Black Butte Accidental
I’ve been taking photos of Black Butte up near Mt Shasta (California) for several decades now. This is one of my faves — mostly because Black Butte’s barely more than a distant bit player in it, and because it looks more like a painting or a book illustration than a real photo. Or maybe it’s a cartoon — it just doesn’t look real, as several people have told me. Neither the shape of Black Butte itself — which looks like a quickly-drawn parody of a mountain — nor the winding road going inexorably towards it, look real; and the colors don’t look right to many people, either (especially if they’ve never visited the area). The peak itself looks like something the wicked witch lives on; the road something to be tripped along expectantly or with a sense of dread. And those colors….
But it’s an un-manipulated photo of a real place, taken only a month or two ago on one of the backroads in the area. That light — both harsh and diffuse — plagued my other photo attempts all day by washing out the foreground contrast on everything; but for this shot it works. It brings out the weird greeny-yellow of the ground at this time of year (transitioning between the green of the rainy season and the gold of the dry), made more saturated by the unexpected short burst of rain that happened a few minutes before I took this.
And that sky… I used to get really irritated by grey skies in my California photos (I’d had enough of them in London), and I’d really wanted a nice sunny typical blue-sky shot here; but instead I ended up with a textured sky that’s far more interesting than that omnipresent California Blue. I think it’s part of an unconscious effort on my part lately to start using the sky as a texture (when I can) rather than a plain color. I’ve certainly noticed that my favorite photos of California from the last few years all have what I used to think of as un-Californian or simply annoying skies in them. I’ve gone from color fields to textures, I guess (and it’s taken me decades).
I didn’t see any of this when I took the photo, of course — I just saw geometry (all those curves, straight lines, and rough triangles), and textured surfaces. So I stopped the car to take a snapshot with my little point and shoot before driving on impatiently towards my main objective (which didn’t work photographically at all that day, of course). I got back into the car thinking I’d come back with my real camera some time later when the weather’s better and do a proper version. But (of course) I never did, and maybe never will (we shall see). And a snapshot is all it really is, but it’s definitely one of the more evocative photos I’ve taken of the Mt Shasta area over the years, despite my putting no effort or insight into it at all at the time, and despite it not really being about the photo’s ostensible subject.
