White Birch Reflections
White Birches in Concrete
During a socially distanced outdoor class I taught last August, I was drawn to capture a
subject without knowing quite why. Late one afternoon, after a couple of months had
lapsed, I was at my computer, preparing to introduce Aaron Siskind’s abstraction works to
my students. With Zoom, I try to include many of my images as illustrations. While editing
images in this particular folder, I felt the joy of being while immersed in creativity. This
image would not let me go...something about the texture, the marks but also the
suggestion that what I was looking at had qualities that extended beyond the edges of the
picture, something that the great Minor White would attribute to 'what else is it'...This
image when taken out of context is something quite different from its reality. The vertical
marks separated by a horizontal line reminded me of a stand of white birch trees reflecting
on a lake. By removing the color, the graphic qualities are more enhanced, and the literal
drips of paint become a gesture for a very different scene.
Being able to see this kind of abstraction is something I've been moving towards in both my
personal work and in my instruction. It has nothing really to do with photography on a
technical level other than having a fast enough shutter speed to hold the camera steady. It
is more about being patient enough to allow the image to come to me, even if I am not sure
why. It is about getting closer to my subject and connecting on a very intuitive level. The
inherent beauty in a very mundane subject is a very consistent metaphor in Siskind’s work
and I felt that by studying the master, I was able to tune into abstraction in a new way. This
refinement in vision is a path I feel very excited about pursuing.
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