Can Photographs Make the Ordinary Interesting?

About a week ago, I posted a gallery of pelican photos on my Web site. A few were white pelicans, which are inarguably beautiful. A few more were of adult brown pelicans, which have lovely heads of white and ochre, and grizzled edges to their primary feathers. But the majority were of immature brown pelicans, whose coloring is brown all over and pretty drab.

A couple days later, a friend commented on the Pelicans gallery: “This is a bird that I never considered attractive and only photographed if nothing else was around, usually sitting atop pilings at the marina .... But you have changed my thinking by capturing the beauty of their coloring, especially with wings spread and glinting under the sun. I will look twice the next time I see one.”

This was the highest compliment I could ask for. My first objective as a photographer is to get people to see things differently.  The real challenge is to show you a new way to see something familiar, uninteresting or even ugly. 

Some of my favorite photos over the past couple of years are birds that most people, and most photographers, don’t look twice at.  Take, for example, this crow.

 

Crows are probably the most common bird we see, with a raucous cry (can’t really call it a song) and apparently uniform colorlessness.

But one afternoon as I came back from shooting shore birds on a sandbar in Port Royal Sound, this bird perched on a branch and watched me pass.  The lowering sun caused her feathers to shine, and you can even see a subtle purple on the wings. 

If that catches your attention, are you willing to look more closely at this bird, maybe read up on it and learn that crows may be among the most intelligent and socially organized of all birds? I hope so.

Another example is the vulture. Again, a very common bird, carrion eater, nasty looking curved beak, wrinkled featherless head. To many people they are ugly.  But when I saw this black vulture resting atop a power line pole in South Carolina's ACE Basin, I saw and tried to capture the bird's dignity and even sense of purpose (who else cleans up after us, after all; think about roadkill).

One of the most strikingly "ugly" creatures I've photographed was this snapping turtle, which was making its way beside the dirt road in Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge in Delaware one day last spring. I learned later that snappers often travel some distance over land to find sandy soil in which to deposit their eggs. 

There is something primitively sinister about this animal, but I find myself drawn to the eyes, wide, dark and aqueous.  I do not see a threat there, but rather a certain amount of awareness, curiosity and fear. Your mileage may vary. In fact, contrary to common wisdom, snappers normally flee when they encounter humans out of the water. This one just sat patiently while I photographed it, then continued its search for a nesting place.

Although the renowned photographer Edouard Steichen once said that “Photography is a lie from start to finish,” I don’t for a minute believe that these photographs misrepresent the subjects in any way. My goal is to represent my subjects so faithfully that the viewer immediately recognizes and at once is startled by what she sees.  In at least one case, it appears I may have succeeded. 

The next step, which will be the topic of a future blog post, is for the viewer to realize, at least unconsciously, that the moment of recognition is the same experience she has when looking into a mirror. 

Camera Therapy

Camera Therapy is an essential part of my health routine.

I first became aware of the therapeutic effects of photography when I was traveling the West along the route of the Lewis and Clark expedition. I had drafted a novel about the expedition and was revising it as I drove back roads along the Missouri and Columbia Rivers, trying to see at least some of the landscape as the explorers had seen it. I was also taking a lot of photos.

Photography was an important but rarely indulged hobby at the time. It was the stage of my career when I was working at unpleasant and non-photographic jobs to save enough money to retire and do what I'm doing now, traveling and photographing the world I see. I had taken a leave of absence to work on the Lewis and Clark novel.

One afternoon I was walking through a campground in a meadow near Helena, Montana. Wind howled across the treeless landscape and the sun played dodge 'em with fluffy clouds, alternately lighting and shading the craggy mountaintops surrounding me. A pair of mule deer grazed at the edge of the meadow.

I was carrying my camera and trying to capture the scenery, and not doing a very good job of it, but I was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of perfect bliss. For the first time in a long time, I felt complete, like I was who I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to do, where I was supposed to do it.

At the time, I attributed this to the whole experience I was engaged in, traveling, writing, exploring new things, learning and absorbing all of this experience into my core existence. Photography was just part of it. The last time I had felt that way was when I was hiking the Appalachian Trail with my camera in 1982.

It didn't occur to me until later that the camera was the reason for that bliss. When I began to approach retirement a few years ago and knew that I would soon have the opportunity to fulfill this long time photography dream, I began spending as much of my free time as I could out shooting or toiling away at the computer trying to perfect my images. It was a stressful time. Big changes were happening in my life -- divorce, kids leaving the nest, and the stress of continuing to work in a job that grew more boring and less fulfilling day by day.

And that's when I realized that the time I was putting in with the camera was more than just practice. The process of finding and photographing local birds and wildlife was exposing something else: me. The person who had to hide in someone else at work came out jubilantly when I picked up the camera and went walking. I was fully me again.

Then a few months ago, I discovered why it works like that, when I came across Carl Jung's explanation for the difference between the conscious and the unconscious minds. The conscious mind, he said, can be trained. The untrainable unconscious mind belongs to the collective unconscious, which Jung felt was the same in everyone. Much of Jungian psychology revolves around finding one's unconscious.

And there it was. My conscious mind deals with all the technical aspects of photography, which have always been easy for me for some reason. Camera controls, exposure, focal lengths, white balance, all those numbers things I get because I trained myself to get them.

The rest of it, from pre-visualizing the image to finally presenting it, come from the unconscious. Art works when it comes authentically from the unconscious. The receptive viewer sees a work of art not only consciously, but also unconsciously, and in that moment connects with the artist's unconscious and feels the collective unconscious.

At least that's how I think Jung would explain it.

I explain it this way: In order to make photographs, my conscious and subconscious minds have to get along. They have to communicate, collaborate and cooperate. There has to be harmony within the space between my ears and between the head and the heart.

And photography is one of the few activities where this happens. The rest of the time the conscious and unconscious are fighting like little children, and sometimes all you can do is put them in time out and shut the door. But when I can, I gather the cameras and the backpack and the tripod and head to the nearest refuge for fresh air and communion with true nature -- both the world's and my own.

That's camera therapy. Maybe I can get my health insurance to cover the cost of my next big lens.