TARGET PRACTICE

          "The best camera is the one you have with you."  - Chase Jarvis

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I chose a few fishing shots to launch this collection because fishing is such an apt metaphor for photography. Casting about in hopes of bringing a big trout home for dinner is a lot like trying to create a successful photographic image. By "successful" I mean a picture that seizes a moment from the flowing energy of life and brings it into alignment with the heart, mind and eye. If it happens to measure up to editorial grade standards, so much the better.

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Like landing a fish, creating a photograph that works requires the right relationship with the evanescent nature of reality. "The creative act lasts but a brief moment," said the great French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, "just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box . . . The picture is good or not from the moment it was caught in the camera." 

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The camera as gun is another "loaded" metaphor (pun intended). The word "snapshot" is a case in point, a term derived from hunting and applied to the quest to capture moments in time with a camera. Street photographers, like hunters, quickly realize that there are no guarantees and that the best bet is to let go of the delusion of control and go with the flow . . . 

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"The substance of painting is light," remarked the French expressionist painter Andre Derain. And photographer Alfred Stieglitz famously said, "Where ever there is light, one can photograph." One of my favorite contemporary photographers, Maine-based, seafaring photojournalist Peter Ralston (ralstongallery.com), states the case more emphatically. "The light, the light," he writes, "it's always about the light." 

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But when it comes to photographic metaphors, I always think of Minoslov Tichy's comment, "Photography is painting with light." Both painting and photography, after all, are about making pictures in the context of light energy, one of the indispensable raw ingredients of life itself. "Light is what makes things visible to the eye," Wynn bullock wrote in his beautiful monograph of Big Sur photographs. "It is also what holds a rock together. My thinking has been deeply affected by the belief that all things are some form of radiant energy. Light is perhaps the most profound truth in the universe." 

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