I enjoyed looking at ‘Where I live’ over and over again. I would very much like to have it – if it were for sale and if I could afford it. Kindly let me know.

I asked the question about smaller and more transitory elements not by way of suggestion for aesthetic or documentary purposes, but to hear your thoughts, which you’ve expressed so eloquently. As noted, I do not often go for foreground elements, and they can easily look picturesque or overdone or just poorly done. But I do love the few times a bird has flown into a photograph, and wish it were something I could control as June can. To me the contrast would point up the relatively slow time (on a human scale) of these geographies.

Jay’s point about a fencepost (or bird) providing an anchor that affects eye movement and sense of space is well taken. You’re right that in my series with the Bridger (not Bitterroot) mountains in the background (and yes, June, farm fields in the middle ground — there is no near foreground), I am more looking for a sense of sweep that becomes large, flat shapes on the plane. I do have some with fenceposts, sorry to confess. But I think it would be an interesting experiment to take one of these emptier ones and try the effects of different compositions with a digitally added bird. (I don’t do that kind of manipulation in actual images.) Perhaps a future post…

Plucking at the fabric of your thoughts and deeds, which I hope more reveals than ravels…

In what I have seen of your images, Steve, and perhaps too few to measure by - life as clumps and patches serves to punctuate a great process. It’s a sense I get as I had at the Grand Canyon. We stood, the pressing touristy bunch of us, on the lip of a great void made the more empty by the absence of anything of a given size. It was a measure-taking experience and my comprehension could not find purchase.

Sure, a road could cut the Bitterroot and a good explosive charge could topple the balancing rock, but nature does these things in an abundance of time to which we are not privy. I get the sense that a moment - a Steve Durbin - made its flittering appearance as another day among billions began or ended.

June - I was looking at the one picture where a small plateau has bushes. They seem so provisional yet so indicative of a determination to put down roots when at all possible. I realize that my preoccupation with your motif is getting a little long in the tooth - but I go back to your web site which celebrates blossoming things and am struck by the contrast, or the concurrence.

Birgit - drove north along the lake from Holland amid a dynamic landscape. I remember places where the the plants have immobilized the dunes with their cover and others where the shifting sand makes life tenuous. It’s that provisional relationship that I tend to see in June and Steve’s work and I wonder if it plays a part in your response to Sleeping Bear.

Thank you for putting into words some of what I’m trying for. I like to think of myself as trying for a perch or purchase (in the climbing sense) on these formations. One could easily become another bone among the bones.

Steve,

Aside from the obvious problems with adding trees and birds or whatnot, which is that they are quite sparse in September in that large silent looming land (junipers are the trees; an occasional hawk the birds), a bigger part of why I disregard the “picturesque” is that I am trying to project or paint or evoke a landscape that is out of our time, our space, something that has no temporal references. Even trees are a bit too mortal. There are one or two landscape features of the 8 that I might include something of human or animal — Cathedral Rock (sigh, doesn’t every mountain park have one) may have to include the road that winds on the other side of the river, preventing humans from approaching it. And it’s possible that I’ll do something on the more cultivatable landscape, the meadows along the river where the cows roam.But they are still in my future plans.

Your earlier landscapes, Steve, are littered with human remains. The Bitterroots (the most recent photos you’ve posted about) aren’t, although I need to go back and look again — were there fields there? At any rate, your themes seem to come back again and again to loss, absence, disappearance, but with remnants left behind to remind us. All done rather abstractly, of course, but still there. Even the waterfall of one of your photos is a more temporal thing than the sheer rock abstract of others of yours. Clearly it’s not an all-encompassing theme for you, but it’s hovers around a lot of what you do.

So I think, alongside of the consideration of the “picturesque” and what is “really there” is the consideration of what it is that one is trying to evoke. Exactly what D., I think, was talking about — the construct.

Birgit, I thought of these queries (for myself) when I thought of your Dunes. The question for me would be what is it about them that I would want to deal with? Why would I be attracted to them? Dunes are interesting because they are both timeless and easily imprinted and then the imprints get brushed aside in a gust of wind or a torrent of rain. And people can make their marks on the dunes, settle into them, and yet when they leave, the great emptiness remains. The sense of great distances that one can observe from the top of some dunes, and the isolation that I remember in your earlier photo — these resonate with me. I don’t know your art well enough to know what is working on you, but you do keep coming back to the Dunes. They clearly are meaningful.

I am at one of my favorite places - the Sleeping Bear Dunes.

The lack of birds, branches and foreground rocks is exactly what I admire about your work. As a phototyro I am always in search of the odd foreground element to mask my lack of distance command. In your case, Steve, It’s the overarching sense of space that your marching progressions create. Stick a fencepost in there and your pictures bid to become very -esque. I want my vision to fly out there unimpeded by pictorial conventions.

June, I’ve said it before - it’s as though you are attempting a pictorial purchase on the rocks. One can imagine, in some future millenium, that they could find you embedded among the strata. And they might marvel, not knowing that you crawled in there with your eyes, or marvel more for the knowin’of it.
Such a phenomenon can stand without props.

I’m struck that your John Day works (rather like most of my own landscapes) are mostly of distant, large-scale things like mountains and rivers, while your Portland pieces are more of smaller things like flowers and chestnuts. Do you think adding a bird or a branch or a foreground rock would work in any of the John Day quilts? Aren’t those just as much part of the essence of the place?