Artistic Voice and Locale

I’ve struggled seemingly endlessly with finding things I want to photograph here in Arkansas. If I were another kind of person I suppose I’d just say I’m not interested and forget about it but I am really trying to make peace with being here and make good use of my time here. But I keep striking out.

I’ve found some nice details to photograph but the heart of my work in Michigan was with the landscape and I just can’t relate to the landscape here no matter how many times I drive the countryside. It’s pretty enough countryside for the most part but I just can’t get away from the fact that it’s not my countryside. It’s not my home. I have no relationship to this landscape and no amount of good will will change that.

I’ve been particularly frustrated because I have the feeling that I should be able to make wonderful photographs no matter where I am. I think many photographers just enjoy taking pictures of anything, anything that’s remotely visually interesting. But I’m not made that way. I am more like a project type of photographer who wants to work on something that has real meaning to them. I’m a fine art photographer by heart. I don’t want to make pretty pictures of anything I come across. I want to make my own pictures of things that have meaning to me.

It’s no different than my painting and pastel work. I wouldn’t make pastels of junk yard stuff, even though it may be visually interesting and I don’t want to make photographs of junk yard stuff either. Artists are really required to create bodies of work that are consistent. Consistency in terms of subject matter are not strictly required, though the feeling better be pretty consistent if you’re going to vary subject matter. But most fine art photographers do make bodies of work that are of consistent subject matter.

I just can’t make photographs of cattle grazing or mountains and include them with the Michigan farm land that I have been photographing. And even if I tried to make photographs of mountains and cattle, the two things that are ubiquitous in Arkansas, I couldn’t do it. I just can’t do it. I may be able to find details to photograph that could be included in my Michigan portfolio but that’s about it.

I really must put this struggle to bed. It’s making me miserable. But the problem is that I’m an artist and a photographer and I’m here in Arkansas for four more months and I find it very depressing to have nothing with which to work to do creative things. It’s what I live for and I am seriously struggling to figure out what to do with my life if I can’t do that. It’s not really just what to do. It’s really about not being able to create things and the hole that’s leaving in my life. It’s deeply depressing and disorienting for me and it’s spreading into my confidence in all areas of my creative life.

I’m losing hope and hope is the one thing that’s truly required for human existence.

I am returning to Michigan for a photo trip this next week and I am looking forward to it and hoping that I can recapture my enthusiasm and faith in my ability as a photographer. We’ll see. I have been looking forward to it but it’s also a lot to expect to jump out of a state of depression and torpor and begin a vibrant creative life all of a sudden, particularly when I will be so far from my wife and so isolated much of the time.

That’s probably a “secret” about being a “serious” photographer. You have to travel a lot and you have to spend your time combing the countryside for images and then you have to get there when the light and weather are appropriate to take the images. When you’re not photographing, you’re far from home, sitting in a hotel or car or coffee shop or restaurant all by yourself. I’m not very good at it but it’s what’s required to get the photographs that make it worth while.

Missing home

I am sorely missing my home in Michigan. More to the point, I am missing my home landscape. I have been traveling the roads in Northwest Arkansas day after day and more and more realizing that there is nothing here that means anything to me. I have seen some beautiful places but they mostly just don’t connect with me personally or artistically. I’ve even seen some places that I respond to a bit artistically, but they are really only approximations of the landscape that I love in Michigan.

It’s getting a bit depressing for me. I am a person who likes to be productive. I’m really trying to make something of my photography and I just can’t come up with anything that I care about. I am even thinking of starting work in new directions just because I can’t do what I really want to do here. I may have to do that but I don’t really want to. I want to be home, taking in the landscape that inhabits my spirit.

Here is one landscape that I do respond to pretty well. I took this shot a couple of days ago and I like it a lot. It’s maybe not a very happy picture, but then a lot of my pictures are not exactly exuberant! I like the sense of tragedy that hangs on this picture. Here it is:

Vineyard in NW Arkansas

Seeing it again here I really do like it. The moody sky is nice. The little bit of hillside visible right in the center of the image and then off to the right are also very nice. The vines themselves look so bedraggled. But the numbered posts at the ends of each row and the wires strung from them remind me of concentration camps for some reason. That’s where the real sense of tragedy comes in for me.

I love the color in the image, though most of that comes from my editing. The scene was pretty grey to begin with but I increased the saturation and contrast quite a bit to get this result. There’s a lot of detail lost in this small reproduction. The original image is stitched from three very high resolution digital images so it’s enormous. It could be printed six feet wide or more just fine and be sharp as can be. In fact, I want to see it printed large.

So maybe it’s not impossible for me to find images I will like here in Arkansas. But it sure is difficult.

Today I drove through a huge swath of the Arkansas National Forest on some of the most remote dirt roads I’ve ever been on. I saw only one pickup truck in a couple of hours of driving these roads through the mountains. It was a nice trip. I hiked a trail at the top of a mountain. It was all very well and good but it means nothing to me photographically or artistically. Here are a couple of pictures from that trip:

Vineyard in NW Arkansas

Nice scenery, and they might be meaningful to someone else, but not to me.

I think a lot of photographers think that they should be able to make wonderful pictures of anything and everything that they come across. I don’t feel that way at all. I am interested in expressing something that comes from inside me. It’s all well and good if I can compose an interesting picture out of the things I come across from day to day. But there are certain scenes and images that carry my sense of what life is like and those are the things I want to photograph and exhibit. So far this fall, the vineyard, one or two pictures of some rock bluffs and a couple of pictures of leaves frozen in the ice are the only images that feel right to me. It’s not enough to satisfy me. I have too many hours here to fill.

Ah well, tomorrow I guess I will go out and try again. I don’t know what else to do until I can go home again. I’m planning to do that after Christmas. I want to photograph in the snow. I have shots that I want to re-shoot with a better camera and technology and I just want to roam that land that I know so well–the farms of Southern Michigan and the rivers and hills and snow of Northern Michigan. It’s funny. Of course there’s nothing especially magical about those places except that they are my landscape. I do like the crisp cleanliness of fresh snow. The trees are called out so starkly against it. Things sparkle and go almost black and white. I don’t really like the rich greens of summer as a photographer. I love the sharpness and spareness of fall and winter.

A Photo Project

I’ve recently been re-reading a book I bought some time ago entitled Photo Projects by Chris Dickie. It’s premise is that photographers should work on a project that gives your work an organizing principle. I think it’s a great idea. I’ve been working on a general theme when I was at home in Michigan–that being the pastoral landscape around my home. But this is not really a project. I would say a project is something that is organized around a concept. It’s more specific than “landscape photography.” I would define a project as something that tells a story, that is cohesive, and comprehensive.

Some of the examples of projects given in the book include one on biscuits, another on the Thames River estuary, one on genocides around the world, one focusing on a nuclear plant, and another based on the idea of the shipping weather forecasts. I’ve read of others that included photographs only from within a five minute walk of your door, or another where the photographer took only one photograph a day. He didn’t take fifty and then pick one. He just took one picture!

One of the things I realize from looking at this book is that without an organizing principle you can wind up with a lot of photographs that don’t really hang together, can’t really be shown together and generally just don’t amount to much. They may all be lovely photographs and they will generally be related by your interests and favored subject matter, but they don’t readily add up to a show or a book, which are the ends for most projects.

So I think that it’s important for me to start one or more projects so that my work coheres into a whole rather than a bunch of parts. So what would differentiate what I’m presently doing from a project? Take the recent lichen and moss photographs. They don’t add up to a project, but they could if I defined a project of illustrating the miniature life found along a specific path or trail. A project might be to illustrate the small scale flora along the Buffalo River Trail, for example.

With the trail as the organizing concept, I would need photographs of the trail itself to serve as the backdrop for the other photographs. I could use the geography of the trail, its many sections and regions, as an organizing concept for a book or exhibition. I could perhaps define the project as documenting only the flora that exist within ten feet of the trail or maybe no more than one foot tall. These become kind of silly at some level but they help to define the project and give it cohesiveness.

With the project defined, you can envision the book or the exhibition or both because it has a point. A collection of macro photography is not really a project. It’s fairly random, as is a lot of my macro photography, just a lot of details that don’t cohere into a whole.

Another part of a project is that it must cohere visually. You not only take photographs that tell a story but you must design them so that a book or exhibition hangs together visually. You want to define a look to your photographs that make it clear they are a part of a whole. That means no mixing of stark, contrasty, black and white photographs with richly saturated color photographs for example. You could perhaps mix a couple of different aesthetics in a single book but they had better at least sit comfortably with one another.

I haven’t yet come up with a project for myself. There are elements of projects that I don’t like, such as needing to photograph things that I’m not that interested in just because they are part of the story or the project. Maybe it’s just a matter of defining the project correctly.

Of course, defining a project changes the nature of your work as well. You will need to plan the subject matter, make arrangements to photograph what you need, organize it all somehow, and put it together visually. You won’t be just going out looking for something interesting to shoot and photographing whatever you run across. I can see now that this is a double edged sword. The project can organize and make your work more cohesive but it can also take the spontaneity and pleasure out of what you’re doing.

Why am I in Such a Hurry?

I went out for another photo shoot yesterday and I was struck by the sense of rush that I had all day. You might think that a photo shoot would just be a pleasant day in the woods but it seems fraught with anxiety and can be emotional roller coaster.

I was driving over an hour to my location particularly to re-shoot the lichen shots that I took a couple of weeks ago. That was my primary goal. But I have also been thinking about starting a photo project while I’m here in Arkansas on the subject of rocks. It’s a very rocky state and it’s been cropping up in my pictures everywhere I go, including in taking the lichen pictures. So I also had the idea that I might stop in one of the dried up rivers I’ve seen on my way out to the lichen location and photograph the dry river bed. So I did that, and spent maybe a half hour in the river bed trying to shoot the overal flow of the riverbed. I also found some very interesting details of rocks and spent a few minutes shooting them. If you want to skip all my tedious writing then you can see the pictures at the bottom of this post.

I was already feeling rushed. I knew I should be going to my ultimate goal for the day so I didn’t bother setting up the tripod for each shot. I know I’ve made this mistake before but I always feel like I don’t have time. It’s probably a mistake to try to do more than one thing on any one shoot as it adds time pressure and necessitates changing of lenses and moving the tripod around a lot. All these things take time and I don’t feel like I have it.

So, I jumped back in the car and drove the rest of the way to my destination. I had read that there was an area with mosses and lichens that was a short distance along the trail in the opposite direction that I had gone the last time so I decided to check that out. Well, there were indeed some very nice areas of beautiful moss along the trail so I spent some time setting up and moving around trying to get a really clean shot of the varied collections of mosses along the way. Just to get started I had to take off the wide angle zoom I had on the camera from the riverbed, carefully cap it to avoid getting dust in it, take out two extension tubes and the long telephoto zoom that I intended to use for the mosses and install all that on the camera. Again, I felt in a hurry here. Each area that I saw looked great but when examined in detail through the camera there was always a leaf in the way or some other flaw that I thought would ruin a photograph. It was also time consuming to keep moving through the dense underbrush on the steeply sloping site trying to set up a tripod where all three legs had to be different lengths and frame a shot that inevitably seemed imperfect to me.

I kept seeing new and different varieties of moss so I kept moving on and setting up again and again, all the time thinking that I should be shooting lichen up on top of that ridge in the other direction. Who would know that moss could be such an exciting subject for photography but I think you’ll see that it’s quite beautiful. After maybe 20 or 30 setups I came to a scenic overlook on the trail that gave a view of the high bluffs that lie along the Buffalo River. Well, with my ideas about a project involving rocks would do nicely with a shot of that bluff so I took off the extension tubes and used the telephoto zoom by itself. The shot needed a vertical orientation so I was fumbling with the heavy camera and lens tipped on its side. It seemed like it took forever. Remember that each time you change the camera you’re taking off a backpack, unzipping compartments and storing and removing stuff.

I went a bit further down the trail in hopes of finding another overlook nearby but things didn’t look promising. I did find another very interesting patch of moss so I changed the camera back to the macro setup with the extension tubes and the telephoto and took a few more shots. Finally, I decided I needed to head back up the trail and go the other way from where I had started and go up on the high ridge where I had seen such wonderful lichen before. I knew this was a strenuous hike so I completely broke down the camera and collapsed the tripod and put it all back in the backpack and set off back up the trail.

After a few minutes I arrived at the trailhead where I had started and went up the trail to the ridge. It’s hard to overemphasize what a strenuous hike this is. It goes straight up from the trailhead at a brutal angle and doesn’t stop for a half hour. That’s a half hour if you’re in really good shape by the way, which I no longer am. But I’m still strong enough to put in a very vigorous half hour the equivalent of climbing stairs on uneven ground. The trail map I have says this is a 600 foot climb but I’d swear that it’s more. Still, climbing a sixty story building with twenty pounds of camera equipment strapped to your back is no small job.

Finally, I’m in the area where the lichen is and I’m to my destination for the day! And now the rushing can stop. I have plenty of time to shoot for a couple of hours if I want. But wait! The lichen looks dull and uninteresting. No matter where I look it looks burned up, dried up and nowhere near as varied and rich as I remember it. I get out the camera, lenses, extension tubes and tripod again and start searching the woods, looking for the beautiful lichen I remember from the previous trip. But there’s very little of it that looks photogenic now. I think the frost we’ve been having has hit the lichen and weakened it. It also seems very dry up there. It looks like I have lost my golden opportunity from before by failing to use the tripod that I had in my pack. Another good photo lesson. Shoot what’s in front of you as if it will never be there again! Because it may not. Or at least not until perhaps spring or the next fall!

I did find some decent little patches of lichen that, if I zoomed in really close and cropped out all the dead and ugly stuff around it might make for a few decent shots. I was disappointed when I headed back down the sixty story building that I had climbed but finally I wasn’t in a hurry.

Here are a few shots from this day. I’m saving a few others for another post so stay tuned!

Cabin in the Woods

There is one more image from the last shoot that I didn’t post before that I thought might be worth a few minutes discussion. The image is of an abandoned cabin or shed of some kind that I saw on my way in to the waterfall trail. It caught my eye right away and I walked out into the field where it was located and shot it several different ways, which is what most photographers would do. Here’s the wide view of the cabin:

What interested me about the cabin or shed is that it was such an interesting evidence of human presence. Not only the building itself was interesting but also the trees that had grown up around it. They are a different species than any of the surrounding trees and their light bark really stood out against the cabin.

There are a few different ways you could photograph this cabin, many different ways of course. I started out with this long shot of the cabin and I actually like this pretty well. Being a long and wide shot, it makes the cabin small and pretty isolated in this big environment. That fits with a lot of the images that I create. I like that mood. I like a lot of big empty spaces and human habitations overwhelmed by that space.

Having gotten that shot, I began moving in towards the cabin, intending to see if I could get a higher resolution shot and to see if the details of the trees against the cabin could be emphasized more. That results in something like this:

Kind of interesting, I suppose, but now I’ve lost the feeling of space and the isolation of the cabin. It’s no longer clear that this building is in a big environment or is isolated but the trees against the building are not prominent enough either. It’s kind of a middling mess. So I went in closer. And I got this:

Now this is a little more interesting than the middle shot. There’s a nice interplay between the trees and the building and the framing feels about right. But it’s not what I’m interested in about this building. I like the wide shot.

But I have some misgivings about even the wide shot. It feels a bit too formulaic to me. It’s cute or clever or something. It doesn’t feel genuine to me, it feels like a postcard shot and I’m not interested in that. I don’t know any way to rationalize why I feel that way. It’s just an instinct. I don’t quite like the shot. I think some people will like it. I think a lot of people will like the closeup shot. But it’s not what I’m after either. So it will wind up among the many photographs that are nice but not quite me.

Maybe the wide shot is a bit too melodramatic, with the cabin so small and nearly centered in the shot. In fact, maybe it’s the centering that bothers me. So I tried one more re-framing but it didn’t work any better. Symmetry is not the problem. The problem just lies in the whole gestalt of the thing. It doesn’t feel serious to me. It feels a bit contrived, somehow. And maybe that is because this cabin has probably been preserved as a part of this park. It’ s not quite natural. If it were found outside the park there would probably be other elements of human presence that might have made this shot feel right.

One thing I know is that as a painter I had to intuit all these things before I started the painting. There was no trying five different compositions. Maybe you get the instinct right right off the bat but I think often a painter gets caught trying to resolve an image by one technical means or another when the composition or even subject matter is just wrong from the outset and there’s no getting around it.

That’s a real luxury with photography and it’s a great education too. You learn by having the opportunity to try a lot of things and getting to easily toss out the shots that don’t work.

A Walk in the Woods

Yesterday I went for my first hike in my winter home, Northwest Arkansas. I went to the Buffalo National River area, where there are abundant steep rocky bluffs along the Buffalo River. I first hiked up to a little waterfall. It’s still pretty dry here so the water was not running very high but it was a nice hike. That’s something I’m not used to in Arkansas. In Michigan there is abundant water both in our lakes but also in our beautiful clear-running rivers. In Arkansas, most of the smaller creeks and rivers are nothing but piles of rocks for much of the year. They begin to collect water in the winter and spring when there’s more rain. After a heavy rain, they can flood to enormous proportions.

On the walk up to the waterfall you travel along a creek bed that is typically dry except for a few small pools of water. Along the way, I noticed some interesting roots sticking out from along the banks and promised myself to go back and photograph them after I shot the waterfall. I also noticed some interesting rock formations along the way. The waterfall itself was a little unspectacular but it was a pretty enough hike. On the way out of the waterfall area I noticed a nice little building in the woods at the edge of a field. I had to stop and photograph it too. In the gallery at the bottom of this post you’ll see some pictures of this segment of my trip.

From the waterfall, I drove over to the Buffalo River Trail. I began hiking up the trail to the south and was immediately faced with the longest, steepest climb I’ve ever seen outside of Yosemite Valley. I’m not a big hiker so I know there are many bigger climbs around but this one was big enough! Straight up out of the parking area for about 600 feet. It felt like a thousand or more! There was one overlook point but otherwise the trail was wooded and rocky. After about half an hour I came to an area where lichens and mosses began to cover the rocks. They were incredible! I began photographing them, just moving from one incredible rock to another. I’ve never seen lichens that were so clearly little plants. It was like looking at an aerial photograph of forests and alluvial plains. You’ll see pictures of the lichens in the gallery as well.

All in all, this was a very satisfying trip. It felt fantastic to get the camera out after all the hassle of moving down here. I just don’t feel good when I’m not being productive and the move has felt anything but productive. I do love the sense of complete involvement that happens when I’m looking through the lens at something interesting, working the compositions, framing, focusing, adjusting apertures, etc.

I did however, make one real mistake on this trip. When I got back and looked at the pictures very closely, I could see that areas of the lichen pictures were subtly out of focus. I had been too lazy to use my tripod on this section of the trip. It’s a real pain in the neck to set up a tripod for every single shot. I love to get in there, look through the viewfinder and move and constantly re-frame the shot, zooming in, moving, rotating around. I have image stabilizing lenses and I was counting on that and a relatively fast shutter speed to prevent blurring but it didn’t work. Either the stabilization wasn’t working or perhaps it doesn’t work properly with the relatively high shutter speeds I was using but in any case, the images are not sharp.

With a tripod, every move requires moving the tripod on about five different axes, adjusting the length of the legs, the center post, the ball head. It’s just a pain. But it’s also the only way to get razor sharp shots and you have to have razor sharp in order to be able to print the images at all and certainly if you wish to enlarge the images as I do.

So that means going back to that trail, over an hour drive away, hiking back up that 600 foot hill in order to re-shoot those shots with the tripod. Oh well, I won’t make that mistake again!