Taking Pictures

I'm officially stumped, hitting a wall. Vacation is over and I'm back to work and time just seems to evaporate. So this will probably be short, what with the dogs barking and the freezer repairman clanking in the kitchen not ten feet from my desk. Going back to work always puts me in a different mind-frame, as if my thoughts have to relate to my job. Writing should be work-related writing, about scholarly things that other people, scholarly people, would deem worthy. It's a real kill joy.

On my own, I can stop thinking about what other people would think about my thoughts. They're just there and I can enjoy them, or move on to other thoughts. So, I'm trying to figure out how to have an independent thought during the semester and how to make time to write them down.

As an ease into this awkward transition, I chose to write about photography, so I can mostly use pictures and let the words take a siesta.

Lately, I take pictures of plants up close. Its a way to see the familiar in a new way, like the poppies in my garden. Everything I know about plants changes when I move in close. When I first met the camera, it was just a tool for capturing memories or documenting work. No art, everything at a human scale, like the eye sees.

I admired the work of Ansel Adams, because he could get so much of the landscape into one image. He captured the immensity of the American West and I loved that.

Then I found Dorothea Lange. She seemed to do for human tragedy what Adams had done for the beauty of the Western landscape, but not by grabbing a big image, rather by moving in to reveal the immensity of the human soul. She also seemed less encumbered by the photographic equipment, compared to Adams who always lugged a large format camera into the mountains.

She used a medium format camera or a 35 mm. Sometimes using a camera with a lens that could capture images 90 degrees from straight, so she could appear to be photographing something other than her true subject. Her photographs convey her unobtrusive nature as a photographer. I also tend to move quietly and can often go unnoticed in the world. Sometimes it feels that there are the people who live life and those who watch the film. I'm a watcher. It's not that I'm a lazy couch potato. It's that I feel as though there is a script to life that no one bothered to give me, so try as I might I always feel outside the action. So I watch. . . and take pictures.