the heel press

"There are no pictures when I reload"  Gary Winogrand

Another shot from my recent trip through the Southwest.  This was taken inside Valley of Fire state park in Nevada.  Our route took us from Palm Springs, California to Las Vegas, Nevada to Page, Arizona, to the Grand Canyon and back again to Palm Springs.  Shortly before leaving for California I realized I wanted to swing through Valley of Fire as I had seen some spectacular shots here on Flickr (what an amazing tool Flickr is by the way for planning trips).

Turns out Valley of Fire was on our way from Las Vegas to Page, so it was an easy side trip to fit in.  And an impressive one at that.  As Wendi described in her post, you drive through impressively unremarkable flat desert for miles and miles and then suddenly you find yourself in what looks like the remnants of a movie set from some Martian sci-fi flick.  

To jump track briefly, I thought the quote from Gary Winogrand strangely appropriate for this shot.  For those unfamiliar with who may be the most prolific photographer in history, Gary Winogrand shot dozens of rolls of film a day.  He would shoot a roll in the time it took him to walk one New York city block, all the while lecturing on not to shoot from the hip, to always use the viewfinder lest you lose control of your photography.  One of his students famously asked him during a workshop, while Gary was crouched on the sidewalk quickly reloading his Leica if he ever regretted the photos he missed when he had to stop to reload.  The quote above is his famous reply, and an interesting one.

When I first heard it years ago, I thought it a bit foolish.  There are ALWAYS photos to be taken, even when one reloads.  In fact, it seems that in those moments you don't have a camera ready, that the most photos seem to pop up.  But over the years I have come to appreciate a subtle nuance to this truth.  Sure there are visions and scenes to see, but photographs rely on a ready camera and photographer, otherwise they are just passing light, nothing less or more.  It is that man, or woman, standing there seeing what there is to see and having that amazing mechanical device we call a camera ready, that allows a photograph to be created.  For Gary, he probably saw lots of things while he was reloading, or maybe he chose not to, but they weren't photographs.  Some of them could have been certainly, but without film in that camera and him in that right spot...

And this is what this shot boils down to.  As we drove out on this road on my date with minor photographic destiny (to take this photo) I saw a couple of other spots that I was tempted to stop.  I could see the light coming up and knew before long it would be too high and too harsh.  And almost stop I did.  One color cliff face in particular I thought would make a splendid pinhole shot with its wide field of view.  But I did not stop, I kept driving.  And by doing so I arrived in this spot to take this photo.  By the time we headed back, the light was too high and too harsh and that opportunity for a photograph I had seen earlier was beyond my grasp.  But then again, had I stopped, would this photo have existed much longer?  Long enough that I might still have happened along to take it?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  

See a photograph is not simply a beautiful scene.  It is not simply light across a landscape.  It is not a sublime moment between two individuals caught on a street corner.  A photograph is a magical concoction that is part scene, part intuition, part imagination, and part perception.  Note that three of those four parts are human ingredients, notably the human with the camera.  

So maybe Gary's answer contains a great deal of wisdom.  Maybe there ARE no photos when we reload, because how can their be a photo with no one to take it?  

And maybe I may have stopped and gotten something spectacular along those red cliffs when I first saw them and missed this shot in the process.  But I didn't.  For me this shot existed, and does.  The other is memory and imagination.