urban ku # 116 - it's a national holiday

Rain in the gloaming with street light • click to embiggenIt has been said that Henri Cartier-Bresson said that it doesn't matter if something was in focus ... as long you got the image - something with which I agree for the most part.

This notion about 'focus' is the reason why pictures made with Holgas, fixed-focus Polaroids, Kodak Instamatics, lores digitals, and other so-called 'krappy kameras' tend to work for me. The thing that I like is that the pictures made with these cameras, because of their lack of detail and specificity, become very fertile grounds for rumination and the imagination. 'Meaning' for the observer can be even more personal than it is with straight pictures.

All of which was summed up neatly by a quote from Oliver Culmann of the French photographer's collective Tendance Floue; "The image has a life of its own. Just because you take the image, it doesn't mean it belongs to you. How it is received, how it is distributed - all that stuff - means the image is an object that develops a life apart from you."

... which, IMO, does not in any way negate the notion that a photographer can make pictures with a 'suggested - inferred - implied' meaning or meanings that many observers will 'get' and, for the 'thinking types' amongst them, expand upon.

civilized ku # 57 ~ non sequitor

Remains of the day before • click to embiggenI can't even begin to explain why, when I was retting-up the kitchen this AM and I opened the garbage for the 3rd or 4th time, my immediate and only thought was, 'where's the camera?'.

But it was, so here it is.

I suspect that it has something to do with being easily amused. Or, just maybe, it is somehow related to yesterday's picture. I don't know exactly other than, as they say on the popular photo forums, "I like the color(s).

Can anyone recommend a good analyst?

urban ku # 115 ~ sunflower

This has been a good week on The Landscapist - lots of page views, new visitors and comments. Thanks to all. I really appreciate all the comments no matter what side of the fence you're on..

I will be launching the Wildness Close to Home Gallery with the next couple days - we have 5 participants so far but I'd like to double that. Those who have indicated participation must send me an email (click email me in right column) This is so I can send you the login and password info for the gallery.

Also, regarding the guidelines -

1. within a 1/2 mile of home, more or less, nobody's measuring
2. walk if you can, but some of you might live in a walking-unfriendly suburban environment, so get there however you can
3. signs of humankind are allowed to any degree you deem fit

urban ku 114 ~ photography that is more than entertainment

The walk to the 17th tee • click to embiggenFor me, photography is more than a fun hobby that provides an entertaining way to pass away idle hours. My photography springs from and is integrated with my deepest beliefs about life and living. I can no more separate one from the other than I can my eyes from my head.

I blame this on my Catholic education, first from nuns and their Mission Babies and then from Jesuits whose philosophy, at the school I attended, reads in part;

...The McQuaid Jesuit community is called to engage in an ongoing struggle to recognize and work against the obstacles that block or limit freedom including the effects of sinfulness, while developing in young men capacities such as self-discipline and discernment, that are necessary for the exercise of true freedom. Such freedom requires a genuine knowledge, love, and acceptance of self, combined with a resolve to be rid of excessive attachment to wealth, fame, health, power or even life itself. It would also include freedom from distorted perceptions of reality, warped values, rigid attitudes, or surrender to narrow ideologies. Consequently, to work toward true freedom, one must learn to recognize and deal with the influences that can promote and limit freedom – both those arising from within oneself and those resulting from the dynamics of history, social structures and culture ..."

Which is not all that different from William Cronon's philosophy re: wilderness;

"... Learning to honor the wild—learning to remember and acknowledge the autonomy of the other—means striving for critical self-consciousness in all of our actions ..."

For me, adopting either of these philosophies leads inevitably to this -

... It means the deep reflection and respect must accompany each act of use, and means too that we must always consider the possibility of non-use. It means looking at the part of nature we intend to turn toward our own ends and asking whether we can use it again and again and again—sustainably—without its being diminished in the process. It means never imagining that we can flee into a mythical wilderness to escape history and the obligation to take responsibility for our own actions that history inescapably entails ... If wildness can stop being (just) out there and start being (also) in here, if it can start being as humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world—not just in the garden, not just in the wilderness, but in the home that encompasses them both." ~ William Cronon

And, from that, my photography flows.

PS it should be noted that, long ago, my notion of 'sinfulness' had digressed from many of the tenets of the Jesuits regarding 'sin', although that, by no means, absolves one from being a 'sinner' (in a more secular sense). It's amazing how often this change in attitude about 'sin' is the result of a Jesuit education. I quess it's the effect of all that 'freedom from distorted perceptions of reality, warped values, rigid attitudes, or surrender to narrow ideologies' that they preach so religiously (pun). BTW, the wife is also the product of a Jesuit education (Georgetown).

It should also be noted that the Jesuits are rather 'practical' regarding the notion of 'sinfulness' - case in point - Maggie, who attends a Jesuit university, could obtain birth control pills from the campus pharmacy as long as they are prescribed and used for the control of the physical and emotional effects of the menstrual cycle and not for contraceptive purposes. You just gotta love that kind of 'flexibility'.

Update on Friday, October 5, 2007 at 11:35AM by gravitas et nugalis

Featured Comment: Brett Kosmider wrote ; "Ironic you're showing a golf course coupled with a Cronon quote, I mean, it's no secret golf courses are probably one of the bigger consumers of water and pesticides for the vanity of perfect greens etc. Sorry I used to live in the desert and golf courses in Arizona drive me nuts. At any rate, I'm sure there's golf courses out there that try to practice "green" friendly maintenance; using less water and pesticides/fertilizers, but a golf course isn't really a model of sustainability, IMHO"

My response: Actually, I intended it to be more perverse than ironic, but, either way, I suspected that it would incite a 'golf courses are bad' response of some kind. Yours is actually quite thoughtful. Most that I have experienced are downright hostile and accusatory, as in, how can you be an conservationist and golf?

I was going to address this notion in my entry but I was afraid, as the wife put it, of filling up the internet but here goes nevertheless -

You are correct in your assessment that there are "green" golf courses and, here's a surprise, the one I belong to is a certified in the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program for Golf Courses (More than 2,110 golf courses worldwide participate in the ACSP). What that means at my club is that irrigation is done with reclaimed water from ponds constructed on the course. Only approved pesticides are used and only in minimal amounts on the greens, not the fairways. Throughout the 2 courses, there are off-limits wetlands and wildlife habitats which makes golfing there a joy - coyotes, fox, deer, heron, hawks and variety of other wildlife sightings are commonplace. And, in my case, I always walk.

So, I would disagree with your statement that golf courses are not models of sustainability. Some are, some are not. It is eminently possible to design and build (mine was built over a 100 years ago) a 'sustainable' golf course with a minimal impact on the environment in which it is placed. It's all a matter of discernment and intent.

FYI ~ comment-posting problems

I have received a number of emails about the inability to post comments over the past few days - more today than previously.

I have contacted SquareSpace support about this and I am awaiting a reply, although the wife seems to think "... that you wrote so much you filled up the internet and there is no room to comment."

FYI ~ Cinemascape fallout

Over the past few days, there has been a small but steady flow of visitors to The Landscapist from The Radiant Vista community as the result of this forum post about Aaron's Cinemascapes.

It's interesting to note that someone over there was able to recognize that "Aaron is actually the son of Mark Hobson of The Landscapist blog... who isn't exactly a fan of The Radiant Vista." Then someone was kind enough to link to this Landscapist entry to put an exclamation point on the not-a-fan notion.

What I find interesting, although typical of when I get a mention on another site that creates a flow of new visitors, is that no visitor from The Radiant Vista has had anything to say about anything. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

Now I know the problem doesn't lie with me - my musings are brilliant, informative and sometime provocative, and, my pictures are also brilliant, creative and superb. So, I often wonder what the deal is?

PS - and, oh yeh, my thanks to Aaron for letting me ride on his coattail.

urban ku # 113 ~ love the one you're with

Wilderness from my windows • click to embiggenEveryone seems to be enjoying the discussion about 'wilderness' so lets give another go - again from William Cronon's essay;

"... the most troubling cultural baggage that accompanies the celebration of wilderness has less to do with remote rain forests and peoples than with the ways we think about ourselves—we American environmentalists who quite rightly worry about the future of the earth and the threats we pose to the natural world. Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home. Most of our most serious environmental problems start right here, at home, and if we are to solve those problems, we need an environmental ethic that will tell us as much about using nature as about not using it. The wilderness dualism tends to cast any use as abuse, and thereby denies us a middle ground in which responsible use and non-use might attain some kind of balanced, sustainable relationship ... a world better for humanity in all of its diversity and for all the rest of nature too. The middle ground is where we actually live. It is where we—all of us, in our different places and ways—make our homes.

That is why, when I think of the times I myself have come closest to experiencing what I might call the sacred in nature, I often find myself remembering wild places much closer to home ... What I celebrate about such places is not just their wildness, though that certainly is among their most important qualities; what I celebrate even more is that they remind us of the wildness in our own backyards, of the nature that is all around us if only we have eyes to see it ..."

Now, it must be said that I'm a lucky guy. My family and I live in a protected wilderness, the Adirondack Park, which is larger than 5 or 6 US states. The park is home to 100,000+ people who are spread out in approximately 100 small villages and hamlets. While the park is about 1/2 'forever wild' state lands, there are also vast tracks of private/commercial forest lands - paper companies, mining companies, hunting clubs, vast estates, and the like. Land use is governed by the Adirondack Park Agency whose mission is to protect the forever wild forest and the 'wilderness character' of all lands, public and private, within the Park. It's a nasty job but, thank goodness, someone has to do it is doing it.

What has emerged from this highly regulated patch-quilt of public and private interests is an ever-evolving modern model of sustainability - if you will, man and nature 'at peace' with one another, or, at 'one' with one another. It ain't perfect - there is an ongoing 'tension' as public and private interests collide but, for the most part, a balance has been struck.

And, more to the point, since I have been living in a wilderness, my idea of wilderness has evolved into something akin to what Cronon and others are advocating - 'pristine wilderness' taken down from its throne and integrated into the rest of the world.

It's why I can wake up in the morning and just look out a window and see and appreciate the 'wilderness' that is all around me.

So, here's my challenge to you (all of you) - if I start a Wildness Close to Home Gallery, will enough of you participate to make it worthwhile? There would be only one rule - pictures must be made within a 1/2 mile radius of your home, preferably reached on foot.

Are you up to it?

Urban ku # 112 ~ wilderness is a bad thing

Autumn ground cover and fence post • click to embiggenIn response to yesterday's entry, Kent Wiley mentioned an essay, The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature, by William Cronon, a professsor of environmental history at the University of Wisconsin.

In essence, the essay is similar in its point to the one in a book, Down To Earth - Nature's Role in American History, that I have mentioned here before. A quote from the essay;

"... wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where nature is not. If this is so—if by definition wilderness leaves no place for human beings ... then also by definition it can offer no solution to the environmental and other problems that confront us. To the extent that we celebrate wilderness as the measure with which we judge civilization, we reproduce the dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles. We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.

Worse: to the extent that we live in an urban-industrial civilization but at the same time pretend to ourselves that our real home is in the wilderness, to just that extent we give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead. We inhabit civilization while holding some part of ourselves—what we imagine to be the most precious part—aloof from its entanglements. We work our nine-to-five jobs in its institutions, we eat its food, we drive its cars (not least to reach the wilderness), we benefit from the intricate and all too invisible networks with which it shelters us, all the while pretending that these things are not an essential part of who we are. By imagining that our true home is in the wilderness, we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit. In its flight from history, in its siren song of escape, in its reproduction of the dangerous dualism that sets human beings outside of nature—in all of these ways, wilderness poses a serious threat to responsible environmentalism at the end of the twentieth century ..."

Cronon goes on to write; "... Wilderness gets us into trouble only if we imagine that this experience of wonder and otherness is limited to the remote corners of the planet, or that it somehow depends on pristine landscapes we ourselves do not inhabit. Nothing could be more misleading. (an aside: visit any of the online nature photography sites and take note that they all strictly forbid any signs of man in their landscape forums. Pictures with any sign of man, which must be kept to an absolute minimum, are relegated to a 'ghetto' forum which has far less interest, participation and activity) The tree in the garden is in reality no less other, no less worthy of our wonder and respect, than the tree in an ancient forest that has never known an ax or a saw—even though the tree in the forest reflects a more intricate web of ecological relationships ..."

Photography-wise, here's what this means for me - (again from Cronon) ...If wilderness can ... help us perceive and respect a nature we had forgotten to recognize as natural—then it will become part of the solution to our environmental dilemmas rather than part of the problem.

This will only happen, however, if we abandon the dualism that sees the tree in the garden as artificial—completely fallen and unnatural—and the tree in the wilderness as natural—completely pristine and wild. Both trees in some ultimate sense are wild; both in a practical sense now depend on our management and care. We are responsible for both, even though we can claim credit for neither. Our challenge is to stop thinking of such things according to set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the nonhuman, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world. Instead, we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral, and the wild each has its proper place, which we permit ourselves to celebrate without needlessly denigrating the others. We need to honor the Other within and the Other next door as much as we do the exotic Other that lives far away ...

To wit: a preoccupation with pictures of 'pristine wilderness' - as exhibited by the overwhelming majority of nature/landscape photographers (romanticists) and as exhibited by a vast adoring throng of viewing admirers - primarily serves the purpose of instilling and perpetuating the problematic 'dualism' in which the human is entirely outside the natural'. By their (the romanticists) overt omission of the 'Other next door', they indulge (in all probability, not intentionally) in a not-so-subtle denigration of the 'commonplace', or, as Cronon writes; "...my principal objection to wilderness (as a cultural invention - ed.) is that it may teach us to be dismissive or even contemptuous of such humble places and experiences ... Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually live, the landscape that for better or worse we call home." I couldn't agree more.

With my pictures, I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

PS - if you read the essay by Cronon (it's long and a little speed reading is called for), he takes a few interesting swipes at Emerson and Muir.

Update on Wednesday, October 3, 2007 at 12:34PM by gravitas et nugalis

Featured Comment: Brett Kosmider wrote ; "... As far as photographs of pristine wilderness, I disagree, there's a place for them. If on the one hand you're saying its a sin not to appreciate photos of anthropocentricity, I say it's a sin to not appreciate a landscape that is seemingly untouched by man. I would like to think that photographs of today's Arctic, as an example of the 'pristine', would inspire future generations when seeing what they have lost."

My Response: I guess I need to clarify my position re: pictures of pristine wilderness.

Some pictures of pristine wilderness are good, probably even necessary for a variety of reasons (including for the pure pleasure of it all). My objection is based on the excessive preoccupation with such pictures (by both makers and viewers) to the exclusion of all else that is not 'grand and glorious'.

And, it is my experience with such picture makers that, not only are they totally addicted to the 'grand and glorious', but they also are not satisfied with what god/nature have wrought. In the words of Sally Eauclaire, author of seminal but now-out-of-print book, The New Color; "... Their lust for effect is everywhere apparent. Technical wizardry amplifies rather than recreates on-site observations. Playing to the multitudes who salivate at the sight of nature (in the belief that good and God are immanent), such photographers often choose such picturesque subject matter as prodigious crags, rippling sands, or flaming sunsets ... (which) they burden with ever coarser effects. Rather than humbly seek out 'the spirit of fact', they assume of the role of God's art director making his immanence unequivocal and protrusive."

Unfortunately, it seems that a preoccupation with the 'grand and glorious' and an addiction to wretched photo-effects go hand-in-hand. What the photographic results of these predilections have to do with 'pristine wilderness' or the 'beauty of nature' is way beyond my reckoning.

For an excellent example of nothing exceeds like excess, photography-wise, visit here. Warning: exercise optical caution. Retina searing is a possibility. Those with a known addiction to eye candy should beware.

Update on Friday, October 5, 2007 at 02:11PM by gravitas et nugalis

Featured Comment: Matthew Cromer wrote ; "A low blow, Mark ... Can't someone else exercise their own creative interpretation of the landscape without being smeared by you as inauthentic?

My response: Sorry to hear that my critique upsets you. However, when any artist hangs his/her work out on the line in public, their work is fair game for a critique/review - in the best of cases, for one that is an informed critique.

Anyone who had followed the discussion here over the preceding days would know that there was lots of discussion on wilderness, how/what is portrayed and the effects of various forms of 'interpretation'. My opinions were made plain and the basis for those opinions - (respected writers, art critics, etc) was also expressed - hardly uninformed.

I don't like the photography that I linked to as an example of 'wretched excess'. I think that, at best, it is little more than sentimental dreck and, at worst, that is harmful to the cause of conservation and preservation. I would call my opinion, just that, an opinion and a crritique - not a smear.

Of course, opinions vary, and I always respect differing informed opinions. In fact, I encourage them here on The Landscapist.