Cheshire, Ohio

Hey folks. I’ve been posting a lot of images and outtakes from last year’s visit to SE Ohio, the start of Plume. I am currently on the road to finish the project. I just finished attending a residency program in this region, Harold Arts (mad thanks to the folks who run it, it was an amazing experience), during which I focused mostly on sculpture, drawing, and video work. Now that I’ve spent an intensive period working with different materials and mediums, I’m happy to be back in my car with a beat up 4×5 driving up and down the Ohio River. With the work made in the next 9 days, coupled with the few days I worked on the project in the last 2 weeks, I hope to finish Plume, and start showing the work more extensively. And maybe I’ll figure out what I’m going to be doing next with coal and Appalachia, if I decide to continue down that path.

Last year’s trip to Ohio was completely funded through print sales, and once again I’m on the road, making work because of the generous support of the larger art community, collectors, friends, family, and other photographers.

There are still editioned prints remaining, and I will continue to offer $30 (shipping included) for any 8×10″ on my site through August. Info here. All additional raised money will go towards lessening the financial burden of mounting the first show of Plume.

The following people made this trip possible, thank you!

Darrius Thompson
Mel Trittin
George Slade
Lucas Fogalia
Peter Baker
Erin Chrest
Ian Maclellan
Tucker O’ Brien
David Schaillol
Jeremy Mlodik
Nolen Strals
Laurence Vecten
Ben Walton
Richard Boutwell
Gabriel Benaim
Matt Johnston
Roger May
Noah Vaughn
Paul Harnik
Alex Foucre-Stimes
Ryan Paternite
Jin Zhu
Ari Kermaier
Ryan Paternite
Rick Valicenti
Aaron Bernstein
Joe Leavenworth
Greg Ruben
Sam Brodie
Thomas Sibley

A special thanks to all the bloggers who helped promote the print sale. I will be sending you something special in the mail, as promised!

And if I forgot to add your name to this list, shoot me an email and I’ll add it on right away.

Frank Tennyson

Frank Tennyson

Frank Tennyson

Reverend in Pomeroy

Mural Painters in Point Pleasant, Ohio

Woman Outside of Subway, Pomeroy, Ohio

Veteran’s Appreciation Day

New Haven, West Virginia

Woman with Dogs in Middletown, Ohio

Robin In Cheshire (alternate version)

Middleport is a small town, appropriately in between Racine and Cheshire along the Ohio River. Suffering from the same economic afflictions as the rest of the River Valley, people make money however they can. I ran across Jim and Vicky Taylor in an old middle school one day, where they had set up shop as Old Glory Auction Services. They pay for people’s old furniture, clothes, and miscellaneous goods and auction it off in the auditorium. The picture of Jim at his auction stand was one of the best photos I took last summer, but ultimately did not fit in the final edit.

I met up with Elisa Young a few times last summer. Her family has a long history in the region, and Elisa lives on a farm inherited from them. Noticing patterns of disease and environmental degradation, she quickly became the figurehead for the local (and very small) resistance to the coal-burning industry.

We started off one of our tours with a visit to an old family cemetary which sits on land previously mined. The path there:

The soil is slowly eroding away as the earth settles from previous mining.

We then drove around Meigs County a bit and talked about potential new coal-fired power plants threatening the already toxic air, the local complacency or mild acceptance of the industry, and the mental wear being one of the only activists in the region has caused.

An Interview with Elisa Young
Meig’s Citizens Action Now
Previous post on Digressions
Video of Elisa

Last summer I was driving down a back road in Cheshire and I drove past a house that felt really familiar. I realized a few seconds later that it was Al Proffitt‘s farm. I visited Al a few years ago when I made my first SE Ohio trip. He was fighting a permit that would allow a coal mine to open up literally across the street from his house. As I drove by his house a few years later, sure enough, across the street was an active (and loud) coal mine.

Al Proffitt’s UFO, from Plume

A few hundred yards from his house I spotted what looked to be a television-style UFO. It was bizarre enough that I actually stopped my car and got out. The space ship was actually spinning in the middle of a field, with no indication of its origin or power source.

The next day I stopped by Al’s place to catch up. He didn’t remember me at first, and then said, “Ohhhhh man, you are the photographer who actually sent me pictures!” Apparently a few photographers had come to talk to him over the years, and each promised to send photos, but never followed through. He was pretty used to the coal mine at this point, but still upset that they ruined his retirement spot. As a lesson, he decided to play a little trick on them. He went over there one day and told them that if they didn’t keep it down, his Indian ancestors would come down from space and get their revenge (he’s part Native American). Within a few days he had salvaged an old satellite dish, hooked it up to a solar powered rotation device and lights (it looks insane at night) and installed it in the middle of the night. When I visited him last summer he was in the middle of assembling a photo album that documented him being taken in the middle of the night by aliens, shot by his amateur photographer girlfriend. Very cool guy.

Read the old entry on Al Proffitt (third story down).

The above image represents an atypical landscape in Appalachian Ohio. I hesitate to start off the series with this image, but even I, a humble man, can’t ignore its power. To be clear, McMansions are not a common sight in the hills of Southeast Ohio. Presumably the owner of this home works for the coal plant in the background, higher up in managment. It wasn’t the first time I had visited the site, and as you can see, shooting at noon and not 5:30 AM can make a big difference:

Cheshire is a town locally famous for a rather unfortunate situation. A lawsuit brought on by the town’s residents against American Electric Power, owner of the Gavin Power Plant, claimed (and conclusive evidence points in their favor) that toxic gas emissions and acid rain were damaging cars, homes, and of course the health of the community. AEP bought the town from the majority of its 221 residents for a total of $20 million in 2002.

The town has since been cleared of homes and most streets, AEP making sure to clear even the foundation of the houses. The landscape is subtlety surreal in that something feels off. The density of the trees feels residential, but there is nothing there, save for a couple of houses, a pizza shop, and municipal buildings.

Here is one of the houses with the town’s lonely residents – Canadian geese. More from Cheshire and the area surrounding Gavin Power Plant:

Geographically rooted in two towns along the Ohio River, Plume focuses on Racine and Cheshire, who sit in close proximity to 4 power plant stations, all within a 15-mile radius. The landscape of these towns presents itself in distinct layers. The subdued palette of the river, with its plodding pace, carries not only coal, but a unique regional sentimentality. Off the banks of the river exist people and sparse economic growth, and above them sprawl small mountains and Appalachian biodiversity. The trees, reaching for the sky, are outpaced by their synthetic allies in upward ambition. These smoke stacks are as ubiquitous landscape accompaniment in contemporary life as any, and in this series they are presented in their social environment, separated from their industrial foundation. Their repetition in the landscape creates a stabilizing visual element throughout the series. I want the viewer to scan the horizon line, looking for the visual cue that connects subject to place, and ultimately, to narrative.

Southeast Ohio resonates a hidden fragility, not just in the industry’s inevitable demise, but in the dejection of its citizens. Like many mono-industrial cultures the resources are being exhausted, much like the emotions of the residents. Coal-fired power plants present myriad of environmental hazards. Burning coal releases carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides into the air, in addition to equally toxic solid by-products that erode from nearby landfills into local ecosystems. Hypothetically, state and federal regulatory bodies exist to monitor the process, but systematic and longstanding deficiencies within these organizations allow these coal-burning facilities to continue to threaten the environment and local communities.

Coal exists beyond industrial and historical development as a larger abstract presence that is woven into the cultural fiber of Ohio. Here, the air of restlessness predicts an overwhelming ambivalence towards the coal industry. The citizens and land of Ohio and West Virginia are the source point in a vast grid of energy distribution. This burden of heavy resource usage is a type of political and industrial play, mirrored in other industry-specific rural economies, and constitutes an act of complex resource siphoning. In other words, non-Appalachian citizens are benefactors of not only inexpensive energy access, but of distance from the destructive industry that makes this access possible. This sociopolitical paradigm, as old as industry itself, calls into question our confounding relationship to power.