On the Road 2

TIME TO TIME THINGS CHANGE 

Kennedy's seventeen years in Santa Fe had been creative and profitable.  New Mexico's mesas, badlands, and summer thunderstorms were a tonic to an artistic eye trained in New York City to shoot  album covers, posters  and editorial photo spreads. In   New York he had won enough awards to satisfy any artist's ego.  But in 1987, urged by an irrational impulse for something more adventurous than Madison Avenue, he moved with his wife and young son to the remote village of Cerrillos, New Mexico (population less than 300) where he set up a darkroom, joined the local fire department, and learned to cook on a wood burning stove. 

The southwest unlocked Kennedy's full potential.  Over the next seventeen years he produced an intensely personal and captivating body of work that included limited edition photographs and portfolios of mushroom shaped storm clouds, juniper covered plateaus, portraits of gnarly locals in boots and cowboy hats, weathered adobe churches, still lifes of Indian masks, and a nest of round eyed barn owls living under a roof. Represented by Santa Fe's Andrew Smith Gallery, arguably one of the most successful photography galleries in the country, Kennedy's photographs stopped viewers in their tracks and fed something in their souls. 

Kennedy made each palladium print by hand, frequently exposing his prints in sunlight.  The warm sepia tones of his prints recalled the historic photographs of Edward S. Curtis and William Henry Jackson, but there was a fresh handling of form and space that appealed to contemporary collectors.  Shows around the U.S. were followed by shows in Great Britain and Europe, accompanied by reams of press coverage.  Students from around the world came to New Mexico to learn the palladium print process from its acknowledged master.

But for all his successes, fractures were appearing in Kennedy's personal life.   His marriage of  twenty-seven years  was coming to an end, and his son, Jesse, was leaving for college. Running the business had become just a little cumbersome. And, Kennedy had to admit grimly, his creative muse wasn't as audible as she had once been.  Something was gnawing at him.  In 2003 he stopped for coffee in Colorado and caught sight of poster for Henry David Thoreau. Emotions and thoughts overwhelmed him. "What's happened to my Walden Pond?" he wondered.  Somehow it had all gotten too complicated. It was time, he decided, to simplify. 

"A trip, a safari, an exploration," wrote John Steinbeck, "is an entity, different from all other journeys.  It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness.  A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike."  A new era was about to unfold in Kennedy's life, bringing with it the chance at middle age to take his life and art in entirely new directions. He began the tedious process of disentangling from Santa Fe, selling the house and its contents, and finding and outfitting an old Airstream trailer into a living space and darkroom.  His sense of adventure awakened, he accomplished it all within the year.  "Time to time things change," he typed in his online journal. On a snowy Tuesday morning in early Spring 2004 he drove north out of Santa Fe with what remained of his possessions.