The last time I wrote to you about Common Ground, I was still in the intentions phase, the why, the process, the Bali residency and what I hoped it might make possible. That post was about the idea of the series. This one is about the work that comes after the idea, the slower, messier, more honest part of actually getting a body of work off the ground.
Image selection.
It sounds like a simple thing. It really isn't.
When you decide to build a series from historical photographs, images that are already in the public domain, images that have been reproduced so many times they've practically become wallpaper, you are not browsing a store or scrolling a catalog hoping something catches your eye. You are excavating. You are looking for the specific images, out of tens of thousands, that carry enough tonal range, enough compositional structure, enough human weight to survive translation into a slow, tactile, deliberately imperfect printmaking process. And you are not just asking what an image means. You are asking what it will do when pigment is laid over it by hand, whether it will hold, whether it will deepen, whether it wants to be touched. Those are very different questions.
Lange Migrant
Seven Photographers. One Grammar.
The photographers who ended up in Common Ground are not arbitrary choices. Each of them was working during a period when the camera was being used as a moral instrument, not a decorative one, not an entertainment one, but a tool for looking at what America actually was beneath the story it kept telling about itself. Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Lewis Hine, Gordon Parks, Edward Curtis, Russell Lee, Ansel Adams. Seven photographers, different eras, different mandates, wildly different relationships to the people standing in front of their lenses. And yet when you spread their work out across a screen at midnight, which is closer to how this actually happened, a shared grammar begins to emerge. Labor. Dignity. Displacement. Survival. The strange doubled weight of being seen and the weight of being overlooked. These are not themes invented by one photographer in one particular decade. They run through all of it like a spine.
That shared grammar is the foundation of Common Ground.
Adams The Tetons and the Snake River
What I Was Actually Looking For
Here is something that almost never makes it into artist statements: curation requires you to think like a printer before you have printed a single sheet. Gumoil is a process that rewards certain image qualities and punishes others. High contrast images flatten. Images with too much fine detail dissolve. Anything that depends on spectacle, on drama, on bravura, on being noticed, tends to fight the process and lose. What gumoil rewards is restraint, midtone nuance, images that live in the quieter registers, images whose structure can hold up when surface variation and paper texture are layered in, images that, when you slow them down, become more rather than less.
So I was filtering for all of that at the same time I was filtering for meaning, thematic fit, historical weight, and whether an image could hold its own on a wall as part of a coherent series. Every image that made the final list had to pass both tests, the conceptual one and the material one.
Ansel Adams National Archives 79 AA Q01
A Few Specific Moments in the Process
With Dorothea Lange, there was really never any serious debate. Migrant Mother is the anchor of the series, one of the most recognized photographs in American history, and also one that carries exactly the kind of human weight this work is built around. A mother with her children, displaced, uncertain, holding herself together in a way that is both exhausted and quietly fierce. The image has been reproduced so many times that people sometimes stop actually seeing it, which is part of why it belongs here. Gumoil will slow it down again, return some of its physical presence, and ask a viewer to sit with it rather than scroll past it. That is the whole premise of Common Ground, and Migrant Mother is where that premise is most clearly tested.
Walker Evans required a different kind of discipline. Evans is technically almost too clean for most alternative processes, and his restraint, his straight-on framing, his moral clarity can go quiet in the wrong hands. But gumoil adds time back into an image, and that changes things. Ellie Mae Burroughs was never really in question once I spent time with it. That gaze is not pleading, not sentimental. It is steady, and in the current moment it lands in a way I honestly did not fully anticipate when I first selected it. Her expression paired with the Hale County interior carries the Evans section without needing any explanation at all.
Ellie Mae Burroughs
Lewis Hine is in the series specifically because of what he represents. He was not a fine art photographer in the traditional sense, he was a sociologist who understood that evidence could move people. Sadie Pfeifer, spinning cotton at age ten, is in the series. Breaker Boys is in the series. Two images only, because one becomes illustrative and three tips toward retrospective. Two holds.
Edward Curtis is the most complicated presence in the room, and I knew that going in. His work sits at a genuinely difficult intersection, the beauty and craft are real, and the ethnographic framing and its relationship to the Indigenous people being photographed is something that cannot be set aside. What I was looking for in Curtis were the images that resisted spectacle, the ones where presence and quietness outweigh performance. Quhatika Girl made the list early and stayed there. Sitting Bear and Painted Lodges. Antelope Ruin, which shifts the series from portraiture into place and absence. American Horse, which is a personal one for me. Together the Curtis selections move the series toward identity and land and continuity rather than ceremony and myth.
Lewis Hine Child Labor - John Dempsey
Gordon Parks is here because he earned it. Ella Watson, 1942, was Parks' first assignment for the FSA. She was a charwoman at a government building in Washington, and Parks photographed her in front of an American flag with her mop and broom. The image is as clear and deliberate as anything in the series. Splint in a Tent made the list because the interior light and human compression translate beautifully into gumoil and because it pairs conceptually with Evans' interiors in a way that extends rather than repeats.
Russell Lee brought the series something the others do not fully provide, which is the texture of ordinary American working life without catastrophe at the center. Greasing a Logging Truck, 1942. Pie Town Gas Pumps, 1940. These images are about labor and place without the weight of crisis attached to them, and they function as breathing room inside a series that carries significant emotional weight elsewhere. That was intentional.
Ansel Adams was the one that required the most deliberation. Adams is not FSA in the same sense as Lange and Evans, and his government work sits adjacent to that orbit but carries a different mandate. He witnesses. He frames endurance and structure and dignity rather than confronting fracture. Three images are in the Adams section: Church at Taos Pueblo, Navajo Girl in Canyon de Chelly, and Manzanar Cemetery Monument. The Manzanar image is not optional in this series. Once you have included incarceration and displacement in the conceptual frame, Manzanar belongs there. But it required care, because it cannot be handled as spectacle. In gumoil, the way that image softens into surface and paper texture may actually serve it better than a standard photographic print would, and I find myself thinking about that a lot.
Gordon Parks -American Gas
Where Things Stand Now
The final core list sits at seventeen images, and my plan is to tighten that slightly before printing begins, aiming for fourteen core works with the remaining images offered as smaller studies or parallel pieces. Seventeen starts to feel encyclopedic. Fourteen can feel declarative, more like a chapter than a full volume, and that distinction matters to me.
Almost everything is on the drive. I am still tracking down one image from John Vachon, a graphic of a railcar transfer bin that has eluded me through several rounds of searching. It will turn up. These things always do.
The next phase is digital positive preparation, where each image gets brought into a format the process can actually use, with tonal adjustments, size decisions, and orientation choices all sorted out before a single sheet of coated paper goes near a light source. I will bring you into that part of it too, because this is the thing about following a project from inside the process rather than arriving at the finished end: you see the problem-solving, the false starts, the small wins, the decisions where three options felt equally right until one of them quietly stopped feeling that way. That is where the work actually lives, not in the final print, but in the hours before it.
I am glad you are here for that part.
Master pnp-cph
The Graveyard Was Never a Failure