Taos Drawing

St. Francis of Assisi, Rancho de Taos, NM

Drawn on my iPad using a painting/drawing app called ArtRage. It's the most natural painter software I've used in a long time. Part of that is the iPad's touch interface, but the app uses the hardware very well. I'm pleased with the results.

When I was in New Mexico, we drove up to Taos for the day. From Albuquerque, that's a lot of driving, but it was worthwhile. I had a good day revisiting the places I knew well, from the time I lived there. I also felt some closure on some things. I wonder if the people I knew are still there; who knows. Meanwhile, we stopped at St. Francis in Rancho de Taos, the beautiful adobe church known from paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe and photos by Ansel Adams and others. It's still an iconic building, and I always enjoy a visit.

It was late in the day, with some thin clouds over the blue sky. I made this drawing impressionistically, not trying to be photorealistic. As I've said before, I have little interest in trying to draw photo-realistically. I prefer to be either impressionistic or iconic. I like cave-paintings, archetypal images, and impressionistic renderings of natural objects.

The Re-Enchantment of Art 5: Instruments of Revelation

(Some random notes and quotes from recent travels and readings.)

At Carlsbad Caverns National Monument, there are a couple of small art galleries in the visitor center devoted to art inspired by the caverns. One of these rooms contains nothing but photographs by Ansel Adams. Adams didn't think his cave images, made for a large project of photos of all the national parks, were very successful: Adams always worked with natural light, and of course the caves had to be lit artificially for his photos.

On the wall of the Adams gallery at Carlsbad is the following quote:

Our time is short, and the future terrifyingly long. Believing as we must that things of the heart and mind are most enduring, this is the opportunity to apply art as a potent instrument of revelation, expression, and perpetuation of wilderness activities and moods. Through art of brush, pen, and lens, each one no less than the other, we possess a swift and sure means of touching the conscience and clearing the vision.
—Ansel Adams

Art as an instrument of revelation. Art as a means of touching the conscience and clearing the vision.

Art is kenotic. Art is prophetic. Art is revelation. Or at least, art can be all these things. It doesn't have to be, or need to be, yet it often is. Art as an instrument of revelation.

My own photographs often feel to me like splashes of cave paintings on the walls of rocks much older than time. I often feel as though all I am doing is waiting to see what is there, and what will happen next.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen . . .
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin.
—Bob Dylan

Stories in fiction and poetry are lies that can tell deeper truths. What passes for human interest on a daily basis is self-involved and deadening by comparison. Most self-involved fiction isn't revelatory, but deadening. What use is criticism if it doesn't likewise enliven the art that it discusses? What use is criticism at all, for that matter? Far better to go on making art than to talk about it. Of course, the old clichéd saying does hold truth to it: Those who can, do; those who can't, instruct.


Carlsbad Caverns; infrared photo

It has happened that we have been afflicted with a basic deprivation, to such an extent that we seem to be missing some vital organs, even as we try to survive somehow. Theology, science, philosophy, though they attempt to provide cures, are not very effective "In that dark world where the gods have lost their way." (Roethke) They are able at best to confirm that our affliction is not invented. . . . Abstract considerations will be of little help, even if they are intended to bring relief. Poetry is quite different. By its very nature it says: All those theories are untrue. Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot—if it is good poetry—look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom or complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.
—Czeslaw Milosz

Poetry deals with the singular. It can also deal with the universal, with the cosmic, with the fully human, but it gets there via the specific and singular. Poetry doesn't have to be didactic or hectoring to be true, or tell the truth. Sometimes the most prophetic poems are those that show us what is going on, that just present the truth as it is lived by real people.

Nothing that isn't beautiful can be true, only the true is lovable.
—Paul Cezanne

Cezanne was an extremist in many of his views, an uncompromising artist who made enemies by refusing to change his ways. But he was often right. There is a lot to his comment here, that whatever truth is, it is always beautiful. Or can be perceived as beautiful.

The simple truth is, those we try to explain away all mysteries fail utterly, simply because there are always larger mysteries that cannot be explained.

Art as an instrument of revelation: What we see that is beautiful contains truth that sometimes we don't want to confront. But we must.

High Surf at Point Lobos

images from Point Lobos, CA, February 2010



Point Lobos! I saw it with different eyes yesterday than those of nearly fifteen years ago. And I worked, how I worked! And I have results! And I shall go again—and again! I did not attempt the rocks, nor any general vista: I did do the cypress! Poor abused cypress,—photographed in all their picturesqueness by tourists, "pictorialists," etched, painted, and generally vilified by every self-labeled "artist." But no one has done them—to my knowledge—as I have, and will. Details, fragments of the trunk, the roots,—dazzling records, technically superb, intensely visioned.
—Edward Weston, The Daybooks of Edward Weston, II. California, entry from March 1929



One cannot make photographs at Point Lobos without thinking of Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and the many other photographers who have worked there. It's an amazing place, as beautiful as you've seen in the classic photographs by the masters. Very few pictorial destinations live up to their reputations; this is one of those that do, along with the Grand Canyon, the Tetons, and a few others.



After the Robinson Jeffers Association annual conference, I spent another day in the Monterey area, at Point Lobos in the morning, then meeting up with a friend to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium for the afternoon, then a fine meal at Fishwife's in Seaside. It was a good day, a sunny and warm day, at the end of which I drove up the coast towards Half Moon Bay, where I spent the night. I also visited one of my favorite places, Pescadero State Park, the next day. The whole purpose of this roadtrip, other than the Jeffers conference, was to by on holiday, and make lots of photos. It's like being on a working vacation, but it's recharging and refreshing because you're doing work you love.



This morning at Point Lobos the surf was very high, from the storms that had been passing through the region. A clear blue sky in the morning, with dramatic seas. The Point was very crowded, as it was a holiday, so my photographic opportunities were somewhat constrained. This was my first visit to Point Lobos, but you can be assured that I will be visiting there again. Next time I pass through the area, I will most definitely spend a lot more time there.



There were a lot of other photographers out that day, engaged with the powerful surf. Some pros, a lot of families out visiting the ocean for the day. But it doesn't matter how many photos have been made at Point Lobos; it's an enchanting and beautiful place, and will provide beauty and splendor endlessly to all who come to visit. And no photographers ever make the same images, even standing side by side.

Photography Is About Light

Artlip Lake, MN

I just returned from a weekend at the Minnesota State Fair, in St. Paul, MN, the city I lived in for a few years before moving on to New Mexico, California, and then back to Wisconsin later on. I liked living in St. Paul; although most of the cultural events I wanted to be part of tended to happen in Minneapolis, I found St. Paul to be a less frenetic and self-involved place to live. Except, that is, during the annual State Fair, which is one of the largest in the USA; although people-watching and tracking the various items you can get "on a stick" at the Fair is always fun.


Hare Lake, MN

This past weekend in the Twin Cities I also shopped. The Twin Cities have many very good used book stores, some of the best between, say, Madison or Chicago, and Portland, OR. Every time I go back to the Cities, I usually end up finding one or two books I've been looking for, for some time, and a few other things besides. This time out, I found one of Jerry Uelsmann's long out-of-print early photo books, which I didn't have; some poetry books; some philosophy and gender theory; and Ansel Adams' Portfolio book, which I had been seeking for awhile but hadn't found a good copy of yet.



Adams published seven Portfolios in his lifetime. A Portfolio is an edition of photographic prints, usually presented in a slipcase with text sheets, signed and numbered. Adams, being the prolific master printer that he was, produced seven Portfolios each numbering over one hundred copies. That's a lot of prints. Nonetheless Adams Portfolios are rare and valuable nowadays. Most are in museums or private collections. Some have been taken apart and the prints individually framed, or sold. All of that is acceptable, of course. Yet it's nice for the rest of us to have this combined book edition, which is excellently printed and packaged, with typography closely matching the originals.


Artlip Lake, MN

In continuing my own thinking about making photographs in the American West, which forces me to always think of both Ansel Adams and Edward Westion, I continually return to study both photographers' work. This book of the Portfolios continues that study.


Artlip Lake, MN

What struck me most this morning, as I sat reading on the porch, was the recognition of something that I have known for many years about my own photographic work: All my photographs are about light. They're not really about the ostensible subject matter. They're really about light, and how the light changes. Many of my photographs are really about the sky, not about the land and people under the sky. I've known this about my own work for some time, as I said. What was nice to read, this morning, was an affirmation, or validation, of this same awareness, as part of Ansel Adams' photography, as well. It made me feel an even closer kinship to Adams than I have felt before: because this time, I knew the why of it.


mist, Artlip Lake, MN

Here is the relevant passage from John Szarkowski's "Introduction," which I want to quote at length before discussing:

Adams would object to being described specifically as a landscape photographer. Like all good artists he distrusts categories, and it is true that he has made many splendid photographs of other sorts of subjects. Nevertheless, it is our prerogative to define the reasons for our own gratitude, and I think we are primarily thankful to Adams because the best of his pictures stir our memory of what it was like to be alone in an untouched world.

It does not advance us very far to note that Adams has made elegant, handsomely composed, technically flawless photographs of magnificent natural landscapes, a subject which, like motherhood, is almost beyond reproach. These attributes are surely virtues. For many they are sufficient virtues, and these many need not wonder what the precise difference is between the best of Adams' pictures and uncounted other neat, clean, and dramatic photographs of the glorious American West.

The difference presumably depends from the fact that Adams understands better the character and magnificence of his subject matter, and thus is especially alert to those details, aspects, and moments that are most intensely consonant with the earth's own tonic notes. We must remind ourselves, however, that all we know of Adams' understanding of the earth comes to us not from any direct view into his mind or spirit, but only from photographs, little monochrome substitutes for his ultimately private experience. To the best of our knowledge, he knows no more than he has shown us. As with any artist, his intuitions are finally no better than his prowess.

What Adams' pictures show us is different from what we see in any landscape photographer before him. They are concerned, it seems to me, not with the description of objects—the rocks, tress, and water that are the nominal parts of his pictures—but with the description of the light that they modulate, the light that justifies their relationship to each other. In this context it is instructive to compare Adams' photographs with those of his older friend and neighbor Edward Weston, who photographed much of the same country that Adams has photographed, but who found there are very species of picture. The landscape in Weston's pictures is seen as sculpture: round, weighty, and fleshily sensuous. In comparison, Adams' pictures seem as dematerialized as the reflections on still water, or the shadows cast on morning mist: disembodied images concerned not with the corpus of things but with their transient aspect.

From the standpoint of craft, Adams' problem is more difficult than Weston's, dealing as it does less with eternal verities than with quicksilver. Those who have wondered whether Adams' legendary technique is in fact altogether necessary, or whether it might be a kind of showy overkill, reveling in an unnecessary perfection, have perhaps not understood the content of Adams' pictures, which describe phenomena as ephemeral and evanescent, in an unpeopled world, as those of his contemporary, Cartier-Bresson, describes in a world of human events. To describe in a small monochrome picture the difference between the warm sun of May and the hot sun of June, requires that every tone of the gray scale be tuned to a precise relationship of pitch and volume, so that the picture as a whole sounds a chord that is consonant with our memories of what it was like, or our dreams of what it might be like, to stand in such a spot at such a moment.

Adams would perhaps say that it comes down to a question of good description, which is doubtless true but which has caused a good deal of misunderstanding, since the thing being described is not (for example) a mountain but a concept of one way in which a mountain might be transposed into a photograph.
—John Szarkowski, "Introduction" to The Portfolios of Ansel Adams

Szarkowski gives us great insight in Adams; more than many other writers have. This is useful precisely because it makes it see the photographs themselves in a new way. Adams himself often said that his (legendary) technique was in service of his vision, that his craft was what he needed to do to create the emotional "performance" of the finished photographic print. (Adams, a trained concert pianist before becoming a photographer, often used musical metaphors to describe his creative process.) Szarkowski gives us insight into what an Adams picture really is about: time, change, the ephemeral nature of geology and life, and the ever-changing light, sky, and land. What was it that led Adams' towards championing environmental conservation, decades before it was popular to do so? His awareness of how fragile and ephemeral the land is, and what lives upon it, including ourselves. And also, his awareness that wilderness is necessary to our often overly-civilized spirits: just knowing that there are wild places still—and which we may travel to, to explore, and experience some of the often-buried wildness in ourselves—is a balm to the spirit.


Cross Creek Falls, MN

In my own work, I continue to make more and more B&W pictures. I receive approval for this from many directions, both artistically and aesthetically. I do not entirely trust the opinions of all who approve my working in B&W, precisely because there has always been a bias for B&W photography being more purely "artistic" than color photography. I've written before about this bias, following upon what Edward Weston wrote about the topic:

Black and white is more artificial than color, in the original sense of the word artifice: rather, B&W allows for more of the photographer’s control and decision. A color photo can be apparently pure reportage; or rather, it is unquestioned in a way that B&W is not. One is reduced to pure tone and form. Some subjects are better suited to color, because there is critical information in the color values. But one reason B&W is still considered—rightly or wrongly—the more artistic medium is because it is more akin to artifice than is the quick color snapshot. The aesthetic prejudice for B&W over color is debatable at this point in time; Weston is correct that neither supplants the other, but at the same time each is valid as an artform. It's no longer accurate to say that B&W is "more artistic" than color. Yet I am drawn to it, as a change from color. I've often worked in monochrome; indeed I have a whole body of work that's monochrome, which I return to from time to time.

So while I appreciate any plaudits I receive about my B&W photography, I have to question what prompts someone to make them. Because of this bias towards viewing B&W work as inherently more artistic, for the reasons I discussed above, I often have wondered if a compliment about my B&W work isn't really about it being in B&W rather it being good, in and of itself. It's important to always check one's motivations, as well as one's biases, at the door, and see what's really there, rather than what one thinks is there.


white stone at the lake shore, Grand Marais, MN

All prejudices—artistic prejudices being rather mild and forgivable compared to others—are a kind of conceptual filter on our perceptions. We all carry around a lot of filters, which are ideas through which we see the world, not as it is, but as we think it is, or as it ought to be. The purpose of meditation practice, be it Zen Buddhist sitting meditation, or Christian contemplative prayer, or Taoist egolessness, is to minimize or eliminate the conceptual filters we carry around, so as to be able to see what's really there. Frankly, making visual art, specifically making photographs, is a way of doing that work that surpasses many others, especially the more verbal forms of art-making, which are more prone to generating than removing filters. I find, when out making photographs, that I can let go of or turn off the monkey-mind far more deeply than when writing a poem or essay. My best poems come from that same place of no-mind that my best photos come from: more often than not, I don't feel like "I" made the photo, or poem, but that it happened, or arose from another place. Photography is also about seeing what's actually there, about finding out how the light brings the world into shape. It's a process of discovery.


in the northern Minnesota woods

Weston himself wrote about this, in his essay on his color photography:

The prejudice many photographers have against color photography comes from not thinking of color as form. You can say things with color that can’t be said in black and white. . . . Those who say that color will eventually replace black and white are talking nonsense. The two do not compete with each other. They are different means to different ends. . . . You find a few subjects that can be expressed in either color or black-and-white. But you find more that can be said only through one of them. Many subjects I photographed would be meaningless in black-and-white; the separation of forms is possible only because of the juxtaposition of colors.
—Edward Weston


Artist's Point, Grand Marais, MN

Perhaps I have made for myself a middle ground between Adams and Weston: I am well aware of how the light strikes the body, which sometimes is illuminated from within. I am fascinated by reflections: in still, in moving water, in glass, in mirrors. I love seeing more than one image at the same time, within the frame, when a reflection gives us another layer of depth and illumination.

There is an M.C. Escher print, one of my favorites, entitled Three Worlds. In this woodcut, we see three levels of existence, three layers of being, all detailed by the way light falls on them. We get the reflection of trees on the surface of the pond; the fallen leaves on the pond's surface itself; and we see a fish in the water under the pond's surface.



At the same time that I experience the world as ephemeral, even fragile, as often as I photograph the sky, I also photograph the rocks and waters of the land, that give the land shape, and which etch and shape it. Having studied geology, I am aware of the long-time-scale forces that shape the surface of the earth, that we experience as eternal but which in fact is ever-changing. I find the rocks to be both solid and shadowy. There was an ocean here before, millions of years before, where the living Prairie now is covered with waves of rounded hills, and waves of prairie grasses cresting in the wind. I find Adams' photographic style to be very comfortable to me, precisely because it's all about the light, and the changing face of the light and sky where they touch the land. But I don't reject Weston's more "sculptural" or "eternal" style, either.


Artist's Point, Grand Marais, MN

I find Weston's pictures call forth a sense of timelessness that is the eternal ground out of which being arises. If Weston expresses the Atman, which in Vedic cosmology is the unchanging, eternal soul, Adams expresses the Brahman, or power of creation, life and change. In Hindu mythology, they go together, are in dynamic balance, in a cosmic dance of balance. That is not unlike the way some artists reflect upon each others' work, or reflect and balance out each other—much as Adams and Weston can seem to do at times.


Cascade River, MN

The appeal of Adams' photographs is in part, as Szarkowski says, their ability to evoke an experience. This is why Adam's technical expertise was so essential to his work: this is what it served. For myself, I don't find myself trying to replicate Adam's technical expertise, not even when making a photograph in the same places he worked, but rather, I find myself trying to find a way to transpose into the photographic frame what it is that the vision of a landscape, or other subject matter, makes me feel. As with the best art, the best poems, the best music, the successful photograph evokes an experience in its audience—in many ways, it is an experience, rather than being merely a distillation of the artist's experience transmitted. A successful photograph or poem makes the audience re-experience what the artist felt: there is an emotional and experiential transmission, something frankly pre-verbal, an empathetic connection, if you will, that ignites either the memory or the dream of what it must have been like, to be in such a place at such a moment, seeing the light there, feeling the heat and pressure of it, and being aware of how quickly the light will change.


Artist's Point, Grand Marais, MN

I make very few photographs in the middle of the day: the light is usually too harsh, too vertical, too strong. Unless, for example, when I'm out in the Utah desert, perhaps, where the overwhelming whiteness of the sky striking the land with its heat and glare is what I'm trying to convey in the photograph. More often, the dramatic light happens at the edges of the day, in the nuanced twilight zones of dusk and dawn, and in the morning and evening periods when the light is strongly horizontal, strongly colored. It was not uncommon for Adams to wait several hours for the light to become just right, before he opened his camera shutter to make the photograph. I have waited hours, myself, for the light to become just right. Sometimes, in my traveling, I find myself lucky to arrive at a place just at the right moment, with the right elements all fallen into place, to make an exceptional photograph. But it's also true that chance favors the prepared: my discipline as an artist is to be always ready, with my tools at hand, with my perceptions engaged, so that when I do find myself in the right place at the right time, I can capture the ephemeral, changing, evanescent light.

It's all about the light.

Returning from Elsewhere: Theories

Well-known and influential literary critic and professor Hugh Kenner wrote in 1998 a small themed book of reminiscence and theory combined. Titled The Elsewhere Community, it discusses the mode of learning new ideas that involves travel. It also contains memories of his encounters with many of the literary Moderns, many of whom created displaced, expatriate communities elsewhere. The book is in five parts, which are talks originally meant for radiobroadcast. So a little necessary repetition occurs between sections, so each can stand on its own.

In talking about the Grand Tour, a common practice a century ago of visiting the central cultural sites of Europe, Kenner defines, if only indirectly, what he means by an Elsewhere Community:

"All humans, by their nature," said Aristotle, "desire to know." A special and unparalleled way to know is to go where you're never been. And the key to this quest for knowledge is "elsewhere." In going there, you join what, in these lectures, we will be calling an "Elsewhere Community." It's a concept that is impossible to define strictly. It can name where you dream of going—where bluebirds fly, perhaps. Or it can describe the people you've met somewhere, memories of whom have helped to change you. Or it's an awareness of your own growth and change, arising from the places you've been: Rome's Sistine Chapel, perhaps, or the Zen Gardens of Kyoto, or the green oasis of Manhattan's Central Park.

Going someplace I've never been always makes me feel alive, alert, aware, and undulled. Even on a long day of driving, if I'm on a highway I've never seen before, surrounded by lands, lakes, mountains, fields I've never seen before, I feel particularly alive. It is my goal, in the next few years, to visit all of the US National Parks, and every state in the Union. At some point I want to drive along the Canadian passage to Alaska. I love the north country, and I don't want to just fly over it to get a notch in my belt for visiting Denali, and making photographs there. Photography is the goal, but in a way it's also the excuse. Just going, being able to go, being able to travel, is equally important.

I like to travel slowly, if possible, to take several days to get where I'm going. I enjoy seeing the land along the way. If I could drive to Hawai'i, I would; next best would be to take a boat there. But I'll probably end up flying there, renting a car, and taking off. Who needs hotels when you have fields of pineapple to explore?

Where I differ from Kenner, and from his generation's assumptions that the Grand Tour was to those places that shaped our history and culture, is that my own Grand Tour is about places more than people, geology more than landmarks, geography more than culture. Kenner's artistic generation was drawn, as children of immigrants, to Europe. The Grand Tour was essentially a cultural tour, a tour of the great cities, artists, museums, and history of Europe. Kenner's own form of the Grand Tour, which he describes in his book, was to visit those literary greats of the generation of Moderns that he could encounter who were still alive. He traveled to Europe to see Eliot and others; he traveled in the US to see Pound, Williams, and others. From his encounters with the Moderns he noticed that so many of them had been ex-patriates, displaced, travelers, living overseas; and from this observation was one of the roots of his idea of Elsewhere Communities.

By contrast, I am drawn to tour the National Parks. I want to be there, to feel that wind, that air, that light, that silence, for myself. I am further drawn to visit many state parks around the Union; for state parks often are equally beautiful to the National Parks, but they are relatively unknown. You can almost always find a campsite at a state park, and there are often state parks so near to National Parks that they share their geography and beauty.

For years I've envisioned myself traveling in a small van which I would have converted to sleep in, and have in it a small workspace corner, a small kitchenette. It would allow me to travel and camp at places that are sometimes too hard to set up a tent in, or unsafe to do so because of weather or local wildlife. (Like the time I pulled into an Everglades campground only to read several signs warning about cougar.) I could travel at a slower pace than I do even now, stopping whenever I was tired, or wanting to work. It would be the Zen of Travel: travel when you're alert, sleep when you're tired.



One of the great Chinese poets, one of my favorites, wrote in one his poems the state of being that an aware traveler takes on: Heaven my blanket, earth my pillow. Yang's approach to poetry changed, when he began to travel, from a focus on the poetry of the past, to that inspired by what he saw right in front of him:

Mountain thoughts, river feelings—never betray them.
Rain forms, sky patterns are always beautiful.
"Closing the door and searching for verses" is not the way of poetry.
It is only when you travel that poems will come naturally.
(trans. by Jonathon Chaves)

Yang says, It is only when you travel that poems will come naturally, and this echoes my own attitude, based on my experience. It is a classical Chinese and Japanese poetic attitude, seen in the great Chinese poets, in Basho, and in one who was self-admittedly inspired more by the Moderns' discovery of Asian literature than by their own experiments, Gary Snyder. That's a capsule summation of a central thread of my own literary lineage. I do some of my best thinking when driving on a long roadtrip. I do some of my best writing, my best photographic work, when traveling. It is from encountering the land directly that the poem arises. When I come home and start to work with the materials I've gathered on my most recent travels, I am still Elsewhere even though I am Home. I see my photos, as I sort through them, and they bring up bodily sensations—memory is an experience, not an idea—which give me more poems, art-making, and music. It's a paradox of inspiration and memory and making.

When I think about the van I want to eventually travel in—face it, I'm not 25 anymore, and setting up a tent under some conditions is really hard work—I also think of William Least Heat Moon's travelogues, beginning with Blue Highways, in which he traveled and lived just such a converted van. I also think of the station wagon that Ansel Adams traveled in on many of his journeys, which he sometimes slept in, sometimes traveled with others in, and on the roof of which he had built a platform for his camera. Stories abound of Adams pulling over, quickly setting up, and making a photograph.



I have to say, here, that I had the idea of traveling in a converted van for myself; but I am pleased that other artists have had the same idea. It's a natural idea, seen in many cultures across many times. The word "caravan," from which "van" is derived, is itself a very old word.

In my own instance, rather than a rooftop platform such as Adams used, I would build a small corner behind the driver's seat, with a computer and flat-panel screen built in on shockproof mounts, where I could download and archive the day's digital photos, and begin to work with them, at night, camped, after a day's travel.

I realize that there would have to be a bookshelf in the van, as well, secured somehow against the books scattering onto the bed at every sharp turn in the road, because as I sit here writing, I realize that I am pulling books off the shelves and scattering them on my desk to make these references. I would have to carry at least a few texts with me, there's no way around it. Some for inspiration, some for pleasure—a lazy day when you don't want to go anywhere, just loaf and read all afternoon, is bound to occur on any given trip—some for knowledge.

Hugh Kenner says, a bit later on:

Within The Odyssey we find the story of a second journey. A supernatural being named Circe—a female magician—tells Odysseus that the only way to get around the Sea God and get back home is by traveling to the Far Shore where dwell the Dead. Once there, he must consult the ghost of a sage named Tiresias. And so Odysseus undertakes a journey after knowledge, fueled by his desire to get home. The knowledge he acquires turns out to be his means of finally getting home. For to travel is always, in some sense, to learn. What we don't know yet, is to be found Elsewhere.

I want to continue with that idea: people traveling after what they do not know. Such a pursuit is a way of seeking entrance to the Elsewhere Community.

So we set out after knowledge, to see places and people we've never encountered before. Joni Mitchell once wrote in a song from her "road album," Hejira:

People don't tell you where they've been
They'll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself
You never really know.

Hejira (the word denotes a journey to escape danger or oppression) is an album of music that lives among others in my truck as a permanent fixture, as a central part of my road music listening collection. It's an album I listen to mostly on the road, because it perfectly captures the feeling of long-distance traveling, its dislocations and its joys. In another song, Mitchell writes:

I pulled into the Cactus Tree Motel
To shower off the dust
And I slept on the strange pillows
Of my wanderlust.

One point of traveling with a few creature comforts, like in my theoretical caravan, is to minimize the effects that "strange pillows" have on one. Sometimes you want the pillows to be exotic and strange and unknown. Sometimes you want to carry your own pillows with you, and sleep in your tent, even when the parcel of ground you're on changes every night. And even my own pillows can seem strange, at times, when I've been traveling for a long time.

In a final turn of strangeness, when we have danced so hard that we slip sideways into other times and spaces, we come to the most recent, most technological form of the Elsewhere Community: the Internet. Kenner discusses the Internet near the end of his book, describing how it has the potential (not yet fully realized) of becoming a truly global communication tool. It creates virtual relationships that collapse geography, bringing people who share affinities into apparent close proximity and dialogue, disregarding the separations of actual distance. In this, Kenner follows the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, who was one of his first mentors. (McLuhan was traveling with Kenner when they first met Ezra Pound; it was this first meeting with Pound that shaped a great deal of Kenner's future interests and career, and Kenner cites Pound as another of his great mentors. Mentoring writers was, after all, one of Pound's great contributions to modern literature.)

Because the Internet collapses space, traveling to learn is less necessary. Your library desk becomes your office or home desk, where The Library of Babel is available now, mostly, at your fingertips. The Final Encyclopedia or Universal Encyclopedia is starting to manifest itself. It is a scholar's paradise. Both data and interpretation are available directly from sources that in previous times would have been either unknown or unavailable. One can go out and do research, and make relationships, in ways both simpler and more complex than ever before.

The Internet is made by its users. There are portal-tenders and gate-keepers, but the content of the Internet is ultimately made by, contributed to by, invented by, its users. Kenner describes the Internet as not being owned by anyone yet; other writers have also described it as a free zone of thought, a temporary autonomous zone, and the last (or next) wild frontier of free thought and free speech. Its attraction to me lies in those realms, in fact: democratizing connection and removing the gatekeepers of discourse allows me, as well as you, to go out there and say what you need to say, for better or ill.

So I don't need to travel as much as I did, to get knowledge. I can stay at home and find many things out. Still, I do travel to learn, and I travel to go see places I haven't seen before, because I want to let those experiences have an impact on me, and change me. I use the Internet a lot for my pre-roadtrip research: to find out about places I want to visit, to find out about places along the way where I might want to stop, to discover information I might need to know traveling. And there are always surprises on the road, nonetheless. The Internet contains only an illusion of approximate total content; in fact, a great many experiences in life cannot be virtual, and never will be. It's easy to get caught up in the "new is inherently good" cycle, that dream of progressive technological utopia that is a principal legacy of Modernism, without ever conceding either consequences or alternative channels of learning. The Internet is still the new toy on the block, still very shiny, still very narrow-band in what it can actually give us.

The chief danger of virtual community is that it might only be pseudo-community, an apparent community that can fly apart from its own energies at any time. Sometimes we think we know people better than we do, online; virtual reality gives us a sensation of intimacy, especially intellectual intimacy, which can be illusory. (Hence the high drama of betrayal and argument cycling constantly throughout the literary blogosphere.) Relationships can be built across vast geographical distance, yet one perceives is still a representation, a persona, an avatar. It's not a matter of who you trust, or what you believe is real. It's rather a reminder that in some ways, all of experience is maya, illusion, virtual or otherwise, and it is necessary to sort through all kinds of noise to get at the signal.

If the Internet is not a huge Elsewhere Community, it is at least a collection of many Elsewheres. Some merge and overlap, many do not. But discovering which is which is another kind of learning journey, another kind of roadtrip for the mind to discover and gain knowledge from. And be changed by, even as the land and what we build upon it change, albeit at different rates.

Making Photographs

Trillium and fern fiddleheads, Robert H Treman State Park, Ithaca, NY

In his short essay, "A Personal Credo" (updated 1982, in The Unknown Ansel Adams), Ansel Adams writes about the difference between taking a photograph and making one. This is an important distinction.

I'm not sure when I first began watching my own language on this point, using making by preference; I may have been influenced by Adams directly, having read at some earlier time the original 1994 version of his Credo. I do know that I've been making this distinction in my own language for some time, and that reading it again in his updated Credo was both revelation and reminder.

Adams writes:

The relative importance of photographic craft and its expressive aspects must be clarified. We would not go to a concert to hear only scales performed—even if they were played with consummate skill—nor would we enjoy a sloppy rendition of great music. In photography, technique is frequently exalted for its own sake; or, worst of all, is renounced as an impediment to creative work. The unfortunate complement to this situation occurs when a serious and potentially important statement is rendered impotent by a photographer's inferior understanding of the mechanics of production. Sympathetic interpretation seldom evolves from a predatory attitude; the common term taking a picture is more than just an idiom; it is a symbol of exploitation. Making a picture implies a creative resonance essential to profound expression.

The difference is in the language itself: to hear photographers talk about grabbing a shot, or taking, or stealing an image, or capturing a moment—these are all aggressive, almost violent actions. The indicate the mindset of a conqueror, one who seeks to possess or own; as though taking a photo of a mountain peak meant you could own the mountain. There is present that inculcated grasping personality-ego in such language, such attitudes.

To hear photographers speak of making an image, though, changes the relationship utterly. The work becomes a collaboration, a partnership, a living relationship between subject, photographer, and viewer. The photographer is the first viewer of the image being made; later viewers can share in the photographer's experience of that moment, if the image is well-made, technically well-presented, and evocative of mood and feeling. Adams talked about feeling a lot. I find his use of musical metaphors makes a great deal of sense to me; possibly both we were both trained as musicians before taking up photography. Adams' use of a word like "resonance," an acoustic term that also applies to psychology, emotion, and thought, is one I often in the same way, in discussing poetry as well as art-making. Resonance is one of those elements of a work that takes us into an experience of the work, and perhaps an experience of what the artist felt that led to his or her making of the work; it is a door that opens further into mythic or archetypal awareness. So Adams' advice to use the word making in terms of photography is in part a recognition that there's more going on, in both the making of a photograph and in its later viewing, than meets the surface of the eye. Making includes the photographer's relationship with what is made, as well as with what the image was made from.

(One might add parenthetically that in poetry as in photography, technique is also frequently exalted for its own sake—or renounced—with results parallel in poetry to those Adams deplores in photography.)

Adams continues in his Credo:

Seeing, or visualization, is the fundamentally important element. A photograph is not an accident, it is a concept that exists at, or before, the moment of exposure of the negative. From that point to the realization of the final print, the process is chiefly one of craft; the previsualized photograph is created by a series of procedures unique to the medium. true, changes and enhancements can be effective during these processes, but the fundamental thing that was "seen" is not altered in basic concept.

Both Adams and Edward Weston discuss the primacy of visualization in their work.

The only caveat, and it's a small one, I might have with pre-visualization as a practice is that I have made some of my best images by not looking through the viewfinder, but by trusting my hand and intuition to capture a moment. Discovering this is what led me to my practice of stealth photography. I can hear Adams arguing in rebuttal that in fact I still visualized the image I wanted to make, and I still saw what I wanted to photograph first, before releasing the shutter. Even in the case of photographs shot from the hip, without looking through the viewfinder, I had an idea of my subject, and what I wanted to discover. I could quibble, but Adams would probably be more right than not, in each case.

Also, Adams and Weston were concerned about fine art photography, of course, and their comments exist in the context of their times and their work: remember that, at the time, what they were doing—sharp-focus landscape and portrait photography, captured in a perfect moment after much seeing of the subject, with some of the interpretation occurring in the technical process of making the print—was considered radical at the time. Remember, too, that fine art photography is still somewhat sneered at by both critics and the uncomprehending public, unaware of its potential as an artform in the right hands.

Seeing, or visualization, inevitably leads me to consider another big influence on the way I operate as a photographer and artist. I refer to Frederick Franck, a self-described "image-maker" who I have come to realize has been a central influence on my adult art and life. Franck wrote:

Looking and seeing both start with sense perception, but there the similarity ends. When I "look" at the world and label its phenomena, I make immediate choices, instant appraisals—I like or I dislike, I accept or reject, what I look at, according to its usefulness to the "Me" . . . this me that I imagine myself to be, and that I try to impose on others.

The purpose of "looking" is to survive, to cope, to manipulate, to discern what is useful, agreeable, or threatening to the Me, what enhances or what diminishes the Me. This we are trained to do from our first day.

When, on the other hand, I see—suddenly I am all eyes, I forget this Me, am liberated from it and dive into the reality of what confronts me, become part of it, participate in it. I no longer label, no longer choose. ("Choosing is the sickness of the mind," says a sixth-century Chinese sage.)

It is in order to really see. to see ever deeper, ever more intensely, hence to be fully aware and alive, that I draw what the Chinese call "The Ten Thousand Things" around me. Drawing is the discipline by which I constantly rediscover the world.
—Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation (1973)

I can say the same thing for my photography: what I have not seen closely, taking time to see it, before making the photograph, I have not really seen. Once seen, though, in this way, it can stay with me for a very long time; perhaps even always.

I first read The Zen of Seeing so long ago that it feels like I've always known it; it must have been sometime in the 1908s, though, that I first encountered Franck's work. In recent years, as he has become ever more lucid and clear, working through his project towards its essence, I feel as if I have followed, also becoming every more lucid and clear. Perhaps this is just experience, the practice that leads to skill in one's craft. I do know now, regardless, that what began years ago as a practice I called a camera walk has become for me something much richer and deeper in recent years, and has improved both my seeing and my photographic craft.

In his photographic Credo, Adams says something so close to what Franck says above that it must have been a parallel insight—and we can read these side by side as individual accounts of the same insight, the same deep seeing. Adams wrote:

The making of a photograph implies an acute perception of detail in the subject, just as a fine print deserves more than superficial scrutiny. A photograph is usually looked at; it is seldom looked into. The experience of seeing a really fine print may be related to the experience of hearing symphony—appreciation of the broad melodic line, while important, is by no means all. The wealth of detail, forms and values, the minute but vital significances revealed so exquisitely by the lens, also deserve exploration and appreciation. A qualitative appreciation of a print may require only a glance by a practiced eye, but a fine image deserves more contemplative attention. It takes time to really see a fine print, to feel the almost endless revelation of poignant reality which, in our preoccupied haste, we have sadly neglected.


Fern fiddleheads, Robert H Treman State Park, Ithaca, NY

When I go out on a photographic (and/or videographic) journey nowadays, I always take some time to see my subject before I make the image. I might take a long time. I might take only a moment; in which case there is something happening rapidly, changing quickly, that I must see in the viewfinder before it's gone. With so much death amongst my family and friends recently, I've become acutely aware of the fragility of all things, how quickly and suddenly they can all be gone, or broken, or unsayable. But even the quick photographs are made after a moment or seeing. I don't claim this is true for all the images I make; it is true, without fail, for those that I feel are among my best. A moment of contemplation before releasing the shutter is never lost, and deepens and enriches our lives and ourselves, even before the image is printed so that others might view it too.

So, I have consciously chosen to use the word making in terms of photographs for some time now. yet I'm also aware of the creative aspects of my artistic work in general, not only in photography, all of which is Making—a collaboration with nature, or in co-creation with the divine. Creation-centered spirituality comes naturally to me, as what I've always known and felt, even before I had the theological or artistic language with which to express it. Co-creation is precisely what it is—the aspect of making that is collaborative with the subject of the photo, for example—because making is also giving back, or giving into creation: adding to Creation's articulate beauty.

Ithaca, NY

From spending the summer of 1990 at Cornell, I remember Ithaca as being a vibrant place, even in summer. The university is on top of the hill, the town is in the valley—actually, it cascades down the hill below the university like a waterfall of houses—at the foot of Cayuga Lake. I don't recall there being much of a town-gown rivalry or competition, but then, I was there in summer.



I spent a bit of free time on the Ithaca Commons. Today I pulled in and parked and walked around the Commons, did a little sightseeing, a little bit of shopping, and just wandered around. After last night's heavy rain, it was hot and sunny today, and people were out walking, just to take in the spring sunlight.



The Commons is also a place for public sculpture, such as this bronze café-goer. There is also a scale-model representation of the solar system in the Commons, with a central obelisk where the sun would be, and the planets placed as circles in the paving, to scale. The obelisk is also a memorial to Carl Sagan, who was professor of astronomy at Cornell, and made Ithaca his home. I remember driving by his home, once, which I recall seeing as a modern brick/stone wall and verdant doorway, the house beyond, all on the edge of the cliff above the town, with a magnificent view of the Cayuga Valley.



I stopped in at this excellent used book store on the Commons, and found a couple of things. One was a museum exhibition catalog of a late Ansel Adams photography show, titled The Unknown Ansel Adams. There are photos in here that you've never seen before, unknown because rarely exhibited, and not as well known as his most famous images.



The main attraction of this little book for me is that it contains Adams major artistic statement about his own photography, "A Personal Credo;" for this 1982 edition, he updated and added to the original Credo which he had first penned some 40 years previous. Adams gets a little pithy in this revised Credo, responding in part to some of the trends in photography he observed from late in his career and life.



It's hard now to remember that what Adams and Weston and their peers created, artistic sharp-focus landscape photography, was radical at its time. It has now become the mainstream, thanks to their influence. What they began, has continued. I have frequently felt Adams' spirit looking over my shoulder into my viewfinder over the past year, since I've begun making black-and-white landscape photos again. This feeling was particularly strong when I was out West last fall, including stops at Yosemite, Big Sur, Yellowstone, and the Tetons. But the feeling continues on this current roadtrip Down East, especially at Acadia National Park in Maine.

Meanwhile, wandering around Ithaca meant seeing what has changed, and what has not. I recognize many of the buildings along the Commons, although the stores in them have changed names and purposes. Driving around town, I see some familiar landmarks, and remember where to turn off the main road, to go up the hill towards Cornell. It comes back to me quickly, and I found myself lost only once.

Ithaca is renowned for its used book stores. There are regular Book Fairs in town. I could spend too much time here wandering from book store to book store, lost amongst the titles, lusting over rare volumes, always thinking about rebuilding my own library. No doubt I would have spent far too much of my travel funds, had this visit overlapped with one of the Book Fairs.

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Ithaca was for me in 1990 also a place of escape from the pressures of the language intensive program I was enrolled in. I came down the hill for respite. At that time, there was an ice cream store on the Commons that received a lot of my custom. Nearby, there was a book store, semi-underground, down some steps into a basement. In there, I found several books on homosexuality that were part of my personal awakening. The summer I spent in Ithaca I was not a good student; I did not do well at the language intensive, as I was distracted by a cluster of personal problems that needed to be sorted out that year, and also by a deeply existential personal crisis. On New Year's Eve 1990, I had had a vision of the Void, in which everything I believed in, that had meaning in my life, had been stripped away, leaving me struggling with a major existential crisis in my life: struggling not only with life's sudden barrenness of purpose and meaning, but also if I should bother going on at all. As I drove alone out to Ithaca, there were times when the highway passed through Pennsylvania and upstate New York, the Alleghenies, for example, when I had to struggle as if my life depended on it against turning the wheel of the car to go over some cliff, or off the edge of some bridge or overpass. It was a struggle that gripped me to the core, and I could barely focus on life, much less on 4 hours of language lessons per weekday. I know now that this was part of a spiritual crisis, the dark night of the senses. Oddly, I can give you the exact dates this crisis began, ended. It began with a vision of the Void, and ended with an entirely different vision, that brought a new sense of meaning and purpose back into my life. (I've written about all of this before; including as one of the central poems in my unpublished book of poetically-written spiritual narratives, the Sutras.) It's strange what one can remember, when the rest is a blur of suffering. I was in some kind of spiritual or emotional pain that entire summer at Cornell—so I did not do well at the language institute, nor later during graduate school.

Returning to Ithaca this spring brings back all these memories. Of wandering over to the waterfalls in the state parks. Of wandering around the Commons; which I might add are mostly pleasant and joyous memories. of finding a music store east of the Commons, near the Moosewood restaurant, where I bought for myself a small mbira made in Africa. Of driving alone in the region, exploring, discovering that driving and photographing could give me solace. Of going alone to the river gorges that run through the Cornell campus, and spending time in the cooling waters on a hot afternoon. Of struggling to find a reason to go on living; and enduring when I could not. Of finding a selection of gay oral history books in that basement bookstore, which I bought and still own, full of personal narratives of gay men of all ages and types, places and times; discovering in these oral histories some recognition and affirmation, a balm for my growing confusion and growth. I now know that that bookstore, what I found there, and that summer I spent at Cornell, were important and essential parts of my coming-out process. It was difficult and turbulent, but I no longer feel anything but good about it.

So, Ithaca was a place of mixed feelings. A lot of this personal history came up again, during this brief visit. But only to be examined, and in many cases, finally laid to rest, cleared and released, settled in my mind and heart. My summer in Ithaca was an important turning point in my life, and I now feel mostly gratitude.

In the Details

Japanese maple and evergreen, Janesville, WI

The details are where the image comes alive. In your story, it's the details that make it feel real, the little moments and spoons on the table that make the writing come alive in the mind's eye, become clear rather than fuzzy. You can deal with the big picture, on the epic scale, but if your movie doesn't have a human story, it will remain cold and alien. Warmth and life come from the details. Sharpness of focus in a photograph brings more and more detail to the eye, and provides more surface to contemplate.

A telling detail in a poem or story can give the reader the hook they need to go into the writing, and experience it from within. The details are what pull us into the universal shared experience of being human; they are also what give us the rich experience of living inside the skin of someone very different from ourselves.

When I go out to photograph, I look at the small details just as much as the overall picture. When I shoot a panorama it often feels bland: documentary rather than expressive. I enjoy documentary films, especially films about music and musicians. And I also enjoy great panoramic photography. But when I zoom out to take an overview shot, I often feel as if I am making a context shot, and the real beauty and interest will be found by zooming in more tightly, by cropping out unnecessary details in the viewfinder, or later in the process of editing and printing. This doesn't mean I take only close-ups. It does mean that I am always thinking about the essential details in the frame. When you can't remove anything else that's inessential, or downright distracting, that's when you've found the right composition. It can take some time to find.


Japanese maple and wood fence, Janesville, WI

In 1932, the Group f/64 manifesto appeared. It was written in response to soft-focus "artistic" pictorial photography, which was the dominant style at the time. The photographers within the group wanted to explore a more "pure" photography, to see what photography could do for itself as a medium for pure artistic expression—for fine art, in other words. The Group f/64 were not content to follow fashion and re-create in photos the same themes and settings and imagery that had been found in painting for centuries, which a majority of pictorial photographers were doing. Pictorial photography was human-centered, often storytelling, sometimes illustration. Group f/64, in my opinion, wanted to see the world as it was, in an almost spiritual manner: to discover it, to find within it the expressions they wished to make, rather than impose ideas on a pre-planned stage. They sought out images without pre-planning, and learned that "luck" consists of being always prepared when one finds oneself in the right place at the right time. I practice this principle now by always having a camera with me; I've been "lucky" more than once simply because I had a camera with me, ready to make an image, when the moment presented itself.

Here's a key passage from the Group f/64 manfiesto, which lays this out most clearly:

Pure photography is defined as possessing no qualities of technique, composition or idea, derivative of any other art form. The production of the "Pictorialist," on the other hand, indicates a devotion to principles of art which are directly related to painting and the graphic arts.

The members of Group f/64 believe that photography, as an art form, must develop along lines defined by the actualities and limitations of the photographic medium, and must always remain independent of ideological conventions of art and aesthetics that are reminiscent of a period and culture antedating the growth of the medium itself.

The impact and influence that Group f/64 had on photography, in its wake, is so foundational that many nowadays are not even aware of it. The "fine art photography" print is still considered, in most peoples' minds, to be a tack-sharp black-and-white print on glossy paper. Edward Weston and Ansel Adams are still the models and the standards, along with the other influential members of the Group (among them Imogen Cunningham and John Paul Edwards). The subject matter of photography will always evolve, as culture evolves and artists record it, as the land changes and artists record that, too. But the style in which the photograph is made, its technique and craft as a medium, must still come to grips with the philosophies discussed, and practiced, by the photographers of Group f/64.

What's interesting is that the photography that we view as journalistic rather than fine-art has always wanted to be sharp and detailed; rarely has moodiness been allowed in, in technical terms, and even more rarely have pictorial photography methods been used. But news photography, photojournalism, is reportage, and is expected to carry an aura of clarity and objectivity. There have been many great photographers who were essentially documenters of the world.

There is artistry in journalistic photography, nonetheless. A single iconic image can tell an entire story, through implication, inclusion or exclusion, through form and composition. But the purpose of such photos is to tell a story, so Group f/64 did not regard that as "pure" photography. Rather, Group f/64 placed their emphasis on sharp images, maximum depth-of-field, glossy printing paper which showed more detail than rag or matte papers, and on other factors that showcase unique qualities of the photographic process. f/64 is the smallest aperture on the lens of a large-format camera, which provides the greatest depth-of-field. Relatively long exposures are required to obtain this depth-of-field, as aperture and exposure are inversely proportional; so what blur one sees might be caused by the wind's movement of an object in the frame, or the pull and push of an ocean wave. f/64 images are typically rich in detail, although the process of printing is an artistic process, with shading and tone adjusted to affect mood, sometimes de-emphasizing some detail in order to bring out another.


Japanese maple and wood fence, Janesville, WI

What makes an image startling, a poem breathe, a film have a good rhythm, lies in how each artist in their medium handles the details. Sometimes leaving out details is necessary, to bring more important details into higher relief. A long list of details in a story can kill momentum, but one or two telling and important details, with all the rest left out, may heighten the story's impact.

The minimalist approach is to take away everything that doesn't need to be there. This can be seen in architecture and painting, as well. In photography, as in poetry, the richness does need to be there. But if you can do it with less, do it. Better a white wall reflecting the changing daylight, than a Baroque mirror in which all you can see is overwhelming decorative flourishes.