Trees
"Rails" by Eric Rennie My photograph, "Rails," appears in a juried competition called "Trees" that opens April 30, 2022 at the A. Smith Gallery in Johnson City, TX near Austin. The juror was photographer Kevin Tully, co-director of the gallery. The e-mail announcing the results noted that my image was one of 55 acceptances out of 1,093 submitted. No doubt this was intended to make me feel part of a select group. But it merely drove home to me just how hard it is to get one's work accepted in any show. I have suffered rejection often enough to know there are thousands of excellent fine-arts photographers out there producing first-rate work. The exhibition runs until June 9.
To Take a Picture
Alex with Camera On a visit when she was 10, my granddaughter Alex borrowed one of my old cameras and began taking pictures of everything in sight. She wasn’t the least bit intimidated by all the dials and buttons on a high-end SLR camera. I set it on automatic, and she just banged away. Nothing seemed to escape her notice, including the overhanging tree branches seen by looking straight up through the skylight in our living room. They were duly captured in a photograph. Since the camera was digital, I had no qualms about letting her shoot to her heart’s content, because there was no expensive film to process. Traces
"Cotton Hollow" be Eric Rennie My photograph, "Cotton Hollow," is one of 35 images accepted into a juried competition at the Photoplace Gallery in Middlebury, VT. Its subject is an abandoned 19th-century cotton mill still standing along a creek in Glastonbury, CT. The exhibition, entitled "Traces," runs from February 3 to February 26, 2022. The show is curated by Jeff Curto, a photographer and emeritus photography professor. The Light of the World
"Sunrise in Fog" (2016) by Eric Rennie The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. ― Marcel Proust If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite… —William Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”
As a landscape photographer, I mostly work with natural light, which varies dramatically according to weather conditions, season and time of day. Early on, I realized that if I was going to shoot outdoors, I needed to get up early. The quality of the light soon after sunrise (and at dusk) is particularly conducive to outdoor photography. The sun is lower to the horizon, and its light travels farther in the atmosphere, emphasizing warmer tones on the color spectrum, reds and yellows, while blues are more diffused. The result is softer light and a golden glow that flatters everything it falls upon. Also, photographers are able to shoot directly into the sun, which at any other time of day would result in a blown-out image. We can thank the Impressionists for the insight that they were rendering light first and only secondarily the objects that light illuminates. Once they began painting en plein air, they realized just how changeable lighting conditions could be outside the studio. With his Haystacks series in the late 1880s, Claude Monet began painting the same subject matter under varying lighting and weather conditions, often working on multiple canvasses in succession at different times of day as the sun moved across the sky. For his series depicting the cathedral at Rouen, he set up his canvases side-by-side in rented space by the front window of a lingerie shop across the street. He worked from dawn to dusk over two years (1892 and 1893) on ten paintings in succession as sun and shadow played across its pale stone façade in brilliant yellows, reds, oranges and blues. He thereby demonstrated how transformative it can be to depict the same scene in a different light. Light has long been a metaphor for spiritual transformation. Moses saw a light, a bush that burned but was not consumed. He turned aside to see, and his life took a radically different turn. St. Paul was blinded by a light from heaven as he traveled to Damascus, and he quickly joined forces with those he had been persecuting. Jesus Christ wasthe light, according to various gospel accounts, telling his disciples, “I am the light of the world.” This was not just a metaphor. At one point, Jesus and three of his disciples ascended a tall mountain where "he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light." This episode became known as the Transfiguration. Numinous experiences are often described as “otherworldly.” But as Jesus made clear when he proclaimed the coming of God’s kingdom, he wasn’t talking about another world; he meant this one, the world as God created it. When Jesus said, “I came into this world that those who do not see may see,” he had more in mind than the recovering of sight to those who were born physically blind. From the moment he first wandered out of the wilderness to begin his ministry, his message was always the same: “Repent, he said, “for the kingdom of God is at hand.” By “repent,” Jesus meant something far more radical than merely renouncing sin. The literal meaning of “repent,” or metanoiain the original Greek of the New Testament, is a change of mind -- not simply to think different thoughts or to act differently but to see the world with new eyes. The change Jesus had in mind was so absolute that he likened it to being reborn. “Unless one is born anew,” Jesus told people, “he cannot see the kingdom of God.” The German theologian Rudolph Otto coined the term “numinous” to characterize such events, from the Latin numen, signifying a divine power. The Eastern Orthodox use the term “created light” to describe these transfigurations, in contrast to the natural light I work with as a landscape photographer. According to St. Gregory Palamas, a 14th-century Greek monk and theologian, uncreated light exists in the eye of the beholder. He wrote, “Take note that eyes with natural vision are blind to that light,” he said. “It is invisible, and those who behold it do so not simply with their bodily eyes, but with eyes transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit.” If the kingdom has come, as Jesus said, why don’t we see it? The short answer is that we are looking in all the wrong places. We assume that finding God’s kingdom requires a change of scenery, either in this world or in the next. The last place we would ever look is right here, which is the only place we will ever find it. "The man who is often thinking that it is better to be somewhere else than where he is excommunicates himself," Thoreau declared. We can take “excommunicate” in this case to mean separating oneself from God’s presence. In the end, we don’t need a change of scenery; we just need to view the same scene in a different light. Alchemy
"Monolith, The Face of Half Dome" by Ansel Adams Ansel Adams first photographed the massive Half Dome rock formation at Yosemite National Park at age 14, using a Kodak Brownie camera that his parents had given him for the trip from his home in San Francisco. Having owned a later model of the same simple box camera when I was a boy, I can only imagine Adams’ disappointment when he got the prints back. There was just no way that snapshots taken with a kids’ camera could capture the magnificence of the Half Dome. Adams returned to photograph the same landmark several times as a young man before taking the picture that would establish his reputation as a major artist. In the spring of 1927 he arrived with a 40-lb. backpack holding a 6 ½ x 8 /12 Korona view camera, several lenses and filters, and a dozen glass-plate negatives, with a heavy wooden tripod strapped to his backpack. He and some friends trudged through heavy snow to a nearby overlook that would give him the best view of the Half Dome’s sheer western face, which rose more than half a mile from the valley floor. Adams was down to his last glass negative when he had the inspiration to use a red filter to darken the sky, causing the sunlit edge of the granite edifice to stand out even more. This was the first time Adams had used a technique he called “visualization” to photograph a subject — not as it presented itself in its natural state but as he saw it in his mind’s eye. "I saw the photograph as a brooding form, with deep shadows and a distant sharp white peak against a dark sky,” he later recounted. The resulting image, “Monolith, The Face of Half Dome,” was offered for sale later that year in a portfolio of original prints called “Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras.” The publisher advised that the word “photograph” not be used in the title, believing there was no market for fine-arts photographs. At the time, soft-focus pictorialism still held sway among serious photographers, in which painterly techniques were used in a misguided effort to gain legitimacy as an artistic medium. Adams went entirely in the other direction, embracing the sharpness and immediacy of photographic imagery to lay claim to its place as a unique art form. From the beginning, photography had been regarded as a technical marvel but never much more than that. The camera, after all, was a mechanical device, and photographers were primarily seen as craftsmen with a certain mechanical aptitude. The Parisian street photographer Brassaï, who had started out as a painter, shared this prejudice until he began to see photography’s artistic possibilities. He later summarized his approach to the medium this way: "I invent nothing, I imagine everything.” The seeming contradiction of his statement is resolved when you realize he was essentially doing the same thing Adams was. As Adams expressed it, “The ability to anticipate—to see in the mind’s eye, so to speak—the final print while viewing the subject makes it possible to apply the numerous controls of the craft in precise ways that contribute to achieving the desired result.” A camera may be a mechanical device, but the photograph does not take itself. The photographer determines where to point the camera and the precise moment to press the shutter. He or she must be mindful of composition, framing, focus and exposure. During post-production, more factors are taken into account, including cropping, white balance, contrast and color saturation. As Adams explained it, ”The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance." To a photographer, the image that appears in the viewfinder of his camera is merely the canvas on which his imagination and technical skill are applied. "When true imagination is at work, the same power is operating in man as operated, in the Beginning, in the creation of the world,” the philosopher Owen Barfield once wrote. Rabbi Moses ben Naḥman, a medieval Spanish scholar, noted that the root of the Hebrew word “likeness” in the Genesis creation story was dimyon, meaning “imagination.” The creature God created in his own image and likeness was given dominion over the other creatures, including the right to name them. In effect, according to Jewish belief, this gave humankind the power to define their essence. As William Blake expressed it, “Man is a little God, his imagination acting upon nature in the same way that, in the beginning, the spirit of God gave form to the void.” Think of a photographer as a kind of alchemist, who instead of transmuting base metals into gold transmutes objects in the world into images made of light. This can be seen most readily in the darkroom, when the image appears as if by magic on a blank sheet of photo paper bathed in a chemical solution. For those of us working digitally, the transmutation takes place inside a computer, but the result is no less magical. You don’t have to wave a wand to make manifest what exists in the mind’s eye; you just have to click the shutter. |
