PROJECTS

In the past few years I have produced 4 more books bringing my total number of books I have done to 10.

Current Books

The Lobstering Life. 2011
The Countryman Press, Woodstock, VT
ISBN 088150-939-6 $35 128 pages, hardcover.

Here is an Introduction to The Lobstering Life:

“Mawnin.”
“Mawnin.”
“Gawdam Sox.”
“Ah-yep.”

As captain and crew meet on the docks the dark morning begins, the slow prelude to the growing rhythms of another day catching lobsters. There is little time to linger. Before the jetty is even cleared there’s a boat to fuel, bait to load and a hole $500 deep dug. In the growling dawn there’s bait to ready, gear to prep and thoughts of rest to stow. The boat will be back in 12 hours or so- catch unloaded, gear cleaned, deck readied for the coming day- but until then a thousand lobsters or more will cross the gunwale and all hands will be busy.

There are 130 million lobsters crawling the bottom in the Gulf of Maine and over 60 million pounds brought ashore each year to fill plates around the world. But with the buyer paying low and the costs hanging high the lobsterman still has to fight the tides everyday and keep hauling to get ahead. If he or she is just out “changing the water in the traps” or “restocking the snack bar” the boat will be up on backyard blocks before the summer crush arrives.

“We’ll be steaming nawth, haul the outside string first.”
“Back before the game stawts?” “A-yep.”
“Gawdam Sox.”

Lobstering is a dance, stepped across the seasons on a dance floor submerged and dark and crawling with critters. Each month the dance floor moves; sometimes deeper, sometimes closer, sometimes to rocky ground, sometimes to mud. And everyday, sometimes every hour, the dance hall changes as the sea slides from a warm embrace to a nasty slap in the face.

But the dance steps are always the same- haul, pick, bait, set- all day, every day through the months, the years and the generations. It is not the dance of young lovers, tentative and slow. It is the hard-work dance of thousand-horse boats- rolling, bucking, smashing the waves- pulling up paychecks from the cold dark sea. It is the tough, stubborn work of tough, stubborn people. It is the lobstering life.

Click here to view the Lobster Gallery.

Quite a Sightly Place: A Family Dairy Farm in Vermont. 2010
Commonwealth Editions, Beverly, MA
ISBN 193321-291-8 $29.95 176 pages, hardcover.

Book review by freelance writer Mark Via for the Vermont News Guide:

When outdoor photographer David Middleton went to see a waterfall in the backcountry of his hometown of Danby, he had no inkling that the short trek would alter his personal and professional life. His path took him past an old dairy farm, replete with potential photo ops, and on a whim he stopped in to talk to the owners. Four years of part-time volunteer farm labor and thousands of shutter clicks later, the material result is “Quite a Sightly Place,” Middleton’s account in pictures and words of the workings of a family farm.

Owned by the same family for 150 years, the farm is now under the stewardship of Roger Bromley, with help from his wife, Trish, and father, Hugh, a nonagenarian who still keeps up with his chores. It is one of four family dairy farms remaining in Danby, out of the 50 in existence a half-century ago. Middleton quickly becomes a fixture at the Bromley place showing up in the mornings to help out in the barn (though the extent to which he is actually helping, at least early on is the focus of much of the self-deprecating humor of the book) and explore with his camera.

Magnificent photos, like a two-page spread of a phalanx of cows marching down a lane, are interwoven with more than 30 short chapters, many of them well-crafted miniature essays, on the Bromleys, their animals, the longstanding partnership between the two, and topics like the seasonal cycle and facing the bitter winter cold. The voice slides from nostalgic to comic to reportorial, but remains highly readable throughout. All the time Middleton spends on the farm allows him to convey a hard-earned understanding of the operation, as when he finally figures out why Roger’s haphazard-seeming milking procedure is in fact an efficiently choreographed routine for milking eight cows at a time. Roger-industrious, frugal, inquisitive, good-humored, tireless, and unflappable in the face of challenges and setbacks- comes alive on the page, as does the friendship that develops between photographer and farmer.

Middleton claims to be a nature photographer, not a photojournalist, hence releasing him from the duty to be objective about his subjects. But he does straddle the line between the disciplines, in that he uses his firsthand stories to perform a valuable public service, in this case documenting and even memorializing a vanishing way of life.

Those familiar with Middleton’s work will want this book for the photos. But evocative as the images are, it is the author’s words that many readers will be unable to forget as they travel around Vermont, scanning antique farmhouses and weathered barns for traces of their untold stories.

The Nature of Vermont–
A Year-long Photographic Journal. 2003
The Countryman Press, Woodstock, VT
ISBN 0-88150-529-3 $35 144 pages, hardcover.

This book was an 8-year project that captured the beauty and diversity of the natural year in Vermont. I ended up taking 40,000 images (including in camera dupes), saving 4000, submitting 400 and using 200 in the book. In other words, I ended up using 5% of the available pictures I took.

Why did I take so many? First of all, with wildlife you have to take a lot of pictures to get the few screamers that you want. Secondly, the best landscapes (or close-ups, etc) I had the first year were not as good as the ones I took the second year and those were not as good as those I took the third year and on and on. Right now I have a couple dozen even better shots than are in the book that I have taken since the book has come out. Such is the joy and agony of ending a book project.

There is also text in the book…little snippets of my impressions throughout the year. Here is the introduction to The Nature of Vermont to give you a little taste:

Danby, Late October

I am sitting on a hill above my house in an island of uncut grass, in an ocean of unkempt brambles. The view from here falls away at my feet through meadow and wood to the northern tip of the Valley of Vermont pinched, here, between the eastside granitic rise of the Greens and the westside, marbly peaks of the Taconics. In the valley bottom Otter Creek snakes quietly north. There is room enough there for a creek, a farm and a road but no more.

All of the nature of Vermont, save lake and bog, is before me. To the north the Taconics drift into rafts of ever-smaller hills until they are lost to the broad limestone bottomlands of the Champlain Valley. To the south the Valley of Vermont ever opens wider until by the time it bottoms out in the corner town of Bennington it is several miles wide and several highways full.

At my back, to the west, the rambling geologic chaos of the eastern New York borderlands lolls, uninviting. My view is east, held by the long green wall of the gray granite Greens. Upon that ridge a trail long is traced, a path that leads to country north and to altered states on south.

Before me, as well, are all of the seasons of the year. I see fall in the golden leaves of maples and birch and summer in the green of the oaks and aspens. Winter lies hidden in the fleeting snow patches destined to disappear after last night’s storm and spring I hear in the twittering notes of nearby robins and wrens.

One hundred years ago this meadow and wood were pastures and my home a farm full of cows. The maples and oaks were rough meadows then too, cut to build my house and those of others and to give work to the valley’s people. Back then there was no distinction between nature and not. There was outside and in, daylight and dark, that which is worked and that which will soon be.

Today, we name all that we see – wild or not, mine not yours, annuals, perennials and weeds - and then pay it no attention as we pass on by. We think nature is to be found over the far ridge or in large parks out west and beyond. Wildness is defined by lines on a map and nature can be found therein. It is something we hike to or drive to all day –it is not in a neighbor’s backyard. All else we call The Rest of Vermont and we give it just one glance a day.

This book is about The Rest of Vermont, the everyday, anywhere part where wild can be found wherever you look and nature is a notice away. The peopled and natural landscapes are one in Vermont so no remote parts were particularly sought. This is roadside Vermont and barnside as well and fenceside and streamside to boot.

It was not my intention to record all that is wild in Vermont. This book is not an encyclopedia. These are just my nature impressions of a Vermont year. A regular guy with a wandering spirit and a camera and notepad in hand. As such, this book is really The Nature of My Vermont with the hope it is The Nature of Your Vermont as well.

Vermonters live in this place with snakes in our basements and mice in our walls and dreams of blue skies in our heads. It is our nature to live with the wild in Vermont. It is the nature of Vermonters. It is the nature of Vermont.

I have put a number of images from the book in part of my web site gallery.

The Photographer’s Guide to Vermont. 2003
The Countryman Press, Woodstock, VT
ISBN 0-88150-533-1  $16.95  96 pages

The Photographer’s Guide to the Oregon Coast. 2003
The Countryman Press, Woodstock, VT
ISBN 0-88150-534-X   $16.95  96 pages

The Photographer’s Guide to the Maine Coast. 2003
The Countryman Press, Woodstock, VT
ISBN 0-88150-535-8   $17.95  112 pages

These books present all my favorite and all of the standard places to take pictures in each of the areas covered by the book. There are 167 sites in the Maine book, 145 sites in the Oregon book and 108 sites in the Vermont book (it’s a pretty small state after all). I give detailed directions to each site and insider-type information such as when the best light is, what season is best and some composition suggestions. When I think about it now, it is actually astonishing that I was so darn comprehensive and thorough.

These are extremely useful guides, especially if you aren’t familiar with an area or if you go to one of these areas but you always go to the same places again and again. All the above books are available in local bookstores and can be ordered at any bookstore. You can also contact me directly if you would like me to scribble lies and put my signature in your book. All kinds of lies and innuendos are accepted.

Copyright 2006-11 David Middleton Photography. All content on this site belongs to David Middleton Photography.
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