Photographer Daniel Jackson is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘The Pond’. To see Daniel’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Our pond was a quarry in the revolutionary war. A train ran across the field to one of the first, and largest, blast furnaces in the colonies. As late as 1874, the pond appears on a map as an “iron ore bed.” At some point, the quarry was abandoned and became Porter Pond. When my wife’s parents bought the land almost fifty years ago, the field was overgrown, and the pond was weedy and inaccessible. Over the next few decades, they cleared the area around it and diverted a nearby brook to flow through it. I’ve been photographing the pond for almost twenty years, as our children and their cousins have grown up around it. In the summer, it’s the center of our family life. The water is never exactly warm, but that doesn’t seem to matter. It’s about 60 feet deep, and the water is clear, but it’s too dark to see more than a few feet down. Vast shoals of fish swim with us, and a heron visits occasionally, rising majestically over the pond and above the trees as soon as it becomes aware of our presence. In summer storms, the water shimmers under the downpour. One of my nieces streaks in the rain while the rest of the family plays board games on the screen porch. I’m with her, out in the rain, hoping that neither of us will be struck by lightning.

Artist statement

When I look at a photograph I’ve taken, I know I was actually there, and that it was a true record of an experience I once had. Each image is evidence of life, but also a hint of death (as Barthes noted), since one cannot help thinking that, in time, these people and these places will be gone. I try to bridge the personal and the universal, to stay true to my own experiences but to show the ideas and values that we all share. As I get older, I find this matters more to me, and I am drawn less to images that are clever or dramatic or calculatedly innovative, and more to images that are straightforward and sincere. As Robert Adams explained, the most compelling photos are often of the most mundane scenes, because only then can they reveal the joy and beauty of everyday life. I find my subjects around me: in my family, in my neighborhood, in my university, and in the landscape of New England. My Pond series was my first serious photographic endeavor when I started it almost twenty years ago, and in some ways it represents my self-education in photography. When I began, I felt my photographic heroes looking over my shoulder, guiding my camera through the landscape: Paul Caponigro showing me our pond as a whole world in a small room; Paul Strand teaching me to see the growth and decay around it; Lee Friedlander curing my aversion to midday sun; and Ray Metzker opening my eyes to the early evening light. As time passed, George Tice and Wright Morris taught me to see the pond in terms of the people around it, even when not present. And most recently, I find myself turning to Emmett Gowin and Sally Mann to understand the darker side of our idyllic retreat. Finally, though, I am beginning to feel that this pond, our pond, is becoming my pond, and, as I learn how to share it more effectively, a pond for all of us.

All images and text © Daniel Jackson