The Mill Room

The next forty years…

The Mill Room

One of my photographs is now titled: Ante Room, Peirce Mill Rock Creek Park… Its first title was “Mill Room”.

It is indeed the ante room of the Peirce Mill in Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC.

Throughout my life as a child and as an adult, I spent time in Rock Creek Park. The Nature Center, the horseback riding stables and of course many picnic sites throughout the park were familiar places to me. Peirce Mill was a particular interest to me because of the waterwheel outside and the stone edifice of the building itself. And of course the idyllic creek that ran along side it, the picturesque waterfall…it was just a wonderful scene I had known from my youth, when I could actually wade in the water.

As an adult and as a photographer seeing the entire scene in yet another context was exhilarating. It was in many ways a culmination of a journey. Those things we take for granted when we are young can later emerge as significant and seminal and it was in that context that Peirce Mill became a chapter for me in my photographic story.

I was teaching creative photography in the Literary Arts Program in the fall of 1971 and since my class was small, I and another teacher took them to Rock Creek Park around the Peirce Mill on a photographic expedition. It was my habit to shoot along with my students so when we later processed our film and made contact sheets, everyone, including me, showed the results to the entire class.

I believed it demystified the process for them. They could see my mistakes as well as their own and I could explain the ebb and flow of photographic seeing and capturing. We discussed composition, exposure and shot selection. I could see the flow of their seeing from the first shot to the next and so on. It was a very fluid process and one I believe was beneficial to all including me.

While on the shoot that day, I went into the mill looking for subjects to photograph. It was not a very sunny day. I would describe it as “hazy bright”, but the mill has many windows, fairly small windows that allow in relatively small amounts of light and the front door was open.

I noticed the light, and how it would rest on various surfaces within the room. It was touching bags of grain, the floor, sides of horizontal beams above and vertical support beams below.

The light coming from the door was particularly noticeable because it highlighted the texture of the grain in the wood floor.

After taking in all of those factors, I was convinced this was a picture I wanted to make and as I was not sure how long I had before the light changed, I had to make the exposure quickly.

What is important for the novice photographer to realize at this point is that,  in the scanning of the room, reading the light, discerning the worthiness of the room and the things in it as a potential photograph…all of this took place in a matter of seconds, maybe a minute or two at the most. It is that process that becomes second nature to you the more you shoot.

I decided where I was going to stand to take the picture. I did not have a wide angle lens, only a normal, 50mm lens. I stood against the far wall as close as possible. I was still using the Nikkormat FS, I had since college, which had no meter. I had to assess the light based on all of my previous shooting experience.

I stood against the wall, raising the camera up to my eye in order to compose the picture. I set the f/stop to f/11 which would give me good depth of field. I set the shutter speed on one second because the room was essentially dark but it was the highlighted areas that I wanted and the drama of Chiaroscuro which was the allure of the scene.

I held my breath and shot two frames. That was it and I moved on.

When my class met the next day, we processed our film and made contact sheets. My students’ work was getting better as I knew it would. We talked about the previous day’s shooting expedition and our shot selection and the shot selection process. I talked about why I had selected the mill room and made mention of the fact that I had taken two shots of it. I discussed exhausting the subject as a strategy for “seeing” and refining the “seeing” and yet, I had only taken two shots of the mill room. I said that it was a feeling I had that I had shot all that I could get at that time, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t revisit the scene at a later time.

I was intrigued with the images of the mill room on the contact sheet. After all was said and done in class, I couldn’t wait to get home to my darkroom and make a print of that one frame I saw of that room. I could see the tonal range in the negative…the highlights and shadows. I was very excited.

The first print I made was on a fiber-base paper. It was Kodak Polycontrast G double weight. The matte surface of the paper accented the rustic look I was after from the interior and the texture of the wood floor came through in fine fashion. The way the light hit in that room was stunning. I was very pleased. I made subsequent prints of that image on Agfa 118 3 paper and got good results. However, the quintessential print of the Mill Room to me will always be on Kodak Polycontrast G matte surface, double weight paper.

In the years that followed, the “Mill Room” image would become my signature photograph.

The Mill Room

Ante Room, Peirce Mill, Rock Creek Park

Washington, DC

1971