This is more work from the Newfoundland trip, though it’s not related to location at all. For some reason, despite my long-standing interest in rocks, I never tried photographing them very close-up. The closest I came was in connection with the Patina series, where I was mostly interested in flat colors in analogy with weathered paint. Here, as the title implies, I’m visualizing these as landscapes. Most have no horizon line, that powerfully suggestive, if far from universal, feature of landscapes. But they seem, at least the later ones, to resemble landscapes in the way one moves around the picture. Of course, in viewing any image, the eye moves under the attraction of various elements. With landscapes, the motion is also kinesthetic: one can imagine one’s own body walking around the scene and visiting different spots within it. I bet there’s more activity in the motor cortex when looking at a landscape; maybe the experiment has already been done.
A difference from classical landscapes is the fairly strong use of limited depth of field to throw parts of the image out of focus. I can’t really give a good reason for it, except that it’s been a steadily expanding part of my photography. I’m painfully aware of the faddish use of the technique in recent “tilt-shift” photography of urban landscapes, where I’ve disliked it in the work I’ve seen so far. Perhaps this mini-project will lead me to re-examine it with a more favorable eye. I haven’t decided whether I like or dislike the air of artificiality it lends, a sort of mysterious surrealism.
There’s probably a good argument to be made for concentrating on major projects. But I apparently can’t resist side experiments like this one. Perhaps later, now back home, I will carry on with it when I have a chance. It will be interesting to see the direction it takes. Do you also tend to hatch ideas by incubating them on your mental back burner?
Steve:
Would seem that my perception of rocky surfaces is influenced by recent events. Your wet and worn boulder images appear as though captured by Europa, or whatever the name of that machine wandering in the vicinity of Jupiter.
Trying to capture the eroded and partially dissolved Maritime coastline has been an ongoing challenge for me. And then to have you hie in from Montana and get these pictures is just too much. Something to think about while pondering the tidal pool garden.
The second image is sensual!
As a landscape devote, I will ruminate on ‘ horizon line, that powerfully suggestive, if far from universal, feature of landscapes’.
Jay,
The first one made me think of seeing the moon from a spacecraft in orbit around it. We should have a moon, or half of one, in this tidal garden.
Birgit,
The second one has the closest thing to a horizon of any, a rounded hill against a dark sky. I didn’t think of horizons while photographing (only later while writing), or I might have tried more of them.
Steve:
Did I see “we” and “tidal garden” in one sentence? This idea would waft away like a summer breeze if left up to me alone.
By ‘moon’ would you be referring to rockiness or more to an evocative shape. The tides are all about the moon, and vice versa, and something sculptural that would make a statement about that relationship would be more than merely nice.
Jay,
I’m thinking a large and pale, rounded rock that stands out from among darker ones, especially when wet from waves washing over it like passing clouds. Of course, there should be stars as well. This would probably require some maintenance, depending on the wave action. But isn’t that what a garden is about?
Steve:
Once one accepts the notion that elements in the garden can be fashioned, and not entirely natural, then all is possible.
You may be describing a large boulder of feldspar set amid boulders of basalt: perhaps a good ten feet in diameter in order for its relationship to the tides to be easily readable. A lot of scrubbing would be in order to keep clingers at bay.
I’m sure that potholes in stream beds abound in Montana. Such features exist in the White Mountains and as part of one reef of ironstone that crosses the Susquehanna River close to my birthplace. It might be possible to include something like this – a hemispheric depression holding a sphere that rolls about in the waves – as part of the more energetic portions of the garden.