Fine art photographer Edward M. Fielding (edwardfielding.com) sits down to discuss his latest photography project, “The Flower Cottages”.

Tell us a bit of how you got into fine art photography.

I first fell in love with photography at summer camp in the sixth grade. We were given 35mm SLR cameras, loaded our own film canisters and developed black and white negatives on picnic tables. I was hooked by the magic of photography. Later I had my own darkroom I’d set up in a bathroom or closet.

In college I’d often try to avoid working on a paper by spending time flipping through the extensive photography monograph section at the Boston University library. From Adams to Weegee, I started at one end of the row and worked my way through all the books.

My first ever online purchase was an old Graflex Crown Graphic 4x5 press camera. I bought a wooden tripod and a Polaroid back to shoot Type 55 film which gave you both a positive proof and a negative which could be used in an enlarger.

But life got busy with career and family. I dabbled along the way with photography but it wasn’t until digital cameras became more mainstream that I had the time to seriously get back into it, as well as having online income sources like stock photography and print on demand sites like Fine Art America which could help support for my passion.

Tell Us About Your Latest Project, “The Flower Cottages”.

"The Flower Cottages" documents the iconic row of 22 identical small two bedroom summer weekly rental cottages built in the 1930s. There is also a 23rd cottage across the road which is a converted gas station that has basically the same dimensions and look as the beach front cottages. Over the past roughly 90 years countless families have enjoyed these tiny homes away from home to spend a vacation on the beach just outside of Providence and the seeming endless row of cottages have inspired artists to paint and photograph them. They have even been used in car commercials and movies.

Officially the cottages are "Days Cottages" named after the Days family who started building the cottages along old Route 6 when this area was nothing more than a spit of sand. Each cottage was given the name of a flower like Poppy or Daisy, so they are nicknamed “The Flower Cottages.”

What were your influences behind this project?

“The Flower Cottages” is really a homage to "New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape" which was an exhibition from the 1970s that shook up the photography world. Rather than presenting landscape as uninhabited beauty or some kind of pristine untouched environment, like you’d see with the work of say Edward Weston or Ansel Adams, new landscape photographers like Robert Adams focused on showing the encroachment of humans on the landscape. For example, Robert Adams would show a beautiful mountain valley but it would include a seemingly endless housing development of nearly identical homes.

The show itself and the photographers were no doubt inspired by the earlier work of Edward Ruscha, especially the numerous artist books such as "26 Gasoline Stations" (1962), "34 Parking Lots" (1967) and others that he self-published in the 1960s. Of course the influences probably go back even further to Walker Evans’ work which often showed the mark of humans on the landscape.

I’ve been inspired by these photographers and others working in this vein such as Mark Klett, whose work focuses on explorations of man’s interaction with the American landscape, and more recently, on issues of photography in time, including rephotography which is photographing places that were photographed year ago to highlight changes to the environment.

Another influence was from a German photography team who were included in the original “New Topographics” show. Bernd and Hilla Becher created an amazing series of straight forward, documentary style, large format photographs of industrial sites such as blast furnaces and water towers which were then presented next to each other, inviting the viewers to see the sameness as well as the individuality of these normally overlooked industrial structures. They found a quiet beauty in structures most would consider ugly blights on the landscape.

Can you tell us about your process, how much pre-planning do you do before such a project?

I had all of these influences running around in my head when I was researching Cape Cod for an upcoming trip. When I came across Days’ Cottages, a row of 22 identical 1930s summer rental cottages on a spit of beach between North Truro and Provincetown, I knew I had a new project.

I immediately saw the themes of man’s folly of building on shifting sands, a bit of pop art era commentary on mass production and the idea of identity as well as a dose of nostalgia. The cottages could stand for people in a over-crowded world and the desire to stand out from the crowd. Here the cottages strive for conformity but when observed closely, subtle differences and perhaps individual personalities start to emerge.

Certainly the vacationers, who came back year after year to the same cottage, found something about “their” cottage’s personality that made it desirable over the others. The cottages might look the same on the outside but each contains a separate history of memories made on those summer vacations. Identical twins might look alike but their journeys through life are full of individual experiences.

So before even traveling to Cape Cod I had the final presentation planned out in my mind. I’d photograph the row using a long lens to compress the view and then take individual portraits of each “identical” cottage and present them next to each other so small differences could be noted.

Did project turn out as you planned?

It is interesting that the day I went to photograph the cottages in the offseason, the cottages were undergoing a bit of transformation. The cottages have recently gone condo -- after 87 years of being a family-run business, they now will all have individual owners. The cottage outsides will stay the same (as determined by town zoning laws), but the insides will start being renovated to the individual owner’s tastes. When I visited the cottages for the photo shoot the water line was being changed from one main water feed to twenty-two individual feeds, conjoined twins being separated perhaps.

I had hoped to photograph the backside of each cottage with the flower names but the name plaques were stored away for winter and a construction crew was digging up the road. So I have some future work to do.

So the result of my project is a few overall shots of the iconic row of summer cottages as well as 23 individual portraits of each cottage including the 22 along the beach and the 23rd cottage which was actually a converted gas station of the same dimensions located across the street from the beach.

How will you present the final project?

The plan is to present the work as a gallery show similar to the Becher’s with the cottages lined up on the wall just like they are lined up on the beach, well as an accompanying book or catalog of the portraits in vein of Edward Ruscha’s small art books. Both the book and prints invite the viewer to examine the seemingly identical cottages for subtle differences and perhaps reflect on man’s brief time on the planet and the concept of ownership vs the eons of time that nature lays claim to shifting landscapes such as the beaches of Cape Cod.