Conversations with painting
Dark trees and light, Rio Hondo valley
I have joked that some of my photographs are rip-offs of modernist paintings (see Tow Away Zone) but they are not. Photography has been in conversation with painting since its invention; the two art forms riff off each other rather than rip off. In this case, modernist painting – abstract expressionism and minimalism in particular – have cleared the path that allows the image to be observed in the field and presented here.
But, while this photograph may have the appearance of being like a modernist painting, it is not a modernist image. This is not art talking about art, this is not art enshrining the platonic ideal of ‘flatness’, this is not art circling the void of absent meaning; this is of and about the presence of light and color in the trees of a mountain valley. This was made not with brush strokes from the imagination or intellect but with sunlight blocked by, and reflected from, trees.
There are places that affect your spirit for which a straight photograph cannot do justice; the road side stream and trees in this New Mexico valley is one of those places. The camera has been moved such that the light fell on the silicon to capture the way it fell on the mind.
