Discovering a Subject Matter

When I first carried my camera into the woods of northern Michigan, much to my surprise, I turned my camera away from the grand landscape around me to a glow of light in the streambed at my feet. In that random choice, at nineteen, I discovered a subject matter that would spark a life-long exploration. I saw in the interplay of light and water a landscape where objects seemed to dissolve and reflections could look solid, where scale and volume blurred, and where the nature of materials appeared transformed. I felt I had touched something inexplicable and vast at the water’s edge that gripped my imagination as nothing had before.

Photographing the Invisible Landscape

The Invisible Landscapes images are created by the interplay of light, wind, flora, reflective and transparent surfaces, and by my ability to look into the 1000s of shapes across the water’s surface. Typically, a glow of light, the bend of a reed, or a pattern will attract my eye. I will then anchor my tripod in the soft pond sediments and begin the process of exploring with a camera. I open the lens shutter and f/stop to see the composition; tilt the front lens to focus across the water’s surface; level the Y axis to assure side-to-side sharpness, still my body and take an exposure. I check sharpness in the image; refocus; level the camera again; shift the back to lengthen the frame, wait for calm; take another exposure, and another. I repeat this process again and again, as I respond to changes in the environment and maneuver my camera and tripod along seeking new compositions. My approach is not deliberate, but one more of focused confusion where the success of my efforts is not clear in the moment. Typically, I will take hundreds of exposures over four weeks of photography at Acadia, and it will require months of review and working on rough edits to determine which images continue to challenge and engage me.

Revealing an Inner Landscape

The Invisible Landscape photographs do not depict a scene in nature you can see with your eyes. They are a version of nature constructed with my imagination. This is the power I discovered at the water’s edge so many years ago: my ability to  draw the exterior landscape into an interior place through a camera, where my imagination can illuminate and shape the world around me. I found in those close-up ephemeral environments a relationship to the natural world where the “grand landscape” is created by a place inside us that we can all access.