I've been looking at some of my older photographs and came across this image. I was in Pennsylvania in the autumn of '04 and I looked up above my head and saw this leaf canopy. Later I made an abstract of the photo, which is what you see here.
Three images from my recent trip to Palatka, Florida. The first image comes from Ravine Gardens State Park in Palatka; the other two are the St Johns River at sunrise.
Recently I came across a phrase I think is applicable to what a photographer does. In a comment about Shunryu Suzuki's "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," Steve Silverman suggests that that book provides "profound and subtle insights . . . dancing gracefully on the edge of the unsayable." (Italics added.) I like that last phrase a lot; I think much photography "dances on the edge of the unshowable." 12 some years ago when I started working in photography, like many newcomers I suppose, I thought a photograph shows us just what is there. One photography class shook that belief out of me; working in a wet lab, I came to realize just how far removed a photograph is from whatever is just there. It is after all a pattern of tones on a two dimensional surface. I once came across a statement supposedly made by Picasso: a woman looked at one of his paintings and said "it's a tree." He said, "no, madame, that's a tree" (pointing to one), "this is a pattern of colors on canvas." That may not be an exact quote, but it gets the idea across.
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