Musings on Photography

Today is the halfway point for my SoFoBoMo project. I wanted to head out yesterday, but it was just rain, rain, rain. And, although I’m sure I can protect the camera, somehow the prospect of being out in the rain just filled me with dread of the very worst kind. Today, though, it’s only been raining on and off, and Kodak insisted that if we didn’t go for a walk today he was going on strike, so we headed out in the morning, just to change things up.

Kodak insists that the world is a nicer place when it’s wet. Wet, he argues forcefully, makes everything smell better, taste better, and generally just makes it more fun. Today, for some reason, he was particularly interested in whatever I was interested in - several times he came rushing up to check out what sort of good thing I’d found (see photo above). “See?”, he’d tell me, “aren’t those leaves just a lot more interesting when they have water drops on them?”

And the interesting thing is that he’s right. If there’s one thing I’ve started to appreciate for the first time because of this project, it’s how much I like the landscape in and after the rain.

When we got to the open field, Kodak raced gleefully into it, charging around with abandon. This scene reminded me of a stanza from Robert Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud Time”:

The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching wand
In every wheel rut’s now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water but don’t forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water it’s crystal teeth.

We’re at little risk of frost at this time of year here in the PNW.

There’s so much fun in looking at the landscape with the dog. There’s a new adventure around every corner. Kodak doesn’t so much lean back and observe the landscape, he just flings himself into it to see what happens. Mud, rain, tall grass, prickers - it’s all good. Different, certainly, but fundamentally good.

Things have been a little slower in terms of posting because things have been a little more active on other fronts.

For example, in the ‘interesting things that have arrived’ front:

• A short stack of different books on book design, which puts me even farther behind on reading (I got distracted by Extraordinary People, a murder mystery by Peter May). Comments on these books in a few days.
• The L plate for the Powershot G9 finally arrived from Really Right Stuff, so it is now easier for me to do some serious image quality comparisons between the G9 and the EOS-5d. Hopefully progress on that soon.

Last night, I walked outside to get something from the studio and the night was very clear, with a more or less half moon illuminating the snow covered scenery. I was suddenly overwhelmed by that deja vu feeling that I’d seen this scene on Joe Reifer’s website, so I got out the camera, fiddled around for half an hour, and made one ten minute exposure. The clouds moved in and spoiled my nice star trails and I should have turned out the lights on the house, but the result was pretty interesting, and now I think I’m going to have to spend a little time fiddling around with this. It’s interesting in that way that indicates that perhaps I’ll spend more than a little time, actually. I will have to start paying attention to which places have those dratted ‘closes at dusk’ signs, I guess. This naturally provoked a sudden desire to buy some equipment.

On the subject of my musings on the photos not to take, I found this post on Mike Johnston’s TOP to be one of the best things I’ve read there. I’m not saying that Mike is right because he seems to agree that some photos are better not taken, or even that I agree with everything Mike has written. But I do appreciate the fact that people are thinking about it and that it’s being addressed by folks in places where the issue gets exposure.

My little community, a town of under two thousand souls, was recent stricken by a multiple homicide - six members of a family all murdered on Christmas eve. The event itself was enough to have the community reeling. Added to shock of the event was the impact of having all sort of reporters, camera crews, and photographers overrun the town. I stayed out of town for a week. It gave me increased sympathy for the plight of all those folks who lived near Nickel Mines, PA.

Led by things that appeared in the ‘Search Engine Terms’ page for this blog, I was browsing back over previous entries and comments, and came across this comment on my post about Jeff Wall:

I think the real challenge is that Wall is more or less doing what he can to bury the tradition of documentary photography. You can still find the Gursky’s and Burtynksy’s of the world working - but to do landscapes at this point you need access to places that most people can’t get to, and a strong project.

Maybe it’s just a bit too easy to drive somewhere and take a picture. Might have worked for Ansel Adams, but that was a long time ago.

If you’re doing landscape photography is it really necessary, as this writer suggests, that you have access to places that most people can’t get to?

I’d reject the idea that ‘easy’ has anything to do with it. I don’t think it’s easy to make good, insightful photos of the places we live, I think it’s hard. It’s hard to strip away our labels and our finely tuned ability to gloss over things that we see every day. Paradoxically, it’s hard to make compelling photos of places we see every day, but it’s comparatively easy to go to exotic places and make compelling photos - the mere exotic quality of the place means that the photo can have impact with the viewer even if the photo isn’t particularly insightful.

But it seems to me that the landscape photography I like the best these days is not so much about going to places where no one goes and showing me things that no one sees. It’s mostly photography that seems to be about going places where people go all the time, and showing things that people look at constantly but somehow never happen to see.

An interesting post on Joe Kazimierczyk’s blog about his current show and a talk he gave at the gallery. The title of the show, which I find intriguing, is “Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary”.

I’ve been following his blog for a while now. His artistic stomping grounds are not far from where I grew up, so I find his work both familiar in subject matter and interesting in approach.

Taking heart from the Harry Callahan passage about times when the photographs are nearly all poor but believing that those poor photos lay the groundwork for later work, I’ve been flogging myself to go down into the valley and make photographs there.

This morning, the valley was filled with fog - a not unexpected thing in September. But this fog looked and felt different, and everywhere I stopped the car, I was treated to an unusually deep quiet - the fog seemed to just swallow up all sounds except for the steady dripping of the water off the leaves of the trees.


I’ve been down in the valley with the camera several times in the past weeks, and each time it felt forced - sometimes very forced, and sometimes just a bit. But today I finally hit that rhythm where things seem to fall away and the photos are all around, and it’s more a matter of picking which ones to make exposures for than it’s a matter of finding the photos to begin with.

I’m not going to claim the photos are good. But it was nice to be back in that state where making the photos felt good.

And yes, the fascination with gates and fences is still there.

(and now that I’ve typed this all up, I look at the photos and realize that in many, the fog looks just sucky. Oh, well.)

At the end of the first lecture by one of my favorite professors, the professor asked “Are there any questions?” I raised my hand, and when he pointed at me, I asked “Is there an objective reality?” (the course was not a philosophy course, it was a course on finite mathematics and formal languages.) Amazingly, the professor did not kill me outright.

Anyway, I’ve spent more than my share of time pondering whether there’s an objective reality. I think the answer is yes, but with qualifications. The qualification is this: we stumble through this existence, and because understanding how the world around us works is a key to survival, we’ve got a large part of our brain dedicated to figuring it out. You don’t have to be highly capable at coming up with symbolic solutions to differential equations to catch a thrown object, because there’s a big chunk of your brain that’s figured out how to do ballistics. We go around, constantly building a mental model of the world, and we run this model forward in real time, and we use it to make useful predictions like “After I fire this arrow, that bird in motion will continue to move, so I’ll aim such that the arrow and the bird end up in the same place at the same time, and henceforth I’ll call this situation ‘dinner’.” That is, we use this model as a map to navigate through life.

The problem is this: we start out life with very simple maps, full of large gaps. Even worse, our ability to model things in our head is strictly limited, and reality is comparatively unlimited. So our maps start out not very accurate, and slowly improve, but they will always contain errors. Cartographers (and explorers, and hikers, and in general all users of the cartographic arts, as well as the followers of Alfred Korzybski) remind themselves of this problem by stating “The map is not the landscape”. In any disagreement between reality and the map, the map loses. In other words, maps always contain errors. The landscape never contains errors, it just *is*. Maps have gaps where there’s no information; reality does not.

To make what is turning out to be a longer story into a shorter one, I’ve concluded that one of my reasons for making art is that it’s a way for me fill in the gaps in my map. I went to the coast, and I made a lot of photographs there, and in the process I filled in a lot of the gaps in my map of ‘beach’. My map of ‘beach’ now has more information about beaches, and is more accurate. I’ve made thousands of photographs of the area where I live, and as a result my map of the area is far more detailed and interesting than it was.

(those of you interested in maps, models, and utility will find this article in Wikipedia to be a pretty good overview. Just remember that a wikipedia article is, in a sense, just a map, and not the territory.)

Not much posting going on here, sorry. Partly that’s because I’m undermotivated, partly it’s because I have plenty of thoughts running around in my head but no thoughts that have gelled to the point where they can be articulated. I’ll settle for drawing a connection between two blog posts.

The first post is Paul Lester’s post here, about photographing people. At the end, Paul writes:

There are happy faces, sad faces, proud faces, and angry faces. I saw faces of love, faces of hope, faces of contentment, and each one of them brings me joy.

There are no insignificant moments.

The second post is this one by Colin Jago, in which he writes

I’m interested in pictures of the ordinary.

This creates an immediate tension. If you are interested in pictures of the extra-ordinary then the drama of the subject (war, location, sexuality, event) can pull a picture above the mass and make it interesting. However, without that edge, pictures of the ordinary can be, well, pretty bloody ordinary.

Unlike Paul, I don’t generally make photographs of people, and I don’t generally engage in street photography. I’m not so much interested in people as I’m interested in places. But if I were to translate Paul’s words into my field of interest, it would probably come down to “There are no insignificant places.” And, it turns out, that’s a view I believe very strongly.

And, like Colin, I’m very interested in pictures of the ordinary.

We tend to divide places into categories. There are exciting places, like Yosemite, or Victoria Falls, the Galapagos Islands, and so on. And there are places that are not exciting - the street in front of our house, our back yard, the parking lot where we park the car when we go to the office.

Exciting places are exciting primarily because they’re exotic. That is, we go to a place like Yosemite, and we want to make photographs of the place because we are amazed at what we see, and we’re amazed because we don’t see it every day. The places which are not exciting are generally so because they’re not exotic - we see them every day. But what I’ll call ‘The Lester Principle’ as applied to landscape photography tells us that there are no insignificant places. As Annie Dillard observed “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” and thus it turns out that although they might seem boring and ordinary, the places we see every day are probably more significant to us than exciting, exotic locales that we visit rarely if ever.

I strongly suspect that if I want to ensure that my art matters to anyone else, I must first ensure that it matters to me. Yosemite is exotic and gorgeous and stupendous and epic, but it is also a place where I spend zero time, and so although it might be important in some global sense, it doesn’t matter so much to me.

The forest that surrounds my home and the valley over which that forest looks are where I am, day to day. The forest and the valley are not exotic nor stupendous nor epic on the scale of Yosemite. They are ordinary, quotidian places. But because I spend nearly 100% of my time in those places, they have tremendous significance to me, and so they seem like the natural focus of my photography.

That probably limits the audience and appeal of my work, as well as pretty much killing any prospects for wider recognition. I suspect, though, that this is true of nearly 100% of all the art that is ever made.

Lately I’ve been enjoying how things look in the rain.

This weekend it got quite windy, and during the period of high winds on Saturday morning one of the big bitter cherry trees let go and started leaning low across our driveway.  So I got out the chain saw and I cut the tree  down, and then I cut off all the branches and bucked the trunk up into pieces.  And then I got out the chipper, and fed the branches through.  All the while, the foreground part of my mind was concentrating on things like not cutting off my foot, and not having my hand dragged into the chipper while it was running - your basic high priority stuff if you happen to be fond of your extremities. 

Meanwhile, the background part of my brain was chugging along thinking about why I worry about outside influence on my photography.  That generalized into pondering about the mass media onslaught that’s such a problem for so many folks - not just artists who find it makes for a bad influence on their work, but a lot of folks who feel that the mass media aren’t a positive factor in their lives.

And then I stumbled across across the following quotation:

As long as I assume that the world is something I discover by turning on the radio … I am deceived from the start.

-Thomas Merton

I think this touches directly on the problem.  When we take in the world through radio or TV or magazines, we’re not getting a direct view of the the world, we’re getting a view provided by an intermediary who, no matter how good the intentions will always add interpretation. When I’m looking at the photography of other people, I’m seeing the world through their eyes.  That can be good, or it can be bad, but no matter what it amounts to experiencing reality through an intermediary.  When we watch the mass media, it’s even worse, because the various interests in the mass media aren’t interested in just presenting reality, they’re interested in advancing their agenda.  (I’d note that photographers and other artists often do the same thing).

One of the things about making photographs myself, as opposed to viewing photographs made by others, is that for me to make the photographs I do, I have to actually contend with reality directly.  I don’t mean this in the sense used by Mary Chase’s character Elwood P. Dowd, who remarked “I’ve wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I’m happy to state that I finally won out over it.”  When I say ‘contend with reality’ what I’m saying is that to make a photograph of what the forest looks like in the rain, I must actually be in the forest in the rain.  Unless, of course, I take a page from Jeff Wall’s playbook and construct a fake forest in my studio, filled with fake plants, and then contrive to dump fake rain on it while I make photographs.

Mass media, the internet, books - all add to the reach of our experience at the expense of including an intermediary in that experience.  In order to make photographs of reality, though, we must have a direct experience - no intermediary.

There is a real world out there - an objective reality that can be photographed.  Interestingly, the process of making photographs of that reality immerses us in it, and the process of looking at the photographs we’ve made moves us one step away from it. 

 The photos in my recent post Untitled are from just south of my home, where a huge windstorm caused widespread forest damage.  They’re photos of a salvage harvest - picking the fallen trees off the ground, taking down the hopelessly damaged standing trees, and preparing the area for replanting.  I’d made a number of satisfying photos in that stand of trees before the storm, and since then I’ve tried several times to take persuasive photos of the carnage after the storm.  Every time I try, I come back thinking that this time I’ve gotten something good, and every time the stuff I thought would be great turns out to be dreck.

Part of the difficulty is that it’s a daunting photographic problem, both visually and practically.  What was once a nice, beautiful stand of Douglas Fir was turned into a jumbled, random, tangled mess of trees that were very large.  It’s not just that it’s hard to move around in the mess, it’s that it’s downright dangerous.  That seemed to leave trying to photograph it from the edge, and everything I tried along those lines was just more photos of tangled mess.  I tried getting higher, I tried to isolate things and focus on details.  Nothing seemed to work.

The whole thing is just very frustrating on so many levels.