There are two things about me that are self-evident to people who know me. The first of those two things is that I’m quite an introverted person. I have little need for human interaction, and most of the time merely going out in public satisfies that need. Sure, I have people I see on a semi-regular basis: the help at the photo lab where I process my film, the folks at the other photo lab across town where I make my prints, the tellers at the bank where I manage my money. My interactions with these people are purely business, and I’d honestly have it no other way.

The other obvious thing about me is my love of photography. I’ve told everybody from family members to cashiers at thrift stores about my obsession, and I think it must be the worst-kept secret about me next to my love of the Denver Broncos. By comparison, my favourite operating system might as well be a state secret — hardly anybody knows about my adoration of the Debian Project. (I’m kind of a nerd.) Because of the fact that I process quite a bit of film, the lads and lasses at the photo lab know that I love shooting the stuff, and I’ve learned more about photography by shooting film in the past six months than I learned in years of digital photography.

One of the things I’ve learned is that I really dislike taking pictures of people. Sure, I’ll do it — when word spreads that you’re handy with a camera, you end up being the semi-official family photographer — but that doesn’t mean I like it. No, I favour pictures of anything but people, and I have discovered that I like shooting four increasingly specific things:

1. Landscapes in the Appalachian Mountains, specifically the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina
2. Water
3. Wildflowers
4. Cityscapes without people

It’s kind of like my increasingly niche hobbies: I enjoy video games, but only on Sega consoles or the original Xbox. I listen to radio, but only medium- and shortwave. I watch sports, but only American football. The list goes on. (If this progresses, then by the time I’m 60 I’ll enjoy skydiving, but only naked during a new moon in the autumn months of odd-numbered years.)

Communal Emptiness

It was Ansel Adams who said that there are two people in every photograph: the photographer and the viewer. That’s one of many dicta to which I subscribe as a photographer, and I find that it has served me eminently well thus far in my career. As far as people-free street photography goes, I think my first influences in this area were the shots by Elena Filatova and others who dared to take cameras into the ruins of Pripyat, site of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. Of course, the lack of people in exposures made in Pripyat is completely involuntary, since nothing kills the mood quite like a catastrophic release of radiation into the atmosphere, but as art the Pripyat photos are quite instructive.

But Knoxville isn’t Pripyat; more than 180,000 people live here and on any given day, at least a handful of them will probably turn up at Volunteer Landing, which happens to be my second-favourite place to take pictures within city limits. (The UT campus is my favourite.)

This style of street photography, for me, started out as a way for me to explore a place quietly, namely Volunteer Landing. My prime concern at the time was selling images with identifiable people in them, since I didn’t want to have to collect releases, disburse royalties, or any of the other formalities attached to selling people pictures. I also wanted to experiment with the square crop. The square experiment turned out to be fruitless because I dislike square compositions.

I also find a neat dichotomy between the solitude of these scenes and the perception of Americans, and especially Southerners, as inveterate talkers. Even I will talk your ear off in the right circumstances, but as a general rule I’m not an overly talkative person and I view talkativeness as a negative trait, mostly because some people really don’t know when to shut up.

Perhaps the larger goal of photography sans people is much easier to grok: to show the viewer what a given place is like without the visual clutter of crowds of people possibly distracting from the message of the place. As silly as it may sound, I think Garfield Minus Garfield, a webcomic that’s exactly what it sounds like, might be an inspiration here. By removing the lasagna-addled feline from Jim Davis’s original strips, a completely different picture is painted, one of a Jon Arbuckle grappling with depression and existential angst. Photography has been invaluable in dealing with my own depression, and I think the challenge of photographing public spaces with no people has been rather liberating.

“Lonesome Tree,” above, represents that essence pretty well: it shows off the Smoky Mountains as they are in the morning when the weather is nice in the autumn. It is an incredibly bucolic place at its prettiest, and it can be downright dangerous at its worst. Cities are the same, but in a different way, or more accurately for different reasons.

The landscape is seldom a humorous place, but cities allow us to let our hair down, as in this exposure here, which is suspiciously incomplete just like the Volunteers’ efforts at football this past season. It does require some background to explain the joke, but that’s exactly what this exposure is: a joke. The joke is the beginning of a dialogue, and the dialogue is what makes photography social. In a picture with no people, we find each other, and in each other, we find ourselves.

Presentation

When you take a photo of a person, chances are they are aware of the camera’s presence. Cartier-Bresson worked very hard to get candid photos, going so far as to cover his beloved Leica with flat black paint and vinyl tape so it’d be less noticeable. The camera industry has even gone so far as to produce lenses with spherical aberrations in them to produce soft focus and hence more flattering portraits in-camera. I think that’s a load of steaming hot bunk. When I see a picture of a person, I’m culturally conditioned to expect a flawless rendition of that person at his or her best, but as an artist and a photographer, it’s not what I want to see. I’d much more quickly gravitate toward a picture of, say, Taylor Swift with every blemish intact, a few hairs out of place, maybe a stray wrinkle or two in her shirt. That’s the lady she sees when she looks in the mirror, and it’s what you or I would see were we to meet her in the flesh.

The camera, lens, and sensor do not lie. That is why I favour photography over other art forms. When I see a portrait, I want to see the person, not the retouching. Below is a picture of yours truly, straight out of the camera, looking basically the same way as I look today — which is fair enough; I handed my Dad the camera to take this picture in mid-November 2014.

The camera doesn’t lie, but then again it does. On my 500px profile, I say that all photographers are liars, and that all photographs are lies. As loudly as I champion the unfailing honesty of a camera lens, I just as loudly proclaim that a camera sees reality only according to its own perception; it has but one lens, and a finite amount of resolution. We humans have two lenses, two sensors, and a fantastically powerful computer behind them that allows us to see and interpret things with far greater accuracy than any manmade camera or computer. The world is not ultra-saturated outside of Velvia 50, and the world is not monochrome outside of Pan F Plus and HP5 Plus.