Indian Garden from El Tovar ~ Winter 2010
The more one looks, the more one sees. And the more one sees, the better one knows where to look.
Tielhard de Chardin
When I first began seriously making images I shot everything I could find in my viewfinder. A roll of PlusX lasted but minutes; I knew when I was finished because I had no more film. The simple truth was I had no vision, no means of seeing beyond the surface where everything looked interesting indiscriminately. Every once in a while I might find an image I really liked but they were few and far between. Those early years were important because I spent time looking, both in general and specifically through the viewfinder of my camera. I began to discriminate, to frame images more carefully, ignoring some potential images and concentrating on others. Still I was only looking in the broadest sense of the word.
That all came to an abrupt halt when, in high school, I signed up for photography as an elective class my freshman year. On the first day in class we sat through a series of slides of iconic images, discussing each one in terms of how the image stands alone and how it relates to the images that preceded the one in question. At the end of the discussion we were given an assignment to photograph “flat.” No one had a clue. The class met three days each week and the assignment was due on Friday. Wednesday we spent time learning elementary darkroom techniques and how to develop a roll of 35mm film.
I spent the next several days trying to figure out what photographing “flat” meant? Then it dawned on me that all I had to do was go out and look so, camera in hand, I began to look for something “flat.” By Thursday afternoon I wasn’t sure I could complete this assignment when I looked down and there at my feet was a maple leaf that fell from a nearby tree. It stood alone against the sidewalk and I suddenly had the idea that this was “flat.” I shot the image, got to school early Friday morning and developed the roll of film containing several views of the leaf and sidewalk. By lunch the film was dry and I returned to the darkroom and printed one image. By the time class met I had an image to share with the class. Over the hour of class time we looked at the images of “flat” that we all produced, critiquing and learning from the experience of creating images from this simple assignment. This was my first experience at learning how to see while looking. Then next assignment was to photograph motion…a whole different story.
The Indian Garden from El Tovar ~ Winter 2010 by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
