The Online Photographer: A Visit to Jenia's Farm (One Thing Leads to Another)

Photo by Jenia Fridlyand, from Entrance to Our Valley

In the life I lead, one thing often leads to another.

For example, in the Comments to the "Test Shots" post, two readers were discussing Michael Ashkin's recent book HORIZONT (one liked it, one didn't.) So I looked it up, just to see what they were talking about. Not on Amazon. I found it on the TIS Books website, here.

Not quite my own cuppa, didn't seem like*. But I had never heard of TIS Books before, so I poked around a bit on the website and discovered Jenia Fridlyand. (Not hard, since the publisher emblazons her book on its landing page.) Her book, Entrance to Our Valley, sold out its first printing and will be printed again in a second edition—reasonably rare for a photobook these days—in April. Turns out it attracted a whole lot of attention and won awards. That was news to me too.

You can see a video runthrough of the book here, but be sure to look at larger, better JPEGs first, to get a sense of the quality of the pictures—you can then apply that to the images you'll see in the video.

The backstory of the photos is fascinating too. But let her tell you about it:

Our main motivation for buying it [the farm] was to establish a multi-generational home: for our parents, who are now living more than five thousand miles from the place of their birth; for my husband and I, both first-generation immigrants; and for our children, so they could have the privilege of coming back to a place where they grew up. Both my husband and I are third generation Moscovites—our grandparents came to Moscow from Ukraine as students in the early years of the Soviet Union—so we grew up and always lived in large cities, with no experience of rural existence or farming; and, as I mentioned, there was no history of land ownership in our families going back centuries. It was quite confounding to find ourselves on, and in charge of, over 200 acres of land, in the middle of the Hudson River Valley, whose own rich history begins in the pre-Columbian era. Photographing there, intensely, was my way of getting to know the place and making it my own.

I read that and I just thought, cool.

Entrance to Our Valley's awards included The British Journal of Photography's Best of 2019, as well as my old friend John Gossage's "Photobooks of 2019," a top ten list. John is interesting in that his photobook collection is exceptionally large—or was, rather, when I knew him in the 1980s and early '90s—and it contained almost no "chestnuts" (standard accepted classics), and very few of what you might call "the usual suspects." For instance, in his many thousands of books at that time there was no Ansel Adams and no Joel Meyerowitz.

As you might know I like filing books in pairs where each seems to amplify or add to the other. I think I'd file Entrance to Our Valley next to Paula Chamlee's High Plains Farm. The latter is a sort of inverse of the Fridlyands' situation: she left the farm she grew up on and that had been in her family for generations, and photographed it (using techniques very similar to Jenia's) on return visits.

I confess I'm somewhat susceptible to the lure of pastoral myths and fantasies myself, so chronicles of a countrified home life (like Sally Mann's Immediate Family, still in print after all these years, or Larry Towell's The World From My Front Porch) appeal to me. I'll probably like Entrance to Our Valley. I'll let you know when it gets here.

Here's the publisher's page for preordering the reprint.

Snow and fox
It snowed this morning. I love that. A coating of snow the thickness of cake frosting can transform the land around the house from grim and bleak into a vision that charms the eye.

Another instance of one thing leading to another: when I was researching the "Bandana Republic" post, one of the many articles I read was "The Best-Case Outcome for the Coronavirus, and the Worst." Nicholas Kristof interviewed a number of leading epidemiologists and summarized the consensus in the article. If you need hope, he advises that you read the first half—about the best case outcome—only! Factoid from the first half: viruses do mutate, but they typically only get worse in the movies. In real life, they tend to get more moderate and less deadly. (The reason is a bit macabre: it's not good for their survival if they kill their hosts. Mosts colds are just coronaviruses that have learned over time not to kill us.)

Anyway, that article led me to Nicholas's and his wife Sheryl WuDunn's new book Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, about the decline of low-income and lower-middle-income families in the U.S. Nicholas (does he go by Nick? I don't know) and Sheryl were the first wife-and-husband journalists to win a joint Pulitzer, awarded for their reporting of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

So guess what? Tightrope turns out to be illustrated with photographs by none other than Lynsey Addario, the photojournalist who wrote the memoir It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War that we discussed back in 2015. (I still haven't read all of it, I'm ashamed to admit—I fear that photo-related reading often takes a back seat to books about things I know less about. Curiosity drives me. I should absolutely catch up with It's What I Do, however.)

But looking at pictures, that's something I can do. So even though I've already downloaded Tightrope for consumption on my iPad, I requested a paper review copy from the publisher. I'll let you know about the pictures if and when I get the book.

...A red fox just went trotting by right up the middle of the road! Smug as you please. Five years here and it's the first time I've seen that.

Mike

*Just going by the small sample. I haven't actually seen the work or the book, so I'll keep an open mind.

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

William Lewis: "Beautiful work. I am so jelly. It reminds me of David Plowden whom I have always loved deeply as well. His barn work has been especially influential on me. Thank you for sharing this."

Brad: "He does go by Nick. I have met him; sat at a dinner table with him once. I've even said hello to his mother a couple of times in our local grocery store."