I now live in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in a small city named Manistique. The city lies on the north shore of Lake Michigan at the point where the Manistique River flows into it. Hemingway wrote about the "Big Two Hearted River" in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and each year you can find fly fishermen that want to retrace Hemingway’s adventures in search of steelhead, chinook salmon, or brook trout.
Manistique has a population of 3,097 …now 3,098. It is a perfect little city with a main street (Cedar St.) devoid of chain restaurants and chain stores (with the exception of a most welcome Ace Hardware at the end). It has mom and pop shops, local restaurants that serve such things as pasties (a delicious meat pie and part of the regional culture) and one of the best pizza’s I have ever eaten on Main Street. It also boasts a two mile boardwalk along Lake Michigan, a movie theater, a weekly farmers market, and a public spring where you are welcome to fill up your containers with free water so pristine that it makes Poland Spring blush.
I moved here on the heels of publishing my photoBlog for 6 years. The majority of pictures I took then were street photographs and the subject matter consisted primarily of people. New York was, in a sense, my canvas and an extremely obvious and profound one at that. I love people and love photographing them, but I am now looking at a totally different canvas and the nature of my work must invariably change.
I still am not quite certain exactly what it will become, but I have to start again somewhere, so here is my first offering. I present here a handful of photos taken in an around Manistique Michigan during my first few weeks here. They are devoid of people at this point. There are fewer people here, of course, so the rules are different and I really stand out a lot more with my photo gear and all dressed in New York black (that will have to change too.)
What I hope to do is present a controlled collision of my hyper-stylized photo experiences from the Metropolis and marry them with the serene simplicity of small towns, rural areas, and even some places slightly off the grid. That, at least, is my starting point. Let's see where it goes from here. - Dennis Novak
