Month: April 2012

Charlottesville High School prom night 2008, as captured in the new photo-essay Prom by Mary Ellen Mark.

The prom is a major event in a teenager’s life. Arguably, the girls more than the boys, look forward to it all year. They obsess over what to wear and how they’ll do their hair. The guys, whether they admit it or not, get anxious over whether their crush will say “yes” to being their date. When prom arrives, and everyone is styled up, the next step in the ritual is to get a photo taken as a lasting memento.

Looking at the images in Mary Ellen Mark’s new photographic essay, Prom (April 2012, J. Paul Getty Museum), it’s eerie how closely the event approximates some kind of fleeting marriage. Maybe it’s some precursor of what’s to come as they step into an adult world? Many of the teenagers in Mark’s portraits already appear to be experiencing some grown-up issues—pregnancy, love, cancer—heady stuff. Looking back on the project, Mark has a brighter perspective. “I was very moved by the optimism of the youth,” she said. Mark is known worldwide for her commercial photographs, exhibitions, and documentary photo books including Seen Behind the Scene, which features her work as a unit photographer on such movie sets as Network, Apocalypse Now, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This is her 18th book and is accompanied by a documentary directed by her husband Martin Bell.

Prom features 129 black and white portraits shot between 2006 and 2009, during which Mark visited 13 high schools from Newark to Cape Cod to here in Charlottesville. Diverse student populations were a prerequisite when it came to selecting locations. Charlottesville had “a lot of bold kids who were really ‘out there’.” Yet, it was traditional enough to remind her of her own prom in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. “Most of the high schools had their proms at a big hotel or some other place, where Charlottesville High School actually had their prom at the high school, which I really liked,” said Mark.

To photograph the students, she used a 6′, 240 pound Polaroid 20×24 Land Camera. Only seven still exist. With a 20×24, there are no negatives—each image is a final print. “You have to make a decision right away. The film is very expensive, so you can’t overshoot. You make a decision about the scale, the picture, and what you want and you shoot that,” said Mark. She favors the 20×24 because the photo becomes “a beautiful object that’s very much about detail.”

In Prom, that detail is depicted in the eyes, since the majority of students aren’t smiling in their pictures. This is intentional since Mark prefers natural, real expressions in her portrait subjects. “If someone is just smiling for the camera, its kind of a fake smile and it always looks that way. So if someone bursts out laughing and it’s a real smile then it’s fine. But I never say ‘smile’,” she said. More personal expression can be seen in the styles of dress. From traditional prom gowns and funky thrift shop finds to the unique camouflage dress with stud embellishments or the striking white tuxedo and Mohawk hairdo.

Prom captures the diversity of America’s student body—and yet, each student could have attended any of the other schools. They are all the same and different at once. What Mark’s photo essay accomplishes is to ask what’s going on behind their eyes, which have already seen a lot. You wonder, “What were they thinking—in that instant?”

 

Woodberry Payne (pictured) says that certain places make good horses. But mostly, he said, what makes a good horse is something intangible inside them. It’s about a horse’s desire, what’s in a horse’s heart. (Photo by Carissa Dezort)

The spring race at Foxfield is Saturday, April 28, and Woodberry Payne will be there as usual. For the last four years he’s been a steward there, which basically means he keeps the show running. Before he was a steward, he was one of the patrol judges for…well, he doesn’t know how long. A long time. Between riding, training, and officiating, he’s been involved in steeplechase racing for over 30 years, but his involvement with horses goes back farther. There has never been a time in his life when there weren’t horses around.

Ingleside, the horse-training center Woodberry, 54, has owned since 1996, is located on the grounds of Montpelier. The historic home of fourth president James Madison has been a famous center for all things equine since Marion duPont Scott, the last private owner of the house, established the Montpelier Hunt Races in 1934. A lifelong rider, she imbued the place with a strong legacy. One of her horses, Battlefield, was the only horse to win both of steeplechase’s top races, the American and English Grand Nationals, and is buried on the property. The place is a natural fit for Woodberry, whom I’d been scheduled to meet in advance of the race.

I’m supposed to meet him at the barn, but I get lost, so I stop at the visitor’s center to ask where I can find him.

“He’s probably at the barn,” a nice old lady tells me, but there are a lot of barns at Montpelier, and it takes a while before I find the right one. When I get there, there’s no sign of Woodberry.

“He’s probably at the track,” someone there tells me. “He usually goes to the track about now to watch the horses.”

And that is indeed where I find him, hunched down in the front seat of an old, dark green Mercedes, the inside of which looks much like a mobile office/home. There’s a dog in the back and a cat in the passenger seat and Woodberry is sitting behind the wheel doing a crossword as two people on horses ride by.

“This area,” Woodberry said through the open car window, “has a tremendous, rich steeplechasing history.” A history that, as all things inevitably do, goes back to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Woodberry, however, doesn’t train steeplechase horses anymore. He trains horses for flat racing. This is partly because, since he’s now a steeplechase official, training the horses would be a conflict of interest, and partly because flat racing is where the money is.

“The steeplechase market has contracted,” he said. There’s less money in it and limited opportunities. So like him, a lot of people in our area are less involved than they used to be.
After a while, Woodberry leaves the track and drives back to the barn. He gets out and walks inside to his office, leaving the car door open, and the dog, named Infield for the infield of the racetrack where he was found, ambles out after him. The door to the car will stay open the whole time I’m there. His office is inside the barn, but there’s very little demarcation between the two; the barn flows into the office and then follows Woodberry to his car. Everything around him seems to have at least some mud on it.

Curtis Beale “Woodberry” Payne has sandy/gray hair and blue eyes. He seems tall, even though he isn’t. He was born in Virginia, grew up in Virginia, and went to school in Virginia, and he’s been around horses his whole life. His mother rode and his family owned show horses, and from a very young age he worked as a groom and then as an exercise rider for a professional trainer named Dale Jenkins. (The nickname “Woodberry” comes from this time, when someone at a horse show, knowing that he went to a private school, referred to him as “the kid who goes to Woodberry,” as in Woodberry Forest, a school he eventually did end up going to.) In high school, he would go work in the stables after class, and in college he took off on the weekends to ride in races.

But when he graduated, Woodberry veered away from what seemed to be his natural course. In 1980, he got a job about as far away from the stable as you can find, working as an aid for Congressman Ken Robinson. He lived in Middleburg, a 45-minute drive from Capitol Hill that, with traffic, could take two or three hours. His old boss Dale Jenkins had moved to nearby Warrenton, and the two had dinner every night. Just as he did when he was in school, Woodberry snuck away from Washington on the weekends to ride. “The horses,” he said, “kept pulling me back.”

On a typical day, Woodberry goes back and forth between the barn and the track. He monitors the horses for injuries, weight, diet, everything about them. “They’re professional athletes,” he said.

“That reminds me, I’ve got a horse that needs antibiotics.” He grabs a huge hypodermic needle, goes into a stall and slides it expertly into a horse’s neck.

His office walls are covered with framed pictures of winning horses posing with their jockeys and owners. Many of the images are faded, stretching back over decades, and Woodberry has a story to tell about all of them. On most of them, his name appears as the trainer. Maybe it does on all of them, I don’t know. There are, he said, so many major players in the horse world living right here in our backyard that go unnoticed. Woodberry goes to great lengths to tell me about everybody but himself.

After leaving politics, Woodberry went back to working for his old boss until, in 1985, Jenkins “kicked me out of the nest.” He told Woodberry that there was a job open at Ingleside Farm and he should take it. So Woodberry got licensed as a trainer, and 10 years later he wound up buying Ingleside.

There are about 60 horses at Ingleside currently, most of them being trained for races in New York state, where the majority of the client base is located, but a few belong to Woodberry and they race throughout the year. He’s a “licensed trainer up and down the East Coast” and has a stable at Colonial Downs, the second biggest racetrack in the country, where he trains and races horses every year.

Horseracing is big in Virginia, but not as big as it once was. “In its day,” he said, “when the business was really thriving, it had its own night at the Saratoga Horse sales. ‘Virginia night.’” Now the business has shrunk and Virginia is no longer one of the top 10 horse regions.

But what’s the attraction for him? Why is he at the barn seven days a week? What keeps pulling him back to horses? “I guess just the horses themselves,” said Woodberry, whose wife, Olga, also works at Ingleside. “Each one is an individual, with their own personality. It’s pure sport: who gets there first.”

So, this Saturday, he’ll be at Foxfield races, as he always seems to be, as he was for the first one, on a rainy day in 1978. Foxfield is not a big race, but it’s fast and exciting. Many horse owners use it as preparation for other major races on the circuit, like the Iroquois races in Nashville held a few weeks later.

Foxfield is something of a local tradition. The spring races, Woodberry tells me, are about locals emerging from the long winter to spend a day in the sun. “Personally,” he said, “I love seeing the UVA students there.” He was a UVA student himself, and was there for the tail end of the famous Easters party, called “the best party in America” by Playboy.

“I hated seeing Easters taken away,” Woodberry said. The students needed a spring party, and so they found Foxfield, and that’s just fine as far as he’s concerned. “The students are the biggest part of the crowd on race day,” Woodberry said. “I welcome it. I’ve seen how the meet’s grown over the years. It keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

 

As part of the Batten School’s Energy Policy Forum, SELC’s Cale Jaffe (right) and Virginia Uranium Inc.’s Patrick Wales (left) debated the necessity and safety of mining for uranium in Virginia, fielding questions from students of law, leadership and public policy, and environmental science. (Katharine E. Myer)

The debate over uranium mining in Virginia came to UVA last week, as Southern Environmental Law Center attorney Cale Jaffe joined Virginia Uranium Inc. project manager Patrick Wales as part of the Batten School’s Energy Policy Forum.

For two hours on Friday, Jaffe and Wales tackled the thorny issue of mining uranium in southern Virginia, and fielded questions from students, faculty, and members of the community.

According to Uranium Virginia, Coles Hill farm in Pittsylvania County is home to the largest uranium deposit in the U.S., and one of the largest in the world. It was discovered in 1978, but has remained untouched due to a 30-year statewide ban on uranium mining. The SELC is at the forefront of the effort to keep the ban in tact and is one of 16 groups in the statewide Keep the Ban Coalition, but Virginia Uranium announced in 2007 it plans to exploit the deposit.

Wales explained during the debate that the process of extracting uranium from rock is a fairly simple one, and it is merely the “separation of one natural ingredient from granite rock.”

In a written response to Governor McDonnell’s announcement regarding the ban, Wales said “uranium mining can be conducted safely in Virginia as long as stringent regulatory standards and industry best practices are put in place.”

But the SELC is concerned about the safety of the process, regardless of any regulatory standards or industry best practices—consider, Jaffe said, that the BP oil spill happened two years ago this month, despite stringent regulations on Gulf drilling.

Jaffe said the controversy over uranium is about waste management. In addition to the actual mining, he said, the process would also require milling, with the disposal of 58 billion pounds of toxic, radioactive tailings each year. 

According to Jaffe, these tailings retain 85 percent of their radioactive activity, and global studies have shown that those living and working near uranium mines are at risk for cancer, birth defects, weakened immune systems, and kidney and liver damage.

“We need to take these warning signs very seriously before we move forward,” he said. 

Wales said Uranium Virginia has “top notch” state regulators, who ensure the prevention of environmental disasters, and their regulations have been rated as 99.9 percent effective. 

Despite these statistics, Jaffe said the SELC fears that, right now, the risks are just too great to move the project forward. Because Virginia has not yet been mined for uranium, Jaffe said, there is no way of knowing how the area’s climate, rainfall and natural disasters will factor into the equation. Uranium is traditionally mined in dryer areas like the western states, and Jaffe fears that, even with “gold standard” regulations, mining in Virginia will present unexpected complications unseen in other uranium deposits.

“Risk is inherent and will always be there,” Jaffe said.

Wales argued that not utilizing the uranium deposits in the U.S. puts the nation at a greater risk: the risk of being too dependent on foreign countries for natural energy resources. 

“There is no material, from an energy perspective, that we are more dependent on foreign producers [for] than uranium,” he said, noting that the US imports 92 percent of the uranium used to power nuclear reactors.

Uranium is essential in the U.S., he said, because aside from natural gas and coal, there is “no other option for cheap, reliable, and safe electricity.”

“Do we need this stuff?” asked Wales. “The answer is absolutely yes.”

“What is the money for?” Stanton Braverman demanded. “Payment for water? Payment for land? Was it a gift?”

Braverman, a retired Charlottesville attorney, pushed for answers at a hearing April 19 on the city’s deal with the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority to build a new 40-foot dam at the Ragged Mountain Reservoir.

According to Braverman, who filed suit against the city, the county, and the RWSA last month, the city sold its water facilities when it accepted $765,000 from the Albemarle County Service Authority last year, an early step in the dam deal. And that exchange is the crux of the issue, he said, because per state statute, it should have required a supermajority of four out of five council votes, or gone to referendum. City Council’s vote was three to do, and Braverman said the approval was unconstitutional.

“The whole thing was vague,” he said, arguing that the involved parties tried to get around constitutional provisions by convoluting the process. “They’re trying to do indirectly what they cannot do directly.”

Braverman, who is suing with the support of the dam-opposing Charlottesville Open Government Alliance, said he’s concerned property values will be affected if water prices go up because of the deal. He owns three properties in the Charlottesville area.

During the hearing when Braverman questioned the money transfer, which the RWSA has called a “use agreement,” attorney Robert Hodges objected, stating that the question of monetary intentions was irrelevant and “separate from what the court is determining today.”

When the RWSA caught wind of Braverman’s suit, it filed for an expedited hearing in order to still acquire bonds and move forward with the project. Hodges and witness Tom Frederick, executive director of the RWSA, presented a number of documents authorizing bonds and outlining the agreement between the three municipalities.

Braverman’s goal in the hearing was to consolidate the three cases into one, as the evidence and arguments for each were essentially identical.

“If we consolidate, we have the evidence we need to move forward,” he said.

After Braverman and Hodges presented their arguments, Judge Cheryl V. Higgins agreed to consolidate the three cases, and scheduled the next hearing for 9am Friday, May 18.

Braverman was pleased with the decision, and said he has “a lot of work to do” over the next few weeks.