For the town museum in Chaplin, in Connecticut’s “quiet corner,” I photographed doors of houses, barns, and even a tent as a way of revealing how people there live. This scene of a door opening onto a garden, seen through a break in the trees almost as if through a keyhole, whacked me hard when I first glimpsed it on the ground glass: “So simple!” Perhaps the view camera strengthened my perception here. On its ground glass a scene appears upside down, which encourages me to concentrate on essentials of structure and hints how to turn what is usual into something unusual.

Polaroid Type 52 print film, because it has a shorter tonal scale than conventional b-&-w film (because it cannot simultaneously show detail in bright highlights and deep shadows as well) posed a technical problem that ended up lending feeling to the image. So as not to over-expose the door and yard (to keep them from appearing too brighter, garish, thus out of tune with the spirit of the place), I had to let the trees appear in the print much darker than in eye-visual experience. In the print I pulled on the scene, this reconfiguration of tones transformed a mere house into hospitable shelter, perhaps even a cozy idyll, nestled in gloomy woods. After that, I made two exposures of the scene on Polaroid Type 55, which provides a negative, so that I could reproduce the image and the effect (instead of just having the unique Type 52 print). However, all my efforts in the darkroom to make from that negative prints as pleasing as the first one failed. Only digital photography, a scan of the Type 55 negative, has let me approach the first, delicate impression of gloom but not doom. I now assess all my photographs by their powers of transformation.