If a picture is worth a thousand words, is this blog section necessary or are the pictures not communicating?
I once asked an art professor, Why is it necessary for contemporary art to have a didactic explaining what the art piece is about? Does that imply the artist’s work insufficiently expresses their idea or what they are trying to communicate? Of course being an art professor means she did not provide the answer, it was up to me, the student, to research and come to my own conclusion. But I did think my question was a reasonable one given one can look at Michael Angelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling and it’s intent was to, in fact, tell the stories and it succeeded in doing so - the paintings are communicating the intended stories.
But this quasi life imitating “Art School Confidential” moment is not the subject of this first blog post on my website, but putting words alongside, behind, or in addition to the photographs is something I’ve felt the need to do, and so what follows reveals my wanting to understand why…
While I have consciously used a camera since my teen years some 50+ years ago, it was not until more recent years that I found the need to have some purpose behind making the images. I had come to realize I had “taken plenty of picture” as is mentioned in the bio, yet still wanted to make images and more importantly it became apparent I found it required some subconscious justification for doing so beyond just having a picture of something.
As reflected on this website, in recent years my photographic interests have ranged from capturing snow in the Utah desert and the unique landscapes of the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic, to the hint of light reappearing in the winter on the frozen tundra in the High Arctic. And then there are the less romantic or dramatic but no less intriguing and even inspiring noble mesquite trees on a friend’s property in West Texas that found their way through my camera’s lens. Each of these subjects had purposes for me beyond just making images of them. I found the purposes came from somewhere within. I also found that some of those were driven by the need to study more fully or deeply how to make images and this, it seems, led to the why’s.
While I could go through each of these past projects and elaborate more fully on the why’s and wherefore’s than is described in each of their galleries, and maybe in doing so the viewer might see something more than is readily revealed or apparent in each image, I’ll use just one as an example, the project in the Faroe Islands. This project was purposely intended to study more fully, methods of making panorama photographs using measured processes and technical equipment, methodically going about constructing an image both in the field and then in the digital darkroom. But that project was also and maybe much more so about a milestone event in my life - the beginning of a new path following the sale of a property we had held for 30 years in the Colorado Rockies, where we spent summer and winter vacations exposing our children to the pristine outdoors the property possessed, and thus nature in every way possible. Yet it had become apparent that life is ever evolving and dynamic, the children had become adults with jobs and growing families of their own and it was time for us to look to a new future. So the Faroe’s was also about going to a corner of the world to explore a different landscape and do so with a new set of image capture rules; remove the boundaries of the camera’s aspect ratio and become unbounded about where in the world I could make images.
A God Doodle, Faroe Islands, 2018
36-image panorama
Currently I am working on a project that is now in its third year of image making; the roadside picnic areas in Texas. Again, one can go to the gallery and read about this project, but what I am learning is that as this project has and is developing beyond my initial considerations, the purposes are also developing or revealing themselves to me. What started as an idea to capture the Mid-Century Modern styled picnic structures has evolved or extended into the earlier and initial facilities made of stone and concrete by Great Depression era boys and young men, learning about the history of the roadside facilities in Texas, and trying to understand what their future might be. Maybe most importantly, it is not just the “Mid-Mod” facilities I want to visit and capture, but all roadside picnic areas in the State. And the consideration of their future has led me to think about how technological progress influences our lives and what unforeseen changes can occur.
US-82 W of Saint Jo, Texas
So that’s a lot of words as an introduction to the section of a website devoted to pictures, but it is my hope that the posts going-forward reveal more of and about the images and thereby enrich them for the viewer. For me, many times if not most of the time, I don’t know why I make an image until well after I’ve done so, seen it, thought about it, put it in some context, and then maybe the “lightbulb” turns on and I have a greater or broader understanding of why the image was created and exists. So at the very least, I hope this blog section does the same for the viewer.