blue wheelbarrow: Florida landscapes

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Florida landscapes

Clyde Butcher's landscape photography is beautiful--he is regularly compared with Ansel Adams. And the world seems beautiful in his large landscapes and waterscapes of Florida. I would love to be able to look at that world regularly. In fact I do, living in rural northcentral Minnesota.

Do these photographs offer just another perspective on the world or an entirely different way of interpreting the world from David Maisel's work? Mr. Butcher argues that his photographs may lead us to be better caretakers of the beautiful world by helping us become more sensitized to a beauty we miss in our everyday lives. Susan Sontag would argue something quite a bit different. David Maisel's landscapes describe a world where catastrophe like yesterday's mass murder in Virginia happens. That kind of thing doesn't happen in the world of Clyde Butcher's photographs. I love them nonetheless.

Unfortunately, the facts seem to point toward Maisel's vision.
Witness yesterday's massacre and the just-published-report by the
UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that 40% of plant and animal species in the US are in danger of becoming extinct in the next decades. No answers from me on this one I'm afraid.

from "The Names"

When Pohd-lohk told a story he began by being quiet. Then he said Ah-keah-de, "They were camping," and he said it every time. I have tried to write in the same way, in the same spirit. Imagine: They were camping.

In my earliest years I traveled a number of times from Oklahoma to the Navajo reservation in New Mexico and Arizona and back again. The two landscapes are fixed in my mind. They are separate realities, but they are sometimes confused in my memory. I place my feet in the plain, but my prints are made on the mountain.

N. Scott Momaday

from "The Lives of a Cell"

from "The Fork River Space Project"

I have just discovered I can magnify objects by a slight pressure on the lids of my eyes. My head lies on the pillow, a fold of the bedspread touches my nose. The weave is coarse. If I press lightly on the lids of my eyelids the material of the spread looks like a fishnet. If I lid my eyes and turn to face the light, I see a color glowing like heated metal. Across it motes flick, like water insects. The color changes to a smog-filtered sunset. If I give myself over to this impression, I am free-falling in space (that is my sensation), and only by an effort do I recover my bearings. I owe this to Harry Lorbeer. He started me thinking--or should I say seeing? On the mind's eye, or on the balls of the eyes, or wherever it is we see what we imagine, or imagine what we see.

Wright Morris

blue wheelbarrow

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Florida landscapes

from "The Names"

Invocation to the muse from "Ceremony"

from "The Lives of a Cell"

from "The Inner Reaches of Outer Space"

from "On Photography"

from "In the American Grain"

from "Anecdote of the Jar"

the best prayer I know

from "The Fork River Space Project"

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