PHOTOS and SEEING

Does taking pictures keep me from seeing? 

When I thought of this before, I had in mind those hords of tourists snapping their cameras at whatever the tour guide is pointing at.

I also was thinking about pointing a camera and clicking the shutter in contrast to the process of looking, drawing, looking more carefully, drawing, looking again, drawing.

And finally, I thought about the contrast between me with my little camera set on automatic for snapshots (the OED says that "shot" has an early form of "scott") and the real photographers I know with their technical expertise, their ability to see and frame and light and choose focus and speed and then to develop or work digitally with the photo until they have a work of art.

Last night, however, sitting on the deck with a good book and a hoppy local IPA, I saw the light change out of the corner of my eye and turned to see this:

and then, this close-up view of the light in the sage

and then this to the east

and then the light in the rabbitbrush to the north

and then the light in the drying penstemons

with the maples red on the mountain

And finally, I thought I had been thinking the question of seeing and photography badly.

A real photographer could tell me how to make each of my photos better, no question about it.

But with the camera in my hand, I went from wonder to wonder, looking at the light, clicking the shutter, looking at the light, clicking, looking, clicking. 

I wasn't trying to be a photographer. I wasn't a tourist. I was trying to see. Trying to see the sage and the rabbitbrush. Trying to see the light. Trying to see the thing itself, not the photographic representation of the thing.

Of course, the photos remain after the seeing and then can be posted here to remind me of what I saw. But they are secondary. Last night I saw the light in and on and around the sage. It was thrilling.

CURRICULUM VITAE

Labor Day passes slowly, a day of indolence and jazz and reading and an early bike ride.


The day passes. The week passes. The summer passes. A life passes.

Rabbitbrush, Chrysothamnus nauseosus

Goldenrod, Solidago ?

Curlycup gumweed, Grindelia squarrosa

Sunflower, Helianthus annuus

How do we know it passes?


Things change.


For instance, for reasons I don't understand, the preponderance of late-summer flowers in our yard (almost all native, requiring no irrigation but what falls from our desert skies) are yellow.


Shorter days, slowly falling temperatures. Things change. And they keep changing. Relentlessly, if depression has its say. Invigoratingly, if melancholy is on vacation.


The course of a life.


The course of a story like the one Scott Carrier helped Najib tell (see the previous post).


In thought, in language, in memory, a life is, most simply, a narrative. And narrative, in whatever form, is motion. In a story even place is motion, as the flowerville blogger recently noted with reference to Horace & Handke.

Wild lettuce, Lactuca Virosa

My ride up Loafer Mountain this morning had its own curriculum. The first twenty minutes were a climb up the steep streets of Woodland Hills, our little mountainside town. There were neighbors to greet, out walking on the pleasant holiday. Deer slipped from the roadside into the oakbrush. Wild turkeys likewise clucked and galloped into the brush. There was no birdsong -- much too late in the season to get laid.


Finally the pavement ended and the switchbacks began to climb the mountain.


Like the days and seasons of a life, they are relentless, slippery with the late-summer dryness, sometimes treacherous, often exhilarating. They link one to the next and together they lift a rider high above the valley.


About a 2000-foot altitude gain in all. And every year it's a bit harder -- obviously a case of ongoing geological upthrust. 


From a spring ride up the same trail, a set of sweaty photos: