Make It New

For this, my first blog post, I’m sharing a bit of serendipity and paying homage to a couple of photographers I’ve admired for some time.

I made this image at St. Bees, England, looking west over the Irish Sea. I decided to feature this photo last week, but I wasn’t sure what to say about it other than the tedious camera and lens specs, aperture, ISO, and shutter speed. I wanted to acknowledge where in me the image came from, and so I decided to pay homage to the great photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose long exposure studies of sand, sea, and sky have inspired me ever since I saw the short documentary, “Between Sea and Sky”. I know this was in my head and heart when I stood above the sea, mounted camera to tripod, and waited for the right moment. I wanted to capture the texture of the water and the rain curtaining from the dark clouds, so this exposure is around 20 seconds. I’ve tried the same thing at other sites, but I like this the best; stillness, silence, movement, stippled water, all the different clouds, even the graininess.

The serendipity is this. Last week, my friend Luigi suggested I follow Peter Fetterman’s weekly blog, and so I’ve been getting regular emails in which Fetterman reflects on a photographer’s work. Yesterday, he featured Michael Kenna, and who did Kenna acknowledge as his inspiration for a long exposure seascape? Sugimoto!

They say everything’s been photographed, and we store in our subconscious every photo we’ve seen, so we struggle to follow Ezra Pound’s advice —- “Make it new” —- all the while honoring our forebears.

I’ll highlight a different photo each week, generally one not included in the Galleries. If you’re interested, the blog’s title, “Salt & Taxes,” comes from a Donald Hall poem, “Ox-cart Man.”