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Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

#Stunday #Landscapes #Photography #Appalachians #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway #NPS #USFS #GreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark #mobilephotography #smartphonephotography #shotoniphone #AshevilleNC
#TheParkwaysProjects #BlueRidgeMountains #BooneNC
#KnoxvilleTN #TenneseeFoothillsTrail #GatlinburgTN

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Jan 11

"In the gloaming, a trail of Mists" a digital photo from The Parkways Projects. I've been going round & round—how to start this in here...🦋 For it's a multi-tiered sequence of art. Since it began really in 1964, as a 9 year old with a Kodak Instamatic—this shot from 2021, Mount Mitchell trailhead 🦉

A cold and thoroughly rain-soaked trailhead leading down to the Appalachian Trail from Mount Michell State Park in North Carolina. A stand of high-country alpine black spruce.

From the Parkways project, a reclamation of sorts to come. I walked down it for a ways, became very cognizant of Time winnowing away, took a number of other images, and then decided to push on up the Parkway, as it had become very real to me that the remaining 12 days were going to be very fleet.

By this time, I'd found passages which had been turned, the corners folded back so many times that the bookmarks crumbled and fell on the touch.

I was waylaid on the way back up the trail though, and burned the last remaining daylight because, in walking back one sees things that weren't there from the first perspective, or angle of view, depending on the way you see things. By the end of that relatively short and very wet hike, I offloaded over 400 images into a folder set aside for this one little episode that night, once back at my fog-enshrouded campground.

Does that make it a chapter, I wonder?

Digital photography will be the largest component of what I hope will be a photo-essay within a few years. I'll be launching a site soon which will include much older photos from 1964 through 1972. They are family shots made over five camping vacations through the headiest part of the 1960's. There's a patina of age, a soft depth to them. Then the archival National Park Service images. A sequence on the small bridges & structures now long gone. A series on the people. Two abstract sequences of works, both digital composite builds. A study on the Civilian Conservation Corps efforts to reclaim the old forests & build some of the most beautiful rustic structures in America.

February 17, 2025 at 5:30 AM Everybody can reply

11 likes

11

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

#Stunday #Landscapes #Photography #Appalachians #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway #NPS #USFS #GreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark #mobilephotography #smartphonephotography #shotoniphone #AshevilleNC
#TheParkwaysProjects #BlueRidgeMountains #BooneNC
#KnoxvilleTN #TenneseeFoothillsTrail #GatlinburgTN

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Jan 12

The original image is blurred, the camera slipped or perhaps it was a windy day in the mountains. There's no name inscribed on back. She's unknown, but not on that day so long ago. She's my longest mystery to date.

“Oconalufty River (Missing Portal in Time) #BlueSkyArtShow #Layers #EastCoastKin

“Oconalufty River (Missing Portal in Time),” digital composite build from the ‘America: Lost & Found’ series, one of the few ‘A:L&F’ works which include a person.

They are the specters, the shades, the one gone missing, that one who must have done something wrong, or possibly just the one who remained unmarried and was eventually allowed to lie in the sun, flat on a table baked by sunlight each day until the albumin or nitrates faded, leaving their visage just an enigmatic ghostly shape.

Here is one of those images to me. She resides in the Bin of Kershaw/Lancaster counties, her life was lived between circa 1922-1928 to maybe as long as 2010-2015.

Yet I do not know who she is. I may never know, but I have an idea she is one of my maternal grandmother’s extended family. That narrows it down to abut 12-15 young women somewhere in their 20-33rd year between the years of 1946-1960. I can guess those years by the physical photograph shape and the undulating edge which in our family matches one of my Grandparents old Brownie cameras.

She remains nameless to this day.

February 17, 2025 at 5:29 AM Everybody can reply

9 likes

9

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

#Stunday #Landscapes #Photography #Appalachians #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway #NPS #USFS #GreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark #mobilephotography #smartphonephotography #shotoniphone #AshevilleNC
#TheParkwaysProjects #BlueRidgeMountains #BooneNC
#KnoxvilleTN #TenneseeFoothillsTrail #GatlinburgTN

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Jan 12

"Ooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Ooh yeah I'm gonna fade away..."

1965 #DigitalPhotograph from #TheParkwaysProject, a labor of love & faith in something intangible, something that is viewed from the peripherals. #BlueSkyArtShow #EastCoastKin #Layers

"Ooh, a storm is threatening
My very life today
If I don't get some shelter
Ooh yeah I'm gonna fade away..."

"Gimme Shelter, constructed 1955," digital photograph from "The Parkways Project,' a labor of love and faith in something intangible, something that is there if viewed from the peripherals. Image Copyright 2023 Tom Ogburn.

"Mmm, a flood is threatening
My very life today
Gimme, gimme shelter
Or I'm gonna fade away..."

≈ Jagger/Richards

It was in picnic shelter such as this one where I learned, meeting them first hand, Hippies were of all of all constructions, side by side with those who just as well seen them banned from the parks, parkways & small town Mom & Pop stores just off the Parkway.

Day by day, step by step, inch by inch, the mill town enclosures winnowed away, replaced by views alien, beyond the pale of even Marvl comics. Which was saying something.

February 17, 2025 at 5:29 AM Everybody can reply

8 likes

8

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

#Stunday #Landscapes #Photography #Appalachians #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway #NPS #USFS #GreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark #mobilephotography #smartphonephotography #shotoniphone #AshevilleNC
#TheParkwaysProjects #BlueRidgeMountains #BooneNC
#KnoxvilleTN #TenneseeFoothillsTrail #GatlinburgTN

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Jan 19

1️⃣ Hello #Bluesky! I'm Tom Ogburn (@bardicarts artist account) I'm launching this dedicated "Parkways Projects" GSMNP-BRP-SDP & ShenandoahNP 🏕️

The theme is #Blur at the #BlueSkyArtShow & its still running—you can still post if it's still Saturday, Jan 18 where you are!

Here's a Blur from Here! 🧵⬇️

Th predominant image you see here is when we drove down to St. Augustine for a four day trip. Wee're at Fort San Marcos here. But come August, we were up at Little Switzerland and Tweetsie Railroad, which began our switch from Motels at the beaches to Camping/Motels in the Mountains.

This Projec will end up being a Photo Essay on the history of the Great Smky Mountains NP, the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Skyline Drive Parkway and then Shenandoah NP. It was a grand plan by FDR, and introduced the CCC and eventually the WPA.

There'll be a lot of elements to The Parkways Projects, both happy, sad, dark and uplifting. For it is a story of the Appalachians.

February 17, 2025 at 5:29 AM Everybody can reply

7 likes

7

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

#Stunday #Landscapes #Photography #Appalachians #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway #NPS #USFS #GreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark #mobilephotography #smartphonephotography #shotoniphone #AshevilleNC
#TheParkwaysProjects #BlueRidgeMountains #BooneNC
#KnoxvilleTN #TenneseeFoothillsTrail #GatlinburgTN

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Jan 23

"If you content yourself with only what can be seen, then you see nothing." ≈ Ruth Bernhard
"No Henge but Sunset," 2019 VA Overlook
#EastCoastKin #BlueSkyPhotogs #BlueRidgeParkway
#DigitalPhoto #shotoniphone #BlueSkyArt #naturebeauty
#mobilephotography #SkylineDriveParkway #photographersofbluesky

On the grassy overlook shoulders exist old, weathered concrete posts stand like sentinels. They are poured forms, using aggregate crushed gravel, with two odd horizontal slots about 3 inches wide & 1 inch high. They make for interesting subjects against the sky.

These are the seemingly insignificant features that intrigue me as a person who has memories of these two ribbons in the sky, connecting The Great Smoky Mountains National Park of Western North Carolina to the upper border of the Skyline Drive, begun in 1934 as part of the Franklln Delano Roosevelt administration’s earlier public works projects.

I call these henges, but that not what they are. They are not mile markers. They aren't hitching posts although four people insisted that was the original purpose. They're up on both the Parkways. I think I saw 9-10. Actually they may have only been on the Skyline Drive Parkway.

I think they might have been posts to chain the old round trashcans to keep the bears from spreading trash everywhere?

I like to consider them to be old standing stones. These posts vary between pale silver gray to medium gray and tan. This one is standing on a healthy patch of grassy overlook with a view far down into a valley. I think this might have been in Virginia. The sky is clouded with almost luminescent pale-blue light, almost glowing from above. The sky in the far background is free of clouds, offering a calm & serene sense of age.

February 17, 2025 at 5:28 AM Everybody can reply

7 likes

7

Tom Ogburn 🪔

@bardicarts.bsky.social

#Stunday #Landscapes #Photography #Appalachians #BlueRidgeParkway #SkylineDriveParkway #NPS #USFS #GreatSmokyMountainsNationalPark #mobilephotography #smartphonephotography #shotoniphone #AshevilleNC
#TheParkwaysProjects #BlueRidgeMountains #BooneNC
#KnoxvilleTN #TenneseeFoothillsTrail #GatlinburgTN

The Parkways Projects 1934≈2025 @parkwaysprojects.bsky.social · Jan 25

1️⃣"Norwegian Woods,"October 2017 #shotoniphone A scrim wall of mists, undulated as if by stagehands. #EastCoastKin #scape #nature #blueskyphotogs
#landscape #treescape #BlueSkyFineArts
#BlueSkyPhotography
Norway, South Carolina. Staying at a farm on land my Huguenot forbears owned 176 years back⬇️