Pause. Look around. Look closely. What have I not noticed every other time I’ve passed this spot. Whether mundane and dull or extraordinary and beautiful. Somewhere around me right now is a detail I’ve not seen before. Find it and add it to my “Museum of Overlooked Details.”
Singular photographs are fragments, or perhaps illustrations waiting for a story to give them context. But series of photographs seem to prompt a different kind of reflection. Collect together enough individual fragments and arrange them in some order, and the begin to reveal something you can’t see when looking at just one. The photographer engages in a sort of Aristotelian project, seeking out as many discrete examples of something in its natural setting in order to discern the features and characteristics each shares. Or the ways that each interacts with, shapes and is shaped by, that natural environment. In this way, photography becomes a project of natural history.
The intentional and sustained effort to take a number of related photos and to assemble them into a meaningful series encourages reflection and a sort of tranquility. And, in the end, says as much about the object studied, e.g., windmills, as it says about the photographer. But then, that’s true of any natural history endeavor.
Linger for a moment to think about ruin and decay. What if ruin is not the result of neglect but is, instead, an expression of value? Ruin and decay are not accidents but choices, as is our fascination with them. The one, perhaps, creates the other.
We live and wander amongst ruin. Ruin dots the landscape. We work around ruin, seem to preserve ruin.
Crumbling is not an instant’s Act
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation’s processes
Are organized Decays
There by itself, in the weak sun that fall afternoon, The Aermotor windmill turned slowly in the breeze, marking time with a rhythmic scraping of the rotating axle. It was a sort of sentinel, standing watch over a barbed wired fence and wide open range. At some point, this windmill probably served some purpose, but what I can only guess. Like so many windmills, vestiges of past hopes and dreams, this one sentenced to a lone existence, forever spinning in the wind to no effect.
Every time I see one one of these windmills I recall those lines:
…
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Behind some pine trees, in the corner of the park, stands a swing set. The old, heavy-duty kind. All galvanized pipes, chain, and hard rubber that will probably survive armageddon. This swing set happens to be for toddlers, the seats those horribly uncomfortable baskets designed by somebody who can’t recall the abrasions and pain these caused. Nobody uses this swing set any longer. Or any of the metal playground equipment. It has all been replaced by garish plastic single-unit contraptions that come in hideously bright colors and are, no doubt, thought to be safer. These new playground sets are placed prominently in the park, where the stand out like sore thumbs and are regularly surrounded by young parents tending to their children who are “playing” on them.
But how much has today’s “playing” changed from the days of see-saws and merry-go-rounds, tall slides, rings and bars, and swings? How much has safety from ever looming injury altered how and when kids “play”? Sure, we think today’s playground sets are less likely to scald your hands in the summer or freeze your skin off in the winter. Sure, we think today’s plastic slides might seem more forgiving than the metal ones of years ago. But at what cost? Today’s playground sets with all their built in “learning” activities don’t require the same creativity and resourcefulness, particularly when the parents are lurking about constantly telling their kids how to play. How much easier is it for kids to just conform to the parameters of “playing” the designers of playground sets and the parents lay out for them? And how will a kid ever learn that no, no matter how hard you try, you can’t swing all the way around the top bar in a circle?
But maybe we’ve consigned that form of play, a form founded in profound boredom and limited options, to the obscure corners of the park, behind some trees where few people will see it.
Wandering through town the other day I walked by a building I’ve passed a hundred times. The most interesting aspect of the building was the astrology and tarot card reader that had a shop there for a couple years. With that gone, I scarcely give the building a second look. For some reason, I paused, wandered around the side, and looked around. There, above me was a set of stairs, an emergency escape of some sort, nearly black against a uniform gray sky.
I should pause more often, loiter around the buildings I have dismissed as uninteresting. Who knows what I might see.
Linger for a moment to look closely at the shell in the display case. It has been there, the label claims, for more than a century. The curator who first selected it for display along with how many of the other workers who have tended to it over the years are now dead. Yet the shell continues to sit there, silently beckoning to occasional museum visitor. How many stop to appreciate its form?
Perhaps only those who might also stop in a portico to admire the form of a staircase.
Carrying around a camera gives me license to look at things most of us walk past without noticing. The camera seems to give me permission to linger, to observe, to look around and behind, to look down and up. One rainy afternoon we took shelter in a portico. There in the shadows I noticed stairs leading up. I walked over and pushed gently on the ornate wrought-iron gate. It didn’t yield. Standing there in the middle, looking up, I wondered what I might find were I able to get past that gate.
On second thought: maybe the camera doesn’t give me permission to linger. Maybe I’m just a lingerer and an observer, and I use a camera to justify to myself if not to others my fascination with the world around me.
I really want to like this photograph, but something about it bothers me.
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:
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.
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.