Photos | A fairy tale, revisited

Today I came across a set of photos from the Spring of 2009 and decided to re-edit them. The photos are from a rainy day at the little "Maerchenparadies" (fairy tale paradise) for children on the mountain overlooking Heidelberg. Because of the rain the park was pretty much empty, and the rain also made my original edit of the photos contrasty and wet with the punchy colors you get on a rainy day.

Almost two years later my attitude toward these images has changed. I edited them to be more neutral, to stand off more, to be a little faded like photos from a long ago holiday. I went back to the originals, in some cases chose some wider angles, in a couple of cases picked an image I didn't pick originally.

A photographer's view of their own images can maybe never be objective (not that anyone else's is), but it does change over time. Re-editing the images is a little like re-visiting the place and, as a different person, taking slightly different photos. Back before 2009 I have photo sets that I don't think I could edit today at all, because the images are so different from what I would shoot if I were there today.

Photos | Elevations, revisited

In assembling a portfolio for FOTOQuest this week I took the opportunity to revisit last year's Elevations theme. In looking through my new images from 2010 I could see that this theme had had started to drive a lot of my shooting. Here's the artist statement for the new set:

An elevation is an architectural drawing of the outside of a building, illustrating the proportions of its facade. The drawing is an orthographic projection (onto imaginary ground glass) of a structure that does not yet exist. It is a representation of intent that orders the reality that will be constructed, but its idealized perspective will not be experienced in life.

In the reverse process, the camera flattens four dimensional experience to a two dimensional image that is true, yet unreal. By virtue of their unreality, their inability to get past the surface of things, photographs can demonstrate an order that is present but not apparent in life. In a further sense of the word “elevate”, the photograph can frame an ordinary scene as an illustration of symmetry, pattern, hierarchy, symbols, and other forms of order.

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