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Peter
N. Romanelli
Photography
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Chautauqua,
a town in western New York State, was home to
a Methodist summer colony, founded in 1874,
that featured speakers and programs known for
their spiritual, intellectual and aesthetic
qualities. These lectures proved to be so popular
that they were given all around the country,
and by the end of the 19th century, they were
widespread and were known simply as Chautauquas.
That tradition of education and enlightenment
is celebrated in this collection of photographs.
While these photographs are chosen for their
aesthetic qualities, each also represents a
process in the development of Provincetown and
the Provincelands Area of the Cape Cod National
Seashore.
Mankind's search for meaning has been a recurring
theme throughout history. My own pursuit has
led me to investigations of the natural world
where I have found answers perhaps best expressed
by these lines from William Blake:
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To
see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wildflower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
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Every
Picture Tells A Story
Most of Cape Cod was formed by the ice sheets
of the last glacial period, the Wisconsin Stage
of the Pleistocene, beginning 50,000 to 70,000
years ago. Ice sheets expanded from Canada across
the granite rocks of New England. Moving southward,
they scoured the landscape, scooping up rocks,
boulders and other earth materials and moving
them like a giant conveyor belt. When the vast
ice sheets expanded to a point where the warmer
climate melted the ice as fast as it moved south,
the leading edge of the ice sheets held stationary,
but the huge masses of glacial materials continued
southward and became deposited in piles known
as moraines. Several moraines, consisting of
rocks, sand, clay and silt, form the major part
of Cape Cod.
The rest of the Cape---Provincetown, Monomoy,
Sandy Neck and several other sand spits, formed
as a result of ocean waves sculpting the moraines.
When glacial ice covered North America, so much
of the earth's moisture was contained within
the ice that the ocean level dropped about 400
feet, putting the edge of the ocean at the continental
shelf about 200 miles east of present day New
England. Gradually, within the last 5,000 years,
the ocean has returned to near its present level
enabling waves began to rearrange the glacial
debris. Our story begins here, as the sea level
returned to near its present level, when the
moraine now known as Cape Cod was a jagged pile
of earth materials extending several miles further
into the Atlantic Ocean, when the coastal of
littoral forces started reshaping the moraine,
and before the dunes of the Provincelands existed.
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These
pictures were originally captured on ektachrome
slide film with a medium format camera primarily
with a normal-80mm-lens. They were then digitized
and manipulated by computer. The photographs
exhibited here are inkjet prints on canvas.
People have asked me: "Is that the real color?"
What is the real color? According to that old
philosophical conundrum, how do you know that
the color you see is the same color that I see?
How well does the film, balanced at 5600° Kelvin,
the color temperature of sunlight at mid-day,
portray the lighting of various other times
of the day? How well does the film processing
and printing respond to the "actual" scene?
And, how do you know that your mind is not fooling
you? When I shot the film that accompanies this
show, I had a hard time recording the sound
of the backwash on the shore: the sound of the
breakers overwhelmed the delicate sound of the
water draining through the sand on the beach
face. Yet, without sound recording equipment,
I could clearly hear it. My mind was filtering
the unwanted sound from the sound that I wanted
to hear. How do we know what color something
actually is from the color we want it to be?
All I can say is that these prints are the closest
representation of what I see in my mind's eye
and the color is what I want it to be.
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Peter@PeterRomanelli.com
303-333-0315
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Information
© 2002 Peter Romanelli Photography. all rights reserved
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