Resilience

 

When I returned to serious photography in 1997, after a long absence, the first step was to recalibrate, to dial in technique. With photography, I've found it's helpful to learn the rules so one can then forget the rules. That is, get equipment handling and technique to the point that they're largely intuitive, and can then fade into the background. That frees up space to focus on the creative elements. It's perhaps daunting for someone just starting out, but I'd already worked at pro and semi-pro levels for something like 12 years, so for me it was more of a refresher and breaking some bad habits acquired as a photojournalist. In the early newspaper days, end published reproduction quality was often marginal at best so the incentive was to get the shot and worry less about say, holding the shadow detail. When I was ready to shift to exhibiting and higher-quality publication the quality had to step up some.

A lot of that initial calibration happened with landscapes, since they're readily available and it was possible to go somewhere, spend days away from other distractions, and just photograph landscapes. At first that was close to home (I was still living on Chicago's north side at that time, so usually it meant a 30 or 40 minute drive out to suburban open space). Toward the end of that year I transitioned to photographing people, and I also made extended trips to a couple of the standard and classic landscape photo places. There was a spring trip to Yosemite which lasted a week or two, and then a two week mid-winter trip to Joshua Tree. 

I was mostly shooting medium format film at the time, most everything was done with one camera body, one lens, and a couple of backs and a hand-held meter. A tripod added some serious bulk and weight. On the Yosemite trip I mostly photographed alone even though I was camping with some rock climber friends at Camp 4; a typical day involved an hour or two hike and then several hours working a given location. Joshua Tree was a bit more diverse. Jon was there for the entire time, now he's a successful commercial photographer http://www.jonchristophermeyers.com/ but then he was young and still learning and it helped me a lot to have to explain most everything I did, it brought to the surface a lot of things I'd been doing intuitively. Ellin was also there for the entire time, as was Melissa. Branka, then one of my favorite models, drove out from LA for several days mid-trip. So there was an interval of people in the landscape within a trip mainly oriented on just the landscape.

I still have a portfolio of prints from those trips somewhere, plus some slightly later images from Glacier National Park and a few Chicago region locations. They're generally perfectly exposed images, archivally printed on fiber-base paper, selenium toned, with rich tonal range. 

When I look at those prints today, all I see is pretty pictures of the landscape. They're related only by place, and otherwise pretty meaningless. 

I didn't have much time to think about it then, because by the time of the Joshua Tree trip I was already well into the "Strong Women" concept which was exhibited a bit later. I kept photographing people, and didn't do a lot with the landscape again until recently.

Last fall included a trip to Ridgecrest CA, in the Mojave Desert. It was a work related trip, but things weren't excessively busy at the time so I was able to wrap a couple of extra days in and drive the long way, up 80 and over Donner Pass and then down 395 on the back side of the Sierra's. I started photographing the second day at Mono Lake, in the higher elevation Great Basin Desert. It was past peak season and hardly anyone else was there. Hiking the best known trail got a few pretty pictures, and a feeling that this has been done a zillion times before. The shift began back at the trailhead when I walked across the road and took a few shots of the dead trees across the road. Then a few minutes of research identified some less traveled trails. Half a day later, I had some images that were a lot less conventional. Carrying just the M10 with a 50 Summicron, I was able to scramble to places that would have been challenging at best to reach with a bigger camera and a tripod.

Those images set the tone for the rest of the drive, with several stops along the roads and batches of images. After a day and a half of work things the return drive had to be more direct and with a lot fewer pauses, although a couple more interesting things were photographed along the way. 

In keeping with the previous post, I won't elaborate on the current concept except to say that the working title is "resilience" and that it was born on a rutted dirt track somewhere just south of Mono Lake. I've added some northern California images since then, a much more densely vegetated place than the deserts. It may very possibly split into two (or more) themes by the time it's done, too early to know right now.