Musings on Photography

Colin Jago’s post on Getting to the end of the block, about the merits of ‘going wide’ and ‘going deep’, has had me thinking.  Like Colin, I’ve recently had another photographer comment that I’m very fortunate to live in a wonderfully photogenic place.  And yet, just recently I had an artist look over the work I’ve done in the past year, and comment “I never see the valley looking like this.  I mean, I know it looks like this.  But I don’t see it looking like this.”  His house is about 2.5 miles from mine; his drive to get into the valley is shorter than mine.

The different approaches of ‘go wide’ and ‘go deep’ aren’t a new idea to me; I wrote about this in  Hunter-Gatherer or Farmer? years ago.  And I certainly agree with Colin that time constraints make it so that we can’t go really wide AND go really deep. But when Colin posits that those who go deep don’t get more out of it than those who go wide, I think he’s on thin ice.

I don’t think it’s so much that folks who go wide (the ‘hunter/gatherers’) don’t get as much out of it as the folks who go deep.  I think it’s that they get different things.  And I think the difference shows in the photos they make.

I think this might be at the core of some confusion I’ve had recently, caused by two books of photographs.  The first book is Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces.  The second book, which couldn’t possibly be more dissimilar, is David Plowden’s Small Town America.

In the introduction to American Surfaces, Bob Nikas writes

Who took these pictures?  The drifter in the bathroom of the bus station in Oklahoma city; one of the hippie boys watching thesun go down at the Grand Canyon; a tourist visiting cape Kennedy for the launch of the Skylab space station?  From one desolate motel bed to another, from one unmemorable meal to the next, from town to town, east to west, they can clearly be seen as a visual diary recounting the path of someone passing through the world, recording nearly everything he sees and does, and almost everyone he meets along the way.  Together, the pictures fo a portrait, and even though we never actually see the man behind the camera, he’s there, present and anonymous.  He could be almost anyone.  But these pictures weren’t shot at random by someone on vacation or simply adrift; we know they were made by Stephen Shore.

What I find confusing about the book is that Shore traveled across America in 1972 (a period I remember clearly) taking photos like mad, and somehow he came away with not so much a depiction of the places he’d been as much as photographs that highlight the superficiality of his interaction with these places.  We’re treated to six photographs of toilets, two dozen photographs of food.  I don’t think the title American Surfaces is an accident - I think this book is just that - a view of things that never gets deeper than the surface.  Sure, Shore went broad, and saw a lot of stuff.  And his life consisted of seedy motel rooms, greasy unappetizing meals, and toilets.

In contrast, Plowden’s Small Town America, although spread wide geographically, presents photographs taken across the spread of two decades.  No toilets, no greasy meals, although surely in the traveling needed to make these photographs Plowden encountered plenty of both.  This book is not about Plowden’s summer trip experience, it’s a ‘go deep’ look at the aspects of rural town life that Plowden feels are vanishing before his eyes.  What we can read of Plowden’s life from these photos is that much of his time was spent looking closely, not at his own experience but at the places he visited.  Unlike Shore, he didn’t go to these places to experience (and photograph) nothing more than surface appearance.  He visited these places to go deep, to get at the underlying essence of the places.  And I suspect strongly that his experience reflects that.

I’m still pondering this whole issue of whether Large Format photography is inherently contemplative, or even more contemplative than other formats.  I finally managed to find an excellent thread on the Large Format Photograpy website, which is well worth reading in it’s entirety, because lots of different viewpoints are expressed and there’s no flamewar.  There are 57 posts in that thread, and there are a broad range of views expressed.  It’s well worth reading.

I still agree with what I wrote on that thread:

…for years, I put up with the meager photographic output that I got when I exposed just a few sheets of film per day. I felt my photography was going nowhere and very slowly.

Then, on one trip to the Olympic Peninsula, I decided to chuck all that stuff, just as an experiment. My goal on that trip was to return with the largest possible pile of exposed film - and screw the whole ‘tuning’ the image thing. If I saw three compositional possiblities, I would expose film on all three. No longer would I spend countless minutes with painstaking focus, agonizing over zone placement, etc. Instead, I’d set up the camera, make the darn exposure, and then move on. If I botched the focus, well, tough.

Before the trip I did a little practice. At the end of the practice, I could set up the camera and make an exposure in about a minute.

On that trip, in one morning, I exposed over 50 sheets of film. Lesson number one was to put more than 50 sheets into the pack when hiking in. My goal was to set up the camera and make an exposure whenever I found something interesting. No ‘editting’ at exposure time. My goal was to get over the threshold where you look at something and ask yourself the question “is it worth spending 15 minutes on this?”. With practice, that question becomes ‘Is it worth spending 2 minutes on this?’ Trust me, you’ll capture far more interesting photographs when the threshold is set at two minutes than when it’s set at 15 minutes, not to mention better results in fleeting lighting.

Now for the bottom line - I got several great shots from that trip - more than any other trip to that point. I got lots and lots of shots ranging from ‘really good’ down to ‘darn good’. On top of that, I got perhaps half a dozen ‘what the heck was I thinking’ images.

I say forget the whole ‘contemplative’ thing. Practice ruthlessly with your gear to the point where you can set up, expose, and tear down in minimum time. You don’t have to always make exposures in a rush but the practice will mean that most of the time you *aren’t* rushing. Assess your gear for how efficient it is. If your meter is too fiddly and it takes more than a few seconds to make an exposure decision, ditch the meter on Ebay and buy a simpler one. At least for B&W work, exposure boils down to a simple decision and a fast way to mark the film for your development choice. I have labels pre-printed with ‘N’, ‘N-1′, ‘N+1′ etc which I just slap on the readyloads. I don’t fill out lengthy exposure records, take careful notes, or any of that stuff anymore.

And the real bottom line is this: on those trips where I have practiced and can make exposures quickly, I come back with more images, and better images. On those trips, I have more fun, I feel more satisfaction, and often I find myself swept up in a ‘flow’ which is really gratifying. None of that would happen if I continued to take 15 minutes to set up each exposure.

and

I think it’s a mistake to equate ’slow pace’ with ‘contemplative’.

If I spend a morning on the beach, and my process is that I just wander where my attention draws me, taking three minutes to make an exposure every fifteen minutes or so - that seems pretty contemplative to me. At that rate, I’d make 4 exposures an hour, or something like 16 exposures in a four hour morning of photography. At that pace, things seem unhurried. 12 minutes out of each hour are spent fiddling with the camera - 48 minutes are spent looking at things. In other words, you’re spending 80% of your time *looking* and 20% of your time setting up and making exposures.

Note what happens if it takes you 15 minutes to set up the camera and make an exposure - suddenly, four exposures an hour means that you’re spending 100% of your time on setup, and 0% of your time looking. It’s hard to be alert and attentive to your surroundings when you’re spending 100% of your time on setup.

So what happens is that you end up slowing down the pace. To get back to the 80% looking, you ease up to the point where you take one exposure every hour and a quarter. The results of your four hour foray have been reduced to 3 exposures. It’s tough to attend to what’s around you when each exposure you make represents 1/3rd of the morning because each exposure represents such a huge investment.

What I’ve learned, I think, is that it’s important to be able to make an exposure quickly and with little effort for two reasons: 1) it leaves more time for ‘contemplation’, and 2) it lowers the threshold between the impulse to make a photograph and the act of making it.

But don’t just consider what I wrote.  Go and read the entire thread.

I went out yesterday afternoon, taking photographs in the valley (which is currently flooded due to the arrival of another Pineapple Express ™). As an experiment, the only lens I used was the PC-Nikkor on the EOS-5d.  My goal was to play with the lens, trying out using the lens to make panoramic format photos with an aspect ratio of 2:1.

There’s no particular reason to choose 2:1 - with two exposures the 11mm shift of the lens lets you make an image that’s 24mm x 58mm, an aspect ratio just about the same as a 7×17 camera.  But 2:1 is what I did with cropping on the 4×5, and I thought it would be fun to try it again.  It took me a while to get a grip on the combination of the aspect ratio and focal length and in the end I had the feeling that I’d like a focal length that’s just a smidgen shorter.  Since the focal length I used to do 2:1 on the 4×5 was a 135mm lens (equivlent to to about a 65mm in this format), this was a bit of a surprise, and the whole thing felt quite a bit different - much wider, and it strangely the frame felt much longer.  But fun!  With the wider lens, there’s more of a sense of interval to the panoramic frame.  Reading it now this doesn’t seem like it’s very well articulated, but with the wider lens it’s easier to get a sense of rythm to the arrangment of things; I don’t know why.

The rotating aspect of the PC Nikkor (which allows you to shift in any direction) has click stops, so that you can reliably reset the shift repeatably to a number of angles - directly left and directly right (as well as up and down).  Alas, hitting the detent doesn’t quite put you back to the same spot reliably, so that the two images are often just slightly offset vertically.  Not a big problem but annoying.

All this makes me think that the Canon 24mm TS-E would be a great choice.  I suspect the next week will see me ordering one.

Oren Grad writes (in a comment on this post)

Whether and how art can bear meaning is a debate for another occasion. But do you think it is possible to tell from looking at a photograph whether the photographer understood the subject in the way you argue is important? From looking at a group of photographs?

Well, I don’t think there’s much debate about whether photographs/art can bear meaning.  It seems pretty obvious to me.  I show a photograph to my wife.  She understands that it’s not random color marks on a piece of paper; to her, it’s actually a photograph of our studio in the snow.  Don’t believe me?  Take one of your photographs with a recognizable subject out into a public place.  Walk up to a random person, hand them the photograph, and ask them “What is this?”

Some very large fraction (I’d guess something like 70%) of the people you try this experiment with will answer “Oh, it’s a (whatever the subject is).”  Some smaller fraction (perhaps 30%) will answer “It’s a photograph of a (whatever).”  None of them will say “It’s a piece of paper with marks on it.”

Asking whether art can bear meaning is about as sensible as asking whether the words you’re reading can bear meaning.  Evidently, they can.  The question of whether we can constrain the meaning so that exactly the information we want communicated gets to the recipient has a certain degree of interest, as Lewis Carroll observed:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master - that’s all.’

On the other question, I think you’re asking it the wrong way.  The question is not so much “Can we look at a photograph (or photographs) and tell by looking at them whether the photographer possessed the sort of understanding I’ve described?” because that’s not what I’ve claimed. 

What I was claiming was that if you want your photographs to have meaning, as opposed to just being shapes on a bit of paper, then having deeper understanding of the subject and not just labeling the subject with ’shape labels’ is actually central to the problem of making the photograph.  The ‘right brain’/'no object labels, just the shapes’ mode is useful for dealing with the graphic design aspect of composing the photograph.  It’s just another way of labeling things - instead of Western Red Cedar, we use Triangle, and so we’re better able to do the graphic design thing.  (the fact that it’s just another way of labeling things is what makes me think the whole ‘right brain/left brain’ thing is a bunch of hooey in terms of understanding where tthe cognition that’s taking place is happening.)

But if we’re aiming at meaning, there’s more to composing a photograph than just arranging shapes on a plane.  If there’s meaning in a photograph, then it got there in one of two ways.  We put it there, or it got there by accident. 

If we’re hoping for meaning to appear in our photos by accident, then I’d suggest we should all be fitting intervalometers to our cameras, setting them to fire the shutter once per second, and then swinging the camera around our head by the strap.  If that’s your gig, great - but I think it will feel pointless pretty quickly.

If, on the other hand, we’re aiming to put meaning in there, it’s going to help if we understand what we’re photographing.  The more deeply we understand, the more meaning we take from the scene, and thus the more meaning we can take into account when we address the problems of making the photograph.

And I think that’s especially true if we’re aiming not just to put meaning into the photographs but also to find meaning in the process of making them.

Well, it seems like everyone has something to say about the NYT piece on Jeff Wall.  Lots of comments on the art theory of his work.  Lots of comments along the lines of “He’s not an artist, he’s a crab with good PR”.

Beyond observing that Wall’s work doesn’t seem to represent good value as an object (Do you have any idea of what a wonderful art collection you could assemble with the price of ONE of Wall’s photographs?), I’d comment on this:

Having chosen not to live in an art capital like New York or London, Wall professes that he could just as easily have lived anywhere, with little effect on his work. “One thing I hate with small cities is the myth of their specialness,” he says. “It’s like in Europe, everywhere has its own ham, its own wine, its own cheese, and they’re all nice, but it doesn’t interest me.” He is after “the indeterminate American look,” which he says he can find by not looking for anything in particular. “You have to forget about the idea of the spirit of the place,” he says. “It’s one of the big, consoling myths of people who live nowhere.”

Here’s my observation on that, speaking as a person who, beyond having visited art capitals like New York and London, has a lot of entry and exit stamps in his passport.  I’ve visited places which were widely considered Important Places.  I’ve visited places which I’m sure would be considered ‘nowhere’ by Wall (and I live in just such a place, in fact).  I’ve been to small cities, large cities, medium cities.  In fact, having spent twelve months traveling in a motorhome with my family, visiting all 49 continental states and every Canadian province and territory except Newfoundland, I’m pretty confident that I’ve seen a heck of a lot more of ‘America’ than Wall has.

And, speaking as a photographer who works almost entirely within the landscape genre, if there’s a myth it’s that there are places which are ‘nowhere’.  Every place, every single damn place I’ve visited has had its own character, its own feel, its own process and history.  Anyone who thinks there’s a single ‘indeterminate American look’ does not have the smallest clue about the staggering diversity of places that fall under the broad category of ‘America’. It’s like looking at Tuscany in Italy, the Bavarian Alps, and London, and claiming you’re seeing ‘an indeterminate European look’.  It’s arrant nonsense.  Trust me, there’s no more similarity between, say, West Quoddy Head, Maine and Niobrara, Nebraska than there is between San Gimignano in Tuscany and Tintagel in Cornwall.  And I say you can trust me because I’ve been to all four places.

To return to the subject of this morning’s post, the problem that afflicts Wall (actually, it’s more like ONE of the problems that afflicts Wall) is that he’s been looking at places, and he’s been too quick to apply the ‘indeterminate America’ label, and as soon has he’s applied the label, he doesn’t look more closely.  He’s like the mother in the anecdote, pointing at a wide variety of different fish, and telling her daughter “Look at the fish!”.

I’m not at all sure I subscribe to the whole ‘left brain/right brain’ paradigm of how our brain and consciousness are structured, but there’s one aspect of it that I find compelling - that part of me looks at things and says ‘book’, or ‘chair’, and another part of me looks at the same things and says ‘more or less flat rectangular thing”, or “wooden thing with four points of contact with the ‘floor’, with a pleasingly curved wooden bow that forms the back and sort of bends to become sides.”  And, of course, that seeing things as shapes and spaces is ‘artist’ mode, and the mode where things get assigned labels is ‘rational/non-artist’ mode.

That is, ‘artist’ mode is useful when you’re trying to compose an image.  You have a bunch of shapes, and you want to arrange them inside the frame of the photograph (or painting, or sketch, or whatever) and the fact that the triangle is actually a tree and the oblong is a puddle of water and the circular thing is a boulder is actually tangential to the graphic design problem you’re confronting to make this photograph.  In this case, ‘tree’ and ‘puddle’ and ‘rock’ are labels that we throw on things so that, having categorized them, we can promptly ignore them, and that means that we need to turn off the labeling process and actually look at what is before us.

The problem I see is this: in the end, if you want to make art that has meaning, instead of just being shapes on a bit of paper, then the fact that the triangle is a tree, and the oblong is a puddle and the circle is a boulder is actually central to the photographic problem.  I’ll go further, and I’ll claim that if, when you look at this scene, you see not just a triangular tree, but you see a  Western Red Cedar, and the puddle is not just an oblong puddle but standing water accumulated on exposed glacial moraine, and the boulder is not just a rock but is specifically granite, then you’ll be better able to not only understand the place and the meaning of the place, but you’ll be better equipped to make photographs of it. 

That’s because knowing it’s a Western Red Cedar growing where there’s standing water tells you something about how this particular place works.  Knowing it’s not just pebbles but glacial moraine, and that it’s not just a rock but is specifically granite tells you something about how this place came to be this place.  And that understanding is essential to the process of photographing it.

And so, paradoxically, it’s not that labels are bad.  It’s as if general labels - labels that lump things in broad categories - are not helpful.  Labels that differentiate are helpful, and good.

A little anecdote - long ago, when my daughter was small, my wife took her to the local aquarium.  They wandered through the exhibits, with my wife holding my daughter up to each tank, pointing out the different fishes, and saying things like “Oh, look at the pretty clownfish”, or “Isn’t that spiny lumpsucker funny looking?” or “Can you find the flat flounder?”  And, as they wandered through the aquarium this way, my wife noticed another mother with another little girl.  They, too, were wandering from one tank to the next.  At each tank, the mother would hold the little girl up to the tank, point, and say enthusiastically “Look at the fish”.  On to the next tank, another boost up to viewing height, and the same sentence - “Look at the fish!”

My daughter grew up, and for quite a while she volunteered at the aquarium, where she reveled in the details of the diverse aquatic life of Puget Sound.  It seems that perhaps being introduced to the subject with the details apparent was more helpful in letting her understand the subject that lumping a whole host of different animals together with one word: fish.

So it’s not that labels are bad, per se.  It’s that we need to learn to use the labels as tools.  We have to not stop when we look across a meadow to the other side and see “forest”, because it’s not just a forest - it’s trees and shrubs and birds and small animals, and perhaps deer and coyotes and bobcats and bears.  And, it turns out, it’s not just trees, but it’s specifically Douglas Fir, and Western Hemlock, and Western Red Cedar, and Cottonwood and Alder and perhaps Cascara and Bitter Cherrry.  Even beyond that, it’s old Cottonwood and Alder, and young Cedar and Hemlock, and a really, really old Doug Fir.  And that tells us a story about how this place came to be the way it is, and how it worked yesterday, works today, will work tomorrow.

And wouldn’t it be nice if, when we made a photo, it reflected all that, instead of just being a ‘forest’?  I think it would.

Last year, my son took a class in forensics.  Yes, forensics like you see on CSI.  One day, at the beginning of the semester, he came home and explained to me about Locard’s Exchange Principle.  This principle states that whenever someone visits a place, they take something away with them, and leave something behind.

So we visit a place to photograph, and we take something away with us.  There are the burrs that hitchhike away on our shoelaces, the dust on our shoes, the pollen on our sleeve from where we brushed against a plant.  And we leave something behind, too - the mud on that was on our shoes before we arrived mixes with the mud at the site, hairs from our balding head blow into the scene,  a slip of paper falls from our pocket.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the non-physical analogue to Locard’s principle.  Every place we visit, we leave changed subtly by what we found there.  Each image we make changes who we are.  And, of course, we’ve altered the place, too.  Our making a photograph somewhere changes the liklihood that more people will visit the spot; our photographs alter other people’s perception of what’s around them and how they should interact with it.  There is, if you will, a sort of Locard’s Principle of the soul, which is why we humans find it so rewarding to travel to different places.

The parallelism between physical world rules and those of our spiritual lives remind me of Plato’s cave - the idea that the reality we perceive is a mere projection of a reality that’s deeper and richer than just what we perceive.  The parallels between the physical world rules (e.g. “if your photos aren’t good enough, you’re not getting close enough,” or Locard’s Exchange Principle) and the apparent rules of the emotional/spiritual world we live in make me wonder if that’s part of what Art is all about - getting past the projection and coming to grips with the reality behind it.

A little lesson in mathematics history.  Even if you’re not mathematically inclined, soldier on.  I promise that by the end, we’ll have come around to the problem of the photographer, the fence, and the fact that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

Long ago (in 1874-84) and far away (in Halle, Germany) a mathematician named Georg Cantor published his seminal work establishing the field of set theory.  In this work, Cantor established that (surprisingly) there is more than one size of ‘infinity’ - that is, not all infinities are equal; some are larger than others.  This caused quite a stir, and Cantor’s work was roundly rejected by many. 

Anyway, it turns out that there are infinities, and there are infinities, and some are larger than others and they’re not all the same.  This brings us to the fence - the one we are tempted to jump so that we might partake of the photographs on the other side.

Part of the reason we’re tempted is that we know that there are infinitely many photographs to be taken on the other side of the fence.  Assign any nonzero value to each of those photographs, and the value of the set of photos we can take only if we jump the fence is infinite, and thus we’re strongly tempted to become a Bad Person, jump the fence, and start filling up those really large CF cards we just bought.  Who can resist a treasure trove of infinite value?  It’s right there, taunting us from the other side of the fence!

But there are infinitely many potential photos on BOTH sides of the fence, and it turns out the two infinities are the same.  Humans being what they are, we sense that if we add the photos on the other side of the fence to the photos on this side of the fence, we’ll end up with access to more photos.  Cantor, having drawn distinctions amongst the possible sizes of infinite sets, however, would tell us that we haven’t actually increased the size of the set of potential photos- we have an infinity of potential photos on one side of the fence, an equal infinity on the other side, and strangely enough, the sum of the two is an infinity the same as the two sides independently.

So the perception that we’ll have access to more photos if we jump the fence is a failing of human intuition, not an actual fact.  Jumping the fence doesn’t get us access to more photos, it gets us access to different photos.  Somehow, the fact that we can’t have those potential photos on the other side makes them more valuable to us than the potential photos we can walk right up to.  We think of the photos on this side of the fence as ‘bad’, and of the photos on the other side of the fence as ‘good’.

But, as a famous Dane once observed, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”  We view the accessible side of the fence as a prison, and the inaccessible side as a land of unparalleled freedom of expression.  But, if you see the accessible side as a prison, it’s because “your ambition makes it one, ’tis too narrow for your mind.”  It’s our attitudes that say the photos on the road side of the fence are undesirable, and the ones on the field side are desirable.

Photographers aren’t frustrated because they want to take photographs of the real world and think it exists solely on the other side of the fence; that’s just silly.  They’re frustrated because they want to make photographs of a fictional world, a world that exists only in their mind.  They know that world isn’t on this side of the fence, and they conclude (quite wrongly) that it must be on the other side.  And it’s not.  It’s just more real world on the other side of the fence.

This fictional mental world that landscape photographers covet is just that - a invented fiction.  In that fictional world, there are no telephone poles or wires.  There are no road signs, no roads, no cars, no drainage ditches and no fences.  There are no houses, no farm equipment, no signs of human interaction with the environment at all.  It’s Yosemite without the parking lots and visitors and trails and footprints.  It’s nature, pure and pristine but without any reality.  It’s the lovely world of Bambi without that nasty hunter - a world where idyllic deer amble peacefully through a strangely unrealistic wood and stop to drink daintily from a surreal but beautiful tranquil pool without any fear.  The real world isn’t like that.

Somewhere along the way, landscape photography has lost its way, and it stopped being about the landscape as it actually exists and became entirely about attempting to exclude reality.  It’s become the photography of whatever is left after you crop out the ‘real world’.

And the reason all those photographers are so frustrated is that when you’re done cropping out the ‘real world’, there’s almost nothing left to photograph.

I thought I’d take a moment to point out a factual error in the comments on the The Photos Not to Take post.

Is it possible that the fence is intended to keep something in and that the land owner has no problem with you on his property taking pictures? In the absence of a “no trespassing” sign, I am more inclined to think the owner would not mind.

This will vary by jurisdiction, but in most places in the rural US, walking into a field that is clearly under cultivation is trespassing by definition,  regardless of whether it’s posted or not, regardless of whether it’s fenced or not.

By the same token, land that’s fenced is presumed to be under cultivation.  Jumping the fence, regardless of whether the property is posted with signs, is again by definition trespassing.

In some jurisdictions, the burden of buying signs that meet the legal posting requirements is eased by specifying a mark which has the same legal meaning as a “No Trespassing” sign.  In most (but not all) cases, the specified mark is a paint blaze around eye height on a tree trunk, but requirements governing the color, size, and positioning of the marks vary wildly from one place to another, as do the spacing requirements for signs/marks.

In rural areas, property boundaries are often long (e.g. miles).  No farmer is going to post signs every fifty feet along his fence line if the law says it doesn’t mean anything more than the fence already does, just because someone who is ignorant of the law might feel the absence of a sign is an implicit granting of permission.  By the same token, no forest owner is going to erect a fence (and interfere with movement of wildlife) or nail signs to trees (and risk a nail becoming hidden in the wood) when a simple paint blaze conveys the same message, costs less, is easier to maintain, has no impact on wildlife, and doesn’t damage the trees.

I’m opposed to photographers trespassing.  But, you’re going to trespass, I think it only makes sense to invest minimal effort into researching exactly what the law is in the jurisdiction in which you’re photographing, so that you understand what the fence/signs/paint blazes actually mean.

People erect fences for a variety of reasons, but in the most general sense, they put up a fence to keep things on one side of the fence from mingling with things on the other side.   Claiming that you can divine the owner’s intent from subtle features of the barrier is arrogant, especially when you don’t understand the strict meaning of the clues you’re interpreting.

This post is a little extension and clarification on the trespassing issues raised in The Photos Not to Take.  Judging from the comments and email I’ve received, I’m guessing most readers are pegging my views on trespassing as falling somewhere between ’sanctimonious prig’ and ‘quaintly naive’.  Maybe it’s more of a bimodal distribution, really, with not a lot of gradation in between.

First, let me observe (and several folks have pointed out) that I’m aware that, in some places and in some cultures, the entire concept of trespass is either nonexistent or else so weak as to be meaningless.  In the US, where I live, and in particular in the rural US, however, trespassing is strongly supported by both the law and by tradition. 

One of the big arguments that seems to have cropped up is what I’ll call the ‘I only do it if I’m not harming anything’ argument.  I don’t think it holds water, and here’s why: in my experience, people’s ability to judge whether there’s harm is pretty limited.

Here’s an example that cropped up just a few months ago.  I had stopped by a spot where a stream runs into the river; it’s a spot that was once cleared and under cultivation but is now undergoing habitat restoration - mostly planting trees and other vegetation which will grow taller, and eventually shade the stream and river, and help keep water temperatures low to improve the habitat for fish.  The same trees and shrubs will provide cover for small wildlife, etc.  You get the idea.

I arrived at the site, and started to walk down the marked path; along the river the actual restoration area was marked off with survey tape and signs that read “Habitat restoration in progress, please do not enter”.  And I came across a photographer who had jumped the tape, walked past the signs, and was setting up on the bank of the river.  He wanted a clear view upstream, so he was pulling up what he thought were just sticks, stuck in the ground at regular intervals.  When I asked him to stop, that’s actually what he said: “They’re just sticks.”

What he didn’t understand was that these “just sticks” were not just sticks; they were actually hybrid poplar stems that had been treated with a rooting agent.  The planters take these “sticks”, jam them into the ground in a promising spot, and the “stick” grows roots, then branches, and turns into a nice, big, fast growing tree with lush foliage.  So his “I’m not harming anything” actually turned out to be quite harmful - monumentally destructive, actually.  His ability to judge harm was hopelessly inadequate simply because he had no understanding of what he was looking at.

Not everyone who jumps a fence or walks past a “don’t go past this point” sign is quite so consciously destructive, of course.  Some just don’t notice their surroundings.  I’ve seen a photographer step off a trail (past a warning sign) and set up their tripod, and in the process tread directly on top of a trillium bloom - a beautiful, fairly rare flower that’s actually a protected species in Washington State.  When I pointed it out, her response was “Chill out.  It’s just a flower.  There are others.” which rather neatly demonstrated her complete lack of understanding.

And that’s what makes it hard to judge.  You come across a fence, or warning sign, and unless you really understand why the barrier to your entry is there, you can’t possibly judge whether you’ll cause damage, or suffer some harm.  To you, it looks like field full of crops, but what you don’t notice is that the field has just been sprayed with some hazardous chemical.  Or, perhaps, it looks like a tranquil field of clover, but you don’t notice the bee hives placed there this morning, filled with stressed out bees.  You step off the path in a cultivated garden, careful not to step on any plants, but your footprint compresses the roots of a delicate plant.  There’s no way to enumerate the risks, and that’s why it’s unwise to second guess the the person who placed the barrier, who almost certainly understands why it was placed better than you do.

Finally, there’s the very real harm inflicted on the psyche of the owner, who has a not unreasonable expectation of privacy and control over his/her property.  I think Walter Baron sums this up nicely in this comment.  It’s easy to dismiss the discomfort of others, but I think it’s very wrong to do so. 

The argument’s been raised that it’s not possible to practice photography without being invasive and destructive, both in the physical and cultural sense.  While that might be true in the most nit-picky sense (everything we do causes damage somewhere) I think that if we go around justifying our destruction by claiming it’s all in the service of Art, our disregard for things will show in our art.  And I don’t think that’s good.