I tend to spend the fall looking up at the trees to see the autumn colors. I particularly like the early fall as the leaves form a sort of autumnal spectrum of colors, ranging from deep burgundy in the upper most branches of a tree through flaming reds and oranges, to yellows, and on to greens in the lowest branches. The maples put on a particularly lovely display.
But I also look down for the remnants of those autumnal spectra. The other morning after a gentle drizzle, two leaves lay on some paving stones not far from the maple where they had until recently hung.
A pair of leaves lay on the ground, the rain having loosed them from nearby maple tree.
The arid forests of the Southwest are beautiful in the fall. Against backdrops of blue-gray junipers and piñons the vibrant yellows stand out. Cottonwoods are the iconic fall tree, and for good reason.
Another cottonwood offers an impressive display of fall color in the Southwest.
But look past the cottonwoods and you’ll see explosions of color everywhere.
Fall colors in the Southwest are magical.
Hikes and walks through these forests present chaotic scenes, often without a clear subject. In this way, they offer less popular photographic compositions—given the current vogue for dominate subjects—but call to mind the sometimes messy and busy compositions of people like Eliot Porter.
A tree that will never again drop a leaf.
Even when a single subject dominates the frame, you can’t escape the chaos that surrounds it.
Fall color high above the desert in the Southwest.
There’s a freedom to photographing the Southwest, a freedom that evokes the mythology of these wild and untamed lands, and the adventures they encourage.
(These photos were taken during a trip to the Southwest one November not long ago.)
Autumn is here, bringing with it the drizzle of falling leaves and the carpet of those already fallen. Greens, yellows, reds, and browns, sometimes crowded together, sometimes by themselves. I wonder if they get lonely?
A personal trainer was cleaning up his equipment the other day in the park. He was wearing a shirt that said: “You don’t have to train today. The world needs average.” An odd combination of snarky and motivational. Nonetheless his shirt is a useful reminder that everyday is an opportunity to practice and through that practice to improve. So, to paraphrase:
You don’t have to take a picture today, but think of all the photos you’ll miss.
The leaves on the roads and the sidewalks remind us that fall is here.
It is common knowledge that a good photograph tells a story. Some go so far as to claim that “Every Photo Tells a Story.” More abstract photographs are surely exempted from this demand to tell a story. But what about other photographs? Do landscapes? Portraits? Astrophotography? Some, like street photography and documentary photography seem more like purveyors of stories. But what kind of story? And who composes that story? And for whom?
How did this skull end up here, in the tall grass on the edge of campus?
I want to try thinking about photographs as not telling a story but inviting the viewer to imagine a story. A photograph, in this way, doesn’t tell but rather asks. It encourages us to notice something and to try to explain it. Such a photograph asks us to reflect and to wonder.
A photograph is wonderfully and invitingly just a fragment of an infinite number of stories. We can use that fragment to reconstruct any number of those stories.
I really want to like this photograph, but something about it bothers me.
If only a person had been standing by the table looking out the window.
It has nothing to do with what’s in the frame and everything to do with what’s not in the picture. Or more precisely: What bothers me is what I had to do to get rid of something that was in the original picture.
I wandered around that corner for quite some time trying to get the right angle that would capture the window, the table, the building, and the sky. There was no ideal spot that isolated the building in just the way I wanted. So I settled for what seemed to be the best composition. Unfortunately, that composition had a massive building dominating the left half of the frame:
If only that skyscraper hadn’t been there mucking up the sky.
Easy enough to remove in post-processing. That’s why they invented the healing and inpainting brushes and the clone-stamp tool. A few minutes with my preferred editing program and the skyscraper was gone. Nobody would be any the wiser.
Except I know what I did. And for me, knowing that I cloned out half the frame ruins the final image. The effort to remove the offending building became an interesting exercise in how much manipulation I can accept. I have no problem with various local adjustments and will make small distractions disappear. But at some point it becomes too much for me. I don’t know where that dividing line falls, and I certainly can’t quantify it. But as a rule of thumb: When the manipulation changes the mood or tone of the photo entirely, as it does in the images here, it is too much for me.
Two caveats: First, my rule of thumb is almost certainly grounded in some combination of a romantic notion of photographic integrity and a preference for one type of labor (walking around and looking for the perfect frame) over another (editing on a computer). Second, this is my rule of thumb for my photographs, and is not meant to apply to anybody else or that person’s photographs.
I was wandering the city that overcast Wednesday afternoon. While not empty, as it had been in the early months of the pandemic, it was not bustling in any normal way. Most offices in the city remained closed or only sparsely staffed. So I took the chance to look for scenes that would capture the emptiness. Glancing up at one corner, I noticed a table next to a window in a low-rise office building.
If only a person had been standing by the table looking out the window.
Nine months ago, I probably could have waited long enough to catch somebody standing at the window, transforming this photo from a minimalist picture into an Edward Hopper-esque photograph.
Even without the person, I really like this photo. It captures the image I had hoped to find that afternoon. I like the loneliness it suggests. The table that earlier this year would have been a meeting place for colleagues to chat and share some gossip, or a place for somebody to take a quick break is today collecting dust, like so many tables and desks in offices everywhere.
With the new month comes a new postcard. This month’s postcard comes from a local park where I spent much of my childhood. If you want a copy, let me know.
When were these lawn bowling greens popular?
How many times as kids were we chased off these bowling greens? More often, I am sure, than they were ever used by actual bowlers.
I recently returned to the Park (the proper name is the Arcadia Community Regional Park, but to the hoards of us who marauded around it as kids, it was just the Park) where I spent so much of my pre- and early-teen childhood. Especially those long summer days. The sun, seemingly stuck in the sky somewhere just past noon, burning down with particular intensity, baking the metal merry-go-round and the rocket ship to a skin-searing million degrees, or so we claimed. The sand offered little relief from the temperature and no cushion from a fall. When we could no longer endure the heat, we would wander over to the pool and try not to get yelled at for doing flips off the diving board. In those eternal afternoons everything seemed harsh and faded in the blazing sun. Today I still see the Park as desaturated and overexposed.
The Lawn Bowling greens were never very popular.
Wandering through the park I was immediately drawn to the Lawn Bowling greens. As kids we would hop the chainlink fence, which at three feet was surely more aesthetic than functional, and run around on the manicured grass until some worker would chase us out yelling something about ruining the lawns. Why, we thought, do the old people get the nice lawns and shaded benches while we have to put up with blazing hot, rough sand? Lawn bowling continues, apparently, to be something of a niche pastime.
Wasted many summer afternoons at this pool.
The pool was a mixed bag. It offered some respite from the heat, but you couldn’t chase each other around it (no running allowed, the sign said and the lifeguard enforced), you weren’t supposed to do flips off the diving boards (another rule announced by a sign and enforced by a lifeguard), and it seemed always to be crowded with moms and their little kids.
Wandering through the Park I couldn’t help but recall those summer days and to lament the loss not of innocence but of the rocket ship, the merry-go-round, and the sand. I also couldn’t help but see the Park in overexposed and desaturated scenes. None of the photos I took that day looked quite right — the colors too vivid; the light too soft. For me, the Park will always be vaguely overexposed and desaturated. Nostalgia seems to be what I photographed that day.
Knausgaard’s collection of essays is a joy to read. While the essays in Autumn are all quite good, the real pleasure comes from the physicality of the book. The coarse texture to the dusk jacket.
Knausgaard’s book is a pleasure to hold and therefore to read.
The pages are a smooth, heavy paper that has a sensuous feel. The illustrations and the printed words look better on this paper, in part because the pages are pleasure to hold and to turn.
Knausgaard on Sander.
Knausgaard has a smart essay on August Sander that hints at the value of printing your work in book form, and the challenge and allure of photography. About Sander’s work, he says (in part):
… They have no names assigned to them, only professions, and the photographs are grouped by social class: the peasantry, workers, the bourgeoisie. They are endlessly fascinating, both singly and taken together. I can’t stop looking at them, the faces of these people who lived in Europe around the time of the First World War. Many of the faces have impenetrable expressions, somehow mute, and yet they say so much, and how can that be?
The photograph not only separates an object from time, but also detaches it from space, isolating it from the relationships it is part of. The tensions felt in these photographs are due to the fact that every face, every person in them carries a charge, but what has created the charge is invisible. This explanatory deficit gives them a peculiarly enigmatic quality, it opens the closed faces, but we don’t know towards what.
These essays, like Sander’s photographs, are endlessly fascinating singly and taken together. They offer a tactile experience that enriches the reading. Their sequence in the book reflect an intentionality and invites us to think about how that order reveals something more than the individual essays can. They encourage us to move slowly through them, perhaps leafing back now and then to make connections to resolve or identify tensions between them.
Similarly, I think, physical photographs encourage us to slow down, to pause, to lay them out next to each other and compare them. If they are printed in a book, the arrangement and grouping tell us more than the individual photographs could. In either case, individual prints or sequences in books, there is a sensual pleasure in holding a photograph that has been printed on good paper.
