Different Brain, Different Eyes
A recent call for entries of seaside landscapes from the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain reminded me of a lonely, somewhat morose motor trip on the California coast. It was almost thirty years ago, and I was driving northward from San Francisco. I needed cheering up. Lovely views of the ocean improved my mood, and I began to relax. Somewhere above the point where the Russian River empties into the sea, I saw two men standing on a roadside cliff, each next to a very impressive large wooden tripod bearing a heavy view camera. One of the men was still hooded in black cloth.
I drove off the road and parked behind their vehicle. A trifle self-consciously, I retrieved a light aluminum traveling tripod and an old Nikon film camera from the trunk. The real photographers were just packing up, and one turned to me and said, “Don’t trouble. We’ve been trying for an hour. There’s nothing here.” Not fighting words, but a challenge. I waited politely for them to depart, and walked to the edge and looked down.
Within the next five minutes I made these four photographs:
A few months later, Image Magazine, a then Sunday supplement to the San Francisco Chronicle, issued a call for entries. For the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of California Highway One, they were seeking pictures made of, on, or from, the coastal road. I submitted the only vertical of those images, knowing that the winning entry would become a cover. I won first prize. The award consisted of two round-trip airline tickets from San Francisco to Hong Kong, a week in a luxury hotel, and gifts from the Hong Kong Tourist Association.
As my wife and I unwrapped the elegant fruit basket, uncorked the Champagne in our Lee Gardens room, and discovered the hotel stationery imprinted with my name, I wondered whether I would ever see those two photographers again. I so wanted to discuss their notion that “there’s nothing here.” I thought of them several times that week, as Karine and I rode the ferry to Kowloon, had High Tea in the glittering colonial Peninsula Hotel (the white-uniformed band played “Love is a Many-Splendored Thing”), and consumed good seafood in inexpensive out-of-the-way restaurants patronized by locals. I thought of them while looking at the splendid views of the bay from Victoria Peak, and again when we took ferries to the nearby islands, hiking across rural Lamma, descending from a steep hill in the dusk, just in time to catch the boat.
I’ll admit to five percent schadenfreude. The remainder comes from lessons I learned when occasionally I taught photography in several Bay Area colleges. I’d draw a chalk circle, about ten feet in diameter, and ask students to step inside, and photograph whatever they wished. When we viewed the results the following week, it seemed as though each image might have been made in a different place, at a different time, from very different sensibilities.
Isn’t it wonderful to enjoy such dramatic relearning that what appears to our limited senses is usually quite different from what others experience?_______________________________________________________________
©Raphael Shevelev. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reprint is granted provided the article, copyright and byline are printed intact, with all links visible and made live if distributed in electronic form.
Raphael Shevelev is a California based fine art photographer, digital artist and writer on photography and the creative process. He is known for the wide and experimental range of his art, and an aesthetic that emphasizes strong design, metaphor and story. His photographic images can be seen and purchased at www.raphaelshevelev.com/galleries.
