through a new reality.

T H R O U G H   a   n e w   R E A L I T Y .

This always happens. Another trip into the Sierras and my head is already filled with dreams of the next. On our way heading north home then I stopped again at the Mono Basin Visitor Center to pick up a copy of Steve Roper's book detailing the High Route he pioneered in the early eighties. Sitting next to pools hot California air while J swam halfway through the introduction or so Roper mentioned a book of photographs published in the mid-nineties by climber-photographer Claude Fiddler. I underlined it. Once home promptly ordered an old worn copy from Better World Books for a buck or so. A couple weeks later I was cracking open the spine.

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It really is incredible. Smelled particularly old and dusty proper. The printing and paper and typography and design aside I was immediately drawn to a handful of Fiddler's large-format photographs. And so in the space of one in particular taken of Cathedral Peak in the pale hue of dusk I discovered a new truth. Or at least in some way to me a new sort of reality.

And as I poured over the frame what I realized was there were no overly-dense blacks. No over-saturated over-exaggerated hues. Just a soft mellow tone that spoke volumes to me of the moment more true than any photograph I have ever viewed of Cathedral. The far end of the photographic vision spectrum. 

But I also realized how this likely would not catch the eye of someone breezing through an endless barage of images as we approach sensory overload in this over-saturated (pun maybe intended) media world. Where posting a photo with text statistically gets higher rankings on Facebook. Where a quick photo is the new expression of every thought and idea we have. Marketing. Imagery is everywhere and in everything permeating our very conscious. The irony of course is how - despite all of this - so little of it is original anymore.

So surprising then on some level whilst sitting motionless staring into Claude Fiddler's frames of Cathedral and another of Wanda Lake sitting on the front porch I had the breath sucked right out of me. They were - maybe in a single word... effortless. Timeless. Not dated by their Instagram-filter-of-the-year effect but instead infinite for their austerity.

Beautiful.

I look through photographs made today - my own included - like so much rubbish rarely moved as I was in an instant by Fiddler's simple work.

Beyond that I am aware of the possibility of its display. In a book viewed on paper held in my hands versus some illuminated monitor propped up glaring back at me. Something tactile and tangible. Thick with a worn sheen a little yellowed around the edges. Another thing I think we forget in our self-created screen-obsessed world… the beauty in the simplicity of holding a book or seeing a large image on display hung proudly on a wall framed perfectly. Of looking into a print made on paper of inks mixed together instead of photons and the effect it has on our subconscious. Of pouring over the recesses and the details. I remember reading once how our minds are literally blown away by the resolution of an eight-by-ten contact print. Of how we literally cannot process all of the information presented to us. All of the detail. And so the image seems unreal.

Little I see online seems unreal in this way. Maybe so - differently... as in unrealistic. Even something of my own from a trip of ours two summers ago into the Sierras I look at now with disappointment and dismay.

But if anything in this age of digital we are afforded a second chance.

And so I dug up the camera raw file buried on my server to look at it with a new eye. A new vision of what is truth. Or closer to it just a different way of seeing it maybe a little less pristine and processed and a little more yellowed around the edges.

So I muted it a bit. Softened the endpoints of the linear curve on the shadows and highlights. Opened up the midtones but with an overall flattening effect while at the same time compressing the tones slightly to give the twilight its proper respectable place. This was not a high-dynamic range image of false contrasts and phony saturation but rather a quiet evening best represented more in this way I now find.

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A photograph is never honest I am aware no matter how hard we try. And just as this shows it can be interpreted infinitely. Here I can no longer completely recall the ambience there lying down in the grass getting eaten alive by the swarms of filthy mosquitoes trying to squeeze in a few more images of the fading light next to the outlet stream making its way down from Hungry Packer to Sailor Lake Picture Peak towering above it all. J off running somewhere getting his own photographs or swatting at bugs or both. Left to guess now erring if anything this side of under-processing. But I look at both renditions. Both interpretations. And - maybe like an imperfect performance of some piano sonata or other by old fragile hands - the muted image speaks to me in a deeper sense perhaps because of the very fact it now lacks the punch of its predecessor.

Even these thoughts I know are not original. Other photographers have approached their work in this way. Abstaining from the eye-catching sameness of exaggerated truths. This is nothing new. But regardless - for me I sense a pivotal moment in my ever-learning how to see - and ultimately interpret the wild places in which I will always explore and in my attempt - likely futile at best - to capture in a photograph their essence.