Fenceposts! You open up a whole new project possibility in those humble, utilitarian parts of a larger whole. For one who can read it, there’s quite a lot of history there. The first photo shows, now serving as fenceposts, a railroad tie, standard steel stakes, cut lumber, and pieces of branches, perhaps dropped from this very cottonwood.

Jay,

That reminds me of the breakthrough brick (in Bozeman!) in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Sadly, we just lost the second of the DeWeese’s that Pirsig came to visit. I had a brief post on it in my local Art Bozeman blog.

Art isn’t the only one who so asserts. Rollie Ruhrkraut, a colleague at the museum, used to say that any decent docent could talk about a brick for that thirty minutes that Mr. Adams mentions.

And I would add that Mr. Hopper saw what he wanted and needed. Another perceptive talent might take that time to gather an entirely different bouquet.

I’m sorry to report that your giraffe is just a snowy branch with a suggestive shape. But I’m more than delighted that the photograph engages your imagination. Imagination is not only permitted, but required, at least to the extent the photograph is taken as art. To quote Robert Adams again (from Beauty in Photography):

“Art asserts that nothing is banal, which is to say that a serious landscape picture is metaphor. If a view of geography does not imply something more enduring than a specific piece of terrain, then the picture will hold us only briefly… In this sense we would in most respects choose thirty minutes with Edward Hopper’s painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street that was his subject; with Hopper’s vision we see more.”

That last sentence, by the way, is from an artist statement in a show I saw last year in which were displayed photographs capturing the (of course) essence of the subject matter, in this case dead tree roots.

Jay: You seem to be adopting the finetooth approach. With your Photoshop skills, I’m sure you can fix it.

D. Lightning strikes, limbs fall, symmetry is lost. Unarranged! Life REALLY is complicated. Maybe I accidentally captured the essence not only of cottonwood, but of Life? :-) In all seriousness, I don’t necessarily require it, but I always enjoy it when a work suggests metaphorical associations well beyond the nominal subject.

Leslie: Just calling me humble is enough to make me blush. Thanks for your reactions, I appreciate your comment about space. That’s an aspect I find really intriguing, but often forget to think about when photographing (which may be good).

David: I’ve thought of trying to combine photographs from different angles into some kind of composite; I think we discussed this before in connection with Cubism. But I never thought of the relation to Egyptian art–thanks for that!

Joe: You nailed it! Certain aspects, like the diagonal and the overcrowding, were close to my thinking, which was partly at the time, and partly later. (I’m generally more intuitive while making pictures, more analytical afterwards.) I had thought about the broken trunks to the extent of wanting to show them, but your point about the way they are enhanced by the empty sky is quite illuminating; probably they need that, being partially veiled by the smaller branches and twigs. And I like your “sense of suspension,” which I think also owes something to the overall lighter tone of the first image. Thanks for taking the time to write about how this works for you. McFawn, take note!

1. The diagonal plane of the fence is more pronounced than in the second photo, lending an added sense of depth of field and linear dissection of the frame that contrasts nicely with the cacophony of the branches. Moves the eye across the image nicely but subtly.

2. The fence and the branches touch the edges of the frame, but only in specific places, rather than generally as in the second image. Gives a sense of suspension, to my eye, that is lacking in the second image, which feels crowded into the frame.

3. Perhaps the most striking aspect is how the broken trunks jut into empty space. The two play together nicely, indicating a past — a context — that lends that aforementioned insight.

…Specific enough? Hope so! *grin*