La Macchina Fotografica

It’s a brisk day in Northern California. I pull my coat collar tight up to my neck. This stops the downward draft that goes all the way to my waist. The overall visual effect makes me look like one of those little spies in Spy vs. Spy (Mad Magazine, circa 1968). On this day, I feel like the black spy waiting for the white spy’s engagement. I prowl the sidewalks on the balls of my feet—the way cats do.

I look at a shop window and into my reflection. I’m missing my fedora, a dandy Borsalino that I found in Verona on a distant day when I was then, too, cold and brooding. Today I wear a baseball cap, a feeble substitute. I wonder why I don’t wear the fedora more often, but, elegant hats in America just don’t seem right. My reflection looks less like a spy and more like a typical Marin County male just past his prime.

I shake myself of my self-absorption long enough to notice a woman. She’s also looking at my reflection.Given that I’m wearing sunglasses I don’t think she knows that I’m looking back at her. It is an eery encounter. I lift my camera gently, focus…and squeeze the shutter release. She’s still staring so I make five more images.

I walk off. And I wonder about her and her life’s story, figuring we’ll never cross paths again. Then I return to my spy fantasy and look for another window and another reflection. By now my collar has fallen so I pull it up again. The draft is yet again uncomfortable.

I looked out my window late yesterday morning. High clouds. Normally I like to make photos early in the morning when the air is fresh and the sun is golden—when the world is my own. But high, wispy clouds mean magic in photography so I broke my own rules. I went out with my camera in the latest part of the morning.

Cirrus clouds diffuse the sun just enough to soften and fill shadows. They add drama to sky. Painters know that cirrus clouds are the most difficult of clouds to paint. Their delicacy is elusive. In photography we must take care with when pointing the camera to sky. Blown-out highlights are the death of wispiness.

While I’ve noticed the cottony light of cirrus skies for years, I have come to realize that there is more to the magic. Reflections take on new drama and depth on days like these. Gone are the harsh specular highlights that can ruin an image. Surfaces glow instead of sparkle. There is always something new to learn about light. It is a magician who never reveals all the secrets. The sorcerer unveils the truth with time and contemplation.

Yesterday I found the Larkspur Palms again. The sky turned them to towering monuments of grace and drama. I found angles and perspectives that I’d not known before. It was the light that whet my appetite but it was also the emerging truth the comes with familiarity with a subject. Too often we seek the unfamiliar with photography, forgetting our own backyard. The truth can be found in the familiar. Revisiting a subject over and over is like peeling an onion. I’ve only begun with the Larkspur Palms.

One of the best things about cell phones is that I can now talk to myself in public. Not that many years ago it was considered odd to have a conversation with oneself. Now people are talking aloud seemingly no one just about everywhere. True, they usually have some kind of Bluetooth earpiece attached to to them and they are, theoretically, talking to an other human being somewhere. But, who knows for sure?

I don’t wear a Bluetooth device. Nor do I enjoy cell-phone conversations. But, I’ve considered getting a cheap earpiece just so I can talk to myself without being self-conscious. I figure if it’s okay that everyone is jabbering into cyberspace it’s perfectly normal to jabber to oneself. After all, most of us are in our own little world anyway.

It’s easy to spot people in their own little world. I love going into public spaces and finding people who seem alone in thought, daydream or preoccupation. If one is a photographer one needs to be quick. The moments are fleeting. Usually some kind of external stimulus prods our dreamers back into the social universe. Often the click of a camera shutter is all that it takes to jolt them.

I feel connected to those lost in their own universe. It makes me feel that we really are all the same—inextricably linked yet very much alone. Seeing others in this state sends me off into my own little world. I wonder about them; their life, their history, their story. And If they start talking I secretly hope that it’s just a conversation with themselves and that there’s no silly Bluetooth gadget hanging off their ear.

Normally I like to go to Muir Beach very early in the morning, long before the summer crowds start to fill up the small beach. Muir Beach is best experienced alone, save a few turkey vultures, oyster catchers, seagulls, or pelicans. I like the sand when it’s freshly combed by the surf and before myriad footsteps and paw prints muss it all up. Yet, sometimes I arrive late and the party has started without me. On those occasions, the beach is full, the day’s story already unfolding.

On the particular day when I made this photo, I walked down from Mt. Tamalpais onto the beach during a long hike. Starting above the fog, I descended into a netherworld of beach activity. Intense little groups had formed, each in its own pod of activity. Everyone seems so content on a beach, as if they were self-contained, exploration units, completely equipped with all that is necessary for the sustainment of a satisfying life.

The fog muffled the childrens’ cries of glee. And the barks of over-stimulated dogs. The birds had already had breakfast and were gone, yielding to the frenzy of happy beachcombers. I don’t stay long when the beach is full, but I sat and imagined stories of the groups of people around me. I wondered about their lives and their connection to one another. Was this a chance encounter, or were we all meant to converge at this moment on this day?

After resting my legs, I stood and brushed off the sand. I looked around once more and made this photo. I then went off, climbed out of the fog and back to Mt. Tamalpais once again. Soon, I could see the beach from afar, the people I just met reduced to ant-like figures. Then the fog completely obscured them as I went back home.

High atop one of the tallest hills in the Marin Headlands is an FAA antenna. Looking like an odd, little silo, it can be seen from quite a distance. As one approaches it, its strangeness emerges. It stands in utter silence, braced against the ocean wind. Surrounded by a gleaming white fence, it is unapproachable. Warning signs tell hikers to stay away, stay off, don’t tamper. Lives are at stake. In the post-9/11 world one dares not go near anything related to air traffic safety. I figured the fence was electrified or had some weird force field emanating from it. I steered way clear of the damned thing.

I tip-toed around the perimeter, looking at it out of the corner of my eye, the way my cats look at me when they think I’m a big mouse. I wanted to go up to it like the ape that approached the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Maybe there was enlightenment to be found. But, the white fence and Homeland Security were effective as deterrents. I continued my circuitous route. My trail guidebook stated that the best views from the hill were to be found on the trail that surrounds the antenna. So, I continued my walk—but couldn’t take my eye off the white silo. The antenna stared back in utter aloofness.

I felt like I’d been transported to an alien nation. If an alien actually landed right at this spot what would he think? I imagined a tiny Mars-lander kind of probe touching down on this hill, beaming back pictures to the mother ship. I suppose they’d think this thing were a sacred object, a place where mystic rituals celebrated the solstice.

I walked around and around. Then I got tired, bored, and sat down. I ate a bag of trail mix and walked down the hill. To the next adventure.

“Do you guys know how to get back on the Coastal Trail, going north?” I asked two hikers. I was getting desperate. I’d been hiking for about twelve miles on a hike that was supposed to be less than eight. I’d passed the stage of being curiously lost.

“Just follow that trail, and keep going north. You can’t fail,” one of the guys said with confident reassurance. Directions from a stranger are always soothing when one is lost—even if the directions make no sense at all. I followed a meager trail to the top of a steep hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The clear, brisk day revealed a drastic horizon that stretched forever but at that moment all I could see were my two feet and a trail that seemed suspiciously unofficial.

I screeched to a stop. The trail disappeared. Given the dubious nature of it, I was anticipating its demise, but I wasn’t expecting it to vanish at the precipice of an 800-foot drop. I looked down and gasped. There was nothing but a sudden and painful death before me. A tiny beach, crashing surf, and jagged rocks were awaiting my next step. I’d read about fools like me in the newspaper. Someone is always falling to their death in the Marin Headlands. Now I knew how easy it was.

After the adrenaline coursed its way through my body I took a breath. Then I started to talk to myself aloud—never a good sign. I went back down the puny trail and found another two hikers. They had a map and seemed a bit more sane than the two mountain-goat hikers who’d long disappeared over a ridge after they’d disseminated to me their sage wisdom.

“I’m looking for the Coastal Trail going north,” I whined. The woman with the map looked in earnest for a solution.

“Well…” she started. “There’s this tiny, little, dotted trail right here.” The pain was instant and clear. At a fork in the trail some miles back I’d gone the wrong way. Now I would have to backtrack about three miles and go up-and-down and up-and-down a couple thousand feet in elevation. I grumbled to myself and the two women that were helping me. At least their advice was backed by irrefutable evidence.

“You still have about six hours of light left,” the woman without the map snickered.

“Yup,” I responded with a forced smile, grateful for the map and the bitter pill of truth. I sighed and began my trek. Several hours later I was back at my truck, its old seats feeling like a La-Z-Boy recliner. I sighed with relief and satisfaction. I’d hiked fifteen miles instead of eight—a worthy accomplishment. And so that’s the way it is with forks in the trail. A fateful turn can lead one to bumpy adventures. Afterwards, with a bit of hindsight, one is grateful for the gained wisdom. A good story is worth a lot. The key is to appreciate the story while it is unfolding and not wait for perspective to remind us that life is good.

I just finished a new gallery on my web site entitled, Marin Shadows. The body of work has been emerging unconsciously, which I suppose means, I really can’t explain it. It is the result of the mystery of creativity. If one truly lets go and allows the creative process to do work, unexpected things emerge. I never planned to photograph dark, dreamlike images of Marin landscape in black & white. It just happened. And right after I proclaimed, on this very blog, that I’d had enough of it, I found more to say, more to do, more images in my database that wanted to be shown the light of day. And so, on it goes.

Living here, in Marin County, California, is a blessing. There is so much to see, so much to photograph, it is an embarrassment riches. The light changes daily, it teases me with its elusiveness and dances around me like a band of fairies. I feel surrounded by some strange enchantment. Sometimes it all lulls me into complacency. There is so much to see so close to home I sometimes figure I can always go out and photograph it tomorrow. That is never a good idea.

Knowing a place well can dull an artist and make him lazy. But it also allows him to constantly go deeper and to get beyond the superficial. The grand cliches are everywhere around here. Money shots. Photos that are screaming at you to be made. Getting to another, quieter, and more subtle place can be a challenge in a place that has golden gates and shining cities on a hill.

The Marin Headlands are the result of tectonic tensions—faults of building pressures that might, one day, take everything away from us and cause massive destruction. Maybe it is that tension that I feel as I hike and walk my way around the hills and rocks and beaches. There is something deeply mysterious and ancient that I’m just beginning to unearth. In the months ahead, as the days grow longer, I hope to discover more of the mystery that is found in the shadows of Marin.

Photography is a medium that lends itself to series. Theme and variation. One can create a visual fugue with a photo series, a knitting of space and time into a fabric of singular vision. I know of no other medium that invites an artist to explore series in such a natural way.

I have been presenting here, for about a week now, a series of images made during a hike at Pt. Reyes National Seashore. All images were photographed on one day, in one one mood, under the same overcast sky. They represent a journey within a slice of time and sentiment. If they were a dream they would have that odd, undefinable sense of being part of the same dream, though I’m not sure I even know exactly where one dream stops and another starts.

It is, actually, kind of like a of dream to work on any photographic series. My mind and spirit start seeing things through a particular kind of gauzy lens. Some elements are exaggerated, others blurred or eliminated. There is an allusion to reality but there is an undeniable alteration from what is sensed in real time. Series plays with a whim and extends it as far as it needs or wants to go.

Invariably, any series with which I am working loses energy and begins to fade. I can sense it whenever I start working on an image because I feel I ought to rather than want to do so. Obligation begins the sap the energy of the project and things become perfunctory. Then my attentions turn elsewhere.

Maybe it is the scent of spring in the air. Buds are bursting and my mood is changing from the darkness and brooding of winter into something more luminous and upbeat. So, today’s image is the last from the Pt. Reyes hike, at least for now. Elements of the series will inform other work. But this photo, of a stand of trees and their refection under heavy skies, is a minor finale to a small body of work.

I have rekindled my love affair with black & white. For awhile I’d been seduced by the juiciness of vibrating color. Push and pull. Chroma. Intensity. Color is a magic carpet that can transport our emotions to faraway places. It is a lifetime obsession in emotion, physics, mathematics, chemistry, and alchemy. Once smitten, color is impossible to shake off. Lately, however, it has given me a hangover.

The silky quiet of black & white has now recaptured me. It is impossible to know exactly how these shifts occur. One day, when working on some images, I simply decided I’d had enough, for awhile, of color. And black & white reappeared. I had an art teacher who once told me that it takes a lifetime to simplify. We reduce, reduce, reduce from our art until there is nothing left but the essential. Marcella Hazan, my great cooking teacher with whom I studied in Venice, once told me, “What you leave out is as important as what you put in.” And so it is true in cooking and in painting and in photography. For me, black & white is the ultimate reduction.

I think I’d reached sensory overload. The meditative tonality—as expressed in shades of gray—seemed like a tonic. I am now pre-visualizing my images in black & white. I am craving it.

As a lad, I got hooked on photography when I saw my first print emerge in the developer tray. Tones emerged from nowhere. Like a first kiss, it is impossible to forget your first print in a darkroom. It lays the groundwork for all else that follows. One may galavant around the world in technicolor, but will always come home to the subtle nuance of black & white.

Today’s print was found during my most recent hike to Pt. Reyes. Along the trail was this pastoral scene. I immediately saw it in shades of gray. Reflections have the quiet tonality that seems perfect for black & white. The dynamic range of the original scene made it difficult to realize my initial visualization. But, with today’s marvelous digital editing tools, I was able to coax out the tones I imagined. The darkroom may have been seductive but now my computer and I have a relationship that is impossible to surpass.

Every walk has moments of insight—fissures in the quotidian facade. One step, another step, a drone of steps. The crunch of earth under foot is like the shaman’s drum. The drum beats and magic swirls with the wind. Dreams give us clues. In dreams one lifts off the ground when walking. Walking becomes floating. Floating turns to soaring. Waking up after a soaring dream is ever a disappointment, as if being awake were actually the dream instead.

Back to our walk. On the trail, as we are rendered receptive, we start to truly see along the way. Each tree is a unique character in a forest tale, each bird an animated storyteller. Each and every thing becomes something unique and alive, yet all part of a sublime oneness. As we tire we yield ever more and that surrender brings a heady euphoria. Endorphins and oxygen. A walk might be as good as life gets.

With most every walk there are trees. Most trees are part of the giant gestalt, the hike’s backdrop—it is impossible to take in them all. Then, a startling and singular tree comes from nowhere. If you are lucky, it takes away your breath. It speaks to you, reminds you of some person in your life, or of a person who does not yet exist. If you have no schedule you might sit at the tree and sketch it. Or maybe talk to it. If you are a photographer, the tree is like the world’s most gorgeous fashion model. You circle it and photograph it from every angle. When it is time to move on, you and tree exchange something ineffable. Two living beings sharing an eternal moment.

I came across the tree in today’s photo during a hike at Pt. Reyes National Seashore. Among the thousands of trees I saw that day, it was this tree that spoke to me. I only had a brief moment with it. It was bent and gnarled. The imprint of the elements were built into its every twist. The tree’s bluff was exposed to the ubiquitous wind and fog of Pt. Reyes. The tree seemed yielding to these elements but unbroken. Bent but resolved. The tree is now a dream in my memory, forever moody and alive.