The following is my interview with photographer, and Harwich resident, Don Gould. Our conversation ranges from his creative process, to lobster fishing, to living in Alaska. His exhibition “DS Early Light” is currently on display in the Gallery at Orleans Camera.
Liam: Let’s start with just the gallery itself.
Gould: I was thrilled the way they put it together. I just thought it was an excellent combination. I think they laid them out really well. In my 50 years of taking pictures, I probably haven’t seen but a half dozen of mine blown up to any size.
Liam: What kind of story is told when they are viewed all together?
Gould: Well, I mix everything together with the really bright early morning colors. I almost always go out about an hour before sunrise. I just love the soft tones. I never look at it as negative. I love a foggy morning because I just love the soft tones. I really enjoy trying to capture things that are hidden as well, and I just hope that they see the cross-section of the changes, the colors, and the difference that every morning brings.
Liam: What is your favorite piece of gear that you own?
Gould: My Canon R6 and the 75-200mm lens. That’s what I use most.
Liam: When you go out to shoot on these walks or jogs, how much do you bring with you? Do you have a backpack?
Gould: I have a backpack. My previous camera, my first digital camera, I bought here. I was going to trade it in, and they gave me the price on it for the trade, and I went, you know what, I’m just going to keep it. So I keep it, and I often carry two, so I don’t have to swap lenses.
Liam: You can just swap.
Gould: I can just swap cameras. So I do. And I used to use a polarizing filter once in a while, but I’m just not into altering.
Liam: It’s not as the eye sees it.
Gould: Right, right.
Gould: Very often, people say to me, and I guess I should learn to accept it, that I have a great eye. I guess I don’t necessarily see that myself. Like the black and white with the dory that’s washed up: the shot is almost instantly in my head. It’s not like I turn inside out trying to capture it, I just see it, and I go for it.
Liam: So would you say that the subjects of your photos find you?
Gould: Yeah, I think they do. I was standing in the parking lot of the fish pier, this middle one with the egrets flying over the fish pier. I was trying to get a picture of the weather vane on top of the Chatham Fish Pier, and I saw them coming, and I decided I’d see if I could capture that. So I guess they found me.
Liam: They found you.
Gould: I feel like I just show up. That’s what it is. The two swans literally floated in front of me, and I wasn’t paying attention. I didn’t see them coming. I finally caught them just out of the corner of my eye before they got to me, but I never saw them coming. So that was just, they found me.
Gould: I won’t say that I’ve never tried or gone out purposely to find a particular shot, because I have. You know, waited for a tide or something, like the beetlecat on the bottom there. But for a lot of these, it’s as I found them.
Liam: When you first started photography, what, like 40, 30 years ago?
Gould: A lot more than that. A lot more than that. Yeah, that would be about 1975. I had a Polaroid. And my wife said, you should try this SLR. It was an old Pentax, and I tried that, and loved it immediately and never used the Polaroid again. I bought myself an Olympus and just one lens and took a black and white darkroom class.
Liam: I was going to ask, are you fully self-taught?
Gould: Yeah, that’s all I ever took was a darkroom class. I had a darkroom in the house, and then Sally and I moved to Alaska for a couple of years. And I shot rolls and rolls and rolls of Kodachrome, Ektachrome. I did black and white there too, and developed it in the bathroom.
Liam: Nice. How are the lighting conditions different in Alaska?
Gould: In the summer, the sun doesn’t really set. We were just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, and to the south is the Alaska Range, where McKinley is. You’d see the sun start to drop, and it would just graze the top of the mountains and back up again. In the winter, it comes up. It would break the mountains at about 10 and be gone by 2. But the light was still pretty good, because we got our first snow on Labor Day, and it was always bright because the snow never melted again until midday.
Liam: Well, there’s one benefit to that: the lighting.
Gould: That’s a lot of black and white. We couldn’t be any more inland if we tried. And as gorgeous as the mountains and the woods and the rivers and the wildlife were, and as stunning as it was, it’s like nothing you can ever truly describe to people. I still constantly long for the ocean.
Liam: Have you ever worked in the merchant marine?
Gould: I fished right out of high school. I went to work at a fish company. I deep-sea lobstered out on the continental shelf. We would go out a few days at a time, and that pretty much told me, after doing that through a solid winter, that was not the way I wanted to make a living. I fully admit that there were a few trips where I was terrified.
Liam: Yeah?
Gould: Yeah. And again, we’re in the ’70s. GPS was not involved. There was what we called LORAN. I don’t know if you know what that is.
Liam: No, sorry.
Gould: That’s Long Range Aid to Navigation. It works on multiple signals, and you triangulate.
Liam: Was it accurate?
Gould: I mean, it’s very, very accurate. Not like GPS, not around a foot, practically on top of you. You’d come within many feet, but you were pretty confident of where it was. Also, the weather predictions weren’t that great, and it was all radio, so communication wasn’t top of the line.
Gould: There were hurdles with all of that. We would steam out for 18, 20 hours. You’d get out there, and they’d go, “Ah, well, it’s kind of turning to crap. We’re going home.” And it would take us 24 hours to pound home.
Liam: Would you get paid for that day?
Gould: No. We only got paid when we got lobsters, and fortunately, we did well, so I made really great money and I really enjoyed it. But I just decided that it was not something I wanted to keep dealing with: the danger of it, the weather dictating that I wouldn’t get a paycheck for weeks. In the summer I could bank plenty and survive that, but that was not the way I wanted to live. The guys that fish now, one of the things you hear them commonly say is, “it’s not a living, it’s a way of life,” and it is.
Gould: Things happen. When I was lobstering, we would put out strings of 25 traps in 800 feet of water. And once you’ve got 25 traps dropping to 800 feet, there’s nothing stopping it. I had a rope flip around my boot, so I just laid on the deck and let it take my boot off. Otherwise, you know, things like that happen. Mistakes happen. In the fog, people get run down, boats run into each other, because there are idiots in every profession and they’re not paying attention. And you’ve probably heard about the one in the winter that sank, with no sign of trouble. It’s just ice and gear and things like that. It just happens.
Liam: A lot of the culture of the Cape is like nautical motifs being regurgitated from ages past. Do you view those kinds of symbols as superficial?
Gould: Some of the actions that people take with that stuff, I think, are pretty superficial. But I love to capture some of the older things.
Gould: There used to be, and I have a whole collection of black and white stuff, an old freezer plant and packing plant in Wellfleet called the Wellfleet Cold Storage Building. I guess some of it is to preserve history. I just like old buildings, vacant buildings. Not too many left on the Cape. A couple of sheds and things like that, but most of them have been torn down elsewhere.
Liam: Do you ever break into a place to shoot?
Gould: Yeah, just finding places. I usually try not to go places I’m not supposed to go. I’m very fortunate that I was in a business where I had 40-plus years of customers, and many of them let me on their front lawns. So some of these pictures are taken from people’s front lawns that other people wouldn’t necessarily be allowed to walk on.
He pulls out his phone to show me a picture. I see a dilapidated shack, bolstered with flotsam, mostly odd pieces of driftwood and fishing equipment, punctuated by a cheekily placed mailbox.
Gould: So this is now the status of the outhouse.
In a previous meeting with Gould, he had mentioned how the structure featured in the photo, North Beach Outhouse, had fallen into the sea in the ten years since the photo was taken. Before I hit record for this conversation, he further revealed that after the storm that took it, the shack had washed back up, standing upright, further down the beach. It has now become a sort of folk sculpture, and he was to be interviewed by a local paper on the origins of the “Occupy Chatham Beach Shack,” also known as the “Lighthouse Beach Shack” and the “South Beach Shrine.”
Photo credit: Don Wilding, WickedLocal.com
Gould: Oh my God, it’s like, yeah, it’s just people pile things on. And they write things on it, put messages to other people.
Liam: It’s almost like an art installation.
Gould: Yeah. And the thing is, I figured the town would take it away, because it’s on the public beach, but they just seem to embrace it.
Liam: Now it’s a monument.
Gould: So just this center section is the outhouse, and people just add stuff constantly. There’s a guy whose sole job, well, not his only job in life, but it’s his mission, is he puts a new flag up all the time. He always flies a new flag on it.
Liam: So, all part of the story.
Gould: I mean, I guess each of these photos in the gallery, anything that is human-influenced, to create the final product, does include the effort of people who don’t know each other, people who don’t know that they’re working in an interrelated process. And yet all of them together add up to this sum. I guess that’s a lot of these scenes on Cape Cod.
Liam: What photographers do you look up to or admire?
Gould: Locally, there’s a guy named Tom Riley. He seems to do some really nice stuff. And there’s a woman named, her last name’s Wiley. She does some really nice stuff too. They seem to capture things as they are. I love some of the old black and white Ansel Adams.
Liam: Of course.
Gould: I love some of the old black and white. And it’s funny, there’s a man in Chatham who has a store, the Colors of Chatham. He does some very nice stuff.
Barry Desilets owns and operates The Colors of Chatham, which features the work of local artists, including his own.
Gould: And I find that we do some very similar things. I’ll go out and take maybe 50 shots, and there were a couple I really liked, and one of them I was going to post. And the next thing I know, he posts almost the exact same shot. I like that, because I take that as some validation. The same eye, the same shot. It’s happened multiple times. Yeah, I take that as a little shot in the arm.
Liam: What advice would you give to young photographers?
Gould: The number one thing that somebody taught me long ago, and I learned through my own mistake, was never put your camera away. I had myself a really nice camera bag, and I’d go out, and I’d take the time to put the camera back in when I finished. I’d get in the truck and drive away, and I’d go, oh, crap, I should have my camera out for that. I missed so many shots, and then finally it occurred to me what it was all about.
Gould: With digital, you now have the luxury of taking as many as you want. I don’t know if you know the man Jon Vaughn, who’s in Chatham. He has done a lot of box camera work and large format photography, so he will go out and take forever to set up one shot. I can be a patient person, but I don’t have that patience. So I guess I would have to add him to my list of people whose work I really admire. He owns a place in Chatham called Yankee Ingenuity, and he has a lot of his photography in there. He has a book out too.
Vaughn’s books are titled Coastal Effects and Cape Cod Dawn to Dusk, a photographic tribute to Cape Cod.
You can follow Don Gould on Instagram @dsgould54. View his work in the Gallery at Orleans Camera through August 29.
See Don Gould’s work in person at The Gallery at Orleans Camera, on view through August 29.
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