Rob McDonald Photography

Every photograph is a certificate of presence. - Barthes

In the last decade of his life, I came to know a famous and important artist.

These photographs made inside his Lexington, Virginia, studio (circa 2007-2008) are among my favorite reminders of the time we spent together.

I think of them as visual notes from an improbable, remarkable friendship.

Selections from the exhibition
STUDIO NOTES: My Time with Cy
Anzenberger Gallery, Vienna, Austria
11 May – 18 August 2023

These photographs were made one afternoon at the Lake Eden site of Black Mountain College, October 2009.

The visit was unplanned. The weather was dismal—drizzling rain, low-hanging fog, heavy gray skies.

After a bit of wandering, I thought to call a friend, who guided my exploration with recollections from his time as a student there in the summers of 1951 and 1952.

Most of the negatives from that day were underexposed and unprintable, but a few were good enough to suggest the place as I found it.

When I shared them, my friend studied the prints with unusual attention.

He never said, but I have always wondered how these soft images registered against his memories.

Once upon a time, I became friends with a great artist who maintained a studio in the rural Virginia town where I live and where he was born. I made many photographs of the artist's home and studio. Despite the quality of our friendship, he was so private, so reticent in most ways, his willingness to permit such access always surprised me. When news of his death arrived, I said goodbye by taking my camera for a final visit to both places.

I began working through all of those images by starting at the end. The current series is a study of--and engagement with--marks from the walls of my friend's empty studio. 

Mixed media on archival pigment prints, each unique.
Series I (2013): 4” x 4”
Series II (2020): 6” x 6”

Available exclusively at the Anzenberger Gallery.

Last copies of the book are available here.

~

I have lived in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia for more than thirty years. It is a spectacular place, but I cannot name a more beautiful spot here than the hay pasture attached to a nearby historic farm known as Fancy Hill.

In this mountain landscape of winding roads and deep hollows, I have come to love the stretching and rolling and dipping of those 119 wide-open acres.

For years, I’d stand along the boundary fence, in different seasons and times, studying the lay of the land and its dramatic contours. The view became both metaphor and muse.

Then one day I began walking out into the field with my camera.

My photographs of Fancy Hill are not documentary in the traditional sense. They are exercises in matching my imagination to the experience of the place.

Original publication: “Fancy Hill”
Elsewhere: A Journal of Place (2022)

NATIVE GROUND is an ode to my love of reading - to books, to writers and the places that inspire in them the words for things that matter. The photographs are documentary only insofar as they begin in attention to particular writers' personal spaces and native landscapes. What interests me most is how the images can suggest resonance, how places inhabited might be imagined to shape vision and voice. 

Are we all lost and far from home? I think I could build an argument around that. —Paul Kingsnorth, Savage Gods

The title of this series is borrowed from a friend who created amazing sculptures and drawings from fantastical dreams of structures he’d encountered growing up in rural Alabama.

My own dreams are more literal, but they are also rooted in personal history, and they often involve places like the ones in these photographs, tumble-down forms that once provided shelter or sanctuary.

It would be entirely reasonable if these photographs initially suggest emptiness and loss, places left behind.

Looked at another way, though, maybe they’ll also whisper possibilities of remembering and reconstruction, stories ripe for telling.

(Originally published in Barren Magazine 21 [2022].)

“Imagining Harry Crews: The Landscape of A Childhood”

Photographs from Bacon County, Georgia

Recipient of the 2022 Jerome Stern Award for the best essay in Studies in American Culture 45.1 (October 2022): 5-34.

”‘Larry Brown, Writer,’ and a Place Called Tula”

Read the essay in the Southern Literary Review (15 April 2021).

Appalachian Ode:
Photographs of Breece D’J Pancake’s West Virginia

Landscape is personal and tribal history made visible. The native’s identity—his place in the total scheme of things—is not in doubt because the myths that support it are as real as the rocks and waterholes he can see and touch. He finds recorded in his land the ancient story of the lives and deeds of the immortal beings from whom he himself is descended, and whom he reveres. The whole countryside is his family tree. (157-158) —Yi-Fu Tan, Space and Place

Published in the South Atlantic Review (Fall 2020).

THE FATHER BOX

“So many fragments.  It comes down to fragments always.” – John Lane

Award-winning writer John Lane’s father committed suicide in 1959 when John was five years old.  A single box holds letters, photos, objects, and papers comprising nearly everything John knows about his father.

Two years ago, John sent the box home with me and asked me to contemplate its contents through the lens of my camera. 

These are some of the photographs I made. 

(See the book, published by Horse & Buggy Press, November 2018.)

A new book from Hub City Press, October 2015.

PAPRIKA SOUTHERN interview with Rob McDonald

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard suggests that "When we examine a nest, we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world." The Birdhouses portfolio represents a personal exploration of the relationship between place and identity: meditations on home.

In 1806, Thomas Jefferson began construction on a personal retreat near Bedford, Virginia, some ninety miles from his home, Monticello. He transformed nearly five thousand acres of pristine farmland and woods into a modestly equipped estate he called Poplar Forest. Jefferson visited Poplar Forest regularly during construction and after the house was complete. He found there, as he wrote to a friend, "the solitude of a hermit." These photographs explore the notion of retreat, of private space, which we all--even a man so great as Jefferson--require and seek instinctively.