Inspiration

Toby approves.

Several months ago I bought a used copy of Eliot Porter’s Intimate Landscapes on the recommendation of a photography blogger. The photographs are beautiful, and they made me think about the landscape photos I’ve been making. I have been to some beautiful places with grand, sweeping vistas that beg to be photographed —- the kinds of images that Ansel Adams would have made. I like those as much as the next person, but Porter’s close-cropped nature images are closer to how I see the world. And so I’ve set about capturing my own “intimate landscapes.”

This is White Sands from September of this year, one of the first times shooting with my Leica Q2. I wanted it to be clearly White Sands, but I also wanted to get close to the delicate grasses that miraculously sprout from silica and sun. You still get the glory of the dunes and its blue sky, but in this image the star is the grass that says, “I survive. Will you?”

On a November trip to Tucson to celebrate Thanksgiving, I took some time to explore the sky island of Mount Lemmon, and I didn’t have to go too far to find a deep and dry arroyo that ran alongside the road. Here a vertical wall of granite with quartz veins and willow leaves in its cracks creates an abstract and almost aboriginal pattern. I didn’t think it needed any context other than what you see here.

This grand old tree has withstood its share of flash floods and droughts. You’ll have to believe me when I tell you it has a broad and asymmetrical canopy. I just didn’t think that mattered. I loved the way the yellow leaves and black branches frame the tree’s trunk. Some leaves even dribble out of its gaping mouth.

I keep hearing Eliot Porter insist, “Get low and get closer.” Here water from a recent rainstorm sticks around to reflect the blue sky. Pawprints lead up to and into the puddle; the sand leaves them anonymous.

I’m working with my intimate landscapes photos to make a proper book. Many of them (I’ve selected 24 so far) are recent and with my new camera. Others are from as long as 12 years ago, shot with Canon, Sony, and Fujifilm cameras. Still others remain to be captured. I realize that the best of them are meditative and focus away from the grand and even distracting scene. They invite the viewer to look up and down, above and below, look ahead and behind, within and beyond, because the more and varied our looking, the closer we’ll come to seeing.