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Landscape
- RIT Press
- Chapter
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64 A Lakota woman named Elaine Jahner once wrote that what lies at the heart of the religion of hunting peoples is the notion that a spiritual landscape exists within the physical landscape. To put it another way, occasionally one sees something fleeting in the land, a moment when line, color, and movement intensify and something sacred is revealed, leading one to believe that there is another realm of reality corresponding to the physical one but different. Barry Lopez Arctic Dreams In 1970, I moved from New York City to Warwick, New York. At that time, I had been photographing for about 14 years and was mostly involved in ‘street photography.’ I began to photograph the landscape. I was concerned that it would be too easy. Some friends even suggested that I was ‘copping out.’ I learned a lot in the next few years. In photographing nature you don’t get the same kind of random events (gifts) that can make a ‘street’ photograph surprising and magic such as the turn of a head or a hat blowing off. I began to realize that the content of street photography is often based on a kind of criticism or at least a sense of irony. The photographer is in a superior position to the subject as an observer who can isolate and shift context through choice of frame and timing of exposure. Photographing people in public spaces also creates a level of tension and frequently a flow of adrenaline that is apparent in some of the photographs and contributes to the content. The question becomes how to introduce emotional content in landscape photography without all the ammunition that one has in social situations. LANDSCAPE 65 Simple. Get a bigger camera. More detail, more control, plus the seriousness of history. That should do it. Instantly you’re hooked onto O’Sullivan, Watkins, Weston, Adams, etc. ‘Good company.’ I’ll trade one tradition for another. But wait — let’s look at Stieglitz and Thelonious Monk and maybe at Kertész and certainly Balanchine. It would be hard to find four more different artists. The ‘thread’ is that no matter what the style or medium, their ‘stamp’ is unmistakable, and it’s not just the ‘look.’ It’s deeper, much deeper. The image is coming from within the artist, and the creative act is in correspondence with what we experience as physical reality. Can I make a photograph of nature (the woods) that can be next to one of my pictures of people on the street and it will sit there with ‘meaning?’§§§§§ I give myself the advantage of using the same camera, lens and film that I always use so that there is graphic continuity. It must be said here that all of this thinking and explaining of my processes is taking place 30 years later. When it was happening, I was swimming in muddy water looking for something to grab onto. The pictures precede the explanation. I tried bigger cameras. I even dropped a borrowed 8x10 Deardorff off its tripod on the ground and spent two weeks gluing, sanding and refinishing. It slowly began to dawn on me that you can’t criticize nature and that the kind of surprises one gets have to do with light, space, texture, tone of air, and that a place is never the same twice. Luck is sometimes about the shadow of a tree limb on a stone for a moment. I was really starting to understand that a leaf floating on the surface of a puddle with the light a certain way can be a significant event. [3.145.108.9] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 10:38 GMT) 66 I was beginning to see with the eyes of a child. Things were starting to lose their hierarchical nature. Everything was of equal value, and the ‘content’ was in the vision and craft. One time, I was sitting looking out the window at the woods. It was twilight and my cat Goody, who was black, walked across my field of view. I realized something: there is no black in nature or rarely is. Dark is mysterious, black is not. I started to make small prints on matte paper and to extend the tonal range as much as I could. Ansel Adams is a pictorialist as much as any of the people that he railed against. He simply used a different visual system to create sentiment and idealization. Dorothea Lange once said that the trouble with...