Photo Stories - Punkins and Squarsh

Hello again and welcome back. It’s Thanksgiving morning here in the states, and I’m sitting by the Christmas tree (already? Yes, already) having my coffee while the house sleeps. We’re hours away from feasting and family, so I thought I’d sit down and see what I could spin out here. I’ve been meaning to do this photo story for a little while, and with Christmas and Winter imminent, with all the iconography and spirit that they bring, I figured today was a good day to do it. Thanksgiving is like the culmination of autumn, and my Punkins and Squarsh is one of the most autumn images I’ve done so it makes sense to me.

In early September of 2021, my grandma Bonnie passed away. Now, it would take several of these blog entries to adequately explain what what woman meant to me but I’ll try to keep it brief here. She was one of the pillars of my early life, someone I could always count on. She lived most of her years quietly in the little mining town of Elko, Nevada and later just outside Elko in Spring Creek, near Lamoille Canyon and the Ruby Mountains. These remain some of the only places that truly feel like home whenever I visit. We lived in Utah, and didn’t get to see her and grandpa much, just a few times a year, usually when my folks would go on vacation. The times when we’d get to go were always the best. I have such vivid memories of sleeping bag mornings, and her poodles waking me up with licks to the face, often around 6am since grandpa always wanted to put us to work early. It’s funny because I hated the yard work and early rising in those days, I just wanted to relax and rest, but in hindsight I am so thankful that he tried to show us the value of hard work and getting your hands dirty and sore. Grandpa used to scare me back then, with his deep loud voice and stern ways, but I know he was only doing his best to teach me what he knew. I only wish I’d come to realize that before he died. Anyway, grandma was no less stern, but she had a softness to her as well, and if he ever worked us too hard or if he’d be too harsh with his justice, she would make sure we got an extra treat or make a dinner she knew we’d love. That spirit, that mix of stern but gentle would come to define my memories of her. She wouldn’t suffer fools, but she also knew that we’re all humans and we all need a little love. In the later years, when she moved up to Spokane after grandpa died, one of my favorite things was to go over on a Sunday and visit with her. Most of the time we’d have a little glass of Jim Beam and we’d sit and laugh and she’d tell stories or just talk about whatever was new. She’d always ask me “you still takin’ them pictures?” Which always made me smile, she didn’t quite understand photography as art, but she knew I loved it and I could always count on her support.

On her 95th birthday, in August of ‘21, I showed up in my black top hat, which I knew she loved. It was obvious she was frail and declining but she saw me walk in with my hat and smiled a big old grin and said “boy, I love that hat! You sure are a good lookin’ son of a bitch.” She had a folksy drawl, which I have inherited, and people always thought maybe we were southern, or if not southern, we must have been “Okies”. I think it comes from her farm days in eastern Colorado. Anyway, a few weeks after her birthday, I went over to visit because my mom said that grandma seemed “off”. I got to the house just before she went unconscious, she saw me come in the room and looked at me and smiled and laughed, just like she always did. And then we’re pretty sure she had a stroke because that was the last time she was awake. They took her to hospice, and she was up there for three days. Then, on a quiet Sunday afternoon, with my mom holding one of her hands and me holding the other, she passed away peacefully. What a surreal thing, to hold the hand of someone you love as they leave this world. For someone who lived such a life of quiet strength and dignity, it seemed to be the perfect way to go. I can only hope that when my time comes, that I am surrounded by the kind of love that my mom and I had for her. I’ll never forget the walk to the car, or the drive home. I listened to “Because” by The Beatles on repeat the whole drive. I remember seeing people go about their day, driving here and there, going in and out of the shops, pulling into drive-throughs and I just couldn't believe how life could go on like that when someone like her had just left it.

Just after she passed, I started to think of ways I could honor her in my work. I had just begun thinking of still life work as something I wanted to do. A few months before this I had sworn off portraiture (forever, I thought at the time) and wanted to push my art into a new direction. Everything I had been doing that year seemed so posed and forced, it was time to move on from it. Grandma loved fall and some of my best memories with her are during that time, so I knew that whatever I did, it would be centered around that. There was nothing really mystical about how Punkins and Squarsh came to be. Much of my work since then has been done intuitively, guided by feeling and waiting for the moment, but P&S was mostly planned out. In the midst of the grief, the stores and begun to put out their pumpkins and all of the accoutrements of fall and I thought they would make a great subject for still life work. I bought one little pumpkin (which is the bottom right image on the grid of 9) to play around with and brought it home. I had just asked my neighbor, who was a woodworker, if he could make me a little tabletop to use and he finished and delivered it the day before I got the pumpkin. So I brought it home and played around with lighting and composition, I lit it from the left, then the right, then above, probably made a hundred photos that first day before I settled on what I liked which was basically feathered Rembrandt light coming from camera left with my Westcott 3x4’ Softbox. So I had this wonderful image of this pumpkin, beautifully lit and looking so plump and rotund and interesting, but it was just one image and it didn’t pop. For one, I had used a neutral grey backdrop, which was kind of boring, so I started to think of ways to make it better. In my work on the Classic Portrait series I had been using a neutral grey backdrop to shoot, and then in post production I would composite a textured background in to fit the theme of whatever the portrait was, usually some bespoke looking painterly texture but when I tried that same technique for the still life, it seemed a little too plain. I’d have to think of another way.

While I thought about how to tackle that problem, the idea came to me that I should do multiple images and for some reason the grid of nine came into my head. Initially, I had thought to do nine separate pumpkins, and I actually bought and photographed a dozen or more before I realized that nine orange pumpkins wouldn’t be very interesting. The grocery stores had others, white pumpkins and various squash that might work, but they didn’t have nine distinct ones so I thought maybe they’d have some up at Greenbluff, the farm community where we have all the pumpkin patches and things that people visit in the fall. For about a week, I spent each day up there, going to all the farms and looking for the right gourds and it took a while, but I found what I was looking for. I still couldn't quite figure out what sort of background I should use, I had the table and I experimented with using photos and textures in combination but nothing had the look I wanted. In the end I discovered that there were museum websites which had public domain art that you could download and use for free. Basically, at some point anyone associated with the art and artist has been long dead, and so the images become free to use for anyone. Finding the right art was another journey and I downloaded several dozen autumn themed images. When I composited one into my test pumpkin picture, it came alive in just the way I’d been hoping.

So now that I had all my subjects, and I had a ton of backgrounds to play with, it was time to photograph them. Gear-wise, I used a combination camera and lens which has since become a staple, my Canon EOS R5, which I had only just gotten the month before and Canon RF 100mm f/2.8 L Macro lens. For lighting I had a Westcott FJ400 strobe (I use the 800 now, but that didn’t exist then) and the FJ Wireless Flash Trigger and of course the Canon BR-E1 remote to trigger the camera without touching it. Because I was using cross light, I put a piece of white foam core at camera right to bounce light into the shadows so they wouldn't get too dark. I prefer simplicity in my lighting, even when using two or three lights. If it ain’t broke, leave it alone.

I spent the better part of a day just photographing all of the various gourds. I knew I’d want to make an image I could print huge, so instead of one photo I combined a few different techniques. First, I focus stacked the images because with a 100mm lens from only a few feet away, even at f/11 the image wouldn’t be sharp throughout, the depth of field was too shallow (sound familiar? It’s a recurring issue, one that has to always be dealt with in still life macro work). On top of the focus stacking I made each image into a vertical panorama of three separate angles, one low, one in the middle and one high. When all the images were stacked and the panoramas stitched, I was left with a huge file which held an incredible amount of detail, perfect for the large showpiece image I had in mind.

I spent another half a day or more just with the stacking and stitching and compositing. Finding the right background for each image took hours of trial and error. I probably had dreams about the images, so long did I spend looking at them. Even after I thought I had them done, once it came time to grid the nine, I realized I’d put the cart before the horse, so to speak. So I had to go back to the plain grey backdrops, and grid the images first, find out how best they would flow and only after my grid was planned out would I be able to apply the backgrounds in a cohesive way. Man, just thinking back on it I still marvel at the patience it took. So much back and forth and one step forward only to take two steps back.

It got done though, obviously, and without a doubt it remains my most in depth and time-consuming piece of work. I don’t know exactly, but I estimate that I spent close to 70 or 80 hours on it, all told, between the driving and searching and photographing and compositing. During the entirety of the creation, I was thinking about what I would name the piece. I tossed around ideas like “Fruits of the Harvest” and “The Gourds of Yore” and probably dozens of other lofty and high-minded “artsy” names for it. After all, this was the most ambitious thing I’d ever made, the culmination of my skills up to that point. I took the principles learned during my Classic Portrait period and applied them to still life work in a grand tribute to one of the most important people in my life, how could I not name it something grandiose and far-reaching? None of the names I came up with worked, though. They sounded like someone trying to sound a certain way and they were anything but authentic. It wasn't until I made my first test print (a 25x25 matte finish metal print) that it became obvious. The print was delivered, and the kids and I unboxed it and we hung it in the living room. Standing there, seeing it made real I was thinking about what grandma would say if she could see it. In that moment I could hear her voice as clear as day and in her folksy drawl she said “Boy, I sure love them punkins and squarsh”.

I miss the hell out of that lady.

-Cory