Picking Up the Camera

Hewn log...

"Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.... [The] very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images."--Susan Sontag, 

On Photography

When Office Depot put the Canon Power Shot digital on sale...well, it was an impulse buy. The first photographs I took at a stop along a side road caught lines of grapevines that led the eye to the range of foothills to the east of Cloverdale. A yearning for distance, for what was "over there," directed my eye. Our landscape is squared off and striped by the vineyards that dominate what grows here in a valley that once was rich with apples, pears, apricots, walnuts and mustard, artichokes, and table vegetables. Now the rolling rows define the hills in grids. At first, they got in the way, served only as pointers to what lay beyond them. 

The first photograph...

Then I turned to trees, silhouetted against empty sky and the sea at Mendocino Headlands.

The world out there, the more vast, the better. I began to post at Beautiful World, which requires only  that an image must reveal something beautiful--and no people, for reasons of privacy. I began to learn from other posters. They came in close, chose detail over far space, worked with color, texture, abstraction. When niece Jeny visited, she introduced me to the macro setting I didn't know I had (who reads manuals?) My images began to change. I moved in close. Soon the world was made of photographs. Everywhere I looked I saw a fragment that could be caught in a rectangle.

Road Chatter: Back road, Sonoma County

Overcast day, Bolinas Bay

Road by the Russian River, after floods

I set myself assignments. Don Worth, years ago at San Francisco State, set a challenge: Photograph in black-and-white but using color film (you remember film). I remember Minor White, with whom I traveled for some time for a couple summers at Capitol Reef National Park. (I paraphrase what he said about abstraction.)  Most photographers want something in the photograph that clings to reality, he said, one night around the campfire. When you can let go of that, you are beginning to work with the truly abstract.

Reflections in a tide-washed beach, Bolinas Bay

Music: Vineyard in flood--notice the touch of "reality" still showing!

From the early images that beckoned me out--mountain, sea, the vineyards marking the land--I came close, looking at the inner through contrast of dead stalks with new growth at their feet, a dried leaf on a living century plant, lost in details of form, color, texture, and something about meaning.

Now I've taken on the task of letting go of boundaries, of the dimensions of space--letting go, as Minor said, of the urgency of leaving a little reality in the picture! What's next? I wonder. But I'm not leaning forward to find out. My eye is right here, right now, looking at where I'm standing.

Fallen wall of early Cloverdale winery

Stream near Cloverdale, California

Last year's apple and the crop to come

Rest stop

Morning after an all-night rain

Carnival

Avila Beach, California

Comfort zone

Spring in wine country

Visiting armada of antique cars, Cloverdale

This is the way I see the world these days, and the camera serves as a device for grounding. 

Photograph by Luna Zeffer