Date: Fri 09-Jan-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: DOTTIE

Quick Words:

Robert-Fulton-Jr-photographs

Full Text:

Photographic Exhibit Features Fulton's Creativity In Full Flight

BY DOROTHY EVANS

Newtowners have a rare treat in store -- and a rare opportunity.

Starting this weekend, they may view and possibly purchase any one of 35

originally framed photographs by local inventor, sculptor, writer and poet

Robert Fulton, Jr, on exhibit at the Cyrenius H. Booth Library.

Though "going on 90 years old," Mr Fulton continues to find inspiration from

the images he has photographed from thousands of feet up while flying

airplanes.

On Monday afternoon, he and his helpers hung the exhibit in the new Booth

Library meeting room in anticipation of this weekend's opening.

Mr Fulton paused in front of several of his pictures as though seeing them for

the first time.

"I rolled over to take this one -- hanging upside down so the wings wouldn't

get in the way. The plane really flies itself, you see," he told an onlooker.

From the air and seen through his camera lens, certain landscape features (Mr

Fulton calls them "skyroglyphs") such as ice cracks in a glacier, river

systems or mountain ranges, take on a new identity in shape and pattern.

In his retrospective for the show, Mr Fulton explains how as a seasoned pilot,

he first began to appreciate "the incredible designs produced by Nature

herself."

Pilots share "man's basic blindness to what is in front of him," he wrote.

"Perhaps we are too busy looking at charts or flight instruments and the local

landscape is just the distance between two points."

Fortunately, one day while flying the Gulf of Mexico, I looked down and,

bigger-than-life, saw Cortez about to land. And a few moments later there was

Montezuma collecting his defenders... Soon I was at the North Pole

photographing Santa Claus, at the Round Table with King Arthur, in Arabia with

Ali Baba.

How blind I had been for years. To show Nature how much I appreciate this

for-me new gift of sight, I have framed many of the resulting photographs with

letters from her own alphabet.

Dried leaves, flowers, feathers, bark and pine needles are the "letters" he

has chosen to define his images, whether they are aerial views or more

"grounded" views of trees, rocks and romantic, nymph-like creatures.

For many of the photographs, Mr Fulton has used his wife, Anne Boireau, as his

model.

Around The World In 1932

Although Robert Edison Fulton, Jr, has lived for 45 years in Newtown on a

50-acre property off Orchard Hill Road, he writes that he has "wandered the

world" for more than 84 years.

Harvard educated, he first studied architecture but soon turned to photography

and travel when he found people more appealing than buildings.

His journeys have included making a motorcycle tour of the globe in 1932 that

he described in his 1936 book titled, One Man Caravan . The book was reprinted

by Whitehorse Press of North Conway, N.H., in 1996 as part of its "Incredible

Journeys" series.

Mr Fulton is descended from a line of inventive thinkers that includes

American engineer Robert Fulton who designed the first steamship, and his

grandfather on his mother's side who established a cross country stagecoach

line. It eventually became the Greyhound bus company.

"I like to make things," Mr Fulton said simply when asked about the influence

this impressive lineage might have had upon his own creative endeavors.

While he flew for Pan American and for the Air Force during wartime, he

invented the skyhook air-sea rescue system and the sculptured water wing.

At the same time that he was logging 20,000 hours in the air, Mr Fulton was

exploring new ways through sculpture, poetry, photography and illustration, to

express creative insights that those flights inspired.

These black-and-white photographs on exhibit at the Booth Library have

undoubtedly been the starting-off point for countless hours of storytelling

with his ten grandchildren.

Yet he is offering them to the Cyrenius H. Booth Library as a source for

funding donations to further its programs.

Anyone wishing to buy one of the photographs in the exhibit may do so by

writing a check payable to the library for "however much you would like to

give," Mr Fulton said, "and it's yours."

He added that the purchaser should also speak to Library Director Janet Woycik

or a staff member in order to reserve a specific photograph to take home when

the exhibit is taken down.