[Image: “Eclipse Crescents,” by Jon D. Anderson. (Found it on Flickr, and use it here under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) The photo was taken during an eclipse, obviously; the photographer had the camera pointed at the ground, in a filbert orchard — where he caught all the little pinhole-camera-style images of sunlight created by the leaves overhead. My favorite thing about this photo, though, is the scattered greens of fallen leaves and blades of grass: beautiful reality superimposed on the monotone dreamlike nominal subject, as though to remind you where you are.]
On our Roadtrip 2021 mini-adventure, I’ve probably taken thousands of photographs just with my “real” camera (i.e., not counting the — hundreds? thousands? — taken with my phone’s camera). I haven’t done any kind of statistical analysis, but I bet well over 95% of them will never see the light of day, so to speak: “public” exposure here on RAMH, or over on Instagram or (rarely) Facebook. I doubt that I myself will ever go back to look at the unused ones.
About a month ago, the absurdity finally hit me: by far, most of the photos I was setting aside or discarding depicted subjects already publicly available — generally, depicted them better. Consider, for instance, the hundreds I’d taken while touring the interiors of a couple of the Gilded-Age mansions of Newport, Rhode Island. Oh, I’d shot a handful which turned out satisfactorily as photographs, and I’d kept and “promoted” them, so to speak. The rest, though? Why did I take these half-dozen shots of a grand entry hall in The Breakers — you know, the same entry hall depicted in all the postcards and coffee-table books in the gift shop, or even at The Breakers Web site? (Especially considering that flash photography of the interiors is forbidden to the public, but professionals engaged by the governing body may use soft but artificial lighting under controlled circumstances.)
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
So I’ve worked at no longer photographing subjects easily available, in better form, from other sources. Which begs the question: why take photos otherwise? (Note the similarity of this question to the one, “Why write?,” which has obsessed me in the past. For instance, scroll down on this page to the section headed “Background, for Interested Parties.”)
With such thoughts in mind, earlier this week I read the following, on whiskey river of course:
To restore you and myself, I return to my state of garden and shade, cool reality, I hardly exist and if I do exist it’s with delicate care. Surrounding the shade is a teeming, sweaty heat. I’m alive. But I feel I’ve not yet reached my limits, bordering on what? Without limits, the adventure of a dangerous freedom. But I take the risk, I live taking it. I’m full of acacias swaying yellow, and I, who have barely begun my journey, begin it with a sense of tragedy, guessed what lost ocean my life steps will take me to. And crazily I latch onto the corners of myself, my hallucinations suffocate me with their beauty. I am before, I am almost, I am never.
(Clarice Lispector [source])
And a day later, not on whiskey river, I read this:
Song of Ryokan: III
(excerpt)True, all the seasons have moonlit nights,
But here’s the best night to see the moon.
The hills never so aloft, the streams never so clear,
In the infinite blue of autumn sky flies a disk of light,
Neither light nor gloom is graced with a life of its own.
The moon and the earth are one, and myself one with them.
The boundless sky above, and autumn chill on my skin,
I stroll about low hills, leaning upon my priceless cane.
Quiet night has held firm the flitting dust of the world.
The bright moon alone pours streams of rays all about me.
I mind it not if another like-minded is also admiring it,
Or if the moon deigns to look on others as well as on me.
Each year as autumn comes, the moon will shine as before,
And the world will watch it, will face it, till eternity.
Sermons at Mount Ryozen, lectures in the Vale of Sokei,
Were teachings so precious, the audience needed the moon.
My meditation under the moon lasts till the ripest night.
The stream has hushed its cry, dew lies thick everywhere.
Who, among the moon-viewers tonight, will have the prize?
Who will reflect the purest moon in the lake of his mind?
(Ryokan, translated by Noboyuki Yuasa [source])
I’m still working my way through the answer(s) to the “Why photograph (or write) at all?” questions. But I sense the presence, in these two passages, of something verging on understanding.
Marta says
Isn’t there a website or Instagram account that collects the photos people post of the same famous places? I can’t remember where I came across it (and it seems like it could have been through something you posted even). But it is meant to show how everyone take the same photos. I think about it when taking photos.
John says
I don’t know if there is such an online resource… but it sounds like there should be, doesn’t it?
During the first year of the pandemic (ugh), I was taking a video course covering various topics in photography, taught by a guy named Joel Sartore — one of National Geographic’s primo photographers. Each lesson included a little mini-assignment which you could follow up with, if you wanted. Just about exactly a year ago, I took him up on one of those challenges — I think it was to photograph something or someone which you’d already photographed many times, but to try it this time by doing something different. (Like, say, placing the camera on the ground and shooting up it it/them, or photographing them in B&W instead of color.)
You may have already noticed the tagline on my Instagram account, which refers to “the extraordinary commonplace.” The idea is that I’ve tried (with mixed results) to take pix of everyday subjects from unusual angles; this worked really well during the times of pandemic isolation, when I really had no NEW subjects to shoot, just household objects and such. So I changed the assignment: shoot a subject that I myself had never shot AT ALL, but many other photographers had, well, done to death. I chose the Florida “Old Capitol” building in downtown Tallahassee — a favorite with tourists as well as locals. I posted results of that visit a few times on Instagram, starting here.
(Now that I think about it, the pictures I post here at RAMH in the “My Photography” category tend, as a group, to highlight that “extraordinary commonplace” thing.)
This is a very interesting subject for me, obviously!
Marta says
Here it is!
https://www.boredpanda.com/social-media-instagram-identical-photos/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic
John says
Brilliant bit of research (or memory recovery, as the case may be)! I spent about a half-hour looking for what you might’ve been referring to, and came away exhausted and empty-handed!