Palimpsests and the art of reticulation
An Essay Tour » A road map to the Parkways Projects, from the beginning
“If you can’t develop the consistency of producing 50 perfect, uniform prints from a great negative, you might get lucky and find a job. If your darkroom skills are slack, you’ll get fired. Glib talk can get you hired. No consistency gets you fired.”
≈ Martha Thomas
Reticulation. It was something I had far too much experience with by 1996. It was usually that laboratory mistake which is most avoided by photographers and photo-lab technicians. As a 19 year old art student taking a photography class in the fall of 1975 at the University of South Carolina-Coastal, I never developed the skills to avoid it consistently.
1975
Conway SC
“Blood on the Tracks” meets “Diamonds and Rust.”
A year to grow up. A year to explore. A year of choices.
According to incredibly intense, focused and multi-talented Art Professor Martha Thomas, it was incredibly important that we realize, as photography students, the importance of being able to control the darkroom process. She required us to produce five prints of each work in critiques. If you didn’t have five prints on crit day, your work was not critted, and she would be miffed.
She’d look at your prints, collect and grade them, returning them the following week with written comments such as, “Tommy, your two photographs received a “A/C” and a “B/D,” since you did not come to class prepared with 5 prints of both. Your shots are good. Your darkroom skills are poor. Get with it.”
The actual grade was the second letter. The first being hope and aspiration, on both her’s and her students’ parts. The second being cold hard reality.
The psyche reeled.
Every ten days we were required to produce 10 prints from a new shot.
Having found I could eke out more or less five uniform prints—but on doubling that number, unless all the vagaries of an art department darkroom coalesced in my favor, Martha would work hard to justify six or seven of them. I rarely made it to ten consistent prints under her discerning eye and the extra sets of eyes of fellow students. Once, I brought in a very solid block of twelve.
They, that 12, that merry few, held up under scrutiny of Martha’s and seven other students communal eyes, but while I loved photography, I was an alien in a strange land in the chemical darkroom.
I was no more a fan of that darkroom than it was of me.
I had the guts—or the temerity—to sign up for the next photography class, but I’d also signed up for my second printmaking and second ceramics class. Both were taught by Martha as well. Add to that lineup my first painting class at Coastal under Jim Ravoira, a damned fine painter and painting professor who believed in challenging his students in creative ways, then American Literature taught by Wolfman Jack, and Biology.
I was what is termed “over-enrolled.”
I was trying to make up for dropping three of my five initial classes due to following in my father’s footsteps at Clemson in the mid 1940’s, and was not yet aware of how much I was about to enjoy being a student at a school on the coast. This was an odd development, geographically speaking, but in time my short history in the Blue Ridge Mountains led to some long weekend forays as sort of a guide for my friends in the Conway, Myrtle Beach to Pawleys Island strand.
The second Photography class was dropped, Martha breathed a sigh of relief, along with two fellow Art students I was close too. This gave me more time to throw myself into printmaking, painting and pottery.
In not so atypical 19 year old college student style, I put down my camera, a Minolta 101 35mm SLR.
It was picked up at times, just for the record, as my careers found directions in which a camera was useful. Illustrator. Graphic Designer, Advertising. Painter. Newspaper owner, where two of us handled all necessary tasks. Film rolls sent off to commercial labs for processing.
Years later, as a teacher, I tried very hard with students to curb that emotion of the cold stop.
In 1996, in New Orleans, I then discovered a little digital camera, a Canon A5 and a program called “Photoshop.”
1983
Seattle WA
“Eye in the Sky” I picked up my Minolta again.
Reticulation was also the realm of wizardry in the art of of photographic developing experiments of a friend by the name of TR Ritchie (sans periods) also once a photography student in college, later to become a practicing street and portrait photographer before he turned to songwriting around 1980. This was in Seattle, Washington, a city well populated by artists and musicians.
The mastery of reticulation was TR’s bailiwick. It was both a fluid and staccato process involving the manipulation of tray baths and room temperatures, the sudden removal of developing prints from an incubation state into air 20 degrees colder or warmer, a refrigerator-freezer, and jarring the print suddenly by dousing it prematurely with an antagonistic liquid. In other words, a very alchemical, unscientific, and imprecise process but very orchestral all the same.
While in college, I had never considered inverting the avoidance most all photographers have for that vague little amoebic-looking area which reticulation enjoys providing, if a non-entity can enjoy such performative acts. Non-entities love the studios of artists, no matter our choice of media or disciplines. As a student, I had never thought to welcome Reticulation as an entity into my studio and ask them to allow me to explore the realms of their own aesthetics.
TR Ritchie was a fine photographer. His eye was refined, his compositions sound and often powerfully surprising. He was fascinated with the idea of observing the core of a struggle, corralling it and bringing it into his spectrum of creating as an artist. This practice of inversion was applied through the years to his songwriting, his poetry, his journaling, his photography, his performances on stage. When once aware of TR’s works, it was easy to tell, no matter the mode or media, which were his.
2014
Santa Fe NM
“Songwriter, touring musician, part-time graphic artist, photographer, tinker and thinker…as well as artist and poet.” ≈ TR Ritchie
In late November 2014, I was listening to one of his CD’s from the early 2000s. It was one of the last times I’d seen him use his expertly controlled reticulation for both the front and back cover photographs.
Which led to this image, originally a color digital photo selected to convert first to a richly tonal raw black and white, filed away as a classically silvered shot. Then I went to work on two goals. First, to produce an image redolent of the early Daguerreotype plates of the 1800s, second, to replicate the reticulation often accompanying those early photos. The digital studio is far less time consuming than the chemically-driven 20th century developing lab, the darkroom. From concept to final, this digital composite image was done by December 17 2014.
“Mirrors should think longer before they reflect.”
≈ Jean Cocteau
“Betzeré,” from the ‘Beaufain Studio’ series of portraits of the models and muses who worked with me for 10 years in Charleston, South Carolina. This was shot in the sunroom of my Beaufain Street studio, up on the third floor, a solid wall of old Craftsman windows on three sides, with Colonial Lake just below. The light in the sunroom was incredible, as the solid three walls of windows allowed the entire arc of the Sun to stream directly into the sunroom from sunup to sundown.
The image is of a woman seated cross-legged, her arms crossed, almost entwined around her knees as well. While she was neither a Park Ranger nor Appalachian to my knowledge, she was by 14 years of age an avid rodeo barrel racer in South Carolina. It is however an image which does relate as progenitor to ‘The Parkways Projects.’ Begun as a digital photograph in the spring of 2003, made with an already archaic early digital camera. It was one of my earlier experiments emulating even more archaic photographic methods, in this instance resembling a very distressed but unoxodized daguerreotype.
This photograph was made with a little Canon A5 point and shoot, one of the earliest digital cameras producing higher resolution images dating from 1996. I still have it plus five other of its little robotic siblings, and will be using those to do a separate tier of photographs for “The Parkways Projects,” which is now up and running on Bluesky @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social —by all means check it out! The core of this cohort series is all about the Blue Ridge and the Skyline Drive Parkways connecting the Great Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah National Parks.
There’ll be about twelve tiers to this compendium, four to six of these tiers based on the written word. I’ll be supplying many of the original illustrations and artworks to stories, fictions, poetry; then articles, journalism, journaling, historical forays and contemplations on observations which I write. I’ll be combining some of the above eight to reach for five tiers of writing.
Articles, Journalism, and Journaling will be one tier, for example. Sidebars will be their own tier, as this will allow me to address topical (Hurricane Helene), human interest accounts, really gothic Appalachian tales and ghost stories, and unique individuals who have been lost to history. It’s my anything goes tier! Stories, fictions, and poetry—all microwaveable, or serialized if I get cheeky—will be one tier. Historical Accounts possibly may start as one tier, I could see it being so already based on what I’ve begun to learn of these four National Parks. Contemplation and Observation will be my tango tier! Either could stand alone, or be a couplet just like a great pair of dancers.
I’ll be spanning the years from the 1880’s to the 1930’s as the National Parks prototype began to coalesce from many state and national environmental, historical, ecological and archeological leaders, all who shared a dream to preserve much of our nation’s natural resources. This 50 year span might, if it proves really cool and interesting, become the sixth written tier, possibly one of the arts wedded to subject matter as mentioned in the next paragraph below, or within the historical. I may have to treat this arena as a maverick, free roaming as we don’t seem to be living in a quiet world any longer. A good roving maverick could function well as an eye in the sky.
I do see myself doing a podcast, but not until I get the writing tiers grounded. And, if anyone wonders just where the hell this post fits among the tier configurations? I’ve not decided if I’ll be using emoji’s here, so I’m chuckling…although the above sentence would be a legitimate question. If you read to the end of this post (and I hope you do) each paragraph will bring you closer and closer to the connection until you reach the reveal at the bottom. I am an artist. I love to write. The other six tiers will be arts driven; about art wedded to subject matter. As in when six visual working modes of art bring the two Parkways and the two National Parks to the forefront. Those six modes of art will define the six tiers, and words will illustrate the art or illustrations, but within the realm of The Parkways Projects.
Arts tiers will be: The Hybrids. My primary art series for the last few years, but tailored to the ways of the Southern Appalachian spine, flattening out to follow the CCC diaspora, as they expanded their services to Parks construction into the flatland East and West of the Appalachians. At times to the Atlantic coast and to the Eastern reaches of Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia. This also allows for the range my family roamed during our 1964-1971 mostly camping vacations.
The Nuclear Vacations are to this day the glue that binds all of these shards of memory. They’re the root core of my original idea of creating a photographic essay of just those eight years, plus the bonus year of 1972, when I chose to go on my own to say goodbye to the Parkways after learning our vacations had come to a sudden and decisive end. I was sixteen that year, and the Parkways may as well have been Haight-Ashbury. For by 1967, a small migration, a spalling off of many within the burgeoning counter-culture of the far West were becoming more and more fond of the natural environment along the Appalachian spine.
Other arts-driven tiers will be The Instamatics, pertaining of course to that other sixties revolution keenly manufactured by Kodak, and extolling the virtue of the square in photographic composition through the viewfinder...on the fly. It will share imagery with the Nuclear Vacations, but treated in a different way, as well as modern digital photography as I try to channel my inner kid’s perceptions and memories of how I recall seeing, appreciating the beauty and awe of that terrain. All of my modern shots within this tier/series will emulate the Instamatic’s format, and the look of the prints emerging from industrial film processing labs of that day. A smaller but pithy grouping which I’ll curate into a traveling exhibit as I build it.
One of at least two post-modernist series certain to stem from The Parkways Projects: Kinship: Iron, Concrete, and Wood, an abstract engagement of spirits and specters, barely lingering gathering places, defined by two once common, extraordinarily ubiquitous accoutrements to the Parks sites nationwide. The Walking Bridges, the tier which will dive deeply into the past, reconnoitering past lives and connections between those inhabitants who once peopled the Parkways. Not exactly “Bridges of Madison County,” but bridges of another sort, set deep into the hollows of the Great Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah National Parks.
Creativity is part of this little zeitgeist engine. I expect it’ll all work out well in the long haul.
The mortar allowing all of this imaginational architecture to persist will be my Artist’s Blogosphere about art—mine and other artists, but related to the outdoors, series of artworks I’ve done in the past, and views to our present and future regarding landscapes, people, and the Arts establishment, especially now that ‘The Parkways Projects’ is officially launched. For we can not cleave too anxiously to the past, for it was never the present we relished with such myopic intent at the time we experienced it. It is to be its own full-bore interdisciplinary, mixed-mode art seriality.
I’ll be including other art in here as well, at times other artists’ works. Again, that could likely become a podcast with freedom to roam, go AWOL, rise up from a high desert wash, or leap from the deep within a riptide like the Creature from the Black Lagoon! Arts writings will always be freeform, fluid and malleable, when I feel it in the moment. Quite possibly, the only stream-of-consciousness extemporaneous writing you’ll get from me here. For that, there is my website, in which I have no shame.
In mid August, I posted “A painter AWOL from the easel” as a re-direct to here, but will be posting my other artwork, my thoughts on being an artist in this World of the 21st Century, and much more often the random stream-of-consciousness, off-the-cuff observations of the day or week.
I may do some observational pieces on artists’ from Earth’s past tense. Our World needs some illumination; I’m hoping for a magic lantern. Spoiler alert: if I veer off into Warhol (I have strong opinions about that man) then he’s likely to appear as one of my Gothic-spooky fictional characters, which will almost necessitate writing about him in the manner of a more serious critique. That’s all the spoils on that topic for now. On the other hand, if I write on Mark Tobey, Agnes Martin, Emil Bisttram, Dora Carrington, Mark Twain, Emily Carr, Arthur Dove, Vivian Maier or Virginia Woolf…prepare for heroic exultations. Epic even, perhaps.
The other five tiers will be structured upon and visually driven by the media and various modes of art I do, to share whatever tiers of story, history, the relics left from the agos of these four National Parks, as well the images from a great sea of scans, primarily from Clemson University’s and the National Park Service’s 1.3 million (and growing) collection of images, some dating back to Yellowstone circa 1883. These will be shorter, and accompanied—illustrated—by words, texts or poetry. I love the illumined nature of words when applied to visual art. There is always an unabashed sheen to them.
In terms of the historical context of what y’all are about to receive from the transmissions from this little crucible of heart and mind, the Open Parks Project is the star of this streaming series of stills. I hope beyond hope that this will gain traction, for as I write these words, our National Parks System, our U.S. Forest Service, and our Bureau of Land Management need help. Clemson University’s phenomenally expansive archival library is a wonder: think—that final scene in ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.’ It is a digital universe, even if I were to be speaking solely of the Open Parks Network. The OPN. They will be featured in here often, for they have much to offer, much to teach, and we all have a lot to learn and glean from their great humane wealth of knowledge and stacks.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”
Margaret Meade
Images: “Betzeré,” digital composite image, 2014 from the ‘Studio Beaufain’ portraits begun in 2005. It continues to this day as a currently active series.
This tiny little 4’’x 5” color digital image, made in the spring of 2003 via a Canon A5 with a mystery super-power created once—then lost—to the digital maelstrom of strides forward. That image alted into a classic raw black and white. But with velvet teeth, layered into its depths in a digital emulation of Ansel Adams’ storied darkroom alchemy. I decided to experiment with this image on my return to Charleston, trying to employ what I could of Adams’ chemical and mechanical methodologies to reproduce the initial, simple black and white final. It was a start, it was okay. I was able to gradually explore more of Photoshop’s facility over time, always returning to the barrel racer’s image.
All of those stacks reside to this day in limbo on the last Western Digital HD I will ever buy. For one day, out of the blue, it ceased to be readable. It was not yet two years old. It had resided in stasis beside my mainframe. One day I’ll take it in for a resurrection. I did find one copy of the first attempt I made in 2003 of its conversion, but at 100ppi-600x800 pixels. It became the source for the above build. For these last two days, I’ve revisited those stacks, and may have another, larger version of it soon. If so, I’ll allow it to be one of the first short photo drops. Those are to be similar to billboards in here, a simple image, a caption, and no more than four short paragraphs as a post. Usually they’ll be Parkways related.
While I was lucky to observe my friend T.R. Ritchie work his reticulation into a very controllable technique, I never knew Adams, but I studied his works for years in print, meaning books. Then on visiting an incredibly generous exhibit twice to thrice a week for six weeks while I was there on campus I learned a story; it’s a sad one. One I hope never to experience. The Ansel Adams show was essentially a posthumous retrospective, at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in the fall of 2002. I observed it, absorbed it, I consumed all the input I could, and primarily learned I knew nothing, for I’d become Jon Snow revivified as a revenant in Hawaiʻi. The curator clarified a lot of my questions, and we had more and more conversations. It was one of the finest museum experiences I’ve ever known.
So. What does this image of a woman from 2003, with traceries of scars from head to toe due to her love of rodeo barrel racing have to do with an inaugural post introducing ‘The Parkways Projects?’
Everything. The ghosted spirits of Ansel Adams’ works in Hawaiʻi brought me into photography as a serious endeavor, rather than just using the little A5 as a tool to record my paintings and woodcut prints into my body of works database.
And so began an idea that eventually became ‘America: Lost & Found,’ which led me eventually back to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which had just been reclassified as an alpine rain forest. Then, a weekend considering that maybe it was time to keep my promise to Mom and Dad, to convey the eight Wonder Years, our last family vacations in these four National Parks. It has gone beyond the labor of love I originally envisioned, by slow osmosis, currents I did not anticipate, and observations of unsettling new realities doubling down.
Image Copyright 2025 Tom Ogburn, words all rights reserved.
Within the songs:
The Original.
I left South Carolina 30 days after my first spouse sat bolt upright in bed one night in our apartment at Lee Court Apartments, April 1982, in a very “Bride of Frankenstein” way. Our home was once very modern (but by the early eighties was a faded 1920’s era condominium) in the midst of a total renovation. We had lucked upon one of the first renovated units, own by Mrs. Chris Christopoulos, seriously akin to the place I lived in Charleston for two and a half years on Colonial Lake in Charleston SC, from 2002 to 2005. I dearly loved such places. I belong to them far more than I do anyplace now, or then.
Beth had literally sprung up at her waist, her torso then at a 90º angle to her previously sleeping legs, her eyes gushing tears like a fountain. “Please, please, can we leave from here?” She was from Ridley Park, Pennsylvania. So was her brother who lived for that present in Myrtle Beach. A former home to me.
We had talked of Seattle since meeting each other in Winter Park, Colorado in 1979. We ended up back in South Carolina because we both had family there. We had survived the Reagan election while living in an apple orchard on a very large pond in the mountains of Saluda NC. We had moved to Columbia for me to re-enroll at USC in a new Graphic Design program, headed up by Lanny Webb, in 1981.
She was distraught. I had never seen such a sight, definitely not within a person I dearly loved. So I promised her that night that by the next day we would start on a plan to get us to Seattle. At that time, my arts dreams had morphed into illustration, and a vibrant Columbia SC commercial arts community was thriving. But, it was the same in Seattle, and Seattle was just a wee bit larger than Columbia.
In late May or early June, I was crossing the Cascades, entering the vaunted West Range of Washington state. I was surfing the radio dial in my van, when I happened upon a song about a one legged mountain climber who had vowed to conquer Mt Rainier, by an unknown singer songwriter name Michael Tomlinson from…erm, Texas? It was followed by a song named “A Delicate Balance” by another singer songwriter, I’d never heard of, Tom Dundee from Chicago,. Then this odd instrumental which led into a song that entered my mind with the other two in recognition of finally having reached the outskirts of a brave new world. I had the strangest feeling that we were about to enter our true home.
The Cover.
“Eye in the Sky,” recorded by Jonatha Brooke. Original lyrics and song by The Alan Parsons Project in 1981, released in May 1982, as I was packing my van in South Carolina to relocate two persons greatly in need of a different mindscape and place of the hearts. For the united places evolved into the need of two hearts, eventually with her remaining West, and my returning East. By then, it was the first wave of the late eighties arts diaspora back into all point America.
Seattle had held us all in thrall, in a beautiful amber of being, for long enough to anneal our spirits to fly. Years later in 2008 I was leaving Vermont when I pushed the radio in my Jeep to play.
”Eye in the Sky,” a song that heralded me into Seattle in 1982. It was emblematic then, it was heart-stopping then. I pulled over on a small two-lane outside of Hardwick just before entering that town, and just listened. I wanted to turn around. I sat. Listened. Absorbed, from a new perspective from a singer I’d never heard. It was in a way my place in that moment; it was the muse whispering to reconvene my thoughts.
But I restarted the Jeep about twenty minutes after turning the radio, and Jeep, off. I was as unsure of myself and my ability to recognize what happiness was, what love might be, as I coaxed the Jeep forward, Southerly. It was the wrong direction, cardinally. It was years before I heard this rendition again. I was in my studio painting, while listening to WUSC out of Columbia, on near-skip. I rustled into hearing skeptically, but I recognized it.
It has since become one of my favorite covers of all time.
TR Ritchie’s visual works will be appearing here in time, including his photography and his remarkable use of reticulation long before digital imaging arrived on the scene.
“Eye in the Sky,” from The Alan Parsons Project album ‘Eye in the Sky,’ 1982, with the Sirius intro:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_in_the_Sky_(album)“Eye in the Sky,” from her album ‘Back in the Circus,’ 2004:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_in_the_Circus
Very impressed, Tom! And very informative as well. And hey, I didn’t know we had rodeos in SC!