Stand of Trees, Pt. Reyes | Mark Lindsay
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.