me like everyone else, but they didn’t know me and I didn’t know them…..so I rightfully got denied….except by this guy who is very proud to be from Sugar Tit…..the very small community next to Reidville (but Tim told me it was partly because he was in a car accident and still wasn’t quite all there.)

    Then after Joe’s Lake, I was back to the nursing home one last time to re-shoot the Reidville sister-in-laws who were neighbors in Reidville and now share a room in the nursing home.

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    Re-shoot because the first shoot was horrible: one of them was tired and I was too cautious to request them to move around. So instead, I saved the awkwardness for when I had to call and ask to come and try again. But this time was much better. They both had just had their hair done, and a niece was there to help. The niece was very complimentary as well, she said she was impressed with how hard I worked this summer because she had seen me all over town, and that if I needed a testimony in order to get a good grade, she would be happy to volunteer.

    My lesson this time: do better to make it work the first time, but if it doesn’t work out….do it again.

  • still learning….always learning

    After using medium format all summer…..where the camera is so slow and therefore each photograph is so slow and at every shoot I take an average of 3-5 frames of each person……I forgot how to use 35 mm and I forgot how when you photograph a 6 year old, there is no slow…..but photographing Hannah while I was visiting SF, I had to relearn and relearn very very fast.

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    Hannah on the stairs is my favorite shot….so I did get a few keepers, but I got a lot of ‘oppses’ as well….but it is so wonderful that Marla, the mother of Hannah, appreciates film and actually requests film over digital, even though it costs more. The quality shows….and I fell in love with black and white all over again.

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    This was the third time I have photographed Hannah and it has been so fun to see her grow up from a 3 year old with a cast, to a 6 year old, who in her saucy-polka-dotted-halter dress looks much older than she is, until you make her laugh and suddenly her big toothless grin appears and reminds you she is still just a little girl.

    To see more photos from this shoot click here.

    And again, I have to give credit to my wonderful assistant and boyfriend, Arann, who made many of the toothless grins possible….I couldn’t have done it without him. It is nice to have an assistant who you love and who is good at assisting.

  • Conflicting Intrests

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    The farmer in Bill Chumley wants the area that he grew up in to stay rural but to actually earn money, he owns a landscaping business and more developments mean more jobs for his family.
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    Sherrie Morrow has just completed her first year in the real estate business. She likes the open green spaces and developers who leave trees when clearing lots, but at this point, she will take the jobs that she can get.

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    Calvin Snow builds custom homes. Most of the town of Reidville is made up of his relatives. He is currently building a 10,000 square foot home, for someone else, on the property where he grew up. But Calvin did turn down an offer to build a different home, on the same family property, because the man who bought the property wanted to tear down the beloved barn that Calvin and his brothers grew up working in. So the man hired another builder and the barn is gone.
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    Cole Wilson loves the countryside he grew up in. He feels claustrophobic living so close to other people, now that he lives in town. But he runs a landscaping business and the growth is good for his business too, especially because there are so many landscaping companies to compete with.

  • Ann, Betsy and Me

    My two best friends from high school. Ann and Betsy. Ann was my bad friend and Betsy my good friend. And I was their ‘different’ friend……and still am…..which can be seen by the two gourds that they are holding. I gave them gourds for my 30th birthday celebration night.

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    Ann got the big gourd, because she is pregnant and Betsy got the little gourd because she is little. They challenge me, and I challenge them….

    Ann: married, first grade teacher for 8 years, mother of almost two, owns a house in the same neighborhood she grew up in, drives an SUV.

    Betsy: single but ready to start a family, manager at an industrial warehouse supply company for 7 years, loves football, owns a townhouse in Atlanta, drives a BMW convertible.

    Me: in a relationship but not sure about having kids, free-lance photographer, loves hiking, doesn’t own a house or a car and lives in London.

    Together we eat ice cream (me from a cone to save plastic waste, Betsy from a cup to save calories,) we laugh at our differences and we gossip about people from high school but we don’t talk about politics and we feel lucky to be in each other’s lives.

    And now, because of the gourds, our lives are connected to Reidville.

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    Ben Brockman, who is now in his 70’s, had polio as a child which left him handicapped for the rest of his life. He was his parents’ only child and the only heir to the property that sits at a busy corner in Reidville. He has full-time care takers who enable him to continue to live in his family home.

    Ben is known by everyone in Reidville for sitting in his golf cart, in his front yard, and selling tomatoes that his dad would plant for him each year. But Ben’s father passed away last winter making it hard to find someone to plant and maintain the crops and Reidville suffered through a long drought this summer, so this summer he didn’t have as many tomatoes to sell.

  • Ann Poe…

    Except to me she will always be Ann Carter. She was my best friend in high school; we were inseparable. I thought we were exactly the same person. We planned to go to college together. We planned to get a jeep and share it. But then I went to Georgia and she went to Charleston. After college, Ann came back to our hometown, but I never did.

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    I was always a little jealous that Ann lived her whole life in the same place, because I moved 5 times, to 3 different countries, before I was 10. It turns out that my life of moving around, and her life of living in the same house for 18 years, made us pretty different people after-all.

    Ann doesn’t like change. She lives in the same neighborhood she grew up in, with her husband and her, soon to be, two children. She has been teaching first grade in the same classroom for 8 years. Whereas, during those same 8 years, I have moved 7 times, had more than 7 jobs and have traveled to four countries.

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    Ann asks me when I am going to settle down… I ask her when she is going to come and visit me, wherever it is I am living at the time.

    We couldn’t be more different, but our friendship is still strong. And now it is fun to see Ann with her little Susie. And when I hear Susie call my name in her little Southern accent… I am still amazed by it all.

  • Up and Over Reidville

    The good thing about small Southern towns, there is always someone who knows someone who can help you…..and this time the Fire Chief said he knew the guy in charge of the neighborhood with the houses that have garages for airplanes, and that guy could take me up in a plane for free.

    This is Johnny Stewart with my ride. The problem was I was so excited and still in disbelief, that I didn’t really think about how or what I wanted…..and I didn’t think that I would be in charge of directing our flying…. and it all happened so fast…. and Reidville is so small……so I didn’t really get the amazing shots that I should have…..but the experience was cool.

    So this is pretty much Reidville…..if you look closely, you can see it all….town hall, the wide roads on main street, the housing developments in the farmland, the Family Dog, the school (the big building,) the White Presbyterian church and behind that is a big red scar where the White church tore down the trees and now the Black Presbyterian Church can be seen. I was told this past Sunday that one member of the white church “didn’t even know those colored churches were back there until they tore down the trees,” (all three churches are over 100 years old. )