all photos (embiggenable)
“The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge – the line that separates in from out – and on the shapes that are created by it.” ~ John Szarkowski
“I’m looking at three-dimensional space and understanding how to articulate that space and collapsing it into two dimensions.” ~ Stephen Shore
“Most color photography, in short, has been either formless or pretty. In the first case the meanings of color have been ignored; in the second they have been at the expensive of allusive meanings. While editing directly from life, photographers found it difficult to see simultaneously both the blue and the sky.” ~ John Szarkowski
I HAVE BEEN GETTING OUT AND MAKING PICTURES of the natural world, Adirondack wise, and I must confess that making natural-world landscape pictures gives me pause–aka: to cause one to stop and think carefully, hesitate, or have doubts about something. It suggests a moment of reflection where one reconsiders their plans or intentions because something has made them unsure or prompted concern.
That pause is instigated by the fact that, in the making of natural-world photographs, that act differs from–or I perceive it to be so–my “normal” picture making visual sensibilities. That is, in a man-made environment, I almost always see Form, i.e. relationships of line, shape, space, texture, value, and color in the real world that, when isolated within my imposed framing, creates interesting–to my eye and sensibilities–pictures. In the natural-world environment, not so much. Consequently, I do something that I rarely do in a man-made environment, make a framing variation; an act that is most often referred to in the photo making world as “working the scene.” And, to be honest, I find this situation mildly disconcerting.
My discomfort is caused by the fact that I actually have to make a choice of which photo to print. When faced by such a choice, I tend to fall back on a Stephen Shore quote ….
“I wanted to make pictures that looked like seeing and not pictures that look like photographs”
Shore’s picture making desire, which is very much like my own, invariably makes the choice crystal clear and very easy to make.
FYI, the photograph of the small river cascade is of the Hudson River, a mere 600-700 feet. from where it first bears the name of “Hudson”.