Eastham photographer Arthur Nichols was standing on a causeway at the edge of Onota Lake in Pittsfield during a wet snowstorm in late March 1972. He was looking at trees. There were no leaves on them yet.
“Everything was black and white,” he says. “It was like looking at a pencil drawing of the world. I thought it was so magical.” He started taking pictures. “That was the moment this started for me.”
Nichols will show his dunescapes and his photographs of asphalt and seaweed at Gary Marotta Fine Art in a show opening on Friday, July 19 and running through Aug. 29.
The seaweed photographs were taken on Cape Cod Bay between First Encounter Beach and Sunken Meadow Beach in Eastham and on Great Island in Wellfleet. They draw the viewer into both the movement of the sea and Nichols’s process of combining multiple exposures. The result, in fine detail, has the quality of surrealist paintings or abstractions in swirling sweeps of chartreuse, gold, and brown.
In Nichols’s Untitled Dunescape 3, an archival pigment print on cotton rag paper, we see the face of the eroding dune at Ballston Beach in Truro. The photograph brings us close enough to hear the coastal storms crash against the beach and see root systems holding the sand. It seems to compress the long project of erosion into one moment in which a shelf breaks away and slips, revealing a new layer of sand. The shelf runs across the middle of the work like an abandoned railroad track. Nichols has kept the hazy platinum-gray sky mostly out of the picture. His photograph makes the dune feel raw and monumental, brooding after a storm.
The dunescapes are composed of multiple photographs taken from a single vantage point. Nichols does this by taking overlapping panoramic images. He uses a tripod that’s level in both directions and pans the setting, identifying the edges of the image he’d like to capture. He goes out past the left end point, takes an exposure, and swings the camera a few degrees so it overlaps 50 percent of the first image. He keeps doing that until he gets past where he wants to end on the right-hand side. By then he has 10 or 12 images that he merges.
The same is true for his minimalist asphalt series, but for these Nichols did not use a tripod. He used a handheld camera because he needed to be able to run out of the roadway if a car came speeding by. To Nichols’s eye, asphalt — in this case seen at a reservoir near Downsville, N.Y. — can become landscape or skyscape.
“I just liked the lines snaking over the blacktop itself,” says Nichols. We can feel the alternately slippery and grating textures of the street. Tire tracks in overlapping black ribbons from Nichols’s merged exposures are reminiscent of gestural elements in an abstract expressionist painting.
More familiar are the elements of Nichols’s photographs of Provincetown’s parabolic dunes and blowouts. In Untitled Dunescape 2, taken in the Province Lands, the hollow of the blowout is alive with pitch pines, dune willows, and beach grasses that spread out from its center.
“I spent many years in a wet darkroom doing black-and-white work,” Nichols says. He made mostly silver gelatin prints until 2010. He bought his first digital camera that year and has been working in digital ever since. Since making that change, he works in color, which he says he has grown to like, although his images seem to want to avoid it, capturing the absence of it instead.
In his dunescapes, the viewer is often placed on trails with sandy paths ahead. One feels the impulse to scramble forward, up and over the dunes. There are gray and barely blue skies, dull gold grasses and reeds along bald strips of sand, the dark of marshes and ponds that flank the frames, and trails that disappear into the distance.
Nichols has a B.F.A. in photography from the University of Bridgeport. He ended up working in engineering, but he says photography has always been his passion. “It is also a second job that costs me money,” he says.
Nichols sees much of what he wants to photograph as he goes about the paths of Eastham, riding his bike to Duck Pond in Wellfleet to swim, or to Orleans on everyday errands, or from the Atlantic to the bay, where he goes to look at seaweed. Walking on the bayside beaches, his pace slows — “My wife says I walk at the pace of a tripod.”
Nichols had a dream when he first got into photography. In it, Alfred Stieglitz appeared and told him, “Photograph what you like.” Nichols says there are a lot of things one might want to take pictures of, but he wonders if the way we snap so many pictures on our phones means we’re missing something.
A student of meditation and yoga for 50 years — he met gallerist Gary Marotta at a meditation retreat in Boston — Nichols prefers a more contemplative approach. “I’m old school, and I like paper,” he says. “It’s something that sticks around longer than 30 seconds.”
Minimalist Lens
The event: Photography by Arthur Nichols
The time: Friday, July 19 through Thursday, Aug. 29
The place: Gary Marotta Fine Art, 162 Commercial St., Provincetown
The cost: Free