On Creating "Passage"

Photo On Creating "Passage" bv Kim Kauffinan At the time I originally created "Passage," one of my intentions was to challenge the misconception that photography is simply a recorder of reality. In this photograph, for example, I wanted to explore my feeling that a combination of images, rather than a single one, might better convey my experience of the subject photographed. More specifically, I wanted to show several images (bark and branches, the sky, massive roots) that combine as my experience of a tree. To do this I needed to juxtapose them in a disjunctive manner. This is, I believe, how our brains work: piecing together 157 158Fourth Genre fragments ofperception to make a whole experience. I chose to use a window as a framing and organizing device because it symbolizes the function of a camera viewfinder. The barely open door suggests that perhaps my interpretation is not the only one; maybe there is more within. When the editors of Fourth Genre approached me about adapting a photograph for the cover, I viewed it as a creative challenge and opportunity. Before they selected a cover photograph, we talked about the content and philosophy ofthe journal. Then we discussed taking a single image and displacing it by dividing the photograph into four panels. This suggestion seemed to be in sync with my own notion that photographs represent a photographer's highly individual, subjective point of view. Each photographer 's series of decisions in creating an image will lead to wonderfully varied renderings ofthe same subject or situation. I am amazed by the multitude of choices a photographer makes when creating an image. The initial choice of a subject is followed by subsequent decisions of what will and will not appear in the camera's frame, point of view, angle, scale, sharpness, lighting and a host of other elements. These may be adjusted and refined many times until the photograph feels right. These are all decisions ofultimate subjectivity. I chose to come in close and emphasize the texture of the bark whereas another photographer might have shown the entire tree, top to bottom. Despite this series ofhighly personal choices, too often viewers assume that my interpretation of a subject or situation will be the same as that of another photographer. While I want to show the massiveness and solidity of a tree, another person might wish to show it as an accent on an otherwise undetailed horizon. I have always worked intuitively, reacting to classic compositional elements such as light and shadow, fine, form, and balance. This visual language expresses things for me that words cannot. Perhaps this is an incongruent statement to make in ajournai ofliterary writing, but that is the language I work with. It is often after my images are completed that I begin to see whether I have been dealing with additional concerns.When I photographed the door for "Passage" I was drawn to the shape ofthe shadow created by the slightly open door and it became the subject of my photograph. Afterward, it occurred to me that the open door is mysterious, suggesting that there is more to see, but leaving the answer up to each viewer's imagination. |h| ...