Sioux Passage Park
I drove out to Sioux Passage Park on Saturday.
It was a cool day, late in the afternoon, and the lowering sun was masked by a thin layer of cloud. The park was not empty, but not enjoying the usual Sunday afternoon crowds a warmer day would have brought out.
As I often do, I carried two cameras. One with black and white film, the other digital.
I’m not quite sure why I do it this way. There is no reason why I cannot convert my digital pictures to black and white — indeed, you have a lot of control over how you want that b&w image to look by processing it in Lightroom or some similar program.
Nonetheless, I find myself valuing the photographs I get with monochrome film in a different way. It’s little to do with the overall appearance; I can approximate closely the look of any black and white film with Lightroom. No, it’s to do both with process and with the result. Film photography is chemical, the result is a little piece of plastic with a silver grain image.
As much as I use and like the results of bits and bytes churning electronically in a little (or large) box and displaying the results on a glowing screen -including this one- I like just as much the results of mixing up powders and liquids, washing, rinsing, drying. Ending up peering through a strip of little rectangles held up to the light to see pictures.
Light — a fleeting moment caught in tiny pits of photosensitive semi-conducting material and translated into an electrical signal or by a photosensitive molecule of silver halide and converted into a ion of silver metal.
Light — a fleeting moment caught by our eyes and processed both photo-chemically and electrically by our cone and rod cells and our optic nerve. I like that. We see in a more complex and integrated way than any of our technologies have yet designed. What we record are memories of that moment, a sophisticated and labile blend of visual impressions and emotions.
A photograph — well, that’s a tiny part of that complexity. Simply a record of the light itself. How well or faithfully it is captured is largely irrelevant. A painting is far more representative image of what we see. Mostly, depending on the skill of the painter, because it is a far better record of the emotions of the moment. As painting moved into abstraction, emotion and emotional form became more important than realism. Many photographers have a problem with this, I think. Some purveyors of the art are so obsessed with technical realism that they fail to grasp that an image is far more than what it shows; instead they remain craftspeople or technicians — highly competent in the practicalities of photography but stunted as artists. Ironically, any student of photography will be aware that realism is far from the only practice; photographers have always manipulated their images to a greater or lesser extent, with whole movements such as the 19th and early 20th century practice of Pictorialism devoted to a radical reworking of a photographic negative or print. Today, Photoshop artists are similarly creative.
My own work remains realist, and constrained as such. I choose this. Instead, I rely on the subject and how I frame and color it to hopefully increase depth and interest. Like everything else I do, sometimes this works well, sometimes not.
Much of any success I have depends on the right circumstance. The light at Sioux Passage Park was moody and involving; not wholly dark nor wholly bright. It was diffuse and without shadow and all colors were muted.
The pale light of a memorial perhaps. This was, after all, Armistice Day, November 11, but those who might remember Sioux Passage Park as ancestral home were centuries gone and few of their descendants were likely to be involved in European wars. Native American tribes of the Woodland and Mississippian eras used these river lands as camp grounds; Sioux Passage Park is named as such for good reason. But no reservation was set aside here; the land was too valuable to those who supplanted them.
Instead, what we have are boat ramps, park benches, playing fields and frisbee golf. And the wide Missouri River.
The river is king. Everything thing here exists because the river allows it — and sometimes it revokes that permission. The banks are piled high with fully grown tree trunks deposited during high water. The low water dam you see in these pictures is far more often deep beneath the water.
To see so much felt like a gift. An unveiling of the land, all the more striking because of the veiled light illuminating it. I looked around me and thought of abstract painting and the geometries than inform much of their structure, often imperceptibly so. Here, the river was showing its underlying structure, the ragged bones of dams and the yielding skin of silt and sand, all, to a greater or lesser extent, revealed in their impermanence. The water makes its own mark, a fearless artist with a broad brush.
As the light dimmed, it grew colder and felt bleaker. Time to leave. I had taken a full roll of film; I did not expect so much. Sometimes what defines a beautiful day transcends your assumptions. Or, as I thought on this day of memory, the souls of those long gone chose to come close to the living. Revealing, perhaps, something of a deep wisdom that remains hidden and unseen on brighter days.
Whatever it was, I came away with a sense of peace that I had not sought nor expected.
