The name of the site is inspired by Chinese landscape painting, in which scholars are often shown walking along streams, over mountains, and through villages. Many of the photographs were taken while I was doing just that, and I often see affinities in the landscape with Chinese and Japanese painting and gardens. Since I have never been to China or Japan, my knowledge comes largely from antique paintings or photographs of traditional gardens.
The subjects of the photographs range from artworks (African sculpture), to artworks in the landscape (ceramics), to the landscape itself. They reflect my personal interests in photography as well as the view that looking at landscape is fundamentally the same as looking at art. And these photographs are more about looking than creating material art objects.. That is one reason why presenting an image on a monitor is appropriate--there is no material presence.
Many esthetic principles derive from the landscape and have entered into the art world through Oriental and European landscape painting. Familiarity with art and art history in turn informs the way we see landscape. The Cornish photographs are in part a contemporary response to the British topographical oils and watercolors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The black-and-white images extend the more introspective symbolist attitude, which Alfred Stieglitz introduced into photography at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
A living tradition acknowledges its historical origins and also incorporates newer approaches. A clear break with the past is not necessary. If art is to speak to the contemporary human condition, it can speak both to the aspects which change rapidly and those which change more slowly. I suspect that one's feelings in the presence of nature, judging from eleventh century Chinese ink paintings, change somewhat slowly.
The photographs on this site were either taken with a digital camera or scanned from black-and-white negatives. The scans do not attempt to emulate darkroom printing on photographic paper. Rather, they respond to the possibilities of the computer monitor and inkjet printing. The digitization takes on a life of its own.
Using several formats allows for a flexible vision and a range of interpretations. The color digital images portray the subject as it looks to the eye, or at least an approximation, allowing for the capabilities of the medium and subtle poetic license. The black-and-white pinhole and negative images enter a more interior realm. Only the colors and tonalities of the images have been adjusted, not the content itself. That remains as the camera recorded it.
Formats
All color images (Cornwall; Ibeji; Cedar River, Winter):
Olympus C5050 digital camera.
Fire in the Shoadows:
Nikon F3 35 mm camera. Negative images scanned from black-and-white film.
Cedar River, Summer:
Zero Image pinhole camera. Positive images scanned from 120 black-and-white film.
Oak Grove:
4x5 film using a 4x5 back on Deardorf 8x10 camera. Negative images scanned from black-and-white film.