Tag: Fog

Categories
City Life

Green Umbrella

An upended green umbrella lies on the damp path beside Rosedale Valley Road while in the distance, obscured by fog, a bridge spans the valley.
Foggy morning in Rosedale Valley, Toronto

When I was a child, I was afraid of umbrellas because, viewed in a certain way, with their eight ribbed supports, they reminded me of spiders. Why would I want to hold a spider over my head? What if the umbrella collapsed and all the spider legs folded over my face? I imagined myself in the clutches of a malicious umbrella, waving my hands over my head, unable to see, running into the street and mowed down by a passing garbage truck. Long before the movie, Alien, there was my imagination breathing life into all the terrors of the modern world.

I once believed that my passage into adulthood would relieve me of my childhood terrors. My imagination would settle itself: a thing is just a thing, and not invested with terrors beyond itself. In a sense, that’s true. I’ve never once been attacked by a malicious umbrella and so my childhood fears have subsided.

However, my adult life is not without fears all its own. And like my childhood fears, my adult fears arise from an overactive imagination. I see a broken and discarded umbrella splayed on the ground while a garbage truck trundles past, and I imagine all the umbrellas that have ever lived since the invention of the umbrella. Billions upon billions of them heaped in a pile of dead umbrellas. Umbrella mountain.

I imagine the flimsy frames of unreclaimed metal, the plastic latches, the nylon fabric fading in the sunlight. In time, the elements work away at the monstrous pile of waste, dissolving bits of the metal, breaking the nylon fabric into microplastics, all of it washing toxic into the water table and borne from there into the hydrologic cycle. In a way, this is a horror far worse than anything springing from my childhood imagination. This is more like FrankenUmbrella: a billion billion arachnid creatures flip over onto their spindly legs and scuttle down from their high mountain on a long march against their creators.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Photographing in the Divide Between Order and Chaos

I was walking down the street when a youngish man approached and offered a piece of paper. You never know what you’re going to get when a stranger offers you a piece of paper. It could be a notice about a closing sale. It could be a rant about how Covid is a psyop mind control experiment. Or, as in this case, it could be a pamphlet promising eternal life with an old geezer in the sky above if only I surrender myself to the path laid down by a bronze age rabbi.

There are any number of reasons why I might find contemporary proselytism offensive. Chief among them is that Christian proselytism is intimately tied to a long history of Western colonialism and has been used to rationalize the exploitation of both people and resources. In my estimation, it hasn’t even begun to atone for its many sins, and will never begin that process until it allows a measure of humility to enter into its teachings. I receive the strident certainty of its tone as confirmation that it is deluded.

But in this instance, I didn’t even make it to that primary concern. I was too distracted by two grammatical errors. To my way of thinking, the function of grammar is a lot like the function of religion: it brings order to chaos; it makes our world more meaningful. A religious tract with grammatical errors is like a book of laws for criminals. It embraces a contradiction that not even faith can overcome.

I confess that I tend to take the same approach to the world when I have a camera in hand. I choose subjects and frame photographs and gravitate towards narratives that reinforce a world view in which order triumphs over chaos. In the distance, the world may swallow itself in fog. But here, right here, I see the world with clarity and that reassures me. Like the proselyte on the street corner, I want to share my view of the world with others. My photos may not have the same heft as a passage of scripture, but my aims are the same. More troubling is the fact that when I insist you look at the world exactly as I have looked at the world, I am replicating the colonizing tendencies of my proselytizing brothers and sisters.

Maybe my photographs would benefit from more chaos.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Fog and Intimacy

Lone Tree in Fog, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

There is something about fog that produces a sense of intimacy. Our view of what lies in the distance fades almost to nothing. All that remains is whatever stands in the foreground. I made this photograph on New Years Day. I make a habit of rising to greet the sun on the first morning of the new year, but when I got up on January 1st, 2022, I found the world shrouded in fog. After nearly 2 years of a global pandemic, attended by a growing cloud of disinformation, fog may be an apt way to start a new year.

I stood alone in a field with a solitary tree and the two of us communed for a time. To be honest, I can’t think of a better way to begin a new year. To be honest, I can’t think of many people I’d care to engage this way. I wish more of the people in my life would treat me the way this tree treated me. It didn’t challenge my thoughts and hint that maybe I’m a fool. It didn’t tell me I’m wasting my life on trivial pursuits. It didn’t tell me I’ve let myself go during the pandemic. The tree was a good listener and leaned in when I let my voice fall low.

I take it as a given that we can enter into relationships with trees. When I was young, my best friend and I built a tree house in a big maple. While we were still in the planning stages, we decided we couldn’t nail boards in place as that might hurt the tree, so we lashed everything with rope and twine. We discovered early on that we weren’t the only creatures to shelter in that tree. There were squirrels, robins, frogs, ants, beetles, lichen, and moss. That tree presided over our childhoods like a benevolent elder.

I have difficulty standing by when people cut down a live tree. It feels to me like an act of violence. I can understand why some people become tree-huggers, and I can understand, too, why industrialists adopt derisive tones when they use the term. A tree-hugger challenges everything an industrialist stands for. Despite the industrialist’s bluster, I’d rather be a tree than a chain saw.

Categories
Country Life Landscape Photography

Fence in Foggy Field

Fence Post in Fog, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

The chief merit of this post is the alliteration in the title: three “F” words in a row is irresistible. I could have added a fourth, but then I’d be giving up my family friendly rating. But enough about rhetoric.

This is a variation on the theme of Kanso, which I’ve previously mentioned here and here, creating a scene of calming simplicity by removing elements from the image one by one until only the essential remains. Although photography in the real world often makes it impossible to remove elements from a scene (Photoshop notwithstanding), nature itself sometimes steps in and lends a hand.

In previous posts, I’ve shown how a backdrop of pure snow can render an utterly simple photo. In this instance, I turn to fog as my natural assistant. It isn’t perfect, but it helps. The fog softens the background just enough that it doesn’t distract us from the foreground, a single fence post. We can trace the line of fence posts that recedes across the field and disappears into the foggy distance.

I shot this on New Year’s Day, 2022 at Williams Farm in Wyebridge, Ontario. The scene arrived like a gift and, although I wouldn’t call myself a superstitious person, I took it as a portent of the year to come. At least as far as photographs go, I expect 2022 will be an excellent year.