close your eyes and hope for the best

Athabasca Glacier below Mount Andromeda, Jasper National Park, Alberta, Canada.
(click image to enlarge)

Working with this photo upset my smug convictions about photography and Photoshop, to the point where I’m no longer sure what is legitimate and what isn’t.

What is real and what is illusion? That has been a frequent, fertile theme in fiction, film, theatre and philosophy, but for the most part photography seldom lent itself, transparently or otherwise, to such a question. Then along came John and Thomas Knoll, and now many a too-good image provokes the skeptical “yes, but has it been Photoshopped?”

That digital editing software had turned photography from a reliable witness into an untrustworthy, potentially perjurious one was a lament which I used to consider misinformed and misplaced. While photography usually told the truth, never was it necessarily the whole truth or nothing but the truth. A scene of apparent pristine wilderness could be framed to exclude an adjacent clearcut or dump, and every ski photographer knows to steepen slopes with a slight tilt of the camera, to give just the simplest of examples.

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Montreal Olympic Stadium (click image to enlarge)

It remains, however, one of the most audacious and extraordinary building projects ever attempted… As a point of comparison, most of the blocks that the Pyramids of Giza are built from weigh just a few tons, with only some of the very largest, at 150 tons, in the same range; but they’re not suspended in mid-air!

The Olympics are coming to my city! Truthfully, I’m less excited than I was the first time that happened. There’s the commercialism, the consequent drug scandals, the acrimonious arguments about misplaced economic priorities. In Vancouver itself, protests over highway upgrades for the 2010 event have led to draconian legal measures against distinguished senior citizens, including the probable death of one elder from illness exacerbated by her jail sentence.

But in 1976 I lived in Montreal, and the noble ideals of the Games, that be-the-best-that-you-can-be philosophy were highly inspiring in my faster and stronger days.

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Women on bench. Mani Greece (click image to enlarge)

Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak had not yet been invented, but I might as well have been wearing one. It was as if I could wander into homes, or move close in on someone by the roadside, with none aware of my presence.

I don’t speak Greek, I explained.

“Why not?” The person whom I had gone to see at the Greek National Tourist Organization in Athens was incredulous. Both my first and my last names, as written and as pronounced, have more than once been misconstrued as Greek. In defence, I avowed that I was indeed fluent in the language of my parents: Latvian. Not very useful in southern Europe.

I needed his help. I was on assignment for Equinox (which unfortunately no longer exists; it was a great magazine to work for). Their photo layouts always emphasized people, and the story I had to illustrate concerned the remotest portion of the middle of the three long peninsulas of Greece that fork far into the Mediterranean. Mani, as this rugged, isolated place is known, ends in the cape that is the southernmost point of mainland Europe, but its history is even more extreme than its wild geography.

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Granny Smith Pumpkins
(click image to enlarge)

…I had stumbled upon something potentially a hundred times more territorially sensitive than a Hell’s Angel’s marijuana farm.

“Sorry Mate, but this is fer y’own good.”

One of the rough-looking characters who had confronted me pried open the canister of Velvia with his 12-inch croc knife, exposing my film to the bright austral sun. He looked like a heftier version of Clint Eastwood (if it’s possible to imagine a somewhat overweight Eastwood). The other, who could have been a blond Keith Richards explained, “If the boss ever thought someone had a picture from here…” He didn’t finish his words, but made a cutting gesture across his slightly too-thin neck.

Their pickup had come out of nowhere and cut me off in a cloud of outback road dust as it deliberately spun sideways to block the route and force me to stop. How had they spotted me? I had only been outside my rented jeep for a couple of minutes, just long enough for three or four quick, furtive compositions.

It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been warned. The dirt road had been clearly posted “No Public Access / Unauthorized Passage Strictly Forbidden”. I had proceeded onto it anyway. I imagined Aussies as among the least uptight people anywhere, seriously disinclined to go nutters over a tourist who had taken a wrong turn.

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Aerial photograph: pulpmill wastewater lagoon. (click image to enlarge)

One friend of mine said this image reminded her of so many butterflies. Another saw in it the suggestion of tree stumps. Most others, well, most of you can guess what the photo reminds most people of. When my friend and pilot Bo Curtis and I were photographing Canada from the air, we looked for angles where we could isolate just two of these rounded shapes in a composition, our obvious intention being to produce a photo that would, of course, resemble a nice pair of eyes.

…the ground-based observer is in the position of one hopelessly viewing a painting edge on. By contrast, seen from directly overhead, the grandest of landscape subjects, mountains, often resemble little more than flattened rubble.

While very few animals even recognize themselves in a mirror (and I must admit, sometimes I have trouble with that myself), it is probably a safe guess that ours is the only species that abstracts diverse and added meanings out of our patterned world.

We are sometimes amazed to discover a face in a cliff or in clouds, even though all it takes is finding among varying colour or tone a scheme of two circles, a line, and another line ;- |

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