A while back I had a comment on my blog that encouraged me and which really got at the core of why I take pictures – of downtown Columbia or Greensboro or anything else for that matter.
I don’t repeat this comment in any spirit of self congratulation but simply because it feels good when the purpose for what I do is realized. Here is the comment:
“Anonymous said…Love the Photography!!! Makes me really proud of our downtown. I tweeted your blog post this am, I hope you don’t mind because I thought it was fabulous. I look forward to reading and viewing your work in the future.”
It was the one phrase that stuck me – “makes me really proud of our downtown.”
I am the first person to admit that I am not at best a decent amateur photographer. It is true that I do often “see” things that other people don’t (no, I don’t see dead people), but that is mainly because I am looking and they’re not. There is a “way of looking” that opens up the mind and heart for impressions and nuance of light, color, perspective, and composition – and I hope that as I get better at photography I will be better able to capture these things. But I am no Ansel Adams.
But in the end my purpose in taking pictures is to enjoy for myself and then celebrate with others the uniqueness and diversity that inhabit “place” – whether “natural” or “man-made.”
Buildings may not in themselves be “life” but they are given a kind of personality as it were by their designers and builders. The jumbled interplay of forms and styles in a cityscape creates fascinating impressions. And though buildings do not walk around they do change their appearance or “impression” throughout the day and throughout the seasons as light plays upon them in a multitude of ways, the “impressions” changing with the varying backdrop of cloud and sky and sun. And as one walks around in different seasons and at different times of day, always looking, there seem to be a near infinite combination of viewpoints and angles. For example, from March 21 to September 21 you will never see sunlight striking the north side of a building. And only at this time of year will be noon day sun be at such a low angle.
For me, the goal is to enjoy myself all of this richness, and then to capture as much of it as possible so that another person may enjoy it too, or as in the above comment, feel proud of his or her “place.” There is no higher compliment that could be paid to me than this.
What is true of inanimate buildings is of course even more true of forests and trails and the tiny bits of “nature” inhabiting our city. Not only are there countless things to discover along a trail such as odd formations of life and ever interesting points of view, but a trail itself is in many ways a different trail depending on season and time of day. We think of different kinds of light – the slanting light of morning, the overhead light of midday, and the slanting light of afternoon. Each provides a unique impression and opens up different interactions of light and subject. Each season provides its own glory, so that, when you do the math, a trail has twelve personalities, three each day for four different seasons. Not only that but small intangibles like fog and mist and cloud give further variation within the twelve personalities. I could walk the same trail a hundred times and never run out of things to photograph.
But then, again, the point is not that someone would say, “that’s a great picture” or whatever (I take enough pictures where some of them are bound to be pretty good even if by accident). The real reward is when, like the person who commented above, someone feels blessed, proud of being a part of such a world as this and community as this, thankful for the people who helped make such views possible, and thankful to the author of such beauty.
And for me it’s not just beauty but also decay in a strange way that I celebrate. Late last week I drove back from Greensboro the “back way,” taking secondary (and tertiary) roads, going through small towns and seeing many many abandoned and decrepit old buildings and homes. What interests me about these old structures are the stories behind them, the histories of the communities, the reasons why people came there in the first place and why they left. Every abandoned old building was once a person’s business, a person’s dream, a place where they invested their fortune and their sweat. More often than not there was a time of prosperity for that business, and I imagine all the people who came and went and worked and shared stories with each other. It’s the story of people and their lives that fills me with a sense of wonder and respect walking around an old abandoned filling station with a faded out Esso sign still dangling from a pole.
Anyway, it’s a nice feeling when the purpose of what you’re doing seems realized even in a small degree. It inspires me to get better so as to bring more blessing and to make more people proud of the community and the world that they live in.
One final note: as I write this it dawns on my how much I have been impacted by my literary hero, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Thanks Gerard.
