Artist's Statement
The beauty of
things -
Is in the beholder's brain - the human mind's translation
of their transhuman
Intrinsic value.
...as mathematics, a human invention
That parallels but never touches reality, gives the
astronomer
Metaphors through which he may comprehend
The powers and the flow of things: so the human sense
Of beauty is our metaphor of their excellence, their
divine
nature: - like dust in a whirlwind, making
The wild wind visible.
-Robinson Jeffers
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To write informatively about art is inherently difficult. When
the work under consideration is one's own, the challenge is
compounded. Robert Adams, in Why People Photograph,
nicely summarized the problem of mixing words and photographs: if
the words are stronger than the images, then the images are a
failure; if the words are weaker than the images, then the words
were unnecessary. Many artists simply refuse to discuss their own
work, and I believe their reticence is worthy of respect. It is
said that a student once approached Robert Frost and asked him to
"explain" one of his famous poems. Frost replied,
"Do you want me to say it worse?"
The cartoon presents a completely different, and certainly
more contemporary, viewpoint. There is truth lurking behind its
blunt cynicism, 
as a visit to one's local
art museum is likely to confirm. We live in an exhibitionist age,
and for every Robert Frost there is a Calvin only too eager to
talk about himself. The results are often pretentious, sometimes
funny, and rarely illuminating.
In spite of all this, I am unwilling to dismiss the power of
the written word to convey important ideas about art. There are
artists and critics who write persuasively, and without their
efforts our appreciation of art would be much impoverished. On
this thought I plunge ahead hopefully with my own statement. If
the outcome is less than successful, well, it's my web
site and I can blather a little if I want to.
Photography as fine art
There are many reasons to take a photograph, among them being
the intention to create a meaningful work of art. Why can the
making of a photograph, a commonplace event in the modern world,
become artistic expression? On a primitive level a photograph is
nothing but a data record: in traditional photography a pattern
of silver grains, in digital photography a set of numbers. The
result is mathematically related to the pattern of light that
entered the front end of the camera at a particular time and
place. In this sense a photograph differs from a painting or a
musical composition, which must be synthesized in its entirety
out of the human imagination. Each note of a Beethoven quartet
was put in place by the composer's creative intelligence, whereas
in a photograph it seems as though much of the hard work is being
done by lenses, film and chemicals.
Nevertheless a photograph is the conscious result of a certain
number of decisions made by the photographer. One of my teachers
has said that a photographer must decide "where to stand and
where to put the edges of the frame.
" To this can be added the
choice of film, the realization of the image in the darkroom, the
selection of images to be printed, and even how to arrange them
for presentation. Given the complexity of the world and the
infinite number of possible photographs that can be taken, the
photographer's creative palette is no less rich than the
painter's or composer's.
In the specific case of landscape photography, it is
appropriate to ask another question: why do we sometimes say that
a particular place is beautiful? A mountain, after all, is a
random act of nature; it is neither inherently beautiful or ugly
but simply is. The answer to this apparent dilemma is to
be found, I think, in the Robinson Jeffers poem at the top of
this page. A certain mountain is said to be beautiful because it
appeals to "our human sense of beauty." That
sense, says Jeffers, provides us with a metaphor of the
mountain's excellence. It is not the mountain that possesses
beauty but its metaphor, which exists only within the human mind.
What the landscape photographer seeks is this same kind of
metaphor. The creative photograph is not a scientific record of a
mountain, but an abstraction intended to serve as a metaphor for
its beauty. When the photographer is successful his metaphor will
be both compelling and new. Such a photograph delivers to its
viewer what mathematics delivers to Jeffers' astronomer:
comprehension of "the powers and the flow of things."
My personal photographic approach
Most of my work in photography, and all of the photographs
shown on this web site, can be described as
"landscape." Where people and manmade objects appear it
is primarily as compositional elements. I favor this branch of
photography not because I consider it to be better or more
important than other branches, but because I find it to be more
personally satisfying. The main reason for this, I am sure, is
that I enjoy visiting places where the landscape is inherently
interesting. The urge to photograph them follows naturally.
I take a resolutely literal approach to photography, avoiding
any extensive retouching or modifying of the image. By
restricting my technique in this way, I can simplify my thinking
in the field. This seems to work best for me. On the other hand,
I try not to be dogmatic: I will indulge in minor retouching to
remove a scenic wart from an otherwise good photograph. You will
not see a small water tower in the center foreground of Black Butte from White Rock, because I
expunged all traces of it - digitally, of course. On every
photograph I use standard image enhancement techniques such as
dodging, burning, and sharpening, but my goal is always, in Ansel
Adams' elegant phrase, "to remain faithful to the image
formed by the lens."
The Web Browser as a Photography Gallery
In preparing this web site, it has been my intention to create
as best I could the atmosphere of a museum gallery. You will see
each image with a minimum of what Edward Tufte calls
"administrivia," the clutter that is so common on
computer screens. There is no background music, animated
graphics, or other distractions. Just pictures. This little
virtual museum has some big advantages over the real thing: (1)
it's free; (2) it's uncrowded; (3) you can eat and drink while
you look at the stuff. It's something to consider while you're
waiting for the pictures to download.
I think the Internet presents an exciting new opportunity for
disseminating many forms of art, particularly photography. The
technology for viewing images over the net is fairly well
advanced, and while it is not yet perfect it will undoubtedly
continue to improve. In its current state of development it
deserves to be taken seriously, as I hope this web site
demonstrates.
Strengths and weaknesses of the computer screen as a fine
print medium
Whether an image is to be made on paper or shown on a monitor,
in most respects the process of making a fine print remains the
same. Cropping, dodging and burning are as important to the
on-screen image as they have always been to the paper print. To
some degree the computer facilitates and speeds up the work. The
photographer's most mundane printing task, dust spotting, is
almost fun on the computer, and can be done without any chance of
dropping those little bottles of spotting dye on the floor. That
alone was enough to attract me to digital photography.
In preparing these images I discovered some interesting
differences between the traditional darkroom print and the
on-screen "print" displayed
by a computer monitor. The most striking of these is contrast.
The monitor, being a light source, has an intrinsically wider
tonal range than a piece of printing paper, which produces its
effect by scattering a fraction of the ambient light back to the
viewer's eye. Intellectually this is obvious, but its
significance cannot be grasped until you make a side-by-side
comparison between a good darkroom print and its digital
equivalent on the monitor. Only then do you realize how stunning
the monitor display is, and how much different the presentation
of the print should be.
After some experimentation it became clear to me that the
monitor shows highlights brilliantly and shadow detail relatively
poorly. This turns one of the 
accepted principles of fine darkroom
printing on its head: in the darkroom it is important to render
the shadows correctly, since the impact of a fine print is often
a function of the shadow areas. The monitor image is most
effective if the highlights are brought out carefully. I have
found this to be more true of black and white than color images;
there is a limit to how far the highlights can be stretched
before unpleasant color shifts occur.
Another important difference between the monitor and paper is
resolution. A good paper print is capable of containing more
detail than can be seen with the naked eye; a monitor is not. I
would estimate that an 8x10 print contains 100-1000 times more
"pixels" than a monitor can display, and thus a paper
print will look sharper than its on-screen equivalent. This
drawback of the digital images can be partially overcome by the
judicious use of "sharpening" filters, which are
included with all image processing software. Sharpening filters,
unique to the world of digital imagery, increase the local
contrast on a pixel by pixel basis. In favorable cases this gives
the impression of overall sharpness. The effect can easily be
overdone, and it is difficult to choose the right amount of
sharpening for a particular image. All of the images on this web
site have been sharpened to some degree, and if you load any of
them into an image processing application and enlarge them this
will become apparent. The sharpening effect also causes the
images to look grainy if you print them on a photo quality
printer. That was a necessary sacrifice to get the best image on
the monitor.
The color photographs shown here were considerably more
difficult to prepare than the black and white ones. It seems that
colors are not always handled the same way by different software
applications, for reasons that I cannot explain. Sometimes the
same color image will vary in appearance from Internet Explorer
to Netscape Navigator, and sometimes neither browser's rendition
matches that of the image processing software. Other images do
not show this effect. Additional problems are caused by
differences in monitors, graphics cards, and even operating
systems. I expect that this technology will improve, but for the
moment it is not possible to guarantee that your hardware and
software will show you the same photograph that mine does.
Equipment
It is with some hesitation that I mention the equipment used
in making these images, since such information tends to dominate
many discussions of photography. All the photographs in the New Mexico section,
and many of the others, were
taken with a Pentax 6x7 (medium format), a heavy but extremely
rugged and well-made camera. It is completely manual but produces
excellent negatives. The film is either Kodak TMAX 100 or Kodak Tri-X for
black and white, or Ektachrome 100 Professional for color.
The digital images were taken with an Olympus D-600L. Despite its many
limitations it can produce acceptable images under the right
circumstances. The digital cameras of today are far less sophisticated and
capable than film cameras of comparable price; nevertheless they are useful
tools and have their place. One suspects that these cameras represent the
beginning of a new age.
The film images were digitized with one of several scanners
equipped an adapter for scanning transparent materials. This setup is adequate
for making images that will be viewed on a monitor, since the
scanning process produces far more pixels than the monitor can
display. For printing onto paper, however, the resolution of the
scanner would be a limitation. After some trial and error I
discovered that the best technique is to scan the negatives in
color (even the black and white ones). When I scanned black and
white negatives in "gray scale," the data exhibited a
noise pattern that could not easily be removed. For the medium-format images I found that I
got noise-free black and white images by scanning the negatives
at a resolution of 900 DPI, applying filters to remove the noise
in the data, and then converting to gray scale.
For image processing I have used Micrografx Picture
Publisher 7.0, and more recently an excellent program named "Picture
Window." It's available for free evaluation from Digital
Light and Color, and I highly recommend it. It was designed
specifically to meet the needs of photographers, and it works beautifully.
It costs about one fifth as much as Adobe Photoshop, but for me it does
everything I need.
Paul Cornelius
September, 1997
Revised October, 2000
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