A Thing of Beauty
Landscape Photography is an art form of observation and patience. It’s the only art form where the artist gets to walk into their canvas. It is a search as much as it is an articulation. To capture what is felt, not simply what is seen. The practice supersedes schedules and time. It is a removal from those around, it requires a slowing down, and it requires a search within to see things others do not. Let them flit about, obsessing with time and speed. At its rawest, art is a function of cultural repudiation. It refuses the societal obligations we have collectively agreed to follow; staying within the controlled experience, pushing for upward mobility, answering only known questions. To practice art is to close the door on convention and open a door to madness. To be mad for the thing. Mad and obsessed. Obsession is a dangerous vice to those without something creative to say. To those with something to say, it is the blood of life itself. All art is this madness. But be careful, if it tips too far, if the dance is too much, you may not like what you find, too bad. It is the place to be lost and found at the same time. To hold balance of this and that, to embrace the rapturous Tao encapsulated within the transmissive circle. This is the difference with artists, they have set themselves apart to observe the thing itself. To open themselves to experiencing what others may deem unimportant, socially reprehensible, unworthy of attention, the artists ignore these stigmas to search the places many fear. The purpose is very much the interpretation of nature and self. I will show you this and not that, and I will show it in this way and not that way. It is not a replication, that is the function of the tool. The function of the artist is to transcend the tool for the expression, to create a piece which stands above its reality. And if someone else looks upon it and says, “ah-ah”, then they have transcended themselves and seen something, and whether or not it’s the same thing I saw is irrelevant for I have provided the vehicle for their transcendence, do you understand.
I recently went through my entire archive to clean and reorganize it and in that process I came across forgotten images. Images I never worked on, posted or printed. Images buried in twenty years of the next assignment, the next destination, the next roll of film. I’ve been finding and pulling these out to revisit and in doing so I come at them with fresh eyes and fresh understanding.
2012, on the flanks of Mt. Tamalpais, somewhere along the rolling uplands overlooking Bolinas Bay I sit with my wife waiting for a solar eclipse. A human being is growing inside her. I have one of my cameras setup, though I’m not really expecting much, my mind is elsewhere. The air is still and as the moon slowly tansits our star the air cools, the light drops, and reality is skewed. If it was a few thousand years earlier maybe I’d be painted in ochre and dancing some trance of exaltation or chanting to scare away the dragon, but that’s all long gone. The mystery was solved but the ritual of paying homage continues with an interpretation through art. To express some part of it.
Photographing an eclipse lives at the periphery of a genre called astrophotography, capturing celestial objects and phenomena. This genre can be exacting, requiring specialized equipment and post production techniques to build the image one seeks. Internally cooled cameras, controllers, telescopes, equatorial mounts, external power supplies, dual-band light pollution filters, guide scopes. Sometimes thousands of individual frames are combined, each addressing some portion of the subject, all squished into a single finished image. Many of these techniques are employed when photographing an eclipse. Some want detail in the moon and a wispy glow around the edge and starlight in the background. I don’t have this equipment because this genre has never interested me. I find the scientific field of astronomy fascinating, but to portray it artistically has not. So I stand next to my camera that lacks everything necessary to capture the eclipse unto itself. But it’s not the physicality of the event that’s stimulating, it’s the surreal quality of day turning to night, of comforting warmth dropping when it shouldn’t. The predictability of the day is flipped on its head. I want to capture that feeling. That dreamlike feeling.
I lower my exposure to almost nothing, I keep dropping it until I can see a dark crescent eating away at the sun. Everything goes almost black except for the highlights on the ocean. This outlines the foreground in a way that alludes to something unseen. I capture only a single frame, it’s all I need.
Metaphor often develops later. In the field I’m so wrapped in the experience I don’t often reflect the moment. Now here I am, eleven years later, looking back on this image knowing that the growing human in my wife sitting there is now my ten year old daughter, full of her own life. That I forgot all about taking this image is kind of sweet. Photography is supposed to replicate reality but it doesn’t, it replicates intention. It is all quite simply, a thing of beauty.