Diptychs (and triptychs). Thinking about photos in groups: twos, threes, and fours, maybe more (the grids of photos by the Bernd & Hilla Becher, e.g.). How does pairing photos change them? How does looking for pairs alter the process of photographing? I don’t know, but I like to think about it.
With the new month comes a new postcard. Leaves always fascinate me. Not in their collective but in their individuality (a collection of portraits of leaves is in my recent 52/4 journal). This one caught my eye. Let me know if you want to get a postcard of it.
A warm fall deprived us the season’s flaming reds, oranges, and yellows. Most leaves just turned brown and fell to the ground. The frost this morning seemed to be mocking me.
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.
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.
But look past the cottonwoods and you’ll see explosions of color everywhere.
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.
Even when a single subject dominates the frame, you can’t escape the chaos that surrounds it.
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.
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.
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 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.
Looking out across the backyard this afternoon I watched a cloud of leaves fall to the ground. Despite the warm, humid day, fall is coming. As the days become shorter and the sun meanders more obliquely across the sky, I look forward to the most colorful season of the year.
Autumn hikes are magical. The rustling of dry leaves in the trees when a cool breeze blows gently through them. The sound of your footfalls muffled by the bed of red and orange and yellow leaves. These are the moments that make fall so special.
Soon, however, all the leaves will have fallen. And then winter will usher in its own quiet, monochrome beauty. But until then, I will enjoy the technicolor splendor of fall.
