Excerpt from
Light on the Landscape
Photographs and Lessons from a Life in Photography
Mudcracks, Zion National Park, Utah 1983
Camera: Wista 45, Lens: Rodenstock Sironar-N 210mm f/5.6
The Magic Element: Emotion
Let You Heart Show the Way
An important aspect of being an artist is the ability and willingness to express and share emotions in your work. Of course, the viewer can only imagine the state of the artist’s mind, but if the work is successful, one can often gain an insight into the artist’s experience or mood. A strong work of art can elicit emotions in the viewer both obvious and unexpected, whether they are the same emotions the artist felt or not.
Whether apparent or not, the artist’s emotions will, and should, affect the work. Most of my best images are a result of a passionate response to the subject. Many years ago, I was exploring in Zion National Park. One day when returning from a solo hike up a narrow canyon, I slipped on some steep sandstone and slid (in shorts, of course) down about thirty feet into a pothole full of water. All my gear was in a pack on my back and the water was five feet deep. It took me several minutes to get my pack off, throw it out of the pothole, and climb out. Meanwhile, my gear, which included my 4×5 and 35mm cameras and lenses, got soaked.
I was scraped up pretty good, and so I cleaned up the “rug burns” on my arms and legs, and then spent hours trying to dry out my equipment. I remember using the hand dryer in a local campground restroom and leaving lenses in the sun on my car’s dashboard. At the end of the day, I called home only to hear some more bad news.
Needless to say, I was seriously bummed out; half my camera gear wasn’t working, plus some personal issues were not helping my mood. Fortunately, my 4×5 dried out nicely, since no electronics were involved, and the lenses and film were okay, so the next day I went exploring again. As I wandered through a streambed, I found these cool mud cracks. They had formed in a depression so that somehow the cracks were small at the top of the slope and progressively got bigger lower down, where the moisture had stayed longer. The composition was made to show this transition.
I liked the image when I exposed it, obviously, and I liked it even more when I saw the processed film. But I didn’t really stop to think about how my emotional state of mind might have affected the making of it. Only months later, when printing the image, did it strike me that the image reflected my mood that day. My emotions had surfaced through the making of this photograph. Looking back, I am happy to have made something good of a bad situation!
Thinking about my own work over the years, the role of specific emotions in image making varies from image to image. Most often, it is the excitement of discovery, of finding a captivating subject in extraordinary light, that demands I make the photograph. On occasion, I have found that some images are also influenced by my frame of mind, like my Mud Cracks image shown here. If one can accept that there is an artistic advantage to creating emotional work, perhaps those feelings will come through more often. The only trick I can think of for doing this is to give yourself permission to allow it. I don’t think there is an easy formula for doing this, nor do I believe it can be done every time.
Waterfall and Sunbeam, Sierra Nevada Foothills, California 2011
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III__EF70-200mm f/2.8L USM__1.5 sec at f / 27__ISO 200
Fortunately, most of us don’t have bad days too often. I am glad I went out for another hike that day in spite of my mood. I am sure that experiencing the beauty of nature was therapeutic. So often nature’s beauty has restored my spirits, and sometimes even resulted in a good photograph. It is beneficial for our photographs to convey emotion—those of joy, curiosity, quiet meditation, or even those bummer days. Rather than make an ordinary photograph, I hope that you will let your emotions make their way into your images. How else will we see your special way of seeing?
Seeing, in the finest and broadest sense, means using your senses, your intellect, and your emotions. It means encountering your subject matter with your whole being. It means looking beyond the labels of things and discovering the remarkable world around you. – Freeman Patterson
February 5, 2022 at 9:55 AM
Thank you for this story! It is encouraging for the neophyte photographer to know that even the icons of the photography world have their struggles, which may indeed counterintuitively inform their work! Each of us brings to our work a unique set of experiences and insights, which we should allow to guide us on our creative journey!
February 5, 2022 at 11:03 AM
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. We all travel the long road… as Eddie Vetter sings.
November 1, 2018 at 1:57 PM
I enjoy, result in I discovered exactly what I used to be having a look for.
You’ve ended my 4 day long hunt! God Bless you man. Have a great day.
Bye
February 14, 2016 at 9:36 AM
Y empezamos esta entrega de imágenes de Jesus para perfil
con esta imagen en la que podemos ver a Jesús
con la corona de espinas y el mensaje: Aquel que pierde dinero; pierde mucho; aquel que pierde un amigo, pierde
más; aquel que pierde la Fe, lo pierde todo”.
February 12, 2016 at 5:24 PM
Thanks for finally talking about > Emotion – The Magic Element
William Neill’s Light on the Landscape PhotoBlog < Liked it!
September 9, 2012 at 8:36 AM
Phil, thanks for your thoughts here. Met Freeman once, and he is an amazing guy!
September 7, 2012 at 5:36 AM
This is a great article and I share your beliefs that conveying in an image one’s emotional response to the subject, light & surroundings is the key to success in a photograph. Images that demonstrate an emotional response are likely to have longevity in the viewer’s memory and also to invite them to gaze longer at the image, and to truly ‘see’ some of what the photographer saw. Images that invite us to ‘step into the frame’; one’s where we can ‘feel’ the spray from a cascading waterfall, ‘smell’ the wildflowers, ‘touch’ the soft mosses on a woodland boulder, and so on.
There are some very technically perfect images one comes across that sadly don’t hold ones wonder for long and on reflection it is always the lack of emotional content that lets them down in such cases. “The camera points both ways”, said Freeman Patterson and how right he was…
September 6, 2012 at 6:32 PM
I’ve observed that when truly engaged in the creative process, my mind is very quiet and clear. However, strong emotion — like those you describe in your essay — quite possibly influences what I engage with, and also how.
I have an example! This was actually a pretty important moment for me, photographically speaking. After a long road trip that began at Mono Lake and concluded, via southern Utah, with a visit to Great Basin National Park, one in which I produced very few images that I was excited about, I happened across a quiet moment of beauty.
This occurred purely by chance, but was profound for me personally, in as much as it helped define my motivation for photographing landscapes. I wrote a blog post about it entitled The Power of a Photograph — and the image of this most memorable moment (for me) can be viewed here.
Thanks for sharing the essay in this format — I’d read the previously, actually, and it’s nice to be able to relate personal experiences to it.
August 27, 2012 at 8:40 AM
Thanks!
August 26, 2012 at 2:04 AM
For me, it is the being still before photographing and then feeling into the view, of whatever it may be, whether a street scene, an object, some food, or a beautiful plant, that often results in that aha image. Often that comes very quickly, as I’ve been taking pix for many years, sometimes it doesn’t happen at all! Really exciting, truly visually appealing images of mine are a rarity, for me.
I like this cracks photograph…a wonderful abstract with a number of different ways to ‘see’ it.
August 21, 2012 at 9:23 AM
Thanks Dan and Chuq. Any stories and links you want to share?
August 20, 2012 at 2:08 PM
Indeed. Photographing the thing is hardly the point. It is how the photographer sees the thing and how effectively his or her photograph communicates the photographers perspective on and relationship to it. Great photographs tell us more about the photographer than the subject.
Dan