The Poetry of Images

I've been thinking about something and want to flesh it out here, not being sure what, if anything, it means. Before I get ahead of myself, let me give you some context. I picked up a book Film for Her by poet and photographer Orion Carloto.  Here is the opening paragraph to the book:

"When poetry is written beneath the folds of every word, images unravel. That never made much sense to me until I began discovering stories in my own photographs. Existing between comfort and desire, you don't realize how valuable a moment is until the years have passed and time slips in between your fingers. There's a special kind of pleasure that comes with appreciating the mundane--the highs and lows begin to feel useless compared to all the in-betweens. Funny how nostalgia shows up in different forms the older you get."

Where to begin?

I have had the extraordinary privilege and pleasure to travel all over the world making images. I have been fortunate and do not take it for granted. But Carloto's book has underscored something I've been wrestling with for some time. Assuming I remained a photographer, and assuming my life had been less peripatetic, I wonder what sort of images I would have collected over the years? I travel to take pictures and I take pictures in order to travel. But what if I was not a traveler? What then?

There's a special kind of pleasure that comes with appreciating the mundane, writes Carloto. The older I get the more this notion intrigues me. And--and this is a big and--the less travel interests me photographically. It is as if I have been challenged to make photographs without the prompt of "the new place." And, to further turn the screw, Carloto writes, "...you don't realize how valuable a moment is until the years have passed..."

After years, decades even, of consistent image making the hard-working photographer might have a archive that, in real time, adds up to only a minute or two. Think about it. A shutter released at 250th of a second, or 500th of a second, over and over again, collectively adds up to just a few minutes at best. The mundane, and the passage of time (in whatever form, the turning of the calendar pages or capturing a moment of time with the release of a shutter)--the mundane and the passage of time of intertwined in a profound way. As photographers we need to be aware of this. And if art is something we aspire to, then we need to embrace it and consider it our block of marble.

"By choosing a precise intersection between subject and time, [the photographer] may transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and the real into the surreal." ~ Constantine Manos

My personal challenge is to not wait until the years have passed to appreciate a moment. That is a hard practice and my goal is to further the effort by means of my photography practice. And that means taking stock of what we commonly refer to as the mundane. I embrace the notion that a photographer moving purposefully through his or her life, totally present (as if that were ever really possible) and open, might discover that the mundane is a myth, that the purposeful "intersection between subject and time" makes it so, if only we are prepared to notice.

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This summer I am self-assigning a project: explore the mundane, aspiring toward art, by documenting three months of life in the woods. 

Thanks for reading. You can find me at Doug Bruns Photography, or on Glass, where I'll be sharing my project.