Tag: Landscape photography

Mirror, Window, or Smoke-Fogged Glass?

I wonder how much of the vogue for photographs to express some deeper meaning relates to Szarkowski’s mirror-window dichotomy? It seems to me there is a strong preference of late for a rather blunt or simplistic version of the mirror side of the dichotomy, echoed in the oft repeated disdain for “merely aesthetic” or “calendar” photos (I’ve mused about this before). Photographs that hint at the inner, psychological states of the photographer garner praise and elicit awe (usually phrased something like, “I don’t really get it, but …” or “I don’t really like it, but …”). Somewhat paradoxically, those same photos are rarely considered pretty. How often have I heard a person compliment a photograph but then say they wouldn’t hang it on their wall.

Urban #181230.2

I need to go read Szarkowski’s Mirrors and Windows. American Photography since 1960 and see how in 1978 he characterized the distinction. I suspect most photography falls somewhere between the two. It is, again I suspect, less a dichotomy and more a spectrum. I don’t make photographs that reveal or hint at or otherwise broadcast my inner states of being, at least not in a blunt or crude way. But the camera always points both ways, is always a mirror and a window, and so all my photographs necessarily emerge from my psychological space. So while the “calendar” photos I take are, I hope, “merely aesthetically” pleasing, they also do more than merely look pretty on a wall.

Landscape #230612

July 25, 2023
Mnemosyne

My day had started early, before dawn. I drove miles down rough dirt roads to a trailhead. I hoisted my pack onto my back and cinched the straps. Without any real trail to follow, I headed off across the open country generally in a cardinal direction. A couple hours later, after setting up camp, I started exploring. It was a hot and stagnant afternoon. The sun blazed in a pale blue sky. I slowed a bit when the canyon narrowed and the sheer walls offered some shade. How do I track my progress: Hours? Miles? Steps? Salt caked on my brow?

Landscape #220512

None of that effort matters. The time, the distance, the effort, and the sweat are all irrelevant for the photograph. Yet for me, and only for me, they are part of the story. Some photographs are linked to the experiences surrounding them, both those experiences that preceded the photograph and those that followed it. Looking now at such photographs, I recall those experiences, the feeling of being there, the thoughts and ideas that moved me to take a particular picture. Not the effort expended to take them, but the intentionality in making them, that’s what matters. Photographs are waypoints, places I have paused. Together, they offer to chart my life. I take photographs to fill the pages of my atlas of living, each an opportunity to remember.

June 10, 2022
An Unoriginal Photo

Just as I am rarely alone, despite how far I might venture into the wilderness, I rarely take an original photograph. Sometimes, my photographs are obviously unoriginal (perhaps not entirely cliché but certainly not obscure).

Landscape #220511.1

I don’t care if some of my photography looks familiar because other people have been there before me and taken similar photos. In subtle and often overlooked ways, my photo captures a fleeting and irreproducible moment and reflects my particular framing of the scene, just as most previous and subsequent photos will capture fleeting moments and reflect some other photographer’s approach to the scene. And I will always take photos that don’t look so familiar, that reflect my personal eye for something. Such photos tend to work better in collections or as part of a series (see, for example, 52/4).

May 27, 2022
Lure of Shadows

I find something peaceful about these photographs. Looking at them recalls for me the days spent wandering alone. Now and then, when I was close to the road or near one of the trails, I would see other people. I might even hear them. But head north west, toward the San Andres mountains and soon I was all alone. Wandering up and down the gypsum dunes.

Landscape #181019.1

After about an hour they all began to look alike. The sun is relentless and seems to burn from above and below. A hat scarcely protects you from the glare so much light reflects up from the ground. Everywhere is either white sand or pale blue sky. It is easy to lose your way. There are no trails, no posts to mark the way. I understand how people get lost out here and, tragically, die from heat and dehydration. “What will I find over the next dune?” I wonder as I continue deeper into the dunes.

Landscape #181019.2

I paused near the top of each dune, marveling at the sight. As afternoon wore on, the sinking sun started casting amazing shadows, giving the dunes texture and shape that they lacked when the sun was higher. There are no footprints. No evidence of the last person who passed. I might be only a mile or so from the road, but I feel like I’m a million miles from anywhere. Just me and these mesmerizing shadows.

Landscape #181019.3

For some people, lush forests are a paradise. They long for the sound of a creek or the wind through the trees. For me, these desolate, expansive, unforgiving spaces are more appealing. That afternoon no breeze disturbed the silence. No birds flew overhead. No water anywhere. And yet so much to see. The ripples and soft contours. The subtle shadowing.

Landscape #181019.4

I had been wandering for hours but had probably walked only a few miles. Time and distance are different here in this pale landscape of undulating dunes — both seem meaningless here. I could have walked for hours more, captivated by the stark beauty of the swells and shadows, but late in the day I turned around and headed back. Any trace of my passage has long since disappeared. What is left are these photographs, the memories they evoke, and the hope of maybe one day returned to that land of light and shadows.

February 26, 2022
On Easy Photography

Get up before dawn and drive for hours. Camp somewhere or sleep in your vehicle at a trailhead. Get up before dawn again. Hike miles lugging all your equipment, ideally through inclement weather. Burn thousands of calories. Find an amazing scene few others will ever see. Set up tripod and point camera. Wait, sometimes for hours. Take a photo. Pack up equipment. Hike back to car. Drive home.

Landscape #190820

Despite all the effort and the beautiful photographs that effort often produces, in the end it’s a pretty easy way to take pictures.

February 24, 2022
Mark Klett on photographing

I make pictures when I can, like other latter-day explorers who work during the week.… No important mandate to chart some vanishing wilderness subsidizes these outings, and even a short drive into the land can become an adventure. Weekend exploration may not be what it used to be, but it’s a compelling act nonetheless.
Mark Klett, Revealing Territory (Albuquerque, 1992), 163–164.

July 15, 2019
Hinting at true nature

The images I take generally are not a precise pictorial representation of what my eye see. They’re usually devoid of color for a start off and sometimes they’re even more abstract, hinting at but not fully describing the true nature of the landscape that I’m photographing.
Steve Gosling (website)

July 8, 2019
Equivalent experience

As photographers, we do not just set out to “capture” an image on film. Rather, as Alfred Stieglitz said, we can use the medium to create an equivalent to the experience of what we see and feel when making a photograph.
John Sexton, Listen to the Trees (Boston, 1994), 84.

July 1, 2019
Photography as creative art

Photography for me is a creative art. It is not simply an illustrative or interpretive medium.… I try, not always with success, to photograph only what stimulates a recognition of beauty, either that which is intrinsic in the objects of nature or is a manifestation of the wonderful relationships of things in the natural world.
Eliot Porter, The Color of Wildness (New York, 2001), 38.

June 24, 2019
Light that illumines

My photographs are meditations on the light that illumines and transforms the ordinary, the often overlooked. There are those rare moments when the everyday reality of our world is transcended and one glimpses the eternal and infinite.
Marion Patterson, Grains of Sand (Palo Alto, 2002), xi.

June 17, 2019