It’s almost the end of the semester and I’m finding myself at the digital printing lab trying to finish up my project. There’s another student with me, so at least I’m not lonely, but the stretch between these prints is rather long as it’s taking 15-20 minutes to print a 12″ x 18″ photo at 300 dpi. What’s a boy to do?
I went ahead and fired up Flickr and started looking at some of my past images. I sat there wondering if I would take the same image now, at least 3 or 4 years later. It’s a hard question to ponder. I would have to answer the question of how much my vision has changed over the intervening years. Before that, I would need to ponder how I’ve been affected by what I’ve seen, heard, studied, researched, etc. What is relevant now vs then? Too many questions must be answered. Sometimes it’s easier to look at old work and just enjoy it.
The above image actually appeared in my Primordial Light blog from a few years ago. This was taken from atop the lighthouse at Montauk Point in Montauk, NY on Long Island in November 2008. When I looked out over the balcony of the lighthouse, I was thinking of Hiroshi Sugimoto and his seascape photos. Keep in mind that I had only seen those photos once prior to this point and I could not remember the name of the artist, so I went off memory the best I could at the time. I didn’t really notice the fisherman until I had started looking through the viewfinder to figure out how to best position the horizon. When I saw him down there, I immediately realized that he needed to be in the frame. I had to figure out how to resolve the composition in my mind, however, as the rule-of-thirds with the horizon and the fisherman wasn’t going to be possible from my vantage point.
I finally settled on setting the horizon at the top 1/3 line with the fisherman and rocks taking up a smaller proportion of the space in the frame. This, I felt, was a good symbol of how little land there is on Earth vs how vast its oceans are. The man fishing, to me, became the human spirit facing the challenge ahead and overcoming it in order to further his survival. Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
I will be revisiting some of these older photos again soon and thinking about my thought processes when they were made. This will definitely serve as a good exercise of where I come from in terms of photography and where I’m going. As for now, it’s time to start my next print.