August 4, 2021: The Quiet Observation of Richard Serviss

It rained one night last week here in Los Angeles. I wasn’t expecting it because the 7-day weather forecast is always the same so it’s pointless to check it regularly. It’s always a 10% chance of precipitation, sunny and 85ºF every day. When the sound of rain woke me up in the middle of the night I had to get up and go outside. I was so excited to breathe the damp, cool air and touch the wet leaves that I couldn’t go back to sleep.

Since we’re facing a severe drought, I think about water a lot. And lately, I get an ominous sense of the future. There is a kind of crass vulgarity when people gloat about their infinity pools or display a cavalier disregard of shrinking reservoirs and wells gone dry as long as it doesn’t affect their comfort. It’s obscene that water is politicized and commodified. And it’s just a matter of time before things will get really ugly.

Sometimes when I think of water, I think of the work of Richard Serviss. Many years ago Richard was a client, a photo editor who would license content for the publications he worked on. But once business was out of the way, we would often get into conversations about upstate New York. At the time I had a cabin in Phoenicia, on Muddy Brook Road. He seemed to know all the Catskill trails and had a passion for the forest.

What I didn’t know was that he had a superb body of work spanning over forty years. When he started posting from his archive, I was drawn to the pictures of water. In these black and white images, I could almost smell the mossy ground, hear the sound of water before seeing it - like when you anticipate a cooling break after a long, sweaty hike and that sound of rushing water makes you hasten your heavy steps. I think about the feet that padded through these woods hundreds of years ago. Although there is beauty in every environment, the landscape of the northeast US is in my soul.

But there is so much more than water and I’m barely scratching the surface by showing this small sampling. In his images of cities - particularly Pittsburgh of the early 1980s, he captures details of the ordinary in the transformation of industrial relevance from one century to the next. The work is honest, unpretentious, and is a quiet observation that we can appreciate.

Left to right: Watkins Glen, NY (2013), Plattekill Falls, Hunter, NY (2008), Foundry Brook Falls, Cold Spring, NY (2018)

All photographs © Richard Serviss

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I’m now thinking about what to feature for September. If you would like to participate, have a topic or work to suggest, please write to me at nancy.glowinski@tadpolesalon.com.