Barre, Vermont
Still another two pictures from the municipal parking lot behind the stores on the northeast side of Main Street. This is something that happens now and then, a cluster of photographs that seem to work, all made in a short space of time in a restricted area. In fact I spend a great deal of time looking for interesting situations, without hitting a lot of pay dirt. Then suddenly a particular time and place seems to offer something no matter where you look. It's not limited to digital capture, either. A lot of my large format negatives come in clusters from a specific time and place. I might have stopped, looked, and not set up the camera at dozens of potentially interesting spots, only to find that when a place does call for the Deardorff or the Korona or the Folmer & Schwing, there often will turn out to be more than one picture to make.
Barre, Vermont
5 comments:
This happens to me quite often. I always think it has more to do with me and my willingness to see than with the particular place.
Carl, this is a phenomenon that I also experienced several times, but I thought the reason to be more inside myself, just the spirit sometimes being in a receiving mood and sometimes not.
Martina, Markus:
It's my blog so you can't outvote me ;-)
I agree that this *can* happen because one is "in the mood" rather than because of the subject/location, but I think the externals are real. Maybe you noticed something because of the extraordinary light at the moment, and that light is there for the rest of your surroundings. Or you've just found a spot that is rich with the urban subject matter of exactly the type to which you respond, so it's no surprise that there is more than one picture to be framed in that environment. I won't go on with more examples, I just got in from teaching a two-day workshop and want to wind down from didactic mode...
Ha, good to read Martina's comment, which was not yet visible when I wrote mine!
"subject matter of exactly the type to which you respond" probably is the key, and confirming both positions. Sometimes a fruitless search for a situation that speaks to me leaves me cramped, with the result that I will not respond to a different situation that just offers itself. But then this is just human and nothing wrong with it, and, it's much nicer to have a concept of what you want to find, to frame, to transport and then being able to resonate with the current circumstances.
Markus, I know photographers who work in single-minded pursuit of a specific subject, but I've never worked that way. The rather large "White Churches" project came about without my ever once seeking out the subject matter. My ongoing American Drive-in Theater project is the result of much prior research and then much physical searching out in the field. But the White Churches were all stumbled upon serendipitously—mostly while on expeditions searching out the drive-ins. Out hunting drive-ins, it would never occur to me *not* to stop and photograph something else that caught my eye.
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