John Wasrzonek Essay

Photography is a unique art form, at least in the way it is commonly practiced.

Painters, actors, sculptors, dancers, performance artists can do whatever they please including simply tacking a canvas to a wall or sitting in a chair for a year or picking up buckets of paint and throwing them against a wall.

A realist or pointillist painter has it a bit harder. There is a constraint in the technique that may be very difficult, but the final work can be anything, including smearing the pointillist spots.

Photography is different and by photography, I mean a subject captured on film or on a digital chip. In Claude’s case, the subject is the landscape and that is its own set of rules and problems.

Something must be in front of the camera and that something must be found. The finding can be as easy as the backyard, the park across the street or as difficult as the South Pole. But a landscape photographer usually begins with a visceral response to something seen, and that will likely be before photography becomes a pursuit.

For a photographer, attempting to create a body of work enough for a great book is a series of challenges. Some images are gifts in that they are moving and beautiful. The composition is all made, and the photographer’s job is to not make mistakes and so to not miss taking the gift home, but such gifts are rare.

Most landscapes are complex, the image needs to be coaxed out which usually means various lenses, distances, angles, waiting for the light or simply framing the image properly. This part is what takes talent for the photographer must see the image in his or her imagination, although it may not be there to capture until some work is done. It is seeing the potential and then coaxing it, so it looks like what was imagined. There are no hard and fast rules. But it does require an ability that is built over time.

All the variables: light, time of day, whether, and the general state of the subject can vary essentially infinitely. Which leaves three options: settle or move on and return at another time or day.

I suspect that Claude either keeps moving or returns as often as he has to. Has chosen the latter and it requires a kind of metaphor for a ladder which Claude has made more complicated by not settling for 8″ x 10″ prints. In the earlier part of his career this meant hauling a 4″ x 5″ view camera up the side of a mountain.

Now I have carried this kind of camera and I remember vividly my one and only visit to Mt. Katahdin in Maine. What confronted me was a gradually rising slope of large boulders. I am not pleased to be high up in the first place, but the boulders might just as well have been the Grand Canyon. I was neither an athlete nor a climber and that eliminated a large part of the world.

Claude is both. I trekked in the woods with a compact studio on my back (or just drove around) but taking even minimum gear up a steep rise or long hikes into Alaska and then composing, focusing (which is a three-point business with a view camera), well, I don’t know how he did it, but of course that is not the end of it. Every challenge facing the visitor to the iconic subject must be dealt with here: light, wind, mist, rain, etc. with the complication that moving is a whole new challenge.

Then, of course, you must decide when to stop looking and to start composing which despite the climb or hike is still the most difficult part. That happens because of a very human trait of not seeing what we are looking at. If you practice by shooting and viewing the results often enough you may get better at it, but not necessarily. I stopped my photography twenty or so years ago and am still finding images I overlooked, because I can feel the image better now. If you are lucky, and Claude must be, the seeing is emotional as well as analytical, and something vibrates inside while the mind analyzes.

So, what is the bottom line, all of the above plus dedication, the simple extra mile, except in Claude’s case, that may be straight up.

Oh! Yes. One more thing. A photographer could choose to repeat a week’s long trek, but in this case, there was a client or a book title. Same difference. Given that it is a book it will likely be a collection of some (one or more images) plus enough new images to satisfy the mission of the book, and that is a challenge from one to infinity. Remembering what has been done and then finding a number of new images in excess (two, three, four times) of the number needed.

Doing this (having done a much easier version) now requires something new: a kind of documentation of the area yet with each image a work of art. So, one starts off without a clue what one will find no matter how familiar the territory. Then the problem is a very common one and that is to see. Others look, but artist sees. It seems trivial, but it is the heart of the mission, to forget what is in memory, or expectation, or (this is the though one) what one hoped for. Claude being Claude will continuously see; that is, respond in heart and soul to the scene before him for that is his business as a photographer and I can attest to the fact that not seeing one can be fooled by pieces of an image and waste a great deal of film, or memory chip.

Now the rubber meets the road. After seeing, comes a demand to see all there is both good and bad what one finds on the ground glass or view finder.

The first requirement must be satisfied, a visceral reaction, an internal metaphor that begins to sing and the pieces are there to make a visual song. They may be rhythms, color palettes, textures, clouds, etc. but if the artist has done an artistic work then the image is nearly complete.

So, take a look. Does your heart sing (as mine does)? because a new melody has been born and the final effort of composition is to the make the best of what is already great because the trail one has chosen is magical.

I cannot help but think this sounds like a lesson in photography and in some sense it is. But I find that is the only way to critique, to understand what comes before puts one in a position not just to smile, but that it is a knowing smile, and I think knowing in two ways: the nature of the road and its obstacles, physical and mental, and the recognition of a piece of art. For me the best I can say it that it is butterflies in the tummy. Silly? Yes, to some, but magic to those in the know. One then just must recognize the species to know which chapter and page in the book it will occupy.