On symbolic ambiguity and doing it anyways, or something...

On making photos you don’t understand

Leica M262 + Zeiss 50/2

I was going over photographs from a walk the other day when I came to a strange realization. I was looking at photographs I had made, even with approval, but was haunted by the realization that I didn’t understand what they were about. Sometimes photos are obvious. The photograph of a beautiful landscape is very clearly a reverential witness to the beauty of things. But I was looking at photos that were, for lack of a better term, simply ambiguous with regard to symbolism or meaning. But they were nevertheless moving in some mysterious way that I didn’t and still do not understand. I struggle with this, mightily.

A stained cardboard box in the snow, or tattered vegetal remnants against a concrete wall are less obviously beautiful, if they are even about beauty at all. I have been trying to take the advice of a friend of mine when they told me to just shoot anything. If it catches my eye, causes me to stop and linger for a second look, I make a photograph of it. It has been a liberating process and has opened up pathways that I would have never previously explored.

In the past I have always struggled with a need to situate my “artistic” output within the architectonics of my broader worldview. Making landscape photographs couldn’t be about simply making photos of the landscape, it had to be connected to a broader critique of the broken relationship with the land in modernity and a practice of re-enchanting our experience of the land, the reintroduction of the sacred in to our experience of the earth. In this context the photographs had a clear meaning and intention. Even until relatively recently I would say that the photographs I was making still fit in to a broader worldview. From my perspective at least they have had a clear function and place within a holistic philosophical/existential framework.

I suppose that it doesn’t matter that I don’t understand them. In having the experiences and turning them in to photographs there is something at work even if I don’t understand it.

The Second Day of December

On winter woodlands and other shenanigans

Canon 5D Mk1 + Canon 50/1.8

I remembered about the snow tax. Snow tax, for the uninitiated, is the increased effort required to walk through any decent quantity of snow. It’s especially tiring when you’re walking uphill in the snow. It always reminds me of that Thoreau quote from the essay Winter Walk. In it he says, “Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.” If you Google “snow tax” you probably won’t find anything. I don’t think this is a real term, I just made it up while walking up the hill and exclaiming, “Ah, I forgot about the snow tax.” Feel free to use it, my gift to you.

The photos here were all made on a short walk in a local park close to town, all shot on the ancient Canon 5D Mk1 with Canon’s cheapest 50mm, the 50/1.8. It’s a fun setup that can get you ready and rolling for not a lot of outlay.

Suddenly, Winter...

Snow and photographs, etc..

Just a few days ago I feel like I was laughing at the idea of Big Mountain opening on December 4th, but if the webcams are anything to go by I might be eating crow on that one. To be fair there wasn’t a flake of snow anywhere except in the tips of the high country and the temperatures had been exceedingly mild. But, as my grandpa says about living in Montana, “It’s never boring.” So, here we are. I usually tend to struggle with shooting anything in the winter, but we’re off to a bangin’ start so far. I can’t seem to put the camera down.

Part of this may also be that I’ve been making it a habit to grab the camera more often than not, which is a new thing. You’re more likely to photograph things if you’ve got a camera in your hand than if it’s sitting on a shelf somewhere, who knew. I think I always felt like having a camera on me regularly might turn me in to one of those idiots who is aloof and absorbed in to “tHe ArT” or whatever, but in some ways having a camera on you almost makes you more present in the moments in which you live.

A thought that’s been on my mind lately is the idea that photography as a medium is fundamentally a practice of paying attention. Unlike painting, for example, most photography has as its medium the given world. And so the task of the photographer is to see, and to respond to the call of the world in the form of photographs. Shout out to my coworker for spurring this train of thought in a discussion about music as an art form, by the way. All this to expand on that idea that the presence of a camera comes with a certain perspectival shift that brings our attention to a sharper point.

The photos you’re seeing here are a mix of 5D and 6D photographs. I’m not going to tell you what was shot with what. Maybe you can tell, maybe you can’t. I tend to think you can’t. I will say having shot the two back to back, the 6D is the better camera to shoot with, but the files from the 5D still win. Anyway, here’s a fun photo of Ruckus to take us out.