Bikes were ridden, photos were made

I spent the morning at the DMV getting registration and license plates for a car we purchased recently. Between finding out that they had moved buildings since I’d last gone there 6 years ago and then forgetting my wallet and having to race home to grab it and try and get back before my number was called, good times were had. The process was more efficient than last time though so it’s still a win. When I went to install the plates on the car at my wife’s place of work I walked inside and she asked what I was going to do today. I shrugged, and said, “I dunno. Nothing? Maybe work on my bike like I was going to do yesterday? Maybe I should just ride my bike and not work on it at all?” She smiled and said, “I think that’s a great idea, I fully support that.”

The ol’ CREV: Country Road Exploration Vehicle. A single speed MTB will get you a lot of places

I brought up the old Surly from the basement, aired up the tires and filled up some water bottles and as I was about ready to head out I thought, “Hey, I should grab a camera.” So I grabbed the Canon 6D and threw the classic 28-70 zoom on it. I could have probably gotten away with just shooting the 50/1.8 but, sometimes a guy wants to shoot other focal lengths (I didn’t really, pretty much everything you’ll see was shot at 50mm). I haven’t ridden much at all lately, much like I haven’t photographed much at all either. Now that I think about it maybe I’m just depressed or something (sarcasm). Anyways, with camera in the frame bag and bike under a Brooks C17 that seemed so much harder than I remembered I pedaled out of the driveway and off to destinations only vaguely known.

I have a bad habit of not doing things for a while and then when I go back to doing them I jump in up to my neck and try to do it like I never stopped. When I set out from the driveway on the bike I said to myself, “Okay, I' haven’t ridden regularly in a while so I’m not really gonna push it. If I ride 10 miles and feel done that’s fine.” But then I just kept riding and by the time I made it back to the house I’d covered 24 miles. It was a nice ride though, even if I was feeling it by the time I pedaled back in to the driveway. I pedaled through a lot of beautiful farm country that sits in the valley floor surrounding the Flathead river in the Flathead valley.

The aesthetic fetishism of rural America is maybe a kind of cliche photographically speaking, and maybe I’m guilty of it but I also find that there is a definite beauty in it, that there is something worth sharing there. Maybe it’s too much Wendell Berry seeping in to my philosophical perspectives but there is something to be learned along a quiet country road and the ways of life that take place along them, and they are lessons that only seem to be more important as we hurtle headlong in what feels to me to be deeply the wrong direction.

It feels like beauty is such a constant theme in my photographic work. The answer to the question “Why do you make pictures?” can, for me, generally be boiled down to an experience of beauty. Maybe this is boring, but I don’t think so. I tend to side with Robert Adams that beauty is not an antiquated category destined for the dustbin of art history. Beauty means something more than a simple historical aesthetic category. Beauty tells us something, it tells us something about ourselves and about the world that we dwell within, it tells of the promise of grace, it is a touchpoint with divinity and all that this entails for us, all that it calls for from us.

But now I’m rambling. And you probably didn’t come here (how did you get here anyway?) for a dissertation on aesthetics and religion, but hey you got one anyways. Tell you what, we’ll wrap this up with one last photo of the slowly meandering Flathead River as it snakes its way along the valley floor, set against the Swan range in the distance. A beautiful landscape, and maybe more.