all photos (embiggenable)
“One of the biggest mistakes a photographer can make is to look at the real world and cling to the vain hope that next time his film will somehow bear a closer resemblance to it...If we limit our vision to the real world, we will forever be fighting on the minus side of things, working only too make our photographs equal to what we see out there, but no better…. My first thought is always of light.” ~ Galen Rowell
ONE MORE DAY UNTIL SPRING BUT I COULDN’T wait, so I got the EYE-TAL-EE-N sports car––twin intercooled turbo, track-tuned suspension, burble / pop / wail free-flow exhaust, soft top––out and on the road-gotta give the Mazda turbo a bit of a rest.With a ˚64F day the top was open and I headed 10 miles down river to check out the Spring runoff at the chasm. Made some photographs while I was out and about.
The day started sunny and gradually turned into a soft hazy overcast. Galen Rowell would have hated it and most likely left his camera at home. That cuz, ya know, it’s all about “the light” and if “the light” ain’t dramatic what’s the point? Without it it’s very difficult to be a photo-caricaturist. That is, a picture maker dedicated to making caricatures of the natural world cuz, ya know, the real world is just…well…boring.
And, iMo, Rowell was one of the masters of that genre and it’s fair to write that he never used a film that wasn’t color saturated and never encountered a hue & saturation slider that he did not use to the max. Rowell apparently believed that the answer to making one’s photographs “better” was to slather on a lot of art sauce cuz only suckers and nincompoops attempt to make their photographs bear a closer resemblance to the real world; in his words “fighting on the minus side of things”.
The only conclusion I can draw from his work and his words is that he is someone who employs the tools of a medium that excels, like no other visual art, at showing what the real world looks like, in order to make photographs that do not look like the real world. iMo, that makes made him the real nincompoop who is was fighting on the minus side of things.