Looking a Little Longer

On learning to see what is already there

Quiet Horizon, Sandhills of Nebraska

I used to think the landscape itself was the subject. Over time I came to understand that the landscape was only where the photograph began.

What interested me was not really the place by itself. It was that moment when something in the place began to hold me there.

That changed the way I worked.

I try not to decide what the photograph is before I have spent some time with the place. Usually I look first. I walk around. I stand still. Sometimes nothing happens. C'est la vie. Other times something begins to separate itself from everything else. And that is when the magic begins.

It may be the way the light falls across a surface, a line I had not noticed at first, or two things that suddenly seem to belong together. I may have walked past it ten minutes earlier without seeing it at all.

The question becomes less What should I photograph here?

and more:

What am I responding to? What is it that I'm seeing?

I don't think there is anything mysterious about that. It is mostly a matter of staying long enough to notice.

In the beginning, a beautiful description seemed like enough. At a recent Phoenix Art Museum tour, curator Emilia Mickevicius used the phrase the ecstasy of beauty. It stayed with me. Sometimes that ecstasy is enough. But it is too easy to be seduced by beauty alone.

I began to want something more from the photograph, something that carried not only what the place looked like, but what it felt like to stand there.

That difference matters to me.

I'm not particularly interested in someone looking at one of my photographs and saying, "What a beautiful place."

I would rather they stop for a moment.

Look a little longer.

Maybe wonder why I stopped there.

And perhaps feel some part of what made me raise the camera in the first place.

That is what I hope for from the photographs, and from these essays as well. Not an explanation of the landscape, but a reason to pay attention to it.