A Blank Silence

Posted on August 15, 2004 in Photography

I’ve been having trouble finding my voice and my eye lately. Followers of Paths of Light have undoubtably noticed the big blank black page. Part of it is the crack over the LCD screen of my camera. Part of it is a general hesitance to put anything up or put myself out. This political season snares my attention and I do not want to seem like the German tourists I met in Croatia who rushed into the country in the hope of photographing shelling of Slavonski Brod, not for any news purpose but only bragging rights when they inflicted the slides on their friends back at home. I do not want to be another political sideshow, even though the dirty campaigning on the Right has angered me.

Nowhere — except the walls of my office — does my photography appear off the net. Only one picture of mine shows a person, Lynn. In my journal, I wrote in stream of consciousness about my fears of photo:

….put these people in a museum, Frodo, put them on the wall, a battleship gray wall and let them float — only my name on the picture — which is why I seldom photograph people — if I were to take someone’s pictur, I would want the right to crawl all over them, move their hands and their arms in intimacy — I would have to turn people into objects — I’m not sure I can do that, but I often find myself taking pictures of flowers like Gary Winograd took pictures of people — always on the move, snapping the picture quickly and moving on to the next — I’m shy — I don’t want to put too much thinking into my photographs — I don’t wait for the lght, I go out and try to find the light — I think that that’s what distinguishes me from the fellow who stands at Sunset Point, his camera mounted on his tripod — he sees the miles of cliffs and I am looking at the pine cones, the cracked off stones, and the gnarled pines — I would, if I could, take a series of pictures of a trail’s evry footstep, every few paces, just to show people how I saw….I seek the piece which isn’t constantly expressed, I tell the story in its fine details, in the paisley greens of the ferns, in the fractures of old oaks….

What holds true there also holds true for my poetry, when I am writing well.