Country Life | William Abranowicz
Intro: Welcome to the one and only interior Design Book podcast, Decorating by the Book, hosted by Suzy Chase from her dining room table in New York City. Join Suzy for conversations about the latest and greatest interior design books with the authors who wrote them.
William Abranowicz: Hi, I'm William Abranowicz. I'm a photographer and I have new book called Country Life homes of the Cascade Mountains and Hudson River Valley.
Suzy Chase: You're the author of eight photography books on domestic life, the environment, travel, and voting rights. Your photographs have been featured in nearly every major publication in the world, and your prints are in public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The National Portrait Gallery in London, The Smithsonian, and Bibliotheque Nationale de France, now when did you realize photography was your thing?
William Abranowicz: When I was 17, I got a camera. I used to go to a lot of concerts I photographed at the concerts, I photographed my friends. It was the early seventy s. And I started there and then my father had passed away that year and I was like in a daze and decided to go to school. Who knows what I'm going to do, okay? Accounting, economics, I can survive. And I took a photography class at Rutgers, which is where I started. And two years later I was at. The School of Visual Arts majoring in photography and taking night classes at The New School and assisting. And I just went deep. I had kind of a rough period in my life at that time. Music was escapist, photography was escapist, everything was escapist. And that's developed into something different.
Suzy Chase: It's your reality now.
William Abranowicz: It's my reality. Exactly.
Suzy Chase: First off, I'd love for you to describe exactly where the Catskill Mountains and Hudson Valley are for those who aren't familiar.
William Abranowicz: Okay, yeah, we tend to be New York Centric, but the Hudson Valley is the Hudson River, which runs north of New York City. So it's anything that runs on either side of the Hudson River that's the Hudson Valley. And my book concentrates on a small segment across the Hudson Valley that runs say, from the Berkshires in the east and the Delaware River in the west. And I connected that through the work of Thomas Cole and Frederick Church, whose homes are located across the river from each other. Church was a student of Cole's and just connected creatives along this sort of line I established.
William Abranowicz: And I live on the Catskill Mountains which is an escarpment. It's about probably as the crow flies, maybe about 70 miles north of New York City. And it's a very high escarpment that runs west from the river over towards. The Delaware River watershed. So I'm in Margaretville, which is sort of the crest. It's the Catskill divide. I guess you could call it. The water on one side of my hill runs towards the Hudson River, and on the other side runs towards the Delaware River. Hopefully that explains it. I had to close my eyes as I was describing it.
Suzy Chase: Well, people are so divided over the definition of upstate New York.
William Abranowicz: Yeah.
Suzy Chase: What does it mean to you?
William Abranowicz: Well, for nearly 25 years, we lived in Westchester, which is a bedroom community county north of New York City. Upstate to some people is way north up the Delaware River near Roscoe, where fly fishing is king in the Beaverkill Valley. Upstate could be. The upstate is to me. Where in I'm in I'm in upstate New York. But it's a big area.
Suzy Chase: So the homes and studios you photograph for Country Life are close to your house in Margaretville. Talk a little bit about the proximity and how you came to choose these particular homes.
William Abranowicz: These homes are my friends. They're friends of friends, but they're all creatives. They're all strung and threaded across this line that I drew. They're architects, they're painters, creative directors, writers, set designers, stylists. They're all involved in some aspect of creativity. They allow their homes to be design laboratories. In a lot of cases, they have a very good visual sense, and things are constantly moving. It's not decoration. It's the evolution of some creative thing that you see that comes from within them. These houses are really quite personal.
Suzy Chase: One thing I love about this book is that it's not only about design and architecture. You dig below the surface so we can connect with the intangible qualities of the people living in the book. And I think you just touched on that a little bit.
William Abranowicz: There are intangible qualities, and the book is visually driven. Hopefully, it's full of things that make you curious. But it will often take a writer to expand on that visual sense when you can't see everything. So the photographs hopefully conjure up a feeling, and then the words really nail that. They put the frame on it. They give you the sense of smell. I have sort of certain things I want to say, but I'm not a writer. And so I gave my son ideas. And he put it in a very nice poetic form. I think of poetry a lot when. I make photographs and the qualities that great literature or poetry give us, and whether it's about silence or sound or about texture and feeling, atmosphere, light, those are the things that matter to me. And you get these great, beautifully designed spaces that creative people live in and you have this wonderful little opera that goes on inside four walls.
Suzy Chase: What was it about Margaretville, a village in the Catskill Mountains, that attracted you and your wife?
William Abranowicz: We came for a visit up here, near here to Fleischmann's, which was one of those Catskill towns that boomed during the late 18 hundreds, well into the 19 hundreds, and then sort of just kind of quieted. And we came up here to ski at this little mountain, a family mountain, and fell in love. The next week, we were renting up here. And then a year later we bought some land. And it was inexpensive, it was remote. We brought up sometimes nine kids to ski. It was just the most beautiful way to spend winter, which I hated. I hated winter. I was just cold all the time. Then I learned how to live with winter by skiing and the proper clothing. It's a pretty simple concept, apparently.
Suzy Chase: Margaretville was known as the Cauliflower capital of the world.
William Abranowicz: Yes, it was. Yes. And we have a Cauliflower festival every year in September and I'm really looking forward to it. It's coming up in a couple of weeks and it's a community based event. You know, that's the wonderful thing that you experience in the West Village you have a little maybe a community street fair. These are kind of our equivalent of that. All the towns around here have farming, know, the county fairs. It's the end of the farming season or the slowdown of the farming season. But yes, it was named for Margaret Livingston who was one of the daughters of Robert Livingston and she had her home just north of where I am. And my mother's name was Margaret and. so it just seemed to be the right thing.
Suzy Chase: There is a photo on the contents page I would love you to chat about. It shows six people jumping into, I think, a river and all are either mid jump or mid dive.
William Abranowicz: That's a photograph of my kids and some friends during the summer months. It's a photograph that I made on our property in our pond. And one of the things I wanted to say in the book aside from this deep, natural place that you're in. That it's just so much fun being here if you're into outdoor activities, man this is the place and in the summertime, that photograph to me was just joy. The pages around it are quiet evolutions through the seasons but that one is about joy and fun.
Suzy Chase: There seems to be a thread throughout the book that kept jumping out at me, and that is the reverence for the Native Americans.
William Abranowicz: Black Lives Matter movement kind of opened up a conversation that.We had to have for a very long time about who, what, where and know in relationship to the history of this country. And no matter where we stand, whether you're in the West Village or in Kansas or in Missouri or in Texas or in upstate New York, you weren't the first one here nature ties you to history, natural history, it ties you to geology. And the history of evolution and humanity, to me, best exemplified through Native Americans how they lived with the land we can see in the paintings of coal and church. Those open spaces were done through sustainable farming that Native Americans had been doing up in this area., in the Hudson Valley.
Suzy Chase: Drive 2 hours due north from Manhattan and you'll run into Melora Kuhn's home in Germantown, New York. One of my faves in the book, Her Big White Farmstead, is my dream come true. Could you chat a little bit about yeah.
William Abranowicz: She Melora is a painter that I was introduced through a friend of hers. And my wife, who has a location business, represents houses up here. And so there was a connection that's another way I get to find houses. My wife's, Andrea Raisfeld, has a location business, and so I get like, sort of first look at things she's finding, and she's always looking. That's her business. And so Malora's house is a farmhouse just outside the center of Germantown, which is a tiny little enclave settled by the Germans in, I believe it was the 17 hundreds and her home is probably one of the original farmsteads there. Her studio is located in a beautiful. red barn right next to that white home you described. The farmhouse talk about the expression of a person in the place in which they live, but then you look at the walls and you see the depth of life that had been there before her and she uses that history in her artwork, and she's a fantastic painter. And the balance between these two structures is just unique, and it's unique to her. That's one of the things I wanted to do in every house, to show. What is unique about this individual that warrants this placement in a book.
Suzy Chase: In the book, Zander described Malora's home. He wrote, “its rooms are grounded by old wooden floors and uplifted by walls painted white and tender shades of blue. Some surfaces are left exquisitely raw wallpaper peeling in perfect little ringlets suggests there's something unseen beneath the surface.” Oh, my goodness.
William Abranowicz: Without reading what Zander wrote, I described that to him, and he put it in those terms, which is a lot better than my lengthy description of a physical know. He just did it in such a nice, concise, poetic way.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called Home, where I ask you to describe one memory of your childhood home. And please start by telling us where it was located.
William Abranowicz: My childhood home was in Bayonne, New Jersey. It was on the second floor apartment. It was a small bedroom with two bunk beds and four kids. My three siblings. I'm the oldest. And it was small and dark and right off the kitchen. And it was usually where I had to go when I was punished. So I'm not so sure I have fond childhood memories, but when I was ten, we moved to another place and I had another bedroom, and that one kind of became my sanctuary. I was the oldest, so I got was paneled walls and a stereo and a little window outside and instead of into an Airshaft. So that's my childhood bedroom.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
William Abranowicz: My website, William Abranowicz.com, or at Art and Commerce, which is my agency there's a very lovely site dedicated to my work on that site.
Suzy Chase: Well, this has been just terrific and I adore your new book. Thank you so much for coming on Decorating by the Book Podcast.
William Abranowicz: Thank you so much. It was a real pleasure to talk to you and if you need any help with the Upstate real estate, you let me know.
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