ku # 584 ~ Spring has sprung # 18

Tamarack bog # 2 • click to embiggenA few days ago I mentioned that if I had a pension and a sea-side shanty next to a Scottish links golf course I would be happy for the rest of my life. Of course, that fantasy would also include the wife. However, I'm resigned to the fact that that is just not gonna happen.

A more likely fantasy, albeit a low-probability one, is that the sea-side shanty is replaced with an Adirondack camp built in the heart of a tamarack bog. A nearby golf course would be a bonus. And once again, the wife is invited.

To my eye and sensibilities, a tamarack bog is the most beautiful place on the planet. I can't fully articulate why I feel that way but everything about a tamarack bog - the colors, the smells, the sounds, the textures, the wildlife that a bog attracts - just suits my eye and disposition.

Yesterday was overcast / rainy and this particular bog was on my mind. I knew that the rain would saturate the flora and thereby intensify the rusty colors (my "natural" Hue/Saturation slider) that are found in a bog in the Spring. I was hoping to be able to picture during a driving rain but the most I got was a steady rain from time to time.

Update on Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at 12:38PM by gravitas et nugalis

Featured Comment: Aaron wrote: "... if it was permanently spring, fall, and winter a tamarack bog would be wonderful. But why don't you go back and try to photograph there and hang out a while when there are 68 trillion mosquitoes, noseeums, and black flies all singing their hit song of "buzz buzz bite" and see if you don't change your mind. Just looking at that photo makes me involuntarily swat at the air.

my response: that's why the fantasy includes a screened (to no-see-um standards) wrap-around promenade porch. Oh yeh, and some bug zappers .... and some bug repellent ... and some hat nets ... and long sleeve shirts ... and summer gloves ....

ku # 583 ~ Spring has sprung # 17

Tamarack bog # 1 • click to embiggenI would be over-stating the case if I said I had spent the entire afternoon in a tamarack bog ... but ... if I were to post one picture a day from my "keepers" from this outing, I'd have just about a month's worth of pictures.

ku # 582 ~ Spring has sprung # 16

The Flume • click to embiggenIn his essay, In Our Image, Wright Morris opines that:

Photographs of time past, of lost time recovered, speak most poignantly if the photographer is missing. The blurred figures characteristic of long time exposures is appropriate .... [T]hese photographs clarify, beyond argument or apology, what is uniquely and intrinsically photographic. The visible captured. Time arrested. Through a slit in time's veil we see what has vanished. An unearthly, mind-boggling sensation: commonplace yet fabulous. The photograph is paramount. The photographer subordinate.

The photograph is paramount. The photographer subordinate.

In support of his idea, Morris goes on to mention John Szarkowski's notion that the photographer's vision is convincing to the degree that the photographer hides his hand. After which he (Morris) continues with:

There will be no end of making pictures, some with hands concealed, some with hands revealed, and some without hands, but we should make the distinction, while it is still clear, between photographs that mirror the subject, and images that reveal the photographer. One is intrinsically photographic, the other is not.

One is intrinsically photographic, the other is not.

On one hand, I tend to sorta-kinda agree with Morris & Szarkowski regarding the notion of The photograph is paramount. The photographer subordinate. Or to put it another way, it's about the pictures, stupid.

On the the other hand, I tend to rather strongly disagree with Morris regarding the notion of One is intrinsically photographic, the other is not. I mean, hell, if one is using a camera and if the resultant picture looks like a photograph / quacks like a photograph / walks like a photograph, then, in my book, it is a photograph.

That said, the question I have regarding the above premise is simply this - if a making a picture is all about expressing one's self, doesn't every pictures so motivated in its making tell us something about the hand of the maker?

Is it even possible to make a good picture without revealing anything about the hand of the maker?

ku # 581 ~ Spring has sprung # 15

Morning light (this AM) above the West Branch of the Au Sable River • click to embiggen

ku # 580 ~ Spring has sprung # 9

Sunlight here and there • click to embiggenConsider this:

Photographs are evidence, after all. Not that they are to be taken at face value, necessarily, nor that they mirror the real, nor even that a photograph offers any self-evident relationship between itself and what it shows. Simply that a photograph can be material for interpretation - evidence, in that sense: to be solved, like a riddle; read and decoded, like clues left behind at the scene of a crime. Evidence of this sort, though, can conceal even as it purports to reveal, what it is evidence of. A photograph can certainly throw you off the scent ... In order to show what it is evidence of, a photograph must always point away from itself. Annette Kuhn - from the essay, Remebrance - The child I never was

ku 579 ~ Spring has sprung # 7

A Spring thicket • click to embiggenThe Frame - one of the characteristics and problems inherent in the medium of photography.

The photographer's picture was not conceived but selected, his subjects were never truly discrete, never wholly self-contained. The edges of his film demarcated what he thought most important, but the subject he had shot was something else; it extended in four directions ... The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it. ~ John Szarkowski - from The Photographer's Eye

In case anyone was wondering, the black frame common to all of my pictures - a nod to the wet-darkroom tradition of printing the film's clear borders - is the most obvious of my techniques that "forces a concentration on the picture edge - the line that separates in from out - and on the shapes that are created by it".

Update on Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 10:13AM by gravitas et nugalis

Featured Comment: Bill Gotz asked a very good question: "Do you find any irony in the fact that the black edge was usually included to prove that the picture was reproduced full frame, as the photographer originally took it, but that your photographs are created by cropping?"

my response: While I might vigorously protest that my pictures are NOT cropped - I see square, even if my sensor does not - the fact is that my square pictures are cropped from a rectangular image file. Since, up 'til now there were no dslrs that offered native in-camera square image files, I have been forced into using what the US military calls a field-expediency methodology to get squared away.

But, to answer your question - "Yes. Absolutely." My entire visual presentation is intended to be somewhat ironic or, at the very least, a bit of trompe l'oeil - very much intended to be a sort of backhanded slap across the face of the digital perfectionists in the photography crowd who are in hot pursuit of technically perfect but insipidly dull (content-wise) pictures.

ku # 576/7 ~ Spring has sprung # 4/5

On a narrow trail above the West Branch of the Au Sable River • click to embiggen

The photographer was tied to the facts of things, and it was his problem to force the facts to tell the truth. John Szarkowski from The Photographers Eye

ku # 575 ~ Spring has sprung # 3

Another stump in a marsh • click to embiggenJohn Szarkowski, in his book, The Photographer's Eye, lists the detail as one of the medium's inherent characteristics about which he stated:

.... The photographer was tied to the fact of things ... he could only record it as he found it ... he could only isolated the fragment, document it, and by doing so claim for it some special significance, a meaning which went beyond simple description ... [T]he compelling clarity with which a photograph recorded the trivial suggested that the subject had never before been properly seen, that it was in fact perhaps not trivial, but filled with undiscovered meaning. - italic emphasis by me

The more I understand my attraction to picturing - both the making and viewing thereof, the more I realize that I am immensely attracted to the detail and, without a doubt, the medium of photography excels at recording with compelling clarity those details which at first glance appear to be quite trivial. As far as I am concerned, the more packed with compelling-clarity detail a picture is, the more I am attracted to it - I get no kick from visual simplicity (or very little).

But here's the thing about the detail in my pictures - at best, I pay little attention to the detail found in my pictures at the point-in-time of picturing them. My only awareness of them is as clumps / fields of details as opposed to specific / discrete / individual elements. At the point-in-time of picturing it is those clumps / fields, viewed as a whole, that I attempt to organize across the 2-dimensional surface (and within the frame) of the yet-to-be print in a pleasing manner.

This approach to picturing, that is to essentially ignore the detail specifics when picturing, is the reason why my eye, my mind, and oft times my soul are endlessly fascinated by my own pictures - even though I made them, they are filled with compelling-clarity details that I did not see at the point-in-time of picturing them but that I can discover and explore after the fact of picturing.

I find it quite amazing that I can so regularly amaze myself.

FYI, this entry is the fulfillment, at least in part, of my stated intent to discuss the following from Minor White:

When I look at pictures I have made, I have forgotten what I saw in front of the camera and respond only to what I am seeing in the photographs. ~ Minor White