Receptiveness and Inquisitiveness

It's easier to go to exotic places and make beautiful photos of really impressive mountains than it is to make a beautiful photo of a really boring pepper.

- anon.

Colin Jago's photostream has become my must visit blog as I struggle to come to grips with several intertwined thoughts. In this post Colin hits the nail on the head when he writes "Seeing, it would seem, needs not just time. It doesn't automatically start whenever we stop rushing. Seeing is an activity that requires receptiveness and inquisitiveness too."

I'm thinking:
1. The photographs I most want to make are not the impressive grand landscapes in really impressive places, but the quotidian views of the landscape I happen to live in. I want to show (with beauty) how it looks in the rain. I want to show (with beauty) how it looks when it's under the dull, leaden winter sky, and the branchs are all bare, and there are puddles on the street. Not the luminous landscape, but the non-luminous one, as Colin puts it. I want the landscape that I see, warts and all. That means including the power lines, and the roads, and the farm equipment covered with the ubiquitous blue tarps. If including those things presents photographic challenges, then I guess those are the challenges I want to tackle.

2. I'm increasingly of the view that the photographs that I want to make are ones that either lead me to new understanding of how the landscape around me works, or else show my new understanding in meaningful ways. And I'm more and more convinced that I can't do that in places I don't know. Not only am I a farmer in the hunter-gatherer/farmer taxonomy of photographers, but I'm a farmer who for right now wants to stay close to home. Not close to home in the sense Colin uses (90 minutes is close?) but in the 'just outside my door' sense. That means in the forest in which I live, and in the valley below where I live and across which I gaze from my kitchen windows.

3. Doing that involves what Colin calls "receptiveness and inquisitiveness" along with familiarity. The goal (and the challenge) is to show what I look at every day, often not really seeing it. I know that I drive my wife crazy with my constant habit of pointing at things ("Look at that evening light on those trees! Isn't that awesome?") as we go about our daily travels, but I need to not only point at it, but stop the car and get out the camera and make exposures. Doing that takes motivation, and because it's often during a period when I'm not explicitly out photographing, it means learning to stop the car, make an exposure, and then go on about my daily life. It's a level on integration with life that I've not really tried for before.

It's not about going off on a trip to some place, and coming home with thousands of exposures. I want it to be about going about my day to day life and coming home with thousands of exposures of things that I've not only looked at but actually seen for what they really are, and managed to photograph that as well.