Rob McDonald

Every photograph is a certificate of presence. ~ Barthes

“For the last twenty years of his life, Cy Twombly returned often to Lexington, his hometown in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. During extended visits, he created significant works in modest rented studios. Otherwise, he filled his days observing the rhythms of the tiny college town, taking long reflective drives in the countryside, and spending time with a small circle of acquaintances. One of those was photographer Rob McDonald.

STUDIO NOTES features photographs McDonald made inside Twombly’s final storefront studio in Lexington in 2007-08, as well as images made at site of Black Mountain College where he made some of his earliest important work.”

What emerges is an intimate study of ordinary spaces that quietly sheltered the genius of one of the world’s great artists.”

Selections from
STUDIO NOTES – My Time with Cy
Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, 2024

Once upon a time, I became friends with a great artist who maintained a studio in the rural Virginia town where I live and where he was born. I made many photographs of the artist's home and studio. Despite the quality of our friendship, he was so private, so reticent in most ways, his willingness to permit such access always surprised me. When news of his death arrived, I said goodbye by taking my camera for a final visit to both places.

I began working through all of those images by starting at the end. The current series is a study of--and engagement with--marks from the walls of my friend's empty studio. 

Mixed media on archival pigment prints, each unique.
Series I (2013): 4” x 4”
Series II (2020): 6” x 6”

Available exclusively at the Anzenberger Gallery.

These photographs happened in sequence, on a single roll of film, when a very famous artist—a great collector of things—-bought a dusty Rolleiflex at a yard sale and invited three photographers to see if it would work.

September 13, 2008
Rockbridge County, Virginia
 

From Cy's Rollei
Photographs by Sally Mann, Rob McDonald and Even Rogers
Nazraeli Press (2010)

Last copies of the book are available here.

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I have lived in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia for more than thirty years. It is a spectacular place, but I cannot name a more beautiful spot here than the hay pasture attached to a nearby historic farm known as Fancy Hill.

In this mountain landscape of winding roads and deep hollows, I have come to love the stretching and rolling and dipping of those 119 wide-open acres.

For years, I’d stand along the boundary fence, in different seasons and times, studying the lay of the land and its dramatic contours. The view became both metaphor and muse.

Then one day I began walking out into the field with my camera.

My photographs of Fancy Hill are not documentary in the traditional sense. They are exercises in matching my imagination to the experience of the place.

Original publication: “Fancy Hill”
Elsewhere: A Journal of Place (2022)

“Imagining Harry Crews: The Landscape of A Childhood”

Photographs from Bacon County, Georgia

Recipient of the 2022 Jerome Stern Award for the best essay in Studies in American Culture 45.1 (October 2022): 5-34.

Are we all lost and far from home? I think I could build an argument around that. —Paul Kingsnorth, Savage Gods

The title of this series is borrowed from a friend who created amazing sculptures and drawings from fantastical dreams of structures he’d encountered growing up in rural Alabama.

My own dreams are more literal, but they are also rooted in personal history, and they often involve places like the ones in these photographs, tumble-down forms that once provided shelter or sanctuary.

It would be entirely reasonable if these photographs initially suggest emptiness and loss, places left behind.

Looked at another way, though, maybe they’ll also whisper possibilities of remembering and reconstruction, stories ripe for telling.

(Originally published in Barren Magazine 21 [2022].)

”‘Larry Brown, Writer,’ and a Place Called Tula”

Read the essay in the Southern Literary Review (15 April 2021).

Appalachian Ode:
Photographs of Breece D’J Pancake’s West Virginia

Landscape is personal and tribal history made visible. The native’s identity—his place in the total scheme of things—is not in doubt because the myths that support it are as real as the rocks and waterholes he can see and touch. He finds recorded in his land the ancient story of the lives and deeds of the immortal beings from whom he himself is descended, and whom he reveres. The whole countryside is his family tree. (157-158) —Yi-Fu Tan, Space and Place

Published in the South Atlantic Review (Fall 2020).

THE FATHER BOX

“So many fragments.  It comes down to fragments always.” – John Lane

Award-winning writer John Lane’s father committed suicide in 1959 when John was five years old.  A single box holds letters, photos, objects, and papers comprising nearly everything John knows about his father.

Two years ago, John sent the box home with me and asked me to contemplate its contents through the lens of my camera. 

These are some of the photographs I made. 

(See the book, published by Horse & Buggy Press, November 2018.)

A new book from Hub City Press, October 2015.

PAPRIKA SOUTHERN interview with Rob McDonald

NATIVE GROUND is an ode to my love of reading - to books, to writers and the places that inspire in them the words for things that matter. The photographs are documentary only insofar as they begin in attention to particular writers' personal spaces and native landscapes. What interests me most is how the images can suggest resonance, how places inhabited might be imagined to shape vision and voice. 

In 1806, Thomas Jefferson began construction on a personal retreat near Bedford, Virginia, some ninety miles from his home, Monticello. He transformed nearly five thousand acres of pristine farmland and woods into a modestly equipped estate he called Poplar Forest. Jefferson visited Poplar Forest regularly during construction and after the house was complete. He found there, as he wrote to a friend, "the solitude of a hermit." These photographs explore the notion of retreat, of private space, which we all--even a man so great as Jefferson--require and seek instinctively.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard suggests that "When we examine a nest, we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world." The Birdhouses portfolio represents a personal exploration of the relationship between place and identity: meditations on home.

A fine press, limited-edition book was published by the acclaimed Horse & Buggy Press in Durham, NC, in 2007. The edition is long sold out, but please visit the STORE for details.

A broadside, designed and letterpress printed by Horse & Buggy Press, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Birdhouses was published in 2017.

“Rob McDonald’s photographs are an affectionate response to the variety and beauty of birdhouses. The honesty and purity of his eye are to be savored.” —WILLIAM CHRISTENBERY

“Rob McDonald has focused his Southerner’s affinity for home, the handmade, and the unique qualities of individual places on the many birdhouses he has photographed. These images remind us that no two spots on this earth are the same, that every house comes with its own set of spirits, and that everybody needs a shade tree.”—DAVID WHARTON, Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi