What I thought was light was clouds and hills
Great photography is about depth of feeling, not depth of field.
– Peter Adams
What I thought was light was clouds and hills. March 2025.
Howdy and happy Thursday which isn’t arbitrary even though I started this letter to you days ago and that you may through the odd asynchronous beauty of digital communication read it on any day of the week or not and even though epistolary connections have always been this way it feels different with digital and also as a mystic I believe we manifest energy around us so at least one Thursday a month I appreciate you being part of this manifestation which is to say I hope you have a great Thursday (and most days even).
I got to thinking — I don’t know whether or when photography is an art form. I mean, isn’t it, in ways, the same thing as recording sounds which we never consider the who and what of? People know Canon and Nikon cameras but it’s rare to overhear people discussing the acoustic differences between The Neumann TLM 103 and the Shure SM7B although we feel the difference when we hear a podcast recorded with one or the other microphone. It’s almost always the SM7B because search results.
Similarly, Sony cameras capture light balanced at a high white balance while Canon shifts toward magenta and softens skin tones across the spectrum. Have you heard about the “everyone is welcome here” poster here in Idaho? The Sony captures the effects of light accurately while the Canon captures what we feel in the scene. It’s why we prefer the soft golden light of warm white bulbs (3,000k) but think that what we want must be “daylight” bulbs (6,000k) which are great in garages to see well but don’t feel right anywhere else.
A few months ago I ran across the landscape photographs of David Ward and fell in love with these as art immediately. I’m working my way through his book, “Landscape Within: Inspirations and insights for photographers” and it’s fantastic! It’s about the aesthetic and philosophical ideas around photography as an art form! There’s very little technical operations discussion and I’ve been moving at about four pages an hour because I’m taking so many notes. I highly recommend it for photographers, especially abstract and landscape photographers.
Glenn Gould wrote in 1966 about the proliferance of music available as recordings, “music has become a pervasive influence on our lives, and as our dependence upon it has increased, our reverence for it has, in a certain sense, declined.”
Remember James Joyce writing about the “ineluctable modality of the visible” which I think I’m accidentally paraphrasing here but in the previous chapter Stephen had lost his glasses so at the beginning of the chapter he stumbles around considering to what extent we rely on our vision to navigate and believe in the world around us. What are we actually seeing? And then with our glasses on? Or through the lens of a camera?
Are we at max image these days? When does an image communicate a particular story, universal, yet focused through the boundary of its borders? When does a photograph communicate something beyond, “here’s a thing”? What aspects of craft or luck are present when I can feel about a photograph rather than think about the photograph?
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we can not see light? We only see the effects of light on objects. To look into the sun will make you blind. Light is simply an energy. We don’t see it. We feel it on our skin and watch it wrap itself around everything we think we see.
I wonder too about the light inside each of us. When is it visible? How often do I manifest this energy? And what compassion is required of those around me when I don’t feel this light within myself? I wonder whether what I feel in some photographs is a kind of compassion for what I can not see?
These things too inspired me recently…
The 99 Names of God — short film — so much beauty and mystery here…
Waltzing Matilde — you know the song by Tom Waits, well he tells us what the hell it means and it’s even more beautiful.
One Painting Got Me Through Winter — an interactive NYTimes story on Mondrian’s representational paintings of flowers and how the abstract grid paintings are very similar to these…like tiny landscapes.
Oh! Have you seen “Tokyo Cowboy” yet? What a great slow-but-lovely character study. Or the documentary “A Life in Waves” on the pioneering electronic musician Suzanne Ciani? She literally took Gould’s ideas on where music was headed to where they were headed. And, you’ll recognize some of her sound recording work too. Oh, or the 2024 “Count of Monte Cristo”?
Happy Thursday friends, thanks for hanging out with me.