Canyon Walls

Neon Canyon.  Grand Staircase - Escalante. 

(Click images to view larger--best viewed large)

There’s an appeal in the relentless march of entropy—objects in nature decay and fall into patterns that are random and beautiful.  To me, this is especially apparent in arid places, because with more water comes a tangle of plants that is too complicated for me to sort into compositions after 30+ years of squinting through a viewfinder at the arid West.  

Eliot Porter, who masterfully photographed desert landscapes and wetter places, said:

 “Much is missed if we have eyes only for the bright colors. Nature should be viewed without distinction… She makes no choice herself; everything that happens has equal significance. Nothing can be dispensed with. This is a common mistake that many people make: They think that half of nature can be destroyed — the uncomfortable half — while still retaining the acceptable and the pleasing side.” (Eliot Porter) 

I think that part of what he is saying is that patterns in nature are perfect because they are both random and inevitable (and stop screwing them up!). 

Over the years I've tried, and often failed, to capture the perfect random patterns in sandstone walls while wandering in Utah canyons.  My mind is on the desert this week as I prepare to head to the Grand Canyon on Friday for my spring canyoneering trip, so I’m resurrecting my woefully inactive blog with images of canyon walls.

Natural Bridges National Monument.

The Golden Cathedral.  Neon Canyon.  Grand Staircase - Escalante.

Harris Wash.  Grand Staircase - Escalante.

West Fork Big Spring Canyon.  High Roost.

High Spur Canyon.  High Roost.

Hurricane Wash.  Grand Staircase - Escalante.

Coyote Gulch.  Grand Staircase - Escalante.

Coyote Gulch.

Coyote Gulch.

Silver Falls Creek.  Grand Staircase - Escalante.

Harris Wash.

Echo Canyon.  Zion National Park.

Echo Canyon.

Echo Canyon.

Pine Creek.  Zion National Park.

The Golden Cathedral -- Ceiling.

Along Escalante River near Choprock Canyon.  Grand Staircase - Escalante.

Kane Gulch.  Cedar Mesa.

Peek-a-boo Canyon. Grand Staircase - Escalante.

Neon Canyon.

Willow Gulch.  Grand Staircase - Escalante.

Willow Gulch.

Paint

Caboose, Laramie

(Click any image to view larger version)

Paint weathers in surprising ways and, like many photographers, I find myself occasionally getting caught up in the world of micro-patterns.  This is not a unique impulse--a quick look at flickr will reveal many photos of paint abstracts--but it can still be fun sometimes.  And there's no particular need for fantastic light, you don't have to get up at 5 a.m., and once you find a good spot, you don't even have to move very far.  The photos here are a few of my favorite abstracts.

Train paint, Laramie.

Train paint, Laramie (currently in the UW Art Museum traveling exhibit)

Train paint, Laramie

Xishuangbanna, China

Bitter Creek, Wyoming

Shibaoshan, Yunnan, China

Shibaoshan, Yunnan, China (I was told later that the poster warns of the dangers of STDs)

Oaxaca, Mexico

Oaxaca, Mexico

Oaxaca, Mexico.  Sometimes the work of street artists becomes abstract.

And one of my favorites--not abstract but with a lot of potential to get that way.

More Laramie Refinery

Building ruin at the Midwest Refinery in Laramie, 2012
(Click photos to make larger)

I continue to obsess about photographing the refinery ruin on Laramie's West Side.  The site, which I blogged about a few weeks ago, is destined for cleanup beginning next summer, and I want to spend some time there before it becomes a reclaimed field.  I've also poked around on the net trying to find out more about it.  As it turns out, it was only used as an oil refinery from about 1920-1932.  After that it was used for other things (yttrium?).  The UW Heritage Center has some photos in its collection of the site and of people that worked there (I'll post one below) from the Ludwig-Svenson collection.  

From a photography standpoint, the site has great potential that I haven't figured out how to realize.  I plan to make regular visits to see what evolves.  Sometimes getting one good photo of a place requires going there 10 times to experiment, slowly moving towards some image that you don't see until the 11th trip.  Maybe that will happen here.  In the meantime, it's a fun place to explore and a good excuse to be out with the camera in the winter.

The other day when I was there, a group of about four kids, probably junior high school age, showed up and were climbing around in the ruins, unperturbed by the guy with his camera or the protruding rebar.  I simultaneously imagined how much I would have enjoyed this unambiguously dangerous place as a kid and how much I hoped as a parent that my daughter Bei would never do that.  

Workers at the Laramie Midwest Refinery, 1928.  From the Ludwig-Svenson collection at the UW Heritage Center.   I wonder if any of  their children still live in Laramie?  This was 84 years ago.

Art or graffiti?  I'd say the former.

Floor of main building, Laramie refinery.

Graffiti or art?  Main building.

Refinery art.  No doubt about it.

Ruins, Laramie refinery.

Explaining Art

Rivet and stress fracture on an old Union Pacific caboose, Laramie, Wyoming.

I recently listened to Alain de Botton's wide-ranging TED Talk about what atheists can learn from religion.  His central theme was that even if you don't believe in God, there are a lot of good things in religion that all of us could benefit from -- educational techniques, the concept of the sermon, the importance of time, community, and the power of institutions.  Rather than having to take the whole pill, Alain asserts that secularists could adopt some of these characteristics of religions by themselves and benefit from them.  

He also talks about how religions handle art:

"The two really bad ideas that are hovering in the modern world that inhibit our capacity to draw strength from art: The first idea is that art should be for art's sake -- a ridiculous idea -- an idea that art should live in a hermetic bubble and should not try to do anything with this troubled world. I couldn't disagree more. The other thing that we believe is that art shouldn't explain itself, that artists shouldn't say what they're up to, because if they said it, it might destroy the spell and we might find it too easy. That's why a very common feeling when you're in a museum -- let's admit it -- is, "I don't know what this is about." But if we're serious people, we don't admit to that. But that feeling of puzzlement is structural to contemporary art."

 I look at a lot of photography on the web, in books, and at museums, and I have to admit that often I see photographs that I just don't get.  A lot of contemporary photography is that way for me--photographs of sterile suburban neighborhoods or images designed to look like snapshots.  My wife and I sometimes watch movies that we both acknowledge were "good," but then we go to the web reviews to try to figure out what they were really about.

Alain de Botton goes on to say...

"Now religions have a much saner attitude to art.They have no trouble telling us what art is about. Art is about two things in all the major faiths. Firstly, it's trying to remind you of what there is to love. And secondly, it's trying to remind you of what there is to fear and to hate. And that's what art is. Art is a visceral encounter with the most important ideas of your faith. So as you walk around a church, or a mosque or a cathedral, what you're trying to imbibe, what you're imbibing is, through your eyes, through your senses, truths that have otherwise come to you through your mind."

I attended a workshop last fall at the UW Art Museum in which we were asked to just study a single piece of art for 10 minutes and write down everything we could about it.  I was able to fill several pages with observations of a weird piece of sculpture that I otherwise would have spent 10 seconds looking at before moving on to the next one.  Maybe it's the same with photographs--I need to slow down before hitting the arrow to move to the next image.

I took the photograph above of a detail on an old caboose that used to be mothballed on the West Side of Laramie but now occupies the new railroad park near the historic train depot.  It was an intuitive composition for me--I didn't think explicitly about how to frame it as I made the image; it just felt right.  The image has been popular for me--I've sold a few in shows--and now it is part of the UW Art Museum's traveling exhibition.  But I have never given it a lot of thought.  What makes it appealing? (or is it?).  Is there something about the shapes and how they work together?  Or is it the color?  I don't think I'd like it as a black and white image.  Is there something about the pattern of rust flecks?  Does it matter that it's an old UP caboose--does the nostalgia of the railroad add to the image, or is it irrelevant?

What do you think?