The Nature of Things

For the first time in my life I live in a city, or rather a place where the countryside is more than a few minutes drive. It has made me think a lot about the photographs I have taken in nature and of nature and the power that those kinds of photographs hold.
I have talked to several photojournalist friends who tell me that they have trouble connecting to nature photographs. It is completely understandable that a picture of a distant mountain range can seldom grasp and hold our attention that the way a person’s eyes staring back through a picture can do so.
When you see a picture of another person you have an immediate and intimate relationship to them. The picture in front of you is no longer a stranger but is a picture of you. No matter how exotic or striking the countenance, it cannot be that different, at least anatomically, from yours. The biggest difference is the story that it holds. We grow close to a photograph not by immediate understanding, but by measuring the differences we have with that “other” person. It is not through similarities that we learn and become less ignorant to ideas and peoples, but through separation. It only makes sense that with more separation there would be an easy of measurement and a desire to explore deeper.
I would say that most people who have learned the rules of composition and the nature of light can take a beautiful nature photograph, but to take one that makes us go deeper is a different task all-together. I think that we live in a world that constantly separates people from nature. Spending too much time under fluorescent lights makes me long for and sometimes even begin to forget about the feeling that I had many years ago, the first time I was lost in some Kentucky river bottom and became caught in a briar patch while trying to find my way back to a familiar field or creek that would guide me in the right direction. I have taken a lot of nature photographs in the few years that I have been roaming around with a camera but few of them would ever make a “portfolio edit.” In fact, right now I can only think of three I even like very much.
All this rambling is getting at is that I don’t know what makes me like one over another, other than the way it makes me feel. And it is that same feeling I felt when I was young, that mystified and terrified me in that helpless and beautiful situation, that I am still looking for when I edit through pictures without people. Pictures with which I wish to measure the distance between myself and our world beyond walls.