April 13, 2025

“There exists in the seeing of nature, in any seeing, a delicate balance between the chaos of ignorance with its gift of freshness, and the order of knowledge, with its curse of restricted vision. All attempts to understand seeing involve, to some extent, the discussion of order and chaos, with their associated gifts and evils.”

Steven Meyers, On Seeing Nature

I can’t tell you how many times I have gone out to photograph with a sense of excitement accompanied by a sense of fear. Not a fear of the elements or environment but more a fear of seeing. A fear that it has all been done before and probably better, and what can I do to see things differently, illustrating my way or perhaps my style of seeing and ultimately printing.

What the world doesn't need is more of the same landscape photographs we have had for over a hundred and sixty years. But how can a photographer go to a familiar or famous location and create something new, something to inspire a fresh vision? The natural tendency for me is to start to repeat what I have had success with before, with the result that things start to look the same.

Lately I have tried to spend more time with a scene, to take more time to sense what it is that actually told me that something here has triggered a response. I try to take the time to follow those feelings and respond in a sensitive way, to enjoy the sense of freshness of my discovery in a unique, individual style that I have invested time, emotion, and thought into. It might look like a tree or a rock, but it is my tree or my rock, seen only as I saw it at that moment using my internal vision. Sometimes it can be a matter of excluding unrelated information from a scene, or including information about the sense of place and light.

It is the exquisite tension of being in a place physically and experiencing the beauty and the sublime, independent of intellectual understanding to a large extent. Photography lies in the gift of immediate perception, of feeling and not of intellectualizing it. That will come later when we engage with a viewer.