I started the website, Pine Plains Views, around 2000, in the infancy of what we now know as the internet. I had just moved to Pine Plains as a full-time resident and, being a professional filmmaker, I used the camera to help explore my new surroundings.
I now lived here but I did not feel like I had joined the community and I was not sure how to do it.
The preface that I wrote at the time still holds:
WHY THIS WEBSITE
I came to Pine Plains by choice, not by chance of birth.
But the small-town rural community I chose is changing. The farmers have, for the most part, sold to people from the city and fields are becoming lawns.
And, like the land, people, too, are becoming subdivided as difference breeds distance rather than discourse.
I have been making these videos to preserve and reconstitute what I can of a changing way of life and to share it with the community.
On a more personal level, I am making this website as a way of holding on to the reasons why I came here.