Three Things Thursday: Photography

I am a mediocre photographer, but I enjoy photography, and this fall and winter, I’m going to work on a few small photography projects. Ideally, the outcome of these projects is sufficient to create a small ‘zine on the various topics. I have no idea whether this will actually happen, but I’ve now thought about it enough to make it a three thing Thursday.

Part of these projects is to try to use none written media to inform how I write and think. I’ve never been much of an “artist” and lack a kind of basic sense of form, movement, or proportion. This characterizes my writing as well as almost every aspect of my life. That feels like something that deserves a bit of attention as I continue to try to recreate myself as I enter my fifth decade. 

So here are three little projects that I plan to use to engage a different part of my brain:

Thing the First

The first project will focus on our local flood wall and greenway along the Red River. As readers of this blog know, I’ve been fascinated by the Grand Forks Greenway for the last several years. Increasingly, I’ve come to appreciate its status as a permeable border zone between the built up areas of the town and the unpredictability of the river. It also marks an area where wildlife and riverine plants intermingle with the residues introduced when the city’s neighborhoods came down to the banks of the river. The remnants of the various neighborhoods, roads, and buildings are still visible in the depressions and slopes of the park. These very subtle features are incredibly hard to capture in photographs and that, for me, is the technical challenge of this project.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been fascinated by the work of a group of photographers known as the New Topographics. These photographers combined interwar traditions of of highly detailed, texturally nuanced landscape photography (particularly of photographers like Ansel Adams and members of the Group f/64) with views of landscapes profoundly shaped by modern development. Warehouses, suburbs, trailer parks, coal mines, and power plants stand against vast backdrops of mountains, plains, and the horizon.

The Greenway offers the ideal backdrop for the kind of rumination undertaken by the New Topographics and their contemporary heirs. The absence of humans, the monumental scale and the incredible detail (plus the sensitivity to light and texture) is something that deeply appeals to me and is likely with my technical grasp at this stage of my learning. (It also feeds into some of my research.)

Thing the Second

My second project is one for the winter. I want to practice still-life photography centered around assemblages of objects in my home. I want to take the photographs using a fairly high ISO setting and using natural light. The winter light in our house has a kind of ethereal and pale cast that I think makes the little clusters of objects that collect around our house feel almost otherworldly. This makes their circumstances feel not so much deliberate but somehow archaeological in character.

In particular, I want to document my office where things tend to accumulate, but where the light is also particularly difficult. To help this project, I’m going to use a tripod and try to get scenes where there light enables me to pull out the kind of contrast necessary to define objects precisely (even with relatively high ISO). If I can pull it off in the office, I want to gradually expand the project to other rooms in the house and experiment with creating an obvious feeling of difference in the rooms (based on light as much as anything) and creating a sense of monumentality for even small assemblages. Without being cliche (actually, I wouldn’t mind if my photos were cliche provided that they are technically good), I want to try for a kind of cinematic vibe.

Thing the Third

I have purchased three rolls of Kodak Tri-X 400 film, but right now I’m too terrified to use it. I want to take these rolls of film with the hope of producing a series of photographs that documents my reengagement with film. 

For now, I’m taking a roll of Kodak Max 200 which is probably 25 years old. I have no idea what it’ll look like, but I’m keen to see what comes out and whether I get anything right with it.