This is a picnic table—an old one, with lichen on it—taken from a standing position on the bench attached to it. I got obsessed at a point with textures and then what post-processing could do to bring them out. I was thinking ahead to work where I might collage or make layered compositions in Photoshop.
The first thing that I remember happening to me in a year of intense photographic dabbling is simply that I started to see light in a completely new way. That was a spiritual experience as well as an empirical one. Then shape and texture. The surfaces of things had such individuality, such variety. Every picnic table I looked at on the day I took this was different: old and new, a paradise of lichen or sterile but scarred by sun and rain, smooth from usage, so lost at the edge of the woods that it was one with the forest.
Then I found it was still impossible to make everything I saw appear in the camera or in the photo. Then I realized that was undesirable anyway, and I started seeing in the image things I hadn’t seen in the world. Sometimes things that I couldn’t see otherwise.
Then I stopped for a while. I sift now, as historians will, through an archive, one of my own making. I don’t know what to make of some of what I find, other than once again I’m seeing in new ways.