Edges.Limits

Working back through some shots from a favorite series and something occurred to me. Maybe its was listening to Shriekback while fiddling or some other thing but I played and I found another connection. The Dark Inside.

The Dark Inside

It is a photograph made in Glen Coe in the highlands of Scotland. What it is about is the question of how we should be asked to think about natural landscape photography. Close inspection of the middle third reveals rocks jutting through carpets of grass and furze cut by running streams fed by recent (perpetual?) rainfall. That must mean that the dark of the lower third is a loch and the white at the top is a mist or low hanging clouds. So the picture is of a loch in a glen on a misty/cloudy day. Maybe the picture is about how we see landscapes and why we find certain landscapes recognizable and appealing and others appealing and provocative? 

Glen Coe Highlands Scotland

Context is everything. With less, its a puzzle appealing primarily to how we feel about juxtaposition, planes and angles, texture and space. With more, its a different kind of puzzle, asking what compels us and fills our thinking as we move from A to B. 

Federal Plaza Chicago IL 2014

Just kidding. Its a storm passing over Fence Lake in Wisconsin late one summer afternoon. But the fact of the baggage I bring to the photograph is why photos should only be titled with a place name and time by the photographer. Otherwise, with almost any other form of title, I impose my take and understanding and preclude a personal response by the next viewer. 

New Joy Fades - Fence Lake WI 2013

Anthropologists refer to certain urban spaces as palimpsestic because they are continuously reworked over the course of perpetual decline and resurrection. There are moments in that process at which point the erasure before the next overwrite is powerfully and brilliantly manifest.

Forms or shapes without form? What makes an image worthy of more than a moment's regard? Inundated by images the bar has been raised to stratospheric heights. Its so much easier to create but the market for creativity is flooded with exceptional works. I read ony captions and hear only bites and see only initial, fleeting impressions. How can I expect more of others? 

With signs of desperation and despair, these windows tell of lives now lived elsewhere but that must remain freighted with what went on before. 

From the series, "I Know What's Best for You." 

I like to find/build images that incorporate a suggestion that things aren't quite right. Things are awry because of an absence or a presence that sends the scene it just over the edge. Or maybe lurking in the landscape is a cypher requiring decoding. This is a shot I took because I was compelled to. And when reviewing the snaps from that day I saw why. Its not a heart stopping photo. Its a quiet photo of lameness and survival and contains a maimed tree and a patched road which form a cypher I'm incapable of decoding.  

ScriptS

Shorelines are brilliant examples of edges where interesting transitions occur. In the shot below, because the lake was calm, the transition was complicated with extra elements not always susceptible to a camera and lens. Clouds highlighted by the setting sun and the lake bottom are incorporated into confused assembly of forms in an unusual opportunity. 

Shoreline - Fence Lake WI

I'm looking carefully for shots that capture the spirit and effect of the excellent abstract/conceptual painters I'm getting familiar with. Finding edges to redefine limits.