civilized ku # 371-78 / ku # 667-68 ~ that's the method
Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 01:47PM 
Pasture and distant / approaching snow flurries • click to embiggen
The Jay Range • click to embiggen
Cattle ranch landscape • click to embiggen
2 Corners • click to embiggen
Silo landscape in light snowfall • click to embiggen
Field / light snowfall • click to embiggenYesterday afternoon, in an attempt to prevent my head from exploding due to a where-the-hell's-the-snow variant of cabin fever, I took a short 4-5 mile meander up in the hills above our village.
The area is a little weird, Adirondack-wise, in as much as there is a decent size - albeit quite "compact" in width - fertile valley that winds its way between some mountain ranges. Consequently, there are quite a number of cattle / crop farms spread over the landscape. Overall, the landscape is quite lovely.
Indeed, it could be very accurately described as "picturesque" and very unique in the Adirondack landscape scheme of things. But, that said, I'd be very stunned if more than a few hundred of the 10 million+ annual visitors to the Adirondack Park ever see the place, even though the one-and-only highway into the Adirondacks in the NE corner of the Park passes within view of the fringes of the area.
I have only occasionally explored the area. Each time I do, I make a pledge to return more frequently but something else, picture making wise, always seems to demand my time and attention. And so it was that, yesterday, I made the same pledge. We'll just have to wait and see how that goes...
In any event, enjoy the pictures and, of course, comments are always welcome. Especially so, in light of this:
If a more or less random snapshot is like an infinitely fine scale that has been scratched from the surface of reality with the tip of a finger, then in comparision the photoseries or photomontage lets us experience the extended massiveness of reality, its authentic meaning. We build systematically. We must also photograph systematically. Sequence and long-term photographic observation--that is the method. - Segei Tretyakov - in 1931
Reader Comments (2)
6 inches here today and looking outside a second ago there were snow squalls, zero visibility across the street with 25-40mph winds. Lows tonight around 7 below and wind chill of 30 below zero f°. Probably won't be doing any long exposure photography tonight.
I've recently read John Szarkowski's "The Photographer's Eye". He offers the following perspective. (I'm not quite sure why he is using past tense .. these issues continue up to today.)
The photographer was tied to the facts of things and it was his problem to force the facts to tell the truth. ...it was found in nature in a fragmented and unexplained form - not as a story, but as scattered and suggestive clues. The photographer could not assemble these clues into a coherent narrative, he could only isolate the fragment, document it, and by doing so claim it for some special significance, a meaning which went beyond simple description.
The compelling clarity in 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. If photographs could not be read as stories, they could be read as symbols.
... photography has never been successful as narrative... the heroic documentation of the America Civil War by the Brady group, and the incomparably larger photographic record of the Second World War, have this in common: neither explained, without extensive captioning, what was happening. The function of these pictures was not to make the story clear, it was to make it real.
The great war photographer Robert Capa expressed both the narrative poverty and the symbolic power of photography when he said, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough."
Here endth the quote.