Still – The East End Photographs

Still 

The East End Photographs 

Philippe Cheng

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“poem 42” 

from 73 poems

Long Island was originally part of the New England mainland, but over time 

a river formed which ran from west to east in approximately the location of 

the Long Island sound, which began its evolution as an island. 

And then, 61,000 years ago the Wisconsin Glacier advanced down 

New England and slowly came to a halt when it passed over the river. 

Poised over the center of the future Long Island, it was melting as fast as 

it was advancing and as it did so it rained tons of soil and stone at its 

front line. This pile of debris, known as the Ronkonkoma Terminal Moraine 

stretched from Brooklyn to Montauk in approximately the location of the Long 

Island Expressway. Everything south of it, known as outwash plain, became 

the Hempstead Plains, and, south of that, Long Island’s famous beaches. 

This all took about 40,000 years and then, as weather conditions changed, 

the glacier receded to what is now the North Fork and deposited the Harbor 

Hill Moraine, which stretches from Brooklyn Heights to Orient Point. 

The jagged edges of the glacier, and the large chunks of ice that remained 

behind to melt slowly in large depressions, left an intricate arrangement of 

ponds, bays, and convoluted shorelines. 

This busy relationship of land and water created the conditions that make 

Long Island’s amazing, unique quality of light. 

The light that can inspire an artist to create a work that is simply, beautifully, 

all about his love for this place and its light. 

Edwina von Gal

When asked what makes a good photograph I easily respond by summing 

up my prerequisites: form, content, composition. But asked what makes me fall 

in love with a photograph my answer is quite different. I no longer analyze. 

Instead, I respond to the photograph emotionally. It becomes very personal 

and it has as much to do with my life as it does with the photographer’s 

accomplishment. I look at it much as I read a poem: what I see or read 

resonates and transports me into its world. 

When I look at Philippe Cheng’s pictures collected in Still, my first response 

is the memory of the exquisite walks I have taken on the beaches of the East 

End of Long Island. The light changes from day to day, morning to night, yet 

it is uniquely Long Island light. It comes as no surprise that painters migrated 

there and created masterpieces. This ever-changing light has seduced Philippe 

much the same way. His pictures are not only photographs of nature—they are 

portraits of East End light. He does it brilliantly, never repeating himself. 

His photographs take me to the quietest places I have visited. Walking in 

the dark woods of Germany was my escape during a turbulent childhood. 

I take a look at Philippe’s images and I immediately experience the same 

peace I found then. 

Philippe studied art history and later photography at the School of Visual Arts 

and New York University. However, he credits much of his visual education to 

Magnum Photos. He worked in its library for five years. There he spent time 

with exceptional photographs and photographers he admired. All along he 

kept going to museums, where monochromatic painters like Agnes Martin and 

colorists like Milton Avery influenced his own work.

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Do you do anything to alter your photographs? Do you manipulate the color or use 

Photoshop for composition? 

No. I shot the majority of the Still images on film but some in digital so I did crop. 

I have a square brain so when I’m photographing I’m thinking square. I’m not thinking 

horizontal or rectangular. I don’t manipulate the color or do anything to alter the composition 

on the image. I don’t want there to be any deception. The colors are what I capture with the 

camera in available light. 

To get the one right image, how many frames do you take? 

Sometimes it could be five frames and sometimes it could be ten. Rarely is it more than that. 

I might move, shift my focus plane. I might do five frames here, shift, five frames here. 

In the past there would be a contact sheet and I could follow my thought process. This is 

the challenge I think, of the digital world. When I first started making abstract color fields, 

I knew that’s where I was going and it felt right. 

You use the words, “abstract color field,” which is a movement in the world of painting. 

Are you influenced by or inspired by artists like Helen Frankenthaler? 

When I was young I saw a Milton Avery painting at the Metropolitan Museum, 

“Speedboats Wake,” and that image stuck with me. It was a seascape with a little tiny 

boat and beautiful, rich, deep blue sea. I do love Frankenthaler’s work as well as Mark 

Rothko, Richard Dieben korn, Richard Serra, Agnes Martin. I love color but more where 

the color is muted and subtle. 

In Still there are abstract images as well as some that are more recognizably landscapes. 

But none of them is necessarily identifiable as any particular place, unlike your New York 

pictures that are quite identifiably of the city. It seems that there has been a sea change in 

your aesthetic point of view since you moved to the East End of Long Island. 

Moving here, having a family, all of that definitely shifted my ground and has impacted 

how I make pictures. But this point of view has always been with me to a certain extent. 

Cummings was the first poet I really connected with and I always try to find a way to strive 

to that language and that typography and that feeling. The grittiness of the early pictures is 

something that is not disconnected from me. I needed to do those in order to bring me here. 

I come back to the word “striving” often in the sense that life is very humbling, especially 

when you are trying to find the right language to say what you feel. When I first came out 

here I photographed the landscape in a literal way, but it said nothing to me. I was struggling 

to find the right language and then I started changing.

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Still – The East End Photographs

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