Making photographs, especially those made as self-assignment works, always is a statement of deep commitment to one’s subject. These photographs are made to be interrogated, to be examined, cross-examined, questioned. As a photographer, I ask viewers to look below the surface of the image, that two-dimensional simulacrum of a four-dimensional world, to inquire about what I am really photographing. In the case of my work, I attempt to create artifacts of a time always already past, yet, lingering as a trace of that which was. I seek to preserve a fraction of a second of existence, a blink of one’s eye, for others to view constantly asking what becomes of those places without preservation.
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What is it about a photograph that causes people to think of an image as somehow acting in place of the reality of that which has been photographed. The notion that a picture is worth a thousand words somehow generates the feeling that the truth is somehow contained within the four corners of the image and that there is nothing left to see, nothing omitted either purposely or not. In all candor, nothing could be further from the truth. Just ask a photographer. Learning to see the ordinary, to not overstate or understate, to select a frame from a wide array of possible frames that re-presents that which was but is no longer retrievable, is the essential foundation of photography. In the end, learning to see the ordinary, the ability to pick something that tells a story from the infinite potential of any and every scene, comes with practice, experimentation, failure, and success all rolled up into what one might call experience. Hanging just above the trees that protect a gift shop near Desert View by the Grand Canyon the nearly full moon sparkled in the sky. I stopped for a second, set up my tripod, framed the image and snapped off three bracketed exposures that would later be combined into an HDR image. Choosing the HDR technique guaranteed that I would capture a full tonal range, providing detail in the shadows of the trees and the craters of the moon. The image, now captured, sat for a while before I decided to look at it in black and white. A bit of blue tone brings out the blacks without impacting on the whites and here is the finished image. There are two great mistakes made by those first entering the field of photography. The first is to overrate the value of one’s equipment while the second is the tendency to be satisfied by a one and done approach to shooting. The former suggests that the more expensive one’s equipment the better the images produced as the end product while the latter ignores the possibility of exploration of something being photographed from multiple angles and perspectives. Both are fatal to producing quality images. Images are always there hiding in plain sight. Most are missed, even by those with a strong sense of vision. Sometimes, however, images sometimes seem to jump out demanding to be photographed. The two barrels in this image simply jumped out at me, inviting me to photograph them. It was near the end of our visit to The Hermitage outside of Nashville. I was quite tired and, still recovering from back surgery, my back hurt. All I wanted to do was to get out of there, to get in the car and drive back to our hotel and take a nap. We took a direct line across the grass toward the parking lot to speed our advance to the car. True to form, my head swung back and forth looking for images when the two barrels caught my eye. I made this photograph outside of Nashville while there for a funeral of a relative. It at moments like these that one realizes how small one’s world really is; how narrow one’s vision, even a practiced vision, truly is. One can never see beyond one’s physical/cultural limitations, one’ lens filtered through culture, religion, politics, experience. Without these filters life itself would be unmanageable, void of horizon. Even with these filters, one is often stretched to the limits of one’s understanding as something new, something unexplained, arises to shake the very foundations of one’s vision. There are places on this earth that I never tire of, whether I am merely looking or actively photographing. The Grand Canyon is one of those places. The richness of colors layered upon colors, the play of light and shadow across the rocks, gorges, buttes and formations is forever changing, challenging one to see differently in each passing moment. Like most photographers, I prefer the light from sunrise to around mid-morning or from mid-afternoon to sunset…the hours when shadows lengthen and the colors are most vibrant. Point of view is something developed over time. It comes from practice, the rejection of more images than one decides to keep, and the application of that experience into creating intense images in the camera that require little after capture manipulation to address one’s vision (another term of point of view). Things ask me to take their pictures. When I am out in the world intending to make photographs I am generally moved by something visually screaming for me to make a photograph. I am looking for those things that visually make me look just a little harder, to want to move around an object, exploring multiple aspects of light and shadow as I do. I am not in a rush to find images because I am certain that they will find me. This certainty comes from a place of surrender to the awesome grandeur of nature. I never begin a day photographing without silently asking permission to photograph today. When I forget to do this I find fewer images. |
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