A few more thoughts...On a Saturday afternoon in late August, as direct sunlight was all but gone and the remaining light briefly fit for photographic tonal range, I photographed rocks and the little stream out back of my apartment building, right beyond my own windows. Later, I made grayscale photos from some of the exposures. This morning I was thinking of those rock and stream images and of expanding them, perhaps to a small pamphlet, or to a small portfolio, since the photographic paper is too heavy to bind gracefully in a small book. And I thought of how a scene or an object (or even a person or animal, though those are outside both my field of competence and zone of comfort) will sometimes -- often, with luck -- reveal to a camera lens what it would never confide to the human eye, unmediated, in a thousand years. And that's when there is a good photo. It reveals what we otherwise couldn't know or even guess. The milky outline of rivulets against a rock, or the interrupted sheen of a patch of ice, or the foggy texture of a plume of smoke -- yes, we have no trouble seeing these objects or patterns with our eyes, but only in a photograph, grayscale or color as appropriate, is the "truth beyond the truth" made visible, without shouting, without so much as a whisper: "Here I am." Part of this is the imposed stillness of the one captured image; but there's something more to it, as well. The realm of pregnant meditative silence may in fact be nearby.... This truth beyond appearances is just suddenly there. Hence the unparalleled thrill, despite the often hatefully frustrating nature of the work leading up to it, of that moment when the image first emerges entire in the developer bath. (A pity ink-jet printers only reveal images in tiny hesitant stripes, and not in a moment of blossoming in which I've sometimes felt I might pass out from surprise and joy.) This is what I think photography does, and why it exists and persists, in its several non-utilitarian forms: It simply shows us what we could see in no other way. Each good photograph makes us grateful one more time for having eyes and for having learned once again something new, and perhaps important, through their use. |