Cold Mountain and Fine Art

 

I still shiver from the cold when I look at this photograph.  The photograph itself is cold.  Perhaps I still remember with clarity my experience on the mountain that night.  I remember how my body witnessed the rapidly falling temperature that started below freezing as the sun set below the horizon and the wind whipping up the mountain side over forty miles per hour.  I remember the solitary grays and blues of the landscape as the earth traded the warm glow of the sun for the cold white light of the moon.  I sought refuge from the wind behind boulders of granite as I watched Mother Nature paint the sky for the final time that day.  Perhaps it is the power of the art that now conveys such an experience.

The earth provides us with an abundance of entertainment.  At any given moment in any given place, the ball of rock that we walk upon generates countless channels of quality programming.  I am not a connoisseur of television.  I spend a considerable amount of time “staring into space”, so to speak.  Much of this time I am simply enjoying the show.  My practice as a landscape photographer runs congruent with my spiritual practice.  Both lead me to the moment.  Sometimes that moment is pretty damn cold.

I do not shoot what I see.  I shoot what I feel.  I shoot what I perceive.  What ends up framed in white mat board and hanging on the wall above the sofa is not a capture of what I saw, it is not the result of a place in time, nor is it a documentary tale.  It is simply an experience, one that continues indefinitely.  Fine art is powerful because it moves us.  It makes us feel.  It reflects us, it makes us think, and it sometimes disturbs us or makes us feel uncomfortable.  When I venture to a location that I want to shoot, I generally have a pretty good idea about what I am after.  In most cases, I have been there before.  What I never know though is what I am going to feel.  I do not know anything exactly.  When I get there I sit.

Before I set up my camera gear, measure the light, look for a composition, or anything else photographic for that matter, I just sit.  I watch, I listen, I feel, I smell everything around me.  After some time the photograph begins to build, inside me.  It is the experience that is the powerful component.  While it can not be captured, it can be conveyed.  Just like a story, once learned, can be retold, it is the experience that I aim to convey when I press the shutter button.