Splintered sideboards, milky windowpanes and frayed edges poke through the photograph up on the wall of Jim Westphalen’s studio. It’s a good example of the Shelburne artist’s dedication to creating artistic documents that observe history and its bound on permanence.

Westphalen has increasingly become a known name in Vermont, where he makes photographic subjects of moldering rural scenes. This year he released “Vanish: Disappearing Icons of a Rural America,” a film telling the story of his most recent body of work— elegiac photos of decaying barns and buildings across the state and beyond. It showed at the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival this past summer and is set to screen at Burlington’s Contois Auditorium on Feb. 21.

“It’s not just documenting what’s there, you know,” he said on a recent snowy morning at his studio in Shelburne. “I see it as art. The beauty in decay.”

A self proclaimed “old soul,” born and raised on Long Island, Westphalen grew up surrounded by suburbia’s uniform and cookie-cutter landscape. He was always looking for something ever so slightly askew, something that snagged his attention. So it made sense that, after picking up a film camera in childhood and carrying it with him throughout his two years in college, he realized imagemaking was his calling. After years in commercial photography and a move to Shelburne in the 1990s, Westphalen became infatuated with the state’s great green landscape.

He cites as inspiration Andrew Wyeth’s muted watercolors, the geometric shapes and shadows in Edward Hopper’s oil paintings and the detailed work of his late friend and American classic realist painter Hale Johnson.

He wields a large-format camera, jury-rigged for digital use, and has for 35 years. His choice of camera plays a role in the sense of depth you see in a Westphalen gallery show. The large format makeup — he shoots a 4 by 5 inch frame — allows him to manipulate his subjects in the field, resulting in less time spent editing when he gets back to the studio.

The work can feel like a race against the inevitable, he said, when his subjects are often buildings that are sinking into their old foundations more and more each day. He’s trying to capture the life of a structure before it becomes obsolete.

In his mind, that decay ties the present to history, and he wants to give the past a future.

Westphalen’s film “Vanish,” explores his decadeslong effort to observe the landscape and document accordingly, before it’s too late.

His work in photography is not limited to rotting rural scenes, though. He has also found something of a spiritual counterpart in the ocean, especially on the coast of Maine. With images that play with exposure and subject matter, Westphalen tries to capture the contrast of rough, rocky shores and gentle, thrumming seas. He makes his images dreamlike through the use of long exposure, allowing the viewer access to the sea salt–soaked atmosphere.

Westphalen sees life through the viewfinder and never puts the camera down. Traveling on backroads, Westphalen became increasingly aware of the disappearing landscape of rural Vermont. What he was seeing reminded him of times at his grandmother’s in the Poconos, when she’d tell him stories about who lived in each rundown farmhouse nearby. Buildings like that came to symbolize the cultural loss on which he’d become fixated.

“In the various states of disrepair that they’re in — the textures and the patinas — there’s just so much beauty,” he said. “When I do my photography, it’s always with the goal and the mission of sort of honoring the buildings as they are today — to make people notice what we’re losing.”

Crafting images that evince for so many people a sense of mourning and reverence is the result of learning what does and doesn’t work, testing prints and exposures and angles.

Decades into his adventure in trial and error, he’s learned how rotten wood and rusted metal can produce an idealized portrait, a history written in walls. To lose those relics, he said, is to lose a connection to who Vermonters once were.

Others are trying to restore and instill resilience in the state’s landscape and culture. Rural Vermont, a farmer-led nonprofit based in Montpelier that advocates for agrarian communities, has partnered with many art organizations to tell stories and raise awareness about agriculture, an industry that has been shunted out from inside barns not unlike the ones photographed by Westphalen.

“I love thinking about facets of our rural landscape from a lens of art and creativity because I think the level of craftsmanship is often just so striking and tells the story of the landscape that Vermont has and how it’s changed,” said Mollie Wills, grassroots organizing director with Rural Vermont.

Just as art can bring light to culture, culture can inspire art. Without the farms that once ran the majority of the state, Westphalen would not have a decaying barn to photograph.

Westphalen does not consider “Vanish” a work of activism itself. To him, it instead functions as a call to action for those who feel their connection to the past slipping away and want to do something about it.

“‘Vanish’ reminds us that we are living in a dynamic landscape,” said Thomas Denenber, the director of the Shelburne Museum, as part of an interview in the film.

Asked what advice he would give an aspiring photographer, Westphalen had a succinct prescription: “Find something you are passionate about, shoot like crazy, create a cohesive body of work … and make it your own.”

The Community News Service is a program in which University of Vermont students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost.

A surrealist with an incisive eye, finding the beauty and absurdity of everyday life. A model who posed for Vogue and sat for Pablo Picasso and Man Ray, but whose fashion career was suddenly cut short. A war photographer who embedded with the US military to chronicle the harrowing events of World War II — and posed defiantly in Hitler’s bathtub on the day of his death.

Lee Miller was an American artist who remade herself many times without straying from the principles that guided her life and career. When she died in 1977, her photographic work had largely been forgotten; her own family was unaware of the scope of her practice, and what she witnessed in the war, until they found her cache of negatives. Now, five decades later, she’s the subject of the Kate Winslet-led biopic “Lee,” which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, as well as a recent monograph of her work and an ongoing exhibition at mega-gallery Gagosian in New York, where some of her prints are for sale.

Her son, photographer Antony Penrose — whose father was the British surrealist painter Roland Penrose, whom Miller married in 1947 — has made it his life’s work to bring attention to his mother’s legacy. He co-directs her archive with his daughter, Ami Bouhassane, and has authored multiple books about Miller, including the most recent, “Lee Miller: Photographs.” For the past decade, he’s consulted on “Lee” as it came together, and has finally begun its run in both the United Kingdom and Spain. (A US release date has yet to be confirmed.)

“There were movies proposed and very nearly made before,” Pentose said in a video call with CNN. “This is the one that we’ve been waiting for, because I feel it is a brilliant rendition of Lee’s life, values and personality.”

He still recalls how “bewildering” it was when he and his late wife, Suzanna, found some 60,000 of her negatives and prints in their attic shortly after Miller’s death. She had developed a unique surrealist way of looking at the world, capturing everyday eccentricities that play with the viewer’s perception: a scratched-up door at a jewelry store becomes a small explosion of sparks; tar spilled on the street glistens darkly like some deep-sea or cave-bound creature.

But her range was staggering. Here was Elsa Schiaparelli supine among two cheetah sculptures, and Marlene Dietrich posing in dramatic sun in the designer’s ruched house coat. Here was a crowd of people spitting on four women, their heads shaved, as they went to trial for accusations of associating with Nazis. Here were the bodies of concentration camp victims in Dachau, and the liberated prisoners standing over a pile of human bones.

“None of us — and that includes my father — knew the scope of Lee’s work, particularly her war work,” Penrose said of his mother. “She deliberately didn’t tell him what was going on, because she didn’t want him to be worried.”

After the war, Miller struggled with depression and alcohol dependency, decades before post-traumatic stress disorder — and its symptoms — was officially recognized. When the occasional curator or art historian would turn up to better understand the depth of her work, Penrose said Miller would deflect the focus and downplay her career. It’s only been through her archive that he was able to understand the life she lived.

“It was a voyage of discovery,” Penrose added. “It was like finding a person that we had not known before — way beyond our kind of understanding and knowledge.”

Reinventing herself

For many years, Miller was remembered primarily for her modeling work in New York and with the reductive label of “muse” during her time in Paris. She sat for Pablo Picasso as he painted her in lurid yellow and green, illustrating her “extraordinary wit and liveliness… and a very bold, confrontational approach to life,” according to Jason Ysenberg, a director at Gagosian and co-curator of the gallery’s show “Lee Miller and Friends”, in a video call.

She was also often remembered — but not credited — for her portrait collaborations with Man Ray, with whom she was romantically involved and remained friends throughout her life.

“Those images of Lee were as much by Lee as by Man Ray,” added Richard Calvocoressi, the show’s other co-curator, on the call.

Miller has been described by many as a supermodel on the cusp in her early twenties, a period just before she met Man Ray. But she was seemingly blacklisted by fashion clients overnight, after a portrait of her by the photographer Edward Steichen was licensed for a Kotex ad promoting menstrual products.

“She absolutely came to a crash stop. Nobody wanted the Kotex girl modeling their frocks,” Penrose said. “She didn’t even know that the photograph was going to be used for that purpose — it was bought through an agency.”

Though Miller used the setback as a sign to shift her practice, sexist social structures continued to shape her career. Art historians and curators of the 20th century relegated female surrealists — many of whom appear in Miller’s images, like the painter Leonora Carrington and the photographer Dora Maar — to the sidelines of the movement when they were, in actuality, crucial figures; Penrose recalls that his own father referred to them more as “muses” than artists in their own right, despite their prolific outputs.

But despite the imbalances within their group, Miller’s time with her friends ahead of World War II was seemingly idyllic. She’d left Paris in 1932 for New York when her relationship with Man Ray ended, and then unexpectedly married Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey and moved to Cairo. When she spent the summer of 1937 back in Paris and met Penrose, it sparked a two-year affair (and series of love letters when they were apart), that eventually resulted in the dissolution of her marriage.

Some of Miller’s emblematic images of the period show their vacations across the south of France from beach outings with Penrose, Picasso and Maar and the model Ady Fidelin, to a picnic that has drawn comparisons to Édouard Manet’s famed painting “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” as a topless Fidelin is pictured alongside Man Ray, the poet Paul Éluard and artist Nusch Éluard.

But as Ysenberg points out, the tumult of the era had already begun — Nazism brewed in Germany and the Spanish Civil War broke out, prompting Picasso’s monumental and career-defining work “Guernica” which was painted the same year Miller returned to Paris.

“It was a community that in the sense that they were friends and lovers,” Ysenberg explained. “It seemed a very carefree time for them in a very kind of in a in a world that was changing very quickly.”

She saw ‘what we’re missing’

Many artists fled Europe in the 1940s, and Miller could have gone back to New York to safety, Penrose said. But she’d settled down with Roland in London and refused to leave, instead becoming a photojournalist for British Vogue, documenting women who were contributing to the war efforts, and taking both fashion and street images during the Blitz.

Later, she was accredited as an official correspondent with the US armed forces — one of just four such female photographers. During this period, in Normandy and in Munich she worked closely with the Life photojournalist David E. Scherman. Together, they entered Hitler’s apartment with soldiers on April 30, 1945, the same day that Hitler shot himself in his bunker in Berlin. Just that morning, Miller and Scherman had taken photographs in Dachau; Miller tracked mud from the concentration camp all over the apartment’s floor before stripping down to pose in the bathtub. She took the same photo of Scherman, who was Jewish, as well.

“Those boots carried her that that morning around the concentration camp, and now she’s grinding the filth of that place into Hitler’s nice clean bathroom,” Penrose said. “They prove that she’s not there as a guest in his house. She’s a victor.”

Even as Miller faced the harrowing effects of the war across Europe — sights that would take a toll on her in its aftermath — she still maintained her keen artist’s eye. After all, she believed there was nothing “more surrealist, more mad, more nightmarish” than the war, according to Calvocoressi.

“Even in the most dangerous and demanding circumstances, she’s still looking out for weird, quirky images,” Penrose said. “I find that that so endearing — the hallmark of her artistry is just to see what we’re missing.”

Miller took her last assignment for Vogue in the early 1950s, as Penrose notes that she could no longer meet deadlines because of her declining mental health. But she didn’t stop photographing, taking some 1,000 photographs of Picasso as Roland worked on his biography, which published in 1958.

Penrose said that throughout the course of her career, she was always “looking for the metaphor” in her surroundings. Of the many poetic moments she captured, one took place in front of the Vienna Opera House in Austria’s capital in late 1945 amid the lingering destruction of war. Framed by twisted metal support beams and rubble, the soprano Irmgard Seefried is photographed singing an aria from the Italian opera “Madame Butterfly,” in what Penrose believes to be an image set up by Miller — who captured her with arms outstretched, completely in silhouette.

“In a way, it’s a reversal, because you would have expected the singer to be beautifully lit from all kinds of sources.” Penrose explained.

“Gone is the costume. gone is any kind of glamorization… what we have is this absolute passion, about the triumph of art over destruction.”

Videographer and PetaPixel reader Andreas Hofmarcher sent a voice message to the PetaPixel Podcast and Andreas’ story is so incredible that it warranted a dedicated article.

Although his primary focus is videography, Andreas has done some photoshoots for clients before, including for a local businessman he hadn’t heard from in the last three years.

“He organizes specially-themed children’s birthday parties and was closed because of COVID. I did a few photoshoots for him years back — fun shoots but very low budget,” Hofmarcher tells PetaPixel.

“His photographer called in sick, and so he needed someone on very short notice. First, I was thinking of giving this job to someone else but in the end, I had time, a camera, and wanted to help out.”

As it turns out, the child was not the only person who left the party with a gift.

“So I went and had a lot of fun,” Hofmarcher explains. “The theme was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and everyone was dressed up and played games. They had pancakes, make-up stations, a disco, and, of course, presents.”

After a few hours of taking photos of the event and having a good time, the videographer-turned-photographer was ready to pack up and head home.

“But then the grandpa of the birthday child came over and told me he wanted to give me an old camera that has just been lying around for the last ten years that no one is using anymore,” Hofmarcher recalls.

Andreas thought it might be “an old DSLR, film camera, or maybe even a point-and-shoot.” All safe bets. However, his expectations were way off the mark.

“So we went to his office, and I knew that something special might be waiting for me. There was an Atmos watch on the shelf, a tiger-skin carpet on the floor, loads of pictures of him with politicians, and travel photos from around the world in golden frames.”

“He took a huge backpack out of the wardrobe. He opened it, and I took a glance inside. There was a huge camera body with an attached lens, and as I took it out — it weighs about one and a half Nocts [Andreas really is a podcast listener!] — I read the words ‘Phase One.’”

While Andreas mostly does video work, he says it’s about an 80/20 split between video and photo, he has heard of Phase One and knew “something special” was now in his hands.

“I tried to convince him that he still could use, sell, or give the camera to his kids and that I couldn’t possibly take this camera,” Hofmarcher says. The older gentleman insisted, and so Andreas took the camera.

The backpack’s complete contents are as follows: Phase One 645DF camera body, a Mamiya Aptus Leaf II 12 digital back, three Schneider Kreuznach LS lenses, a digital light meter, gray card, four batteries, three CF cards, firewire cables, and instruction manuals.

“It took quite some time for me to figure out how even to start the camera and how to work it. I took it with me to some regular shootings,” Hofmarcher tells PetaPixel. Hofmarcher captured the photos in this article with his new gift.

Given the age of the camera, as evidenced by the inclusion of old-school CompactFlash cards and firewire cables, even opening the files proved a bit challenging. “Lightroom does not recognize the files, so I had to install Capture One. But I also found that I could open the files in Luminar Neo. But man, my computer is working hard to open them!”

The digital back was introduced at Photokina in 2010 and was the world’s first 80-megapixel image sensor. At the time, it cost $32,000. The camera body is even older.

The large sensor’s ISO ranges from 50 to 800, which is very limited by 2023 standards, and it can shoot a photo every 1.5 seconds or so. It also only has a single autofocus point.

The Aptus Leaf II 12 back sports a large 53.7 x 40.3-millimeter image sensor, putting a full-frame camera’s 36 x 24mm sensor to shame. It’s also larger than modern mirrorless medium-format cameras, like the Fujifilm GFX 100 II and Hasselblad X2D 100C, which have roughly 44 x 33mm imagers.

“But on the other hand — I got noticed walking around with such a big camera. I had to stop and think about the pictures. It slowed me down but in a good way. And everybody else took pictures on their phone. I even asked strangers if I could take their pictures, and I wouldn’t do that with my other camera when it’s not an official gig. But somehow, the camera elevated my confidence,” Hofmarcher adds.

It is a far cry from his normal setup of Canon EOS R-series cameras, like the EOS R5, R7, and R10. “My goal is to have a very small footprint and travel very light,” he says. The Phase One and Aptus combo is certainly not small and light.

“I reached out to the PetaPixel Podcast to ask what I should do. Keep the camera and see what I can do with it or sell it and get some upgrades for my paid video work? The consensus has been that I should probably sell it, but I’m still undecided,” Hofmarcher writes. “What would you do? How much is this gear even worth nowadays?”

As for the latter question, and assuming that Hofmarcher’s new-to-him gear is in “good” condition, the camera, digital back, and lenses are worth only $2,650, according to reputable used gear retailer MPB. Changing the condition to “Like new” moves the value to $3,215.

When the gear was brand-new, the story was dramatically different. The lenses are not the latest “Blue Ring” versions, so information is scarce, but it appears that they ranged in price from about $2,000 to $5,000 when new. The Phase One 645DF body was just under $6,000, and as Hofmarcher mentioned, the Mamiya Aptus Leaf II — 12 back was $31,995. Although it is challenging to nail down a precise cost, in 2010, a photographer would’ve shelled out nearly $50,000 for that equipment, not counting memory cards, the light meter, and other accessories.

Frankly, the current used market is underwhelming and reflects a nearly 25 times reduction in value. Although a private sale would likely net Hofmarcher more revenue than a bulk sale to a retailer, that is brutal depreciation.

It is hard to imagine that the gear is worth more now to anyone else than it could be to Hofmarcher. After all, the photographer said the gear has given him more confidence, and putting a price on that is hard. Besides, it’s a fantastic story of generosity and the beautiful surprises sometimes in store for photographers during gigs.

Image credits: Photos courtesy of Andreas Hofmarcher