July 30th, 2018

First, an explanation.  In reflecting on my trip to Wyoming, it sometimes seems to me that it was more like a trip into a world that can not be shown for what it is, unless one stands before it oneself.  This reminded my of something Susan Sontag wrote in "On Photography:"  "Americans feel the reality of their country to be so stupendous, and  mutable, that it would be rankest presumption to approach it in a classifying, scientific way.   One could only get at it indirectly, by subterfuge—breaking it off into strange fragments that could somehow, by synecdoche, be taken for the whole."  I like that word "synecdoche"—one of the consequences of modern English usage is that we have lost grand old words like that.  "Synecdoche"—a part of something representing the whole.  I often felt like that was at best what I could do with an image:  use some part of an experienced view to stand for the whole (which could not be shown in an image—of course this is in some sense always true).  So the image below is a synecdoche of the Tetons: