You miss 100 per cent of the shots you don’t take. A life lesson. I look at sports as that playing out of the circle of life, all the plans and work and play coming into a moment that defines and redefines … Capturing a little bit of that light that pulsates and fades and brightens yet again.
“The whole point of taking pictures is so that you don’t have to explain things in words,” said Elliott Erwitt. The image provides all the description and power and emotion, and excites and moves and provokes the attention of the viewer. Travel opens up the experience, sends you into a pocket of the imagination.
For a millennia, the Norwegians have been masters of the sea, and a symbol of all that activity of conquering the vast ocean and all the fjords and inlets along its shores is this inconspicuous barque. Norwegians still travel using all kinds of boats going fishing, to church, to funerals or trading their wares in the big and small urban centres.
Walking in the woods, along a lake, or sitting by a waterfall brings you back to something vital that is sometimes lost in us when we live, breathe, work, play and think and sleep in an urban environment. Ansel Adams said, “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” I find the silence in the landscape the element that reawakens the imagination. For me, it’s an adventure of the soul. Diane Arbus said, “I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.” And another, the urban street photographer guru, Henri Cartier-Bresson remarked, “It is through living that we discover ourselves, at the same time as we discover the world around us.”
Black Oak in Fall 2023
Walking in the first days of Autumn in the deep Southwest of Ontario where we experience more a ‘yellow wood’ than the deep reds of the north.
The Detroit River is an endless ‘story’ machine with the way the river bends, the way it meets the light, where the landscape clings for survival.
“For me, the camera is a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity,” says Henri Cartier-Bresson. Standing in the vortex of an urban environment, you may suddenly be stilled by the moment, transfixed, bewildered, stunned as it moves in and around you …. It’s in that instant, you ought to turn to that sketchbook, whether it be a poem that you plot out, find the proper rhythm or best voice, or see the image itself mapping itself out in front of view like a mirror of thoughts you suddenly recognize.
“It's not a faith in technology. It's faith in people.” said Steve Jobs, Co-founder of Apple. As much as we can put down the obsessive use of cellphone technology where people talk into a little box but never look at one another, there’s the opportunity that in some ways we have never seen since the early glory days of the Brownie camera where people captured their daily life with the ‘Sunny 16” rule, the sun over the shoulder.
There is a draw to the solitary and somehow in the echoey tombs of a subway, as in Montreal, or Paris or Rome, a lone figure calls out for definition of aloneness, oneness with the speed, colour blur and tonal shapes. Photographer Susan Meiselas says, “The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.” I found that when I am standing across the platform in a subway, and there are only two of us facing one another. No dialogue. No hellos or goodbyes. No hand saving. Just two figures. I am not sure if it’s loneliness, or happy solitude. French photographer Raymond Depardon said, “It is necessary to like loneliness to be a photographer.” I am not sure. I like carrying the camera, and dipping in and out of the ebb and flow of life, and seeing people, wanting to sense the story behind their faces, or sometimes the gesture in the slope of their body, or the way their head turns to one side, a pensive, daydreaming kind of look. But what will we learn? Emile Zola, the French writer, said, “We are like books. Most people only see our cover, the minority read only the introduction, many people believe the critics. Few will know our content.”
This photograph from the Montreal Metro or subway, its solitary look and the tones of green and gray and yellow.
Taken from inside a railway car with an iphone.
