The Contemplative Photographer

A few days ago I had a weekend engagement in Houston. Looking out the window of my hotel on Sunday morning, I was surprised to see fog. I asked the man at the front desk about the day’s forecast. “The weatherman says the fog will burn off very quickly.”

With no time to drive anywhere, I stepped out the front door. Fifty yards to the west was an expressway. Fifty yards to the east, an often-used railroad track. To the south, a busy city street. That left just the north, where the day before I had seen a nondescript stand of trees, with refuse scattered about. I sauntered northward through the fog.

In almost any other light, this woods would have been hardly worth looking at. The photographic possibilities were constrained by the terrain—standing water was everywhere, making it impossible to move more than a few steps, since I had no boots.

So I simply planted myself here and there over the course of that next hour. I watched and waited. Every now and again I tripped the shutter. The resulting images show nothing of the cars whizzing by on my left, or the two freight trains that lumbered past on my right, or the construction debris that lay at my feet.

I could have been in the middle of a virgin forest, far from civilization. For an hour, I suppose I was.

I photographed after a heavy snowfall. The woods were dense enough, and the snow deep enough, that I was never quite sure what I’d find when I walked from the road, lowered my head beneath those first branches, and stepped into the middle of that timbered canopy. I took seriously Minor White’s observation about maintaining a state of mind that is as blank as possible.

I have learned that when I try too hard, the “goal of blank” becomes too much an active goal and the blankness too easily recedes. Then just when I think it may be gone, and I turn to walk out of the woods, it sometimes hits me—a sudden appearance that says, “Hi!”

The click of the shutter is my way of saying “hi” right back.

I spent several days in northern Michigan earlier this week at my brother Mike’s cabin in the woods. Near blizzard conditions the day before I arrived had deposited almost two feet of snow on forests and fields. Photographs beckoned everywhere.

One afternoon Mike took me to a small bridge over the Pere Marquette River. It was quite lovely—smooth, dark water sandwiched between two smoothly curving lines of snow. I made several images, but something was missing. I think what was missing was me.

So I stumbled down the steep embankment and made my way to river’s edge. Mike watched me carefully from the roadway as I stopped here and there, turning, looking, photographing. Once he shouted, “Don’t go any further!” Later he told me that the ground I thought I was standing on was actually thin ice.

But being next to the river, quite near the water, up close to the floating pancakes of ice, was the only way I could visually interpret that sight. It took me fifteen minutes of moving and stopping, waiting and watching, to see, finally, that languid river and those snowy banks for what they were—a darkness channeling its way into a quiet whiteness. Even then I could have stayed until sunset and seen what was there more clearly and with greater appreciation. And I know, I’m sorry to admit, that I would have walked away still having seen incompletely. I photographed this sight, but I still hadn’t truly seen it for all it was worth.

One afternoon last week I stopped my car on a country road, eyeing a row of trees stretching across a wintry field, shrouded in a light fog. “Maybe,” I said to myself.

Leaving the motor running and without taking the time to grab my tripod, I stepped toward the field. The snow was deeper than it appeared; my boots disappeared into the wet whiteness. I hesitated, then struggled up the incline toward the trees. With each step, more snow found its way into my boots.

Once on top, I said, “I think so.” But my boots kept slipping, my body was shivering, and the motor was running. So I slid to my knees and quickly exposed this image before starting to slide back down the hill, involuntarily. Intuition did the framing, not I.

Back in my digital darkroom, I was grateful intuition had its way.

Writing is a solitary occupation.
Family, friends, and society are
the natural enemies of the writer.
He must be alone,
uninterrupted, and slightly savage
if he is to sustain and
complete an undertaking.
Jessamyn West

I do not doubt what Jessamyn West writes. People can be the natural enemy of the writer. I know that to be true. More than once I lived alone in a single-room hermitage in a woods, without any human conversation, as I labored on a book. I suppose what she described is true—anyone who would act in this way must be slightly savage. While I wince at accepting that word, I understand the underlying truth.

I’ve been a photographer almost as long as I’ve been a writer, so I confess to dual savagery. While some photography depends upon having other people around, the type I do calls for naming the natural enemy and running in the opposite direction.

There is another way of describing this, a friendlier way. It’s the need for aloneness, for solitude. The need to see through your own eyes, not someone else’s. The need to have your own visceral responses to what you come upon, not checking to see if anyone else feels the same way.

So yesterday I drove to Chain O’ Lakes Park, thirty miles northeast. Except for a couple of ice fishermen, I had all those hundreds of acres to myself. I don’t believe I could have photographed that silence, that pale winter haze, those barren branches in the same way if others were nearby, however benign their presence.