civilized ku # 203 ~ taking it one step further

Looking toward Main St. ~ Au Sable Forks • click to embiggenAs most who have followed The Landscapist for any length of time already know, the corner vignette on my pictures has always been a sticking point for many when it comes to viewing my pictures. And, as I have mentioned many times, it's only a sticking point for other pictures makers - rarely, if ever, is it mentioned by the general viewing public.

I mention this for just one reason. I recently came across the work of a picture maker who has taken the formative basis behind my use of the vignette, i.e. to draw attention to the idea of the eye's natural characteristic of blurred peripheral vision, and taken it to its logical conclusion or its illogical extreme (depending upon how one views it).

That picture maker is John Jenkins III and the work can be found in his book, Peripheral Visions, in which every picture is out of focus - one could even say, completely vignetted. A blurb from the publisher about the work states:

The lush color photographs of John Jenkins III freeze the moments that often happen in the corner of one's eye in peripheral vision. By using selective focus, Jenkins captures the color and light of a fleeting moment, the fuzzy areas of shadow and light that move just outside our direct vision. While the collection of photographs in Peripheral Visions are of the familiar and the everyday, these images show what is happening on the edges of the known and become impressions, moments of time and place, meditations of dreams and memories.

The primary difference between Jenkins idea regarding peripheral vision and my idea of it is that his pictures deal solely with "what is happening on the edges of the known" whereas my pictures include a sharp central area that includes "the known" (direst vision). That said, we are both using the notion of peripheral vision to create "impressions, moments of time and place, meditations of dreams and memories."

The idea of "dreams and memories" has been part-and-parcel of my picturing MO for about a decade. about 7 years ago I wrote this on my Adirondack Light website. That idea is still going strong and, quite frankly, I can't ever imagine it disappearing - it is quite literally and figuratively, the way I see.