Concourse: Shadow + Form | Albany, New York

Concourse: Shadow + Form
Empire State Concourse and Office Complex
Image Series 1-20

Artist statement: Concourse: Shadow & Form is a twenty-image series photographed across Albany’s Empire State Plaza and the surrounding New York State Capitol complex, a landscape where mid-century brutalist concrete meets Romanesque Revival stone, and where two very different eras of civic architecture exist side by side.
Shot entirely in monochrome, the series finds geometry in shadow, scale in texture, and form in the spaces between. Concrete and stone. Mass and light. A century apart, connected by the same afternoon sun.

© 2026 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
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Walloomsac Inn, Bennington, Vermont | 03.14.2026

Walloomsac Inn (formerly Dewey Tavern), Bennington, Vermont
For Restoration Obscura 

This building began its life in 1771 as the Dewey Tavern, erected along the road that followed the Walloomsac River just east of Bennington village. Only a few years later the surrounding fields became part of the landscape of the Battle of Bennington, fought nearby in August of 1777. Taverns like this served as more than roadside lodging. They were gathering places where travelers, militia, farmers, and merchants exchanged news and information as the young republic took shape.

Ownership and names changed with the generations. The tavern later became known as Hicks Tavern, continuing its role as a stopping place for travelers moving between the Hudson Valley and the Green Mountains. As the nineteenth century progressed and tourism began to expand across southern Vermont, the building evolved into a larger hotel operation that came to be known as the Walloomsac Inn.

It is often confused with the Mount Anthony House, though the two were separate establishments. The Mount Anthony House stood in downtown Bennington on the corner of Main and South Streets and was originally known as the Putnam Hotel. The Walloomsac Inn occupied a quieter site east of the village along the river road, serving travelers who arrived from the countryside rather than the town center.

Today the structure remains as a weathered survivor of that long transition. The clapboards bow outward, dormer windows lean toward the sky, and a later metal fire escape clings to the façade. Long exposure photographs stretch the clouds overhead into streaks of motion, compressing time above a building that has already witnessed more than two and a half centuries of it.

Places like this become quiet historical archives. Long after the travelers have disappeared and the tavern doors have closed, the structure remains, keeping watch over the valley where roads, wars, and generations of movement once passed.

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The Nott Memorial | 03.13.2026

The Nott Memorial | 03.13.2026
Union College, Schenectaday, New York 

© 2026 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
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Gus's Hot Dogs | Predawn | 03.12.2026

 Gus's Hot Dogs | Predawn | 03.12.2026

"There is a world that begins when yours ends."
— Jeanette Winterson, Author

Gus's Hot Dogs, before the neighborhood is awake. One figure, one lamp. What's happening inside is prep work, the unglamorous part that has to happen before anything else can.

My first job out of high school was as a dispatcher for the Troy Record, right after the paper transitioned from an evening daily to a morning edition. That shift rewired the entire operation. News gathered later. Editors waiting on wire updates past midnight. Pressmen running while the building was otherwise quiet. When the last bundle was stacked, I showed up to get it moving, coordinating drivers, routes, delays, bad roads.

I worked that job through my first years of college. There were nights that generated more material than any classroom. Stories I've told for thirty years.

If you've spent enough time in this subculture, you recognize others in it. Not through conversation, usually. Through timing. Through the way someone carries themselves after a long night. The trucker fueling up at four. The nurse heading out as the day shift comes in. The guy at Gus's with the lamp on and the work already underway. There's a solidarity there. It doesn't require discussion. The early morning hours are one of my favorite subjects to document.

Chapter 10 of Field Guide to the Night chronicles that world, the late night and early morning subculture of the Capital Region and the people who keep it running.

Watervliet, NY
Leica

© 2026 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
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On Location for Restoration Obscura: BKLYN | NYC

On Location for Restoration Obscura: BKLYN | NYC
Image: Kobayashi Actual 

© 2026 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
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Albany Skyline | 03.05.2026

03.05.2026 | A tug pushes north through broken Hudson River ice with the Albany, New York skyline rising behind it.

Albany, New York 

© 2026 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
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Abandoned Farmhouse | Februrary 2026 | Restoration Obscura a

The Abandoned Farmhouse Photo Series | February 2026

The house sits back from the road where the fields taper into a thin line of trees. Snow fills the doorway and climbs the bed frame in the yard, softening the outlines of what was once a working farm. Inside, the ceilings sag and the wiring hangs loose from splintered beams. A root cellar door stands open, as if someone meant to come back for one more season’s worth of potatoes.

Wallpaper curls from the joists overhead, its printed state emblems now the only decoration left in a room stripped to its bones. Hooks line the wall where coats dried after chores, and a rusted electrical panel marks the point where the farm first met the modern grid. On a windowsill, a spoon rests in the dust beside a single earring, filigree and bead, caught in the peeling paint like something dropped in a hurry and never recovered.
Farmhouses like this were the center of small, self-contained economies across the Capital Region, storing the harvest, sheltering livestock, holding together families whose daily rhythm was set by the land beneath them. When the farms went quiet, the houses followed. Roofs opened to the weather, wiring failed, and the long winters did the rest.

What remains is material record. Every loose board, rusted hook, and forgotten object is part of an archive left in place, one that documents rural labor, out-migration, and the slow contraction of agricultural life across upstate New York.

The structure still carries the outlines of the lives that passed through it, though it will not carry them much longer.

© 2026 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
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Liminal | Northern Lights | 01.19.2026

Liminal | Tomhannock | 01.19.2026
Northern Lights + Light Painting  

© 2026 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
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Sunrise in Grafton Lakes State Park | 12.26.2025

Sunrise in Grafton Lakes State Park | 12.26.2025
Grafton, New York 

© 2026 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
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Erie Canal Ruins | Restoration Obscura

Erie Canal Ruins | Restoration Obscura 

A cold sunrise over the 19th-century ruins of a brick and stone outbuilding, possibly a forge or storage house, along a former canal alignment. This landscape once sat at the heart of one of the busiest transportation corridors in the state. Between the 1820s and the early 20th century, canal districts supported a maze of locks, feeder channels, machine shops, mule barns, dry docks, and supply sheds that kept the Erie and Champlain Canals in motion.

Structures like this stood near towpaths and lock clusters, built from locally quarried stone with brick upper courses that could be repaired or rebuilt as the canal changed. Many served as blacksmith shops where canal workers repaired tow hooks, wagon irons, and lock hardware. Others held cordwood, iron fittings, rope, and tools for the lock tenders stationed along these stretches of waterway.

The canal system shifted repeatedly as routes were enlarged and re-routed. Each change left pockets of abandoned infrastructure: alignments cut off from the water, work yards repurposed or left to decay, and stone foundations scattered across former canal farms and meadows. This ruin is one of those remnants, a surviving element of the industrial landscape that sustained the state’s most important waterway.

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© 2026 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
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Abandoned Guard Station | Restoration Obscura

Photo Series: Abandoned Guard Station | Restoration Obscura 

Inside this guard tower, the slow mechanics of abandonment and the remains of its final shift overlap. The curled paint, hardened paper, and corroded metal show how time works on a building once people leave. Heat, cold, and moisture take over, reshaping every surface in small, steady steps.

But the artifacts left behind still speak to what this place was. The roll of institutional paper in its dispenser, the frozen control console, the visitor stickers on the desk, these are the clues. They point to a space built for monitoring, logging, and managing whoever passed through its door. Even the arrangement of the furniture suggests routine: a place for paperwork, a place for observation, a place to wait.
Every abandoned structure follows similar patterns of decay, yet the details inside this one mark its exact purpose. You can almost imagine the last day here. A final shift change. A sticker left on the counter. A form half-filled. A door locked from the outside for the last time.

The science shows how a room breaks down. The artifacts show how it was once used. Together, they turn this guard tower into a record of both time and the people who once worked within its walls.

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Deep Space Objects | 11.20.2025

 

Deep Space Objects | 11.20.2025
[Top] North American Nebula
[Bottom] Andromeda Galaxy 

© 2025 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
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The Ghost Chamber | Restoration Obscura

The Ghost Chamber
Enlarged Erie Canal Lock 4 — Colonie, New York
Lat/Long: 42°44’47”N, 73°42’16”W

Photographed with century-old optical technology, this image looks into the stone interior of Enlarged Erie Canal Lock 4, constructed in the 1840s during New York’s major canal enlargement. Barges once entered this narrow space under towline, rising and lowering between Albany and the Champlain connection as freight moved through one of the busiest transportation corridors of the nineteenth century.

When the canal alignment shifted and the older route was abandoned with the rise of the Barge Canal System in the early twentieth century, Lock 4 was drained, the gates were removed, and the surrounding land was divided into residential lots. Only the chamber remained. What is left is an artifact of tool marks and carefully laid stone, built with a permanence that is likely to outlast any modern-day structure.

The beauty of a ruin like this lies in its survival, a chamber stripped of water and machinery yet still defined by the careful stonework that refuses to disappear.

A new full-length episode of the Restoration Obscura Field Guide Podcast drops tomorrow, wherever you get your podcasts.

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© 2025 John Bulmer Photography, John Bulmer Media, Nor'easter Films, and Restoration Obscura
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