Mather Point at Sunrise ~ Winter 2010
It is either there, or it is not. This means to stop pretending and to stop making excuses for what you wish were there, for what you felt at the time, and for what is not in the photograph. The “it” must be present in the subject to be in the photograph. So, it’s either there, or it’s not. Period. Only trouble is, how do you know what the hell “it” is? Especially if you’ve never seen it before? This is my big insight after the first ten years of trying to find out exactly what constitutes a still photograph. Sometimes simple propositions have the most profound implications.
Priscilla Ferguson-Forthman
Making photographs is, to a large extent, a visual compromise between the origins and the print. Technique will only take one so far; an internalization of the craft contributes to the ability to record what is there in the landscape, what presents itself for capture. Craft alone, however, makes for boring images. Wedded to one’s craft is the ability to see, to gaze with purpose at that which is right in front of one’s nose, so as to allow one to re-present that which one sees, something that goes well beyond the mere presence of something to be photographed.
The image in this post, Mather Point just as the sun is a sliver of intense light just above the horizon, is an example of one’s ability to see beyond that which is merely there, to a point of re-presenting what I saw as transferable to the final print. The warmth of the light in the sky, a light which has not yet permeated into the canyon below but a light which illuminates the tops of a few features in the canyon the rest still covered in shadow, that is the image I saw, the image I chose to photograph.
The art of photography is the ability to see how light and shadow play against each other, to gaze at a landscape and, by relying on one’s craft, transfer that which one sees to the finished photographic image. That is the difference between taking a snapshot and constructing a photographic image.
The Mather Point at Sunrise ~ 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.
