The voluminous landscape

We were lucky to get tickets to Glenstone, and spent a great day there the other day. It was hot and humid, enough to regret not wearing shorts, but not bad enough to induce fainting. I enjoyed myself among the sculpture, as I always do, and had a few successes and failures on the photographic front. The photograph above shows a black and white version of Richard Serra’s ‘Contour’ in the landscape, and this perspective was one of my favorites. I was able to come to some level of understanding of how the piece works in the landscape and got some nice images. On the other hand, I struggled with ‘Sylvester’, the other Serra sculpture at Glenstone. Walking through the maze-like structure was disorienting — and that is part of the intent. But none of my photographs really communicated much about the experience and that was certainly a bit disappointing. Luckily, we are returning in September.

Looking with photography

Photography is simultaneously an investigation of reality and a means to investigate reality. That’s according to an essay I’ve just started reading about abstraction in photography. It takes me several readings to be able to even start to unpack essay-length academic writing, so I won’t reference the original essay just yet. The gist of the argument, though, is that photography is not necessarily about looking at or looking through, but looking with. One way to think about this is that each time you go out with a camera, you are essentially doing an experiment, with the camera functioning as an instrument of investigation. Poking at reality with the camera. I was thinking about this concept while watching a YouTube video about how to photograph the Orion constellation and nebula using only a digital camera and a tripod (no other equipment). In total, several hundred frames (what the author called ‘the data’) were recorded and used to generate the final result. Of course, there is also the whole issue of assigning colors in a ‘realistic’ or at least reasonable manner, which amounted to ‘season to taste’. My approach to photographing this tree growing near my home was much more intuitive, but the images are getting better over time as I continue to return to the scene. Presently, I’m happy abstracting to a monochrome vision, but that could certainly change.