Conspiracy of Cartographers

Link to Kickstarter campaign here.

Hello! And welcome back to us all! I’ve been a bit absent, haven’t I? There’s a completely reasonable and logical explanation for this. Writer’s block. I’m sure I have things to say about something, but I just don’t have the words to say them. I don’t know why.

I’ll sit down to write or to come up with ideas, and there’s just nothing there. Nothing in my head. I can talk and talk about various things – I was just on the Negative Influence podcast and had a bunch of stuff to say! You should check it out. It was a great conversation! But when it’s just me and the keyboard or me and a pen, I’m rather empty.

Sure, I could push through it and just say whatever b******t, but I’m not really in the business of “making content,” so when I don’t have something to say, I’d much rather just not say anything.

Which means that I have something to say, doesn’t it?

Well, I’ll say it.

There’s a Book

For the past few years, I’ve focused a lot of my photography on small, often abandoned, cemeteries through the West and Midwest. I’ve finally decided to put together a book of some of these photos.

The book is titled: Where the Plow Cannot Find Them. And right now, if you’re listening to this in mid-November of 2025, I have a Kickstarter campaign going to help release the book.

While I’ve had writer’s block, I haven’t had photobook block. The thing is ready to go to print; I just need it to find an audience. And that’s where you come in. If you’re willingly listening to this, then there must be something about my photography or words that you like or can at least tolerate. Thank you for that. And fortunately, this book has both.

So here I sit, still wracked with writer’s block, trying to come up with something to say that’s more than “hey, buy my book, I bet you’ll like it.

I guess I can tell you a little about the book itself.

This book contains 75 photographs of gravesites and 75 stories about the photographs and the people buried there. I am based out of Washington, and so many of them come from this state. Others come from Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Utah, Wyoming, and Oregon. Future books will feature more and different states, but Washington will always likely have a special focus for me (if for no other reason than it’s easier).

It is the culmination of thousands of miles, hundreds of cemeteries, countless photographs, and months of research. It is also (hopefully) the first volume of many.

Over my years of traveling and exploring the backroads and towns of the West and Midwest, I continually came across cemeteries. Sometimes I’d stop and look around, maybe take a few pictures. But as time went on, I stayed a little longer, I looked at the names, the dates, and imagined stories. Finally, I brought along my 4x5 camera, and the cemeteries became my main subject.

My interest started as something on the surface. The stones themselves, as well as their settings, were interesting. The decay, the preservation, the way they lay upon the land, and how they sometimes sank into it, all caught my eye.

When I returned home and wished to share a few, I was at a loss for what to say about them. This is where the research came into things. After that, I had stories, sometimes detailed and sprawling, other times hardly anything more than names.

Why Pioneers?

Most people who enjoy walking, exploring, and photographing cemeteries visit the large ones, the famous ones. Cemeteries like Laurel Hill in Philadelphia or Hollywood Forever in Los Angeles get most of the visits. There’s Savannah’s Bonaventure Cemetery and Trinity Church in New York, as well. Their beauty as parks cannot be overstated.

However, the cemeteries I visit have mostly been forgotten by all but locals and the few family members that remain. They are small, often unkempt, and along quiet backroads or in farmers’ fields.

They contain the graves of pioneers, poor folks, and the working class. Anyone who could afford to be buried somewhere else usually was. These are the cemeteries of ghost towns and farm communities.

Most were founded in the same way: A few pioneer families established homesteads on various parcels of land. Before long, a family member would die. Maybe it was the grandfather who came along. Often it was one of the children. Then, one of the farmers would give a small piece of their land to make into a cemetery. The community would grow and expand, and the cemetery would expand along with it.

Then, finally, the pioneers would move on, selling their land to someone who was staying, and they’d leave their dead behind.

I frequent and enjoy pioneer cemeteries over those in cities or towns. Many are abandoned and deserve a little recognition. The people who are memorialized on the stones I photograph have stories, and they deserve to be remembered.

These pioneer cemeteries are often secluded and desolate. I live most of my life in a large city full of far more people than necessary. When I leave the city, I search for solitude. Few places provide more solitude than a pioneer cemetery in the middle of nowhere.

The Mission

I’ve spent so many hours photographing these small cemeteries. They’ve grown to be almost a second home for me. I feel comfortable in them, I feel a sort of mission, like this is my calling (if callings even exist).

This writer’s block thing often comes hand-in-hand with photographer’s block (or whatever we’re calling it). I haven’t picked up a camera since August. I’m always okay with this. Creativity comes when it comes, and if I force it, then photography ends up feeling like a job rather than something I love.

While I don’t miss photography when I’m not feeling creative enough to shoot something, I do miss cemeteries. I could go to one of the city cemeteries in Seattle, but there’s just no character to them. There’s no soul there. City cemeteries contain massive and beautiful stone monuments. There are thousands upon thousands of sculpted headstones, each worth its own photograph. The layout, the planning, and the landscaping of these cemeteries are all works of art. But what I long for is that small pioneer cemetery, overrun with grasses, down a lonely dirt road.

There are places that I miss, that I long for, when I’m so many miles away from them. I miss my hometown, of course. I miss the coulees and sagebrush of eastern Washington, I miss the prairies of Kansas. And, maybe most of all, I miss these abandoned cemeteries.

We often take photographs to remember a time or a person. We want to capture a sliver of the feeling we had in the moment. This is one of the reasons I photograph cemeteries. I love them so much - I don’t even have fancy words to describe it. It’s just a raw feeling down in my gut.

I put this book together for me. I understand that a book of graves isn’t really for everyone. These hours spent among the burials might be a source of calm for me, but it might not be easily translatable.

When I photograph a gravesite, my focus isn’t on making it palatable for the viewer. I’m not concerned about what will get likes on Instagram or look good as a print on a wall. My only concern is to capture how I’m feeling. This is true, of course, for every photo I take. But it’s somehow more true with cemetery photography.

I know that most of the other photos I take – the ones of small towns or abandoned homes – can be and are enjoyed by a bunch of folks. Get me in front of an old house with a dark sky, and people will actually pay money for that print (this actually happened). But the grave of some child who died of smallpox in 1890? That’s not such an easy sell.

But that’s where I’d rather be with my camera.

The Stories

When I’m in the cemetery, I have almost no sense of a story. There’s just names and dates. Sometimes I can piece a little narrative together (like when a mother died in childbirth), but the details must come later.

This book contains stories for each of the photos, for each of the graves, and the people memorialized on the stones. The research for these stories was necessarily rudimentary.

My main source was, of course, findagrave.com. There, a user community photographs and fills in details of those buried in nearly every cemetery. Often they include death certificates, obituaries, and lists of family members.

My other source is the plethora of old newspapers available on newspapers.com. Sometimes there’s not much to learn. Other times, there’s far more than I can use. Usually, it falls somewhere in the middle.

When I take the photo, I never know what the story will hold. Obviously, it’s almost always a sad ending. But I do try to stay centered on their lives rather than their deaths.

I’ve shared two of these stories on Substack already. In the episode titled “However It Happened, James Was Dead.” Both came out of the cemetery at Spring Ranch, Nebraska, and both stories are retold in full in this book.

I also give as full an account as possible of Poker Jim, a cowboy from North Dakota. Oh, that involves a blizzard and a frozen corpse crashing a poker game. You’ll have to read it in the book; it’s a fun little tale that might even be true.

And while it has some longer stories, each photograph is accompanied by a quick little tale.

For instance, there’s Frankie Snyder, the child of a family originally from my home state.

Frankie Snyder was born in March 1879 in Oregon. Her father, Allen Porter Snyder (AP to his friends), was, like many Snyders, born in Pennsylvania.

At the age of 32, he married a woman with the delightful name of Missouri Officer. Friends called her Zude.

According to Zude’s obituary, she was “born in a tent on the plains, August 13, 1845, at a place known as Ash Hollow, Wyoming,” though it was actually Three Island Crossing in Idaho. Either way, she was born on the Oregon Trail as her parents and their eight (now nine) children emigrated from Missouri. They were part of a wagon train led by Stephen Meek, and were part of the “Lost Wagon Train”.

Zude and AP settled on a farm near Dayville, Oregon, and together had six daughters. In Zude’s obituary, Frankie is mentioned as having “died after arriving at the age of womanhood.”

Frankie died at the age of 19 in 1898.

Curiously, one of the Snyder girls regained the Officer name when she married her first cousin, Early Officer, after divorcing her first husband.

There are 74 other stories in the book, some longer, some shorter.

The Four Things

If you’re of a certain age, you might remember the Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete & Pete. If not, just bear with me. Pete & Pete was created by a fellow named Will McRobb. In interviews, he talks about a bit of his philosophy when creating a story. It must be all of these four things: Sad, Funny, Strange, and Beautiful.

When I heard him talk about it, I realized that, while he put it much more succinctly than I ever could, this is how I try to work as well. With every book and zine I produce, I try to make sure that there’s a bit of sadness in them, a bit of humor. I want to show the strangeness of where I explore, and its relentless beauty. These four elements are essential to my work, and I wanted to make sure that my new book has them as well.

These are stories about people buried in forgotten cemeteries. They are almost automatically sad. There’s really no way to avoid sadness. But because the sadness is so obvious, the other things – Funny, Strange, and Beautiful – become even more necessary. Fortunately, humans are pretty hilarious. Also, there’s the Poker Jim story. Really, I’m excited for you to read it.

As for strange, that’s certainly a matter of opinion. I came across a cemetery in North Dakota called the Sons of Jacob Cemetery. It’s essentially the last remnant of a Jewish pioneer colony. The stone I chose to focus on isn’t a stone at all, but a tin box with words in both English and Hebrew punched into the sides, probably with a hammer and nail. It is the grave of Joseph Adelman, and the entire Sons of Jacob story is just strange. You’ll see.

That leaves beauty. To me, it’s all beautiful. But even those a bit creeped out by graves can admit that the stones themselves are beautiful. Some are masterfully carved by sculptors who were at the peak of their craftsmanship. Others are made of cheap concrete with the names and maybe the dates scratched into them. But there’s one monument that always comes to mind as a piece of outsider art.

Who it memorializes is lost to time. No name remains on it. Its base is just an upside-down wash basin, a blank marble footstone bolted to a post rises out of it, and a short plank of wood is fastened above that. The whole thing is topped with a rusty iron cross. When a loved one dies and you haven’t two pennies to rub together, a memorial of some kind can still be fashioned. The love felt for the deceased will be obvious, and there’s something endlessly beautiful about that.

Well, Let’s Talk Gear, I Guess.

I don’t really enjoy talking about gear. I can hardly even remember which lenses I use. I have to look up which specific model of camera I shoot with. These things (or at least the names of these things) aren’t important to me. I just don’t care.

That said, my camera is a Chamonix 45F-2. It’s a great camera, I recommend it highly. I shoot with a variety of lenses. There’s an old brass 27cm lens by Steinheil. It’s an antiplanet, which means something. I also have a 150mm Schneider Xenar, which I’m still getting used to. I’ve got a 90mm Schneider-Kreuznach for the wider shots. Mostly, I guess it’s German lenses. Not sure why. It just sort of happened that way. And yes, I had to look up every single one of these, and even as I write this sentence, I have already forgotten what they were. So let’s move on.

This is a large format camera. My photography, especially in cemeteries, would be so much easier if I’d shoot with a smaller camera. Even my Mamiya RB67 (the greatest medium format camera ever made) would be easier. But that’s not really the point.

While I’ve photographed cemeteries using 35mm and 120 format cameras, all of these photos were taken with a 4x5 field camera. This forces and entices me to slow down my process, to think specifically about what I want to photograph and why.

A 4x5 camera is a bulky thing. For mine, a tripod is essential. This requires lugging a case full of equipment through a cemetery gate and to whatever I want to shoot. Sometimes it’s hot or humid, sometimes the wind is whipping, and the dust is blowing. Sometimes it’s cold or raining. One cemetery introduced me to the yellow star thistle, and I can’t express how much I hate that invasive species. There is no shortcut, no quick way around these obstacles, only made more intense with a large format camera.

Each of the photos in the book was shot on X-ray film – film that was originally designed and manufactured for use by radiologists. Though most of them long since moved on to digital, some (especially veterinarians) still use film - though most of the companies making it, such as Kodak and Agfa, no longer do. Fuji, possibly the last remaining manufacturer, will likely not be in the game much longer.

And so I’m using a dying medium within an art form thought of as dead to photograph final resting places. There’s something poetic (or at least coincidental) about this.

Practically speaking, X-ray film is less expensive than regular film. I buy 8x10 or 10x12 sheets and cut them down to 4x5, thus saving even more money.

Photographically, the emulsion on the film I use is sensitive to only blue light. Most black & white film available today is sensitive to the full spectrum. Others, known as “orthochromatic” are sensitive to blue and green. But my go-to emulsion is blue-sensitive-only.

The early photographic emulsions used in wet plate and tin type photography were also only sensitive to light within the blue spectrum. This gives the film I use a similar sensitivity and thus a similar look.

Radiology film has emulsion on both sides (on regular film, it’s just on one side). The original reason it was manufactured this way was to cut down on the amount of radiation the patient would be exposed to. For me, this means that I can’t develop the sheets in a tank or in anything that touches the film. Instead, I must develop the sheets in trays lined with a glass bottom so as not to scratch the emulsion. I can, however, do this under the red safelight in a darkroom. I use the Ilford darkroom tent that I’ve set up at the printshop where I work. It’s far from ideal, but my options are limited.

The Book Itself

The book will be hardback. It’s my first hardback book, and I’m both excited and anxious about it. It will be 8x10 and 188 pages. It’s also my longest book thus far.

Because I have a hard time leaving well enough alone, I am going to attempt to screenprint a dust jacket for the book. I’m not totally sure I can pull this off, so I’m not promising anything. I’m trying some new techniques, and if they work, then great. If they don’t, well, hardcover books don’t need a dust jacket, but it would be nice.

As for the price, it’s important to me that it’s as affordable as I can possibly make it. I’m asking $40 for it. This also makes it my most expensive book. I have some incredibly mixed feelings about this, but I’m basically breaking even. Almost. I really just want this book to exist. If nobody else wanted one, I’d print a single copy just for me.

The Kickstarter campaign ends on December 9th. If all this sounds fine with you, if it sounds like something you’d like to check out, consider picking up a copy before the campaign ends. And thank you so much if you do.

You can find a link in the show notes or just search Where The Plow Cannot Find Them on Kickstarter.

Oh, and about the name. It’s actually a bastardized line from the novel O Pioneers! by Willa Cather.

The winter twilight was fading. The sick man heard his wife strike a match in the kitchen, and the light of a lamp glimmered through the cracks of the door. It seemed like a light shining far away. He turned painfully in his bed and looked at his white hands, with all the work gone out of them. He was ready to give up, he felt. He did not know how it had come about, but he was quite willing to go deep under his fields and rest, where the plow could not find him. He was tired of making mistakes. He was content to leave the tangle to other hands....

I took in the Evergreen State Fair in Snohomish County, Washington, last week. I walked the midway, avoided the games, and ate too many fries and too much cotton candy. There’s always some mixed feelings swimming around in my head about the animal exhibits. I avoided the cows, but took in the sheep. Saw a bunch of horses, and rolled my eyes at the dogs. I followed half a dozen “cat” signs with arrows only to discover that the cats were somehow not there that day.

Each of these stalls and pens had various awards and ribbons attached to them. Some won for showmanship, others won for driving; there were ribbons and plaques, banners and rosettes for a dizzying array of categories and classes.

While the baby goats were adorable (I booped noses with one!), and the Clydesdales were intimidating and majestic, the sprawling mass of other things that were judged was a bit overstimulating.

In the Arts & Crafts hall were ceramics, metalworking, various miniatures, and some diaramas. The quilts took up most of the room of the sewing hall, and they were impressive feats of bed-size, hand-sewn artistry.

This sat next to your very traditional county fair food: pies, cakes, breads, and jams. There were also homemade beverages and some of the best-looking produce I’ve ever seen.

Each of these items won some sort of award. Most had blue “First Place” stickers on them, while others had ribbons for “Best in Class.” Some ribbons made no sense at all to an outsider (Reserve Champion? Sweepstakes?), but it seemed like everyone did really well. Everyone got something. Good job!

And finally, an entire side of the huge exhibition hall was dedicated to photography. While I don’t know much about pigs or rabbits, bell peppers or apple pies, I do know a bit of something about photography.

The age groups for the photographers ranged from the youngest (ages four through nine) to senior citizens. There were also categories for Master Level and Advanced, though those designations were vague and essentially unexplainable.

So how do the judges at the Evergreen State Fair judge things like Aunt Ethel’s blueberry pie? Does the rabbit with the fuzziest tail win? The cow with the best moo? And, most importantly for us, how do they judge a photograph?

I don’t want to get lost in the weeds here, but technically, they use one of several systems that take into account expected standards (called the Danish Method). Sometimes they will judge on a curve (this is the American Method). There’s nothing objective or set in stone here. It’s really just the opinion of the judges. It’s a mood, a vibe.

Most of this is pretty low stakes. It’s bragging rights and maybe $25. There are generally no entry fees for county fairs (except for livestock), so the risk/reward is almost nonexistent. Of course, that does make one wonder why we do it at all. The way these contests are judged is nearly random. It’s a lottery. So why do we insist upon it mattering?

The Photography Exhibition

This wasn’t my first time visiting a county fair photography contest. Here, you’ll find photos of every kind taken by folks who are just happy to have their photo up in public, where it can be seen.

Like with the cows, the cakes, and quilts, these photographs had been judged, and ribbons and stickers adorned them all. You could win best in your category (and there are a lot of categories), best in your age group, best in show, and even sweepstakes (which still made no sense to me).

All of this was confusing since it seemed like nearly every photograph won something, and usually, 1st place. I asked the woman overseeing the photographs, but she just explained it to me just as I explained it to you, which solved nothing for me and will now solve nothing for you. But that’s fine.

Competition is nothing new. Our drive to compete for fun existed before humans, neanderthals, and even great apes playing throwing games (where you toss something and see who can toss it the farthest).

I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with that; whether it’s a foot race or drag racing, I get it. Sure, it can be taken too far, but seeing if your ‘69 Chevy with a 396, Fuelie heads, and a Hurst on the floor can outrun the other guy’s on the quarter mile is just good American fun. Hell, I used to watch the Amish drag racing their buggies. As humans, we just love to race stuff.

And the whole thing is very simple: if you are quicker, you win. There’s really no debate; it’s purely objective. The “judging” makes sense. The same goes for most games. From football to roller derby, the team that scores the most points wins.

At the fair, when I asked about the photography judges and whether they were local professionals, one of the volunteers told me that all the photos were judged “by Rick.” "Is Rick a photographer?” I asked.

“Oh, he does many things, maybe he takes some pictures too,” came the reply. She then told me that Rick wasn’t here now, but he’s “probably in the pig barn, just look for the guy in the overalls.”

I did visit the pig barn, but none of the overall-wearing fellows were Rick, but all of this got me thinking: Just what the hell are we doing?

Incredibly Short History of Photography Contests

Judged competitions at county fairs date back to the early 1800s (and likely well before that in some shape or form). When photography became more accessible to the masses in the late 1800s, many fairs folded them into the competitions like so much Crisco into pie crust.

In 1896, Charles Emsley and Dr. Lombard were the “lucky ones in the photography contest” at the Western Montana Fair in Missoula. A local paper reported that “Mr. Emsley will wear the gold medal till next fair.”

But county fairs never had a monopoly on photography contests. The La Crosse Camera Company out of Wisconsin held a competition in 1895, advertising that they were giving away $1000 in gold to the winners. $200 for first place, $100 for second, $30 for third, and so on. [$1000 in 1895 is about $40,000 in today’s money.] The only catch was that you had to take the picture with one of their cameras (the La Crosse camera was a 4x5 box camera). The ad ran in papers all across the Midwest and East Coast (though a winner seems never to have been announced).

Even newspapers got in on the act. In 1957, the New England Associated Press awarded its “Best in Show” prize to Charles Merrill for his picture entitled “But ‘Twas Too Late,” showing two men removing the body of a drowning victim from the ocean.

Since then, it’s pretty much been the same – low stakes, low rewards (apart from the gold that possibly never existed) and essentially bragging rights.

Juried Shows Are Just Photo Contests

Of course, photo contests aren’t the only photo contests. There are also juried shows, which are a little bit different, though still very much photo contests. Typically, juried shows cost money to enter, and the selection process is more rigorous. In the end, however, the awards are typically small, and it still comes down to bragging rights.

Yet, juried shows are held in much higher esteem than county fairs, which is why they’re called “juried shows” and not “photography contests.” Juried shows didn’t start with photography; they actually come from the art world.

Still, they seem to have been amplified by the art schools of the 1920s, and were not always received positively. In 1929, the Chicago Art Institute held a juried show whose jurors received so much ire and criticism over their curation that they considered obtaining police protection since the public was, according to the Chicago Tribune, “sufficiently upset to fall upon the offending members eye, tooth, and nail.”

While the paper was almost certainly speaking in hyperbolics (after all, this was Chicago during the era of Al Capone), the jurors, as today, were acting as gatekeepers, and the artists were fed up with it.

If you ask galleries that put on juried shows, they extoll such benefits to the artists as networking, credibility, and the ever-important exposure. This is the same kind of exposure that musicians rightly balk at when offered low or no-paying gigs.

And to be clear, a juried show isn’t just a low-paying gig; it’s a gig the artist pays for. Each juried show has entry fees, typically around $25 to $50. That naturally doesn’t secure you a spot; it merely puts you in the running. The competition here isn’t just with the winning, but with the entering.

One of the “best” bits of advice given to artists considering submission to juried shows is to avoid experimental work or work that the juror doesn’t like. Here, you are essentially trying to please a single important person rather than your typical audience (or even yourself). What the jurors want or enjoy is the only thing that matters.

Gatekeeping and Democracy

With the advent of digital photography and social media, photography was heralded as finally being democratized. This was largely true. Apart from algorithms controlling what we see, the barrier to entry, even for film photography, is incredibly low. Like in the early 1900s, anyone could pick up a camera. But now, anyone can get their work seen by dozens and even thousands of people who would otherwise never see it.

This growth allows not only for novices to quickly learn their craft, but also for experimentation and innovation. These are the two things juried shows purposely dissuade, guiding the photographer to submit their “strongest” work, which here means work that will be strong enough to beat out the work of other photographers. Immediately, the vision of a strong photograph roundhouse kicking another dances through my head, and while I’m woefully overanalyzing the language here, the whole thing is a fairly absurd idea.

But keep in mind that everything is subject to the whims and tastes of the juror keeping that gate. The whole process can be stifling in some pretty important ways, urging the artist to be reactive rather than creative.

When photo zines started coming into their own a while back, there was some disagreement over whether this was a good or bad thing. The upside was that now anyone could put out a well-printed book of their photography. The downside was that now anyone could put out a well-printed book of their photography. Gone were the gatekeepers! And those who wished them to be gone rejoiced, while those who relied upon them were disgruntled.

The Search

If you require or insist upon gatekeepers selecting your art for you, it just feels kind of lazy, sort of boring. Finding art and photography that you want to see can be an intensive search. Social media certainly helps, but it requires hours and days, even years of combing through photographs that don’t quite hold your interest.

When I walked through the photography exhibit at the fair, most of the photos weren’t my thing. But there were some that caught my eye, made me smile, and spoke to me. I must have looked at a few hundred photos, finding only a handful that moved me, but it was worth it.

Over the many years that I’ve been on social media, I’ve scrolled by thousands upon thousands of photos that, while technically fine, did nothing for me. It is almost work searching for those that do. But it’s good, honest work. And when you stumble onto something you love, onto a photographer whose work fits so perfectly into your life, how can that not be worth all the effort?

If not for this democratisation, most of those “technically fine” pieces would still be around. It’s good work and appeals to a broad swath of the population (there’s nothing at all wrong with that). But opening up the field, lowering that barrier of entry, also allows innovation and experimentation. It allows for personality, for diversity, for differences to come through. A juried show (or really, any place that gatekeeps) is typically devoid of that on purpose.

As an aside, the Limelight Gallery in New York City was the first full-time photography gallery, opening in 1954. Helen Gee, the owner and curator, took 25% from any of the pieces sold. She held solo and group shows, though she didn’t dabble in the juried idea.

The job of galleries has always been to sell the work they show; it’s how they stay in business. Galleries also held juried shows, collecting money from the hopeful artists through submission fees.

The Absurdity of (Some) Competition

Just like how living in a capitalistic society makes it nearly impossible not to participate in a capitalistic society, it is nearly impossible to escape competition in art. In our normal lives, everything from news to movies to impending fascism competes for a large chunk of our brains, often stifling our creative drive. Making time to look at photos is seen as a luxury rather than essential to our growth as artists and humans.

And once we make that time, every photo we see is, in a way, competing with every other photo we see, whether we choose to view them that way or not. Of course, this isn’t real competition in the strictest sense, but it’s a very close cousin.

Competition is interwoven into every aspect of our culture and society. In researching this piece, I came across a fortuitous article in a 2013 issue of Psychology Today. “Has America Become Too Competitive?” asked the headline.

The author, Dr. Jim Taylor of the University of San Francisco, praised our competitive spirit. It gave us the space race, Nobel prizes, and clearly, we’re the best country on earth, right?

But he lamented that it might be getting a bit out of hand. In 2013, he warned that reality TV shows like Dancing with the Stars and American Idol were mainstreaming the idea that things we do for fun or for art should instead be a competition. He also lumped cooking in with that, asking, “Could there be any other activity more ill-suited for competition than cooking, which relies on the supremely idiosyncratic senses of taste and smell?”

In answer, he suggested poetry was probably a worse idea for competition. And yet, there are poetry competitions. Maybe they’re not on ESPN, but they somehow exist. He uses this to ask, “Why has America embraced competitiveness to the point of absurdity?”

And this was in 2013. Closing off the article, he wondered if this move towards absurd competitiveness might “coincide with a change in America’s values and priorities.” Now, in 2025, we can see that it has.

Political discourse has become our lives. The news cycle is constant. We are expected to understand and have fully formed opinions on everything immediately. And it truly is everything.

On top of that, our media crafts stories for us rather than reporting the facts. Lately, almost all of our media is capitulating to authoritarianism.

Our reaction as people, voters, artists, and citizens isn’t to sort it out and to have some kind of discourse to make our society better for everyone. Our only objective is to win. It’s not even about being right – we are living in a largely post-factual atmosphere now – it is simply and only about winning.

With winning comes power, but only for the already-powerful. For us, the regular folks just trying to survive, the win is merely for the sake of winning. Our love of absurd competition, especially reality TV, directly led to this.

‘Go Out and Beat Yesterday!’

I’m not saying that photography contests and juried shows lead to fascism. But I am saying that we are already weighed down by competition, so why add to it? Why do this to ourselves?

Each morning after I wake up, my watch gives me a little affirmation. I don’t need it to do this. I would rather it didn’t, but I apparently cannot stop it. Sometimes it’ll say “Busy today? You got this!” or “Listen to your body.” The affirmation that irks me to no end is “Go out and beat yesterday!”

What the hell does that even mean? How can you beat a day? I think it’s implying that yesterday I didn’t exercise enough or get in enough steps. It’s calling me lazy and telling me to beat the arbitrary goals it set for me for some reason (and yes, I realize that I’m actually doing this to myself).

But the idea remains: we aren’t just in competition with everyone else, we are also in competition with ourselves. We are constantly urged to strive for excellence, for perfection, to “beat yesterday.” Yet, how often are we urged to be happier, to find more contentment, to appreciate what we’ve got? Basically never.

And that comes back to capitalism and exponential growth. I will only be able to “beat yesterday” for so long. It’s an impossible ongoing goal. It’s unsustainable in ways that my poor, tired legs can hardly stand.

But it’s not that much different from telling ourselves that we need to keep making “stronger” photographs. This kind of competition is hardly different at all from American Idol, a football game, or even the Evergreen State Fair.

Again, I’m not saying that competition is a bad thing. It can be as useful as most anything else. But does it have to envelop us completely? Does it have to be part of our artistic expressions?

Photography and art in general should be democratic. It should be of and by, and for the people, the artistic community, for us. We don’t need gatekeepers to make this work. We don’t need masters; we shouldn’t even want them.

We will always have influences – we’d hardly have art without muses – but our relationship to them should always be held in suspicion, if not contempt. Are we merely echoing them? Are we tailoring our work to fit their idea of art rather than our own? Are we tamping out our drive to explore and experiment because we believe that a juror won’t pick our most original work? In this way, we are in competition against someone who isn’t even competing.

Winning at Art

Winning at art seems honestly moronic. Winning a race or a game makes sense; it’s objective. But winning the Best Photograph Award is absurd. What does that even mean? It’s dishonest and dispiriting. It’s anti-art.

If we absolutely have to infuse the idea of winning at art into our lives, why couldn’t “winning” mean the most innovative, the most different? Even that seems ridiculous, of course, but it would at least reward pushing boundaries, thinking beyond the norms – something art should be doing anyway.

Do we really want to carry forward the ideals of a county fair? Don’t get me wrong, I love going to the fair. I even love seeing the quilts and the pies and horses, and especially the photography. It’s just that when it comes to art, I don’t see how competition helps; I don’t see how it’s healthy.

Whether it’s at the county fair or a juried show in a highly gentrified neighborhood, it’s a good thing that art is being seen by the public. There’s, of course, nothing at all wrong or even suspect with that. And maybe that alone is reason enough to enter contests (it is an incredibly good reason).

But the fact that many wouldn’t enter without the possibility of winning something is kind of a bummer. It’s not the money, of course (though that $100 in gold does sound pretty nice), the winnings are usually next to nothing. The awards process is essentially a lottery. In the end, I suppose it’s for bragging rights. It’s so you can note that you are an “award-winning photographer” on your CV or social media bio. It’s the next best thing to a lie.

I’ll be honest, I’m very torn on this. With all of the incredibly horrible things happening in the world – from genocide in Gaza to the slipping of our own democracy – my little complaints about photography contests shouldn’t really matter at all.

But with all the horrible things happening in the world, the very least we can do is not let it work against our art. Our work and our community should not simply be a subculture existing under the surface, but a counterculture actively fighting against everything that led us to this point. And that, I’m afraid, includes fighting against absurd competition, where the meaning is meaningless and the only thing that really matters is winning.

Conclusion

The Evergreen State Fair had pretty much anything you’d ever want in a county fair: adorable animals, demolition derby, janky roller coasters, and greasy fair food. It also had photography. That in itself seems like some sort of victory. Here’s a collection of a couple hundred people who saw something they wanted to capture and share with the rest of us. That’s the important thing here. That connection is essential.

The competition, the puzzling array of categories, as well as juried shows, all contribute to and distract from that. Rather than solely appreciating the art and the community, we focus upon winning – somehow the opposite of beauty and art, the antithesis of community.

I’m not putting out some call to action, urging you to boycott photography contests. That’s honestly just dumb. Hell, I might even enter a couple of my photos in next year’s fair. Why not? But I think we could create a better photography community, even a counterculture, by keeping all of this in mind. Our lives and our own art could be greatly improved by focusing less on racing our photos against each other, less on winning at art, less on bragging rights, and more on finding the art that inspires us, and in turn, how our own art can inspire others.

Disclaimer: Even the mere thought of the demise of Kodak makes some folks in the film community have big feelings. I’d like to state for the record (or whatever) that I don’t think Kodak is going out of business. I’m sure they’ll be around for decades to come and will never let us down. They’ll never discontinue your favorite emulsion or raise film prices. They’ll always love us and respect us, and follow us on Instagram forever. They just had a slight financial malfunction. But, uh, everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here, now, thank you. How are you?

Last week (meaning the middle of August 2025) big news hit the film community and the Wall Street Journal: Kodak was going out of business! Well sort of not really. Kodak was apparently having yet another existential crisis.

Kodak released a statement attached to an earnings report detailing their lack of earnings and highlighting their nearly half a billion dollars of debt. They wrapped it all up by declaring “these conditions raise substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

Now, this may seem like the initial rumblings that Kodak might be on its way to going out of business. But no, that’s not at ALL what they were saying, you stupid idiots, what’s wrong with you?

By “these conditions raise substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” they didn’t actually mean that there was any doubt at all about their ability to continue as a going concern. In fact, it’s the opposite, obviously. And why would you think otherwise?

To be clear, in the business world, no longer being a “going concern” doesn’t mean you’re immediately going out of business. It means that you’re probably going out of business in the near future. It’s night and day, okay? When a company is no longer a going concern, liquidation is almost inevitable, usually within a year’s time.

While Kodak told investors and board members of their financial woes, they really didn’t want the public to think of it in such harsh terms. Also, their stocks tanked by like 20%.

In classic Trump-like fashion, Kodak blamed everyone else, issuing a follow-up press release they called a “Statement Regarding Misleading Media Reports.”

When I first read this real and official press release on some random guy’s Instagram post, I thought it was a parody or hoax. It was so poorly written (let alone conceived) that I figured no multi-million dollar company with a 145-year history would ever release this in any official way.

I was wrong. Kodak is this company. Kodak and their decades of shockingly bad business decisions would absolutely release an official statement where they wander aimlessly between talking about themselves in the third person (as “Kodak”) and referring to some collective “we” while blaming “the media” for reporting that Kodak might go out of business after Kodak said “we will probably no longer be a going concern.” It’s baffling and just so dumb in so many ways that I’m tired of writing about it.

Kodak was supposed to hold a big meeting about this on Friday, August 15th, but as of the time of this recording, they haven’t issued any details about that. Maybe by the time you’re reading this, they’ve reversed all their financial woes, re-released Kodachrome, and given every film shooter $100 just because they like us so much. Who knows? The future is impossible to predict.

Anyway, now that we know for sure that Kodak will be around forever, let’s talk about life after Kodak. If Big Yellow can’t pull out of this financial tailspin, what will we, the film community, do? How will we survive without Portra and HC-110, without Tri-X and whatever they call their TMax developer?

This would be the worst-case scenario. Kodak is gone. Now what?

What Is Kodak?

First, let’s talk about what Kodak is and, more importantly, what it isn’t. Kodak is actually named the Eastman Kodak Company. It was incorporated in 1892 and did their thing until 2012 when it filed for bankruptcy. After that, it became two companies: Eastman Kodak and Kodak Alaris.

For our purposes, Eastman Kodak manufactures the film and chemicals we use. Kodak Alaris markets and sells them to us (except for motion picture film, the sales of which Eastman continues to handle).

If Eastman Kodak goes out of business, Kodak Alaris goes under too. Partially because it’s all kind of one company (sort of), but also because Alaris relies on Eastman for stock. Again, I’m narrowing everything to focus specifically on the film community. In reality, it’s a bit more complex than I’m making it. A private equity firm is now involved with Alaris, and that never ends well. So even if Eastman Kodak stays afloat, we’ll have that shitty s**t to deal with eventually.

So, because of this weird arrangement of Peter constantly robbing Paul to pay nobody, if Eastman Kodak goes under and all of the film they make is no longer being made, that will affect a whole slew of companies directly.

Your favorite photography stores, both local and online, will take a hit. Kodak film is a pretty big chunk of their business, but probably not enough to sink them. Especially the ones who have been smart enough to diversify a bit.

Companies like Cinestill, Flic Film and every other company that re-rolls and repurposes Kodak motion picture film will close. Eastman Kodak isn’t the only manufacturer of motion picture film in the world, but they’re the only ones doing color. Also, if FujiFilm is selling any color film, that will go away, too. Kodak has been making film for them for a few years now.

Other companies, like Lomography, will no longer have color film. All of Lomo’s regular color film is made by Kodak. There are other options and they have other emulsions as well as their broken cameras, so I doubt they’d fully go under, but it would be pretty rough.

Ilford, on the other hand, suddenly becomes the largest film manufacturer in the world, so good for them!

The Whole Point

Film photography sometimes seems more about buying stuff than actually creating art. So when Kodak’s latest flirtation with oblivion came to light, we had our own little meltdown during which we said things like “What will I do without Portra?” “How will I survive without Tri-X?” “I only use HC-110! I guess I’ll switch back to digital!”

Now is a good time to remember that what we create has far more to do with us than it does with the material we use to create it. It’s easy to forget that when so much of film photography is collecting gear and stocking up the film fridge, but it’s true.

Of course, most of what Kodak produces can be swapped out with something else. Do you like Tri-X? You’ll be fine with Ilford HP5. Do you develop with HC-110? There’s Legacy L-110. Adore the colors of Portra or Ektachrome? Well, okay, admittedly, we’ve got a problem there. But with Ilford dipping their toes into the color pool, and with them suddenly being the largest film manufacturer in the world, it’s likely they’d jump in to fill that gap.

But even that isn’t the point. The point is that we will survive the loss of our go-to emulsions should Kodak go the way of the dinosaurs. My favorite emulsion is Vericolor III. It was discontinued by Kodak in 1994. I’m doing fine. We are artists and creators, our damn job is to overcome obstacles to realize our vision, our dreams. Film is a big part of what we do, but it’s not the reason we do it. Film is not why we are artists or even photographers.

We Are Small

Kodak has served photographers since before photography became a thing that everyone was doing. At its height (and for a couple of generations before), every household in America and Europe had at least one camera, and that camera needed film. The film community as we know it now didn’t really exist then – it didn’t need to.

Once digital became a thing, we eventually figured out that we missed film. We missed the look, the process, the ritual. A bunch of us came back. That number, however, is an incredibly minuscule fraction of the number of film shooters in the 1980s, when film was at its apex. In comparison to that, we hardly exist. If you talk to any normal person on the street, even those folks old enough to remember buying film at the drug store, nine times out of ten, they will have no idea that people are still shooting film, that film is still being produced, or that labs still exist.

We are living and creating in a bubble and need to realize that. Our community is smaller than many hobbies, and yet we still expect a huge company like Kodak to somehow survive on what we can collectively spend.

It’s true that during its 2012 bankruptcy, Kodak could have downsized to a smaller company to better meet the needs of its film customers, but it didn’t. On one hand, it’s understandable, in 2012, the Holga explosion was happening, but that really seemed like a fad that would fizzle out in a year or so. On the other hand, instead of downsizing, Kodak expanded into several divisions, apparently to make shitty business decisions more efficiently across various sectors.

What I’m trying to say is that we are small in number and tight in community. It makes no sense at all that a company the size of Kodak would be good at serving our needs.

Kodak Doesn’t Care

And what I’m really trying to say here is something that many of you might balk at: Kodak doesn’t really care much about us. Okay, sure, there’s Tim Ryugo, but he’s one guy and not the company. When it comes to film, their main customer is Hollywood.

They know that people still shoot film, of course, that’s why they still make it. It is still profitable (or whatever) for them to do so. But they’re not really a part of the community in the way that Ilford is, or the way that your local camera store is.

As a community, we can survive without Kodak because in many ways, we already are. Sure, sometimes they’ll sponsor a photowalk or two in the same way that Pepsi sponsors a drag race, but apart from supplying us with some of our film and chemicals, they’re really not involved. I don’t see how it's in our best interest to put so much faith and reliance in a flaky company that barely knows we exist.

We are a small community of photographers who are best served by small companies run by our fellow photographers. This is how it works in pretty much any small hobby (which film photography now is).

If you’re into knitting (a much larger hobby than film photography, by the way), you’d be fine with the yarn and needles made by other knitters in your community. The same goes for something like model railroading (again, a much larger hobby), which is almost exclusively served by companies fully dedicated to that specific hobby. Why are we expecting film photography to be different? Why would we even want that?

We’d Do Better

Upon the death of Kodak, we as a community wouldn’t just be okay, I think we’d do better, I think we’d thrive.

Once that cord is cut, maybe we’d realize that they needed us far more than we needed them. And even if that wasn’t true, we’d realize that we don’t actually need them to create, to be film photographers.

Without Kodak, we’d rely on our resources, we’d cherish the companies still sticking around (like Ilford), we’d support new companies making lenses and cameras (like SmartFlex). I mean, we could do all of that now, but the self-inflicted gunshot wound that killed off Kodak would serve as a pretty lovely wake-up call.

We’d also focus more on the DIY aspect of photography. We’d see more wet plate photographers, more dry plate manufacturers, more small camera companies, we’d even see new film companies popping up. Yes, the manufacturing of film is complex, but it’s not impossible.

If our concern is creating photos using film or some emulsion-based process, we would be fine. We might even be better. When restrictions are placed upon artists, we don’t stop creating; we become more creative. We dig deeper, we search harder, we survive because art is life, and what other choice do we have?

Other photographers who aren’t interested in photography without Kodak will find other hobbies or shoot digital. And that’s fine too.

And all of this is under the worst-case scenario. So, the worst-case scenario is that we become a tighter, more self-reliant community? Maybe Kodak can’t shuffle off fast enough!

What Will Likely Happen

Of course, the worst-case scenario probably won’t happen. Kodak is probably not going anywhere. It will likely stumble on as the decaying shell of its former self for decades to come.

Kodak will likely retool some things. Maybe they’ll decide to expand into other areas. Maybe they’ll get a new CEO. Maybe they’ll lay off some workers, screw some others out of benefits, and generally behave like a normal company floundering under its own weight in late-stage capitalism.

As far as the photography community is concerned, Kodak will likely discontinue a couple of emulsions, raise the prices on others (while not blaming tariffs, just in case), maybe even introduce a new one – maybe even a new process.

Much of this depends on the health of the film photography community. Sometimes we’re trending, sometimes we’re not. Our numbers are never very steady, and the somewhat recent trend of old digital point & shoots isn’t helping matters, either.

But it’s likely Kodak will continue on, stabbing itself in the face every few years just to keep us wondering. And who knows, maybe the private equity firm now holding the strings of Kodak Alaris won’t result in gutting the company so the tech bros now running it can drain it to buy another yacht. There’s a first time for everything, right?

Wrap It Up

If color film had never been manufactured, most of us would still be photographers; we’d just be shooting black & white.

If photography had never been invented, or if we lived in the times before cameras, we would likely still be artists and creators.

It’s not the materials that make us the artists we are, just like it’s not Kodak that makes us photographers.

Should Kodak finally nick the right vane and bleed out for good, we can and should continue shooting film. We could still support each other and the manufacturers within our community. We would still create, innovate, and share our work as if Kodak never existed.

I don’t know if Kodak needs us more than we need Kodak, but I do know that we don’t actually need Kodak to survive as film photographers, as a film photography community.

We have options, we have our own creativity and ingenuity, and most importantly, we have our cameras and we have each other. Do you wanna go out and shoot? Let’s go!

If you look through my photos, you will see pictures of abandoned buildings, of houses left empty, of roads seldom driven, of paths sometimes walked only by me. You will see endless photos of old towns, empty cars, power lines, bridges, and railroads. But you'll almost never see a photo of a person, let alone a portrait.

It took me years to realize that I shied away from this. And maybe that's what it is, maybe I am shy. Too shy to ask if I could take your picture. Too shy to learn just how to make it good. Too shy to extend myself to make that connection.

But part of that realization was that while I don't take pictures of people, I do take pictures of humanity, though maybe that isn’t the right word (as you’ll see soon enough). Maybe I take photos of personality.

People

When someone first pointed out that I didn't take pictures of people, I almost didn't believe them. I will roam from town to town, taking many photos, talking to many people, seeing them on the streets and in their cars and in their houses, and yet, rarely have they ever appeared in my photos.

All of these subjects, all of these places that I photograph, were once peopled, were once inhabited. Some still are. Nearly every photo of mine has some record of human interaction with nature.

I have fallen in love with this interaction, this relationship between humans and nature. I don’t even look for it anymore, I just see it. In every place I visit, every photo I take, there it is.

I used to submit some of my photos to an online group that focused upon nature photography of Washington. Their only rule was that there was to be “no hand of man” – obvious evidence of human occupation or manipulation. But almost everywhere in Washington, almost everywhere in America, you can’t find what we think of as nature without the hand of man.

The trails we walk, the hills we climb, the streams we swim were all affected by this mysterious “hand of man.” Perhaps it’s not so obvious as a paved highway through a forest, but the lasting ramifications of our relationship with nature are everywhere.

Nature (Animals)

Our usual definition of nature is anything outside of human interference. It’s tempting to suggest that our view of nature is faulty – that maybe humans should be counted as part of nature rather than separate. This makes sense in so many ways, especially because of how we now build our houses, our cities, exiling nature to the outskirts, and well-managed parks.

But in another sense, maybe it's our perception of people that is faulty. Our idea of personhood and personality is very narrow. We see ourselves in it, of course, and sometimes we extend it to our pets, which is understandable. But almost never does it cross that line, almost never does it leave our house, our property, our bubble.

And yet, it shouldn't be a stretch to see other animals as people. We give names to our pets. We see the personalities in our cats and dogs. And so it shouldn't be insurmountable for us to see the animals we come into contact with in the same light. Maybe we aren't as familiar with their ways, but we could be. There's very little stopping that from happening. Maybe it’s our shyness. Maybe all of us are as shy with the animals as I am with people.

I don’t take too many photos of animals, if I’m being honest. I shared a couple of stories not too long ago about photographing some cows. I’ve also photographed a bird or two, when I got the opportunity. And, of course, there are the photos of Juniper on her deathbed. It was a devastating honor to take those photos.

I do wish I could take more photos of animals, but it isn't shyness that's stopping me, it is skill and maybe patience. I don't have the patience to be a wildlife photographer. Also, most of my lenses are wide. In many photos, there must be hidden animals, unseen, staring at me, wondering what I am doing with a 90 mm lens. If only they could tell me.

Nature: Plants

But why not the plants? In some narrow ways, we are familiar with seeing plants as people. We raise and talk to, and even name, flowers and ferns. There was a prayer plant who lived in my house, and his name was Greg. I didn't name him, but he came to the house with that name, and it stuck.

Many of us fawn over the flowers and vegetables growing in our gardens, and we form what logic tells us is a one-way relationship with them. But somewhere inside, we do understand that there is an exchange happening. Even materially, we water them, they grow, in return, they make us happy and fill our stomachs.

So why not the plants in the wild? Why not the trees, the grasses, why not the wildflowers and sage? Even in the cities, plants are more plentiful than our human neighbors. And they're often much easier to deal with.

Other People

I don't think I've always seen plants and animals in this way, but I'm having a hard time remembering when I didn't. It's something that I simply haven't given much thought to. But when I look through my photos, I can see it’s there. I am, in a way, taking photos of people. Maybe they aren't human people. And many of them aren't animal people.

But I take portraits of trees. I focus in on flowers. They are not, as we often mistake, inanimate objects. They have life in them. They cycle through birth, disease, and death the same way we do. We have much more in common with them than we do a house, or a bridge, or a car.

There is a world going on around us, under our feet, above our heads, and in some ways, we are connected to it. But in most ways, I think we've neglected it. Maybe we’ve forgotten. Maybe we've never had it.

When we were babies, did we really see much of a difference between our older sibling and the dog? Didn't we have a favorite tree? Didn't we have that childhood urge to run to the forest?

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a small town surrounded by farmers’ fields and woods. A large creek bordered one side of town, and I’d spend entire summer days running through the trees, scrambling up hills, building forts, and catching turtles and bugs.

I learned quickly that if I sat silent and still, birds and squirrels would get used to me, ignore me, and go about their normal business. There were special moments when I’d see deer creep close for a drink, eyeing me all the while. And even when the deer and the squirrels weren’t around, I discovered that I could sit by a stream and just listen to its murmuring.

Our Inanimate Friends

So really, why stop at plants and animals? Couldn't the water also be a person? It can be calm and still one day, and full of anger and violence the next. We see that in ourselves. We see that in animals. And we can see that in the rivers and streams, the ocean, especially. None of these beings is inanimate.

Even the rocks, though they are still and solid, are not inanimate. It may take millennia, but they can move. Even mountains can move. There is a mountain in Washington that many geologists are starting to figure out that moved from Baja California. In fact, much of Washington state is made up of tiny islands that were in the Pacific Ocean. They've all gathered together to make the home where I live now. And yet we think the land is inanimate because our lives are too short to see its motion.

Nature Is Motion

As photographers, we can show the personality of animals and plants, of water, and even mountains. And I've always found it important to do so.

Many photographers who photograph nature refuse to take their pictures when the wind is blowing. They want to take a beautiful photo, with a tight focus and a wide aperture. They want a tripod and the fastest shutter speed to negate any movement. I never understood this.

All of nature is in motion. All of life is in motion. Even in death, we are still moving, the bugs wriggling around in our bodies, the worms in our guts. It's all motion. There's no way to escape it. As photographers, why are we trying to deny this?

When I take a photo of, for example, an abandoned house, I try to show the uniformity it has with the nature around it. I try to show how it has changed and bent to the landscape. But I also try to show that everything around it is in motion by letting the shutter linger open for a second or more. I'll wait for a breeze if there is no wind, I will watch for the grasses swaying, and the tree limbs moving, and then I will open the shutter and wait, capturing more than just a quick sliver of light. I'm capturing a moment. I'm capturing a period of time, an era.

Maybe all of my photos are motion pictures, in this way. But it's my way. I've only ever done it like this. I love seeing the movement. I love being reminded of how the stream is alive, the grasses are living, the leaves in the trees are waving. The blur that is present on film represents the opposite of what most nature photographers are trying to capture.

Most nature photographers take after hunters, seeing something in the forest, a flash, and firing their gun to stop it. In fact, this is where the phrase snapshot was derived. Originally, it was a hunting term.

But I long for the opposite of this. I go to nature to observe it, to live in it, and, as a photographer, to bring a little of it home with me. Not as a taxidermied trophy on film, but as my memory holds that moment. I want to capture how the moment felt just as much as how the moment looked. But still, nature photographers who freeze time with no movement at all fail to do this. They fail to move me.

Home and Homes

This isn’t to claim that I never take photos of solid architecture, divorced from any nature around it. I do, and I enjoy that to some lesser degree. I take photos of signs, of cars, of human-built things, like any other photographer might. And yes, you can see the humanity in those things. But they are, without a doubt, things.

More importantly, they are commodities. While there might be some artistry in there, they are, in the end, made to be sold. They are products in the grossest sense of the word. Even adding what little twist of artistry with the camera that I might, there is a deadness to them that nature can't match.

This is why photographing an office building, a sign, a car, or a store is different than photographing a house, a home where a family once lived. And yes, there may be some small evidence of human interaction that is still held in an abandoned storefront. After all, people spent their days here, making something close to a living, trying to keep their families alive. But it's just not the same; it was not a home.

Our homes, in some ways, are the closest thing to nature that we have. We build our homes with our families, both blood and found. This is not any different from birds with their nests and rabbits with their warrens.

Sometimes we mistakenly say that all of nature is their home, meaning the entire forest or the entire prairie is the home of all of the birds and animals who live there. In a broad sense, that's true, but really, most have established specific homes, just like us.

Once, when I was walking through a canyon floor covered with sagebrush, a coyote darted out in front of me, scampering off to the cliffs above. A few more steps, and then another coyote started from behind the same sage, running off a few yards, watching me.

Several more steps and heard their pups, nestled and snug under the shade of a large sagebrush, with grasses and weeds surrounding it, hiding it. I had startled the mother and father, and they bolted out of instinct. And stopped, remembering their young, hoping that I would not hear the helpless cries of their pups, and if I did, praying that I might pass on.

As much as I wanted to look in to see them, in all of their adorable glory, I made my way quickly out of the canyon, away from their home, which I had unknowingly invaded. I didn't stop to take a photo. Even though I wanted to, I could feel the fear of the parents. I could understand that, relate to that. And I wanted to take away the fear that I caused as quickly as I could. I wanted to make things right again for this terrified family. So I did.

All of the nature that we see, all of the forest and the fields, is a world that contains a multitude of homes for a multitude of animals. They may have specific homes, but all of nature is their country. And we are in it, too.

It’s Not Isolation

Lately, I have been rethinking my defensive stance on isolation and solitude. I once wrote that solitude was “that moment you realize you are alone, that there is nothing that will touch you.” After being in the city for so long, I wrote that “I craved isolation, that chance for solitude.”

Of course, I understand what I was trying to say – simply that I needed to get away from people, from humans specifically. And I still feel that way, though maybe I should try to embrace this desire less than I do. Is this truly the mentality I should be encouraging in myself, in others? Shouldn’t I be striving for community?

Unless we are enclosed in a windowless room, we are not isolated. We are never isolated. All around us are the animals, the plants, the rocks, the streams. We are never alone, and if we feel that we are, perhaps it’s our perception of self that needs to change.

This is why prisons are so dangerous to our society. As punishment, we subject our fellow humans to real isolation, to real solitude. This is somehow supposed to be justice; it is supposed to teach some lesson. But in the end, it is all just our petty revenge. We know exactly how to hurt our fellow man, and we do it joyously; we do it jokingly. As a society, we revel in our imprisonment, we profit from it, we create laws and situations to imprison specific cultures present in our society. Prison is a quiet genocide.

Eve

We know this, and it is our fault that we are not changing this, but also, it’s no wonder at all that we have gone down this path. The past 2000 years of Western culture have seen us moving farther and farther away from nature. Our teachings, mostly Christianity, have formed our cultural relationship with nature. We are told that we have dominion over the earth, over plants and animals, even over women. It is impossible to form a healthy relationship with that as a foundation.

Our own creation myth involves the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, as one with nature until Eve longs for more knowledge and they are both exiled from this oneness, from nature. Our cultural introduction to nature then, is that of an exile from it. We are automatically estranged by this punishment, by this petty vengeance.

It’s no wonder, then, that we turn this on ourselves. It’s no wonder we feel disconnected from nature. It’s no wonder those few who have remade this connection with nature were often seen as witches and of the devil. It’s no wonder that we created industrialism. No wonder capitalism. No wonder the times in which we live.

All of this is taught to us by our parents and elders. As children, we are born with an understanding of right and wrong, we even have a sense of justice. But revenge is something we must learn. Dehumanization is something that must be instructed.

We are taught that our fellow humans are worth nothing if they can’t produce, if they can’t serve us. We have turned ourselves into assets and products, into elements of wealth; this is perhaps the most complete dehumanization.

Thievery And Healing

So what chance is there for the beings who are not humans? When we view animals and plants and forests and rivers as commodities and products, we are robbing them of their nature. We are literally stealing nature from them. And as photographers, if we see them as only products to be managed, to be captured, then that is how we will photograph them.

If we treat these subjects inhumanely, we are also robbing ourselves of our own humanity. We are dehumanizing ourselves while we denaturalize nature.

If we do this as photographers, our lens will only see this distorted view. What we capture on film will only be an imitation of what we should be seeing, what we should be feeling. Our subjects, our art, and our world all deserve much better from us. We ourselves deserve much better. We deserve not to be severed from our larger world, from nature. That connection we may have had as children, or that bond we had before careers and obligations got in the way, is vital.

There is a healing in this connection with nature. No, it doesn't take the place of hospitals or therapy. We have all seen the meme of a picture of a forest with the words "real therapy" underneath it. That's a lie, and it's a misrepresentation of nature. It's a misunderstanding of our relationship with the natural world. It's also a misunderstanding of our brains and therapy in general.

It's always good to remember that “natural” doesn't mean healthy; after all, a bite from the Western rattlesnake could be deadly, but it is very natural. There is an array of plants, like death camas, who live in the canyons of Eastern Washington, who can kill you in a very natural way. Their bulbs are strikingly similar to wild onions. Cooking them doesn’t tame the toxins, and eating just two of the bulbs can kill you.

But nature, or rather, our relationship with nature, can be restorative. Meaning that our return to nature, our regular interaction with nature, can help us recover and adapt to the unnatural demands of life. It’s been shown to boost our positive moods and self-esteem. Study after study shows this.

It should also, however, be obvious. How many of our stressors and irritations come from the world that we built to keep nature out, to keep it at bay, and under control? We have created some really wonderful things, but there is a price to pay.

For many of us, making the re-connection isn’t so easy. Most Americans live in cities. While there is nature there, of course, a green belt isn’t a forest. A park isn’t a prairie. These spaces between asphalt streets and sidewalks are important, but they are not wild.

What About Photography?

In the notes that I took while jotting down my thoughts for this piece, I wrote, “What does this have to do with photography?” I even circled it! After my last episode, where I escaped into the wilderness, leaving the camera at home, I’m not sure what it has to do with photography specifically, but I know that I need to change how I approach photography because of this.

Even though I am often able to escape the city to wander in the wild, I want to do more than just wander. Wandering is really just mindless walking. It’s nicer to do in nature, but honestly, it's not that much different than mindlessly wandering around anywhere. I want to take time to be still in nature. It’s the stillness that I’m missing.

I want to first be still in nature, to be still amongst the wind and the blowing grasses, the swaying leaves, and rushing water. I want to be still the same way a musician waits, listening to the rhythm, listening to the beat, waiting for her time to jump in and move with the music.

By the time you hear this, I may already be on the road. I have somehow been fortunate enough to arrange my life so that every year I can take a month off and travel. I generally camp and photograph back roads and small towns. I favor the grasslands and prairies of the plains. It's not where most would choose to vacation, but then, this is hardly a vacation.

In past years, I would wake up before dawn, working with my camera until sunset. I had almost no downtime. Everything was a rush, everything was frantic and left little time for stillness.

My mind was a whirlwind, a tornado exhausting my body, chewing up the miles, and always feeling like I was running late and that there was never enough time.

This year, I hope, will be different. This year, I went to focus on being still and listening. The camera is, essentially, superfluous. I will photograph whatever is in front of me. But I want my approach to those photographs to reflect everything I have said to you today.

I am shy when it comes to photographing people, and maybe less shy with the non-human things I photograph. But there is still much work to be done.

I will still visit these places that were once inhabited, and I will still photograph them, purposely trying to recover their humanity, their population. I'm not sure that the problem is my photography at all. The camera allows me to make this connection to the wider world, to nature. It allows me to see the humanity in the abandoned homes, the ghost towns, the places where our fellow humans lived and loved.

My camera, or rather, me when I am behind my camera, can see all of this. But without the camera, I am almost blind to it. And that is something that needs to change. That is the thing that needs stillness. Not the stillness of nature – nature is never still – but the stillness of myself that is impossible in a city that’s constantly tossing me around. This need to still myself is the thing that I have mistakenly called a need for isolation and solitude. It's a small error, perhaps, but it feels good to correct myself. I was wrong, but I think I'm on a better path now.

For this trip, I want to slow down. This may mean fewer miles, this may mean broken plans, it may even mean fewer photos, but it will also mean that I remember them all. I will remember every blade of grass, every breeze, every movement around my stillness. And maybe, if I'm fortunate, I'll remember to let go, allow myself to drift into the music, into the wind, into the rushing current to be pulled along or finally pulled under.

This episode is a bit different. First, it is audio-only (and when you listen, you’ll understand why). Second, it is fully recorded in the field on a few hikes and an overnight camping trip that would usually be a photography trip. I suggest listening with headphones.

Here, I take my first camera-less trip in well over 20 years. Did I survive? What is left of me?

Along the way, I talk about why I wanted to try this, why I love this part of Washington state, the importance of photography, whether I regretted not bringing the camera, and so much more.

There are, of course, no film photos to share with this one. I did take two or three cell phone pics, though.

[Before we start, I want to let you know about my new zine, Cloudless. It’s now available, and you can pick it up here.]

The narrow dirt road straddled the Idaho/Washington border with late spring wheat fields, their stalks nearly to my knees, growing on either side. I stopped the car on a hill and waited for the dust to settle so that I might see the scene behind me in my rearview mirror.

I stepped onto the road, grabbing my camera and checking to see again what I had loaded. The road ran through a small cut into the hill, with steep enbankments rising above on either side. I scrambled to the top of one and saw the green wheat undulating like waves on a vast and uneven ocean.

The hill I was on rolled its way to a small valley and other hills rising in the middle distance. An old barn stood in the valley, its wooden walls decaying and its tin roof patched, but intact. Light clouds dotted the sky.

I raised the camera, took the photo, and slid back down to the road. This entire encounter took maybe thirty seconds. I stumbled into a lovely composition, and the photo nearly took itself. I was back in the car and driving to the next picture.

Just how much thought I put into this photo, I couldn’t tell you. I know a good composition when I see one. I saw one and took the photo. It’s not that I didn’t think, it’s not that I just shot. I quickly scraped together whatever experience and foreknowledge I had, saw the photo before me, and took the picture.

Lomography

There is a film company called Lomography that markets its rebranded films to photographers who want a certain lo-fi look. It plays well on nostalgia, and they’ve managed to turn the memories of grandma’s photo albums into a thriving business.

On each roll of film they produce, they’ve printed their slogan: Don’t Think - Just Shoot! There is something mildly philosophical about this. I understand immediately what they want us to believe they’re saying. “Don’t overthink the photograph, go with your gut, shoot it!”

Of course, what they’re actually saying is “buy more film.” After all, they are a company whose priority is the bottom line. The more film we shoot, the more film we buy. And the more film we shoot without thinking, the more film we blow through like a mid-80s wedding photographer.

I can’t stress enough how bad this advice is. The advice is as bad as the faith of Lomography’s argument. It is only made worse by how obvious and brazen a cover it is.

And still, on this trip, I brought along a film Lomography called Potsdam. Before the rebranding, the film was made by German motion picture film manufacturer ORWO, which called it UN54. I used to buy it in bulk back in my 35mm days. The only way to acquire it now in medium format is to buy it as Potsdam from Lomography.

I love how this emulsion handles shadows, how inky dark it can be. There is a contrast to this film that you can ply with a yellow filter, or even red. I would shoot this film more, and might even use it regularly if not for Lomography’s lack of quality control. But more on that later.

Cows

I often find myself driving through range land, where cows and sometimes sheep roam free. An awareness of this is necessary when I’m driving, and caution is always in order. A few years back, while driving near the Missouri River in Montana, I was surrounded by cows with their young bulls. One of the bulls spooked and, rather than running away from my car, ran into the front quarter panel, putting a huge dent in it.

I stopped to see if he was okay - he was. And then I called my insurance company to explain that a cow had hit my car. “You hit a cow?” she asked. “No,” I replied, “other way around.”

Cows are usually skittish and fearful of us. It’s no wonder the hell we put them through. Taking their photo is something that almost never happens for me. The car already frightens them, and then when a human emerges from this metal cage, it’s basically the end times.

But along a Summer Road I’ve photographed before, I came across cows and heifers on both sides of the road. They were behind fences, and there were no young and frightened bulls to be seen.

The older cows were immediately uneasy, but the heifers, maybe a year old, were curious. Their eyes met mine, and they stood watching me. Another walked closer to get a better look.

I slowly went for my camera and began talking to them in a soft voice. I have no idea if this mattered, but it put me at ease. I walked from the road, over a small ditch, and into the grass where the barbed wire fence was strung, separating the cows from the road.

They stood, just looking, though I could see the clouds of hesitation and anxiety building behind their eyes. I lifted the camera and focused. This is usually as far as I’ll get with cows. At this point, they’re taking no chances and running away, often creating a mini-stampede.

This time, however, they just watched. They looked into the camera. There were three of them - two younger, one older. I was afraid that the loud click of the shutter and mirror slap of the Mamiya RB67 might scare them away, but even that hardly registered.

I took several photos of the trio and another of a mother and calf, who also cooperated, though with much more apprehension.

I had to work quickly. I had no idea how long my luck would hold, how long the cows would tolerate this strange event happening before them. I had to “just shoot,” worried that I might miss the opportunity. But I never stopped thinking, I never ceased calculating the odds of getting just one more photo.

In the end, that wouldn’t have mattered to Lomography (whose film, Potsdam, I was shooting). I quickly finished the roll and loaded another. They don’t really care if you think or not, they just want you to shoot more. And I did. Then, with the next roll of Potsdam ready to go, I returned to the car, grateful that the cows were brave girls. The boys could certainly learn some lessons.

The Worst Question Ever

Back in the days of the previous podcast, I interviewed dozens of photographers. Through all of that, there was one question I never asked, one question that nearly every other film photography podcast asked first: “Why do you choose to shoot film?”

It’s not that it’s necessarily a bad question. It’s just that nearly every film photographer answers it the same way - some variation of: “I shoot film because it makes me slow down.”

This answer, like the photographers answering, comes at the question from the aspect of a former digital photographer who thoughtlessly shot everything as quickly as they could.

It’s understandable; that’s how digital photography was marketed. With film, you had 36 exposures at most before you had to change rolls. With digital, you’ve got hundreds.

However, these are two different issues: one of speed and one of capacity. They’re not actually related at all.

The push for faster photo-taking wasn’t invented with digital cameras. All through the 70s and 80s, film camera manufacturers pushed how quick and easy their new cameras were. From the motorized backs for medium format to the point & shoot 35mms, how quickly we could blow through frames was a huge selling point.

Wheat

There are small dirt roads that are rarely driven by anyone but farmers to and from their tractors parked on the edge of their fields. But I drive them. There are seldom homes along them, no businesses, rarely even barns. But here, the roads rise and fall with the land. Only slightly graded (maybe once in the springtime), these Summer Roads offer us the closest feel we’ve got to the roads of the territorial days, the days before the car.

As I bounced along one, driving west with the morning sun at my back, I was again between wheat fields. The road was straight and level, though a small ridge rose beyond. In the middle of the road, as if planted on purpose, grew a small and struggling stalk of wheat. Its leaves wrinkled unshaded under the sun, yet still several spikes of grains grew in seeming defiance.

It was not purposely planted here. It likely fell accidentally from a seeder and somehow managed to take root. Standing alone in the center of the road, the stalk of the plant was missed by the tires of tractors and trucks over the months it had been growing. I could have driven over it, not harming it in the slightest.

Instead, I stopped. I sat there looking at the stalk, wondering how I could photograph it. I don’t know how long I considered the scene. Was it even worth it? Before very long, I grabbed my camera from the back seat and walked up to the plant. I’d probably be the only car on this road all day. I had time.

Looking over this stunted stalk of wheat, I consciously mulled the decisions between color and black & white, between a wide aperture and narrow. Did I feel it should be horizontal or vertical? I know I wished for a lens wider than the 90mm. It wouldn’t be the first nor last time that thought crossed my mind.

The light was perfect. The sun was high enough so that I might not cast a shadow onto the plant, but low enough to bring definition and texture to the leaves and seeds. I knew I had time, so I took it.

Crouching, knees now in the dirt of the road, I took my first shot - a simple black & white picture with the wheat in focus. I decided to open the aperture and held myself steady to not miss focus. I knew the fields on either side of the road would fall to a mostly ill-defined blur, but the road and the tread from the trucks driving through before me would show. The story of just how this little plant was surviving would be told.

Following the shot, I returned to the car for the color film loaded into a different holder.

I walked back to my previous spot, framing it over again, but closing the aperture slightly to allow the wheat fields to come into their own. I wanted them to echo this little plant. I tried another from the same position, this time focusing at infinity. This was pointless, and I think I knew it at the time. The small stalk of wheat blurs and blends into the smeared foreground as the ridge beyond takes sharp focus. While it’s halfway interesting to view the scene as we’d see it with our eyes, that isn’t really the point of my photography. I want to show you what we don’t automatically see.

These three shots took five or ten minutes. It wasn’t overlong, it wasn’t toilsome, but I took my time. I did the work. I gave the scene the thought it deserved.

Sometimes scenes require this. They demand our attention, they deserve our thoughtfulness. Even when the composition is obvious, even when we know the results, we pause to consider, to experience. This isn’t unique to film photography or even photography in general. Here, I’m pausing to grow myself into the scene. To learn the landscape, the subject. A camera is secondary. Film is nearly an afterthought.

When we tell ourselves that we shoot film because it slows us down, I think this is what we mean. At least, this is what we want to mean. It’s not slowing down for the sake of slowing. We slow down to match the pace of nature, to return to our natural rhythm. We are winded from our lives of constant movement, communication, and information. We are catching our breath.

We slow down, but it’s not for rest.

The Bridge

Rest is not a luxury I dabble in when on a photography trip. Typically, I drive until I see something, stop the car, hop out, grab the camera, get the shot, and climb back in the car to be on my way. This becomes a flow, a repetition echoed through the day.

The cycle is only broken when I switch to large format. Here, I use a 4x5 field camera. It’s actually lighter than the Mamiya RB67, though with the entire kit, including multiple lenses and a tripod, it’s a 25-pound boat anchor to be lugged from the car to hopefully some scene close by. I hike with the same camera, though the kit that I carry for that is drastically pared down.

I had photographed all morning, rising from my tent with the sun, and spending uninterrupted hours on the road, grabbing photos where I could. I shot four rolls by the time I arrived at my last stop.

The road to the concrete bridge is one and a half miles of dirt, rocks, ruts, and washouts. A high clearance vehicle and dry weather are required. I picked my way through the sharp points of basalt littering the road and worked slowly to the bridge.

This 1915 concrete arch bridge spans a fast-flowing creek over a small series of waterfalls. I have been here half a dozen times before, and try to return at least once a year.

I have photographed this bridge and the surrounding land extensively, and while I have no problems with shooting the same images again and again over the years, I wanted a different take this time around.

Hesitatingly, I crossed the old bridge, its floor now covered in the same dirt as the road. The same grasses and plants have grown on this bridge for decades. The road itself used to continue to a town that no longer exists and then to a ranch that is now a wildlife preserve. I parked just across it.

The sun was hitting the bridge’s north side best, and I scrambled with my kit over a barbed wire fence. The land all around this scene is public, most of it owned by the state, and the rest by the federal government.

The creek cuts its way through basalt bedrock, following a large canyon likely carved out during the ice age. Because of this, the rocks are sharp and brittle. Though this isn’t a tourist destination and is mainly used by locals, it sees enough traffic for there to be a web of unofficial paths and trails throughout.

With my eye on the short waterfalls, I walked a skinny path along a cliff, lowering myself down to the water’s edge. Here, I framed a number of shots, focusing upon the water, on the grasses, on the bridge. I shot both color and black & white, spending about an hour and a half on the endeavor.

This was not like photographing the little wheat stalk or the cows, it was fully different than the quick picture of the barn among the hills and fields. This was, to put it in some vague cliche, a meditation. I took six or seven photos over those 90 minutes, and yet there was no rest.

I moved from one rock to the next, tearing down and setting up my camera each time. I scrambled over boulders, slipped my foot into the water, climbed my way back up the cliff to my car for more film, and back again to shoot it.

My heart raced not just from the excitement, but because it was a true workout. I felt amazing. I felt better than I had all day. Here, I was in my element, in a location I knew well and loved even more. I was with a camera that is as much a part of me as any camera can be. I felt at home. Here, I finally felt like a photographer.

Not that I don’t feel this way when I’m taking quick shots, hopping in and out of the car, but it’s a different sort of thing.

I’m not just racing, of course. I’m not just a scattered mess of an artist, grabbing a lens and dark cloth through the chaos of my rattled mind. If anything, it’s the opposite. I’m never a technical photographer, but during this hour, I was living out what every photographer wants: to think and to shoot.

Lomography Again

Where Lomography’s stated idea falls apart is with failure. What if you didn’t think and you just shot, and none of your photos turned out as you hoped? Lomography has a plan for this as well – any blemish, any mistake, and more importantly, any emulsion or quality control issues on their end, are all part of the unknowable mystery and happenstance that is film photography.

It should come as no surprise that Lomography’s quality control is basically nonexistent. Remember the rolls of Potsdam I used with the cows? When I developed them the next day, I saw that there were white specks all over the emulsion. They rendered as black dots much larger than grain when scanned. This is apparently a common thing for them. They know this and have done no recalls and given no warnings. Instead, we’re told to “embrace and enjoy” the randomness of film photography.

The same rolls, with “Don’t Think, Just Shoot” printed on the backing paper, came out of the camera as loosely wound “fat rolls,” allowing light to leak onto the already-exposed film. This, too, is a known problem, and Lomography doesn’t even bother to acknowledge it. Don’t think about it. Just shoot it and marvel at the randomness of film. It’s a racket.

End

After the hour and a half had passed, it was time to leave. When I arrived, I was alone, but after I took a few photos, a truck pulled up, and then another. This is a fairly popular fishing spot among the few who know about it.

On the way in, I saw a composition that I wanted to shoot on the way out. Here, the road is a two-track and angles off between a fenceline and basalt formation.

I had a few frames left on the Mamiya, more Potsdam. I framed up the shot and took it with me. It was one of the few shots that came out on this incredibly flawed roll.

A number of things went wrong with my film from this trip. Some of them were Lomography’s fault, to be sure. But some were my own. In one shot, looking under the bridge and across some of the falls, I missed focus. In another, my composition was so bad that I couldn’t imagine what happened. And with the black & white sheets, my developer was dying, and they came out thin and grossly underdeveloped.

While most of my shots came out that day, the ones that didn’t are lost. This is sad, of course, but I remember taking these shots. I remember how the day felt, the joy that had come over me while photographing. I remember it all simply because I was thinking. I wasn’t just shooting. All of those photos are still with me, even the ones that didn’t turn out.

It is not film photography that allows us to slow down. It is our discipline, our dedication to our art, our love of the subject that makes slowing down worth it. Slowing down isn’t about shooting less; it’s about thinking, about experiencing the scene; it’s about living it.

Did you ever have someone get really intense with you over something you said? They were insistent, and even their arguments seemed a bit more involved than just boring semantics. Maybe they were even angry. And it’s someone whose opinion you valued, so immediately, you took a step back and gave a long think to whatever you said and how you said it. Then, after quite a bit of soul-searching introspection, you concluded that you were still right and what the hell was that all about?

One time I was casually talking to a fellow film photographer about how much time we all spend on film photography - “it’s our hobby,” I said, “it’s what we do.” They were really unimpressed with this. I wasn’t trying to be deep or even thought-out, but they took offense.

“Photography is NOT just a hobby,” they said, using the word “just” to fully and completely separate what they did for fun from what other people do for fun. “Photography is everything! It’s our artistic outlet, our means of communicating our emotions, it’s how we see the entire world!”

And that’s all true. But this photographer, like me, was not a professional. They spent far more money on photography than they saw in any returns from print sales, etc. We were pretty much on the same level of photographic intensity. It was indeed our lives, it’s what we thought of when we woke up and what we dreamed about when asleep. Every second of our day was consumed by photography.

At that point, I was more than happy with thinking of photography as my hobby, and myself as an amateur photographer. It’s a thing I did in my free time, and I didn’t get paid (in the sense that if this were a business, I’d have been bankrupt years ago). And this argumentative photographer was there too.

This conversation took me aback. Did I misunderstand what a hobby was? Was I not arting well enough? Was my photography lacking or inferior because I was fine with it being a hobby?

What is a Hobby?

At first, my suspicion was that maybe we were using two drastically different definitions of “hobby.” Wasn’t a hobby just a fun thing you did in your free time because you enjoyed it?

After collecting a few opinions on the matter, I hit the dictionaries and discovered, yes, that’s basically the definition we’ve all agreed upon in the English speaking world.

The entire idea of having a hobby is something that didn’t come about until fairly recently in Western history. It seems that the concept didn’t even invent itself until the 1500s when some wealthy people suddenly found themselves with nothing to do and they filled this free time with stuff that seemed like work (and actually was work to poorer people – like woodworking, needlepoint, and baking), but was actually something they did for pleasure.

The word hobby comes from the “hobby horse,” – a stick with a fake horse head on it. For some reason, possibly involving Tristam Shandy, that phrase was expanded to mean leisurely pastime. Eventually, the “horse” was dropped and “hobby” remained.

At first it was seen as a privilege to have a hobby. But by the 1600s, “hobby” had taken on a negative connotation. Maybe this was when the phrase muttered by every shitty boss everywhere came into being: “if you can lean, you can clean.” It is almost certainly tied to the Protestant work ethic. Hobbies were seen as play, and play was something for children. Western Civilization has been in decline since then. (I’m joking, of course, it was already well on its way.)

We have much more free time today than we did in the 1600s. However, we are also living through a period where free time is valued less and less, especially in the United States.

For me, photography is a hobby. It’s probably a hobby for you too, and that’s okay. I also have other hobbies. Obviously, etymology is one of them. So are music and movies. I recently got a fountain pen and I suppose I could make that a hobby if I wanted to (I probably don’t, and that’s okay too). Writing is probably second to photography and scratches many of the same itches.

Is Collecting Cameras a Hobby? Is it Photography?

Caught up in all of this is the strange fact that film photography actually encompasses two completely different hobbies. We have photographers and camera collectors. This is muddied even farther since the Venn diagram depicting the crossover is nearly a circle. Most film photographers have a collection of cameras, and most camera collectors are also photographers.

Some of the desire to draw a line between photography and hobbies comes from this. In some ways, I get it. I really hate gear talk. When photographers start talking lenses, I basically die inside. I just can’t do it. I just don’t care.

It’s not that I think it’s beneath me or not artistic enough, it just doesn’t interest me in the same way that knitters talking about different gauges of needles doesn’t interest me. That’s not my hobby.

I mean, I have a bunch of cameras like most other film photographers these days, but I don’t care much about them (and yes, this is a whole other thing I need to talk about someday). They’re fun to look at, and I’m basically fine with them being there, but I’m not a gear person. When someone asks me which lens I’m using, I have to look it up. I just don’t care enough to remember.

But I guess you could still call me a camera collector, or at least, a guy with a camera collection.

I’m the perfect candidate to look down on those photographers whose focus is gear rather than art. And I admit, it’s really ingrained in us to feel this way. It’s difficult not to. But it’s also shitty, and it’s important that we get over ourselves. Let people find their joy just as they let us find ours. And who’s to say our joy is more joyful, more pure?

Photography isn’t JUST a Hobby!

When someone says “photography isn’t just a hobby,” they’re actually admitting the 17th century Protestant work ethic idea that hobbies are childish, that hobbies aren’t important is true. They’re implying what they’re doing is art and is endlessly more important.

Calling your artistic pursuit a hobby doesn’t diminish what you love; instead, it recognizes that the love other people have for their pursuits is just as worthy and wonderful as yours. Calling it a hobby doesn’t lessen your skills and expertise. It doesn’t make you less of an artist. It’s just a good way to remind yourself that you’re doing this for the joy of it.

The problem with saying “photography is just a hobby” is that we’re also conceding that it is a hobby, but it’s also much more. And it is! Two things can be true! Most hobbies are more than just one thing. Most hobbies involve something that sets them apart from other hobbies. There’s a lot in photography that is unique to photography, but it’s not more unique than the specifics of literally any other hobby.

For me, the go-to example of a hobby is model railroading. It’s nice, pretty much everyone agrees that it’s a hobby, even model railroaders (is this because they’re not pretentious?). Model railroading involves a crazy amount of artistry, physics, research, skill, and free time. There are people even more into model railroading than we are into photography, I promise you. Pretty well anyone would agree that a good model railroad layout is a work of art, and yet they’re never counted amongst other artists. They sculpt, yet aren’t seen as sculptors. They paint, yet nobody calls them painters. They’re often pretty good photographers, too. But that’s not what they lead with. They are hobbyists and seem to understand the actual value of that word.

Meanwhile, we’re over here insisting that “photography isn’t just a hobby” because we can frame a picture and push a button. Maybe we need to recalibrate our enthusiasm.

The Way Out of Hobbies is Dumb

Film photography came back into prominence during a strange intersection of nostalgia and recession. It came about when vinyl records started making a comeback (for some, anyway – I never stopped). Things were turning very digital very quickly, and we longed for the analog.

Digital photography had completely usurped film photography, and nobody but the extreme purists and hobbyists continued to use film. Camera companies had stopped making new cameras, most emulsions were discontinued, Ebay and garage sales were stocked high with grandpa’s old gear.

This allowed for a very low threshold of entry for new and returning photographers. In many ways, this was equalizing. Suddenly, you didn’t have to be a professional wedding photographer to afford a Mamiya RB67 (the greatest medium format camera ever made) and a few rolls of (likely expired) slide film.

Soon, an entirely new community grew from where there was none. The old gatekeepers in their photography clubs were either ignored or ousted, as thousands of new photographers entered the hobby.

Unfortunately, this happened during the rise of hustle culture, a form of workaholism where pretty much every waking minute is somehow commodified. Often, it was done out of necessity, but like with anything, most people took it too far.

When it came to photography, selling prints, zines, and books had always been a thing. With the introduction of hustle culture, all of those were amped up, and things like seminars, tutorials, and even collaborations ended up seeming more scammy than useful.

This led to a very straight and dark line between consumers and producers, separating film photographers from those who do it as a hobby and those who were serious enough to charge money for doing it as a hobby.

We like to say that this kind of thing democratizes art. We like to think that since we don’t have to rely upon publishers and galleries like photographers used to, there are no longer gates to gatekeep.

This is a fairly dumb dividing line, though. What often keeps someone from making zines or prints is simply the upfront costs or the know-how, or even the desire to do one. It’s really no great achievement to select 30 or 40 photos, put them in order, and send it off to a print shop so they can make some copies for you. Being willing or able to do that doesn’t make photography your career and certainly doesn’t make you a better photographer.

The commodification of photography and of art in general can kill a sense of community. What art doesn’t need to thrive is a ‘us vs. them’ mentality. Artists shouldn’t have fans and followers. We should have supporters, yes. But we also should be counted among the many supporters of other artists.

The only way out of a hobby, apart from giving it up, is to turn it into a job, and for so many of us, that’s exactly what we did. Factoring in the film, the cameras, the travel time, the printing, almost none of us broke even. If photography were our job, we’d be unemployed.

That we can’t just do photography without feeling the need to make a buck or two on it doesn’t lift us out of photography being our hobby.

We Really Can Just Enjoy Photography

When we expect money in return for doing art, we eventually come to the conclusion that we will only be artistic if we can make a buck off of it. This isn’t unique to photography or any art, really. But it doesn’t tend to happen within most other hobbies.

Model railroaders, movie nerds, and Civil War reenactors don’t usually try to make money off of what they’re doing for fun. After all, it’s for fun, the very meaning of which is devoid of money. Why should photography be different?

Nobody has ever gotten into film photography because they had to. Nobody is forced to be here. We, all of us, want to do what we’re doing. We enjoy it. We love it. That alone should be enough to keep us going.

Imagine you are an artistic person who has found out that film photography is the specific way you want to express yourself. Not only that, but you also have the privilege of free time and the ability to make the art you want to make. You have answered this calling, fallen in love all over again, and end up thinking “it’s just not worth it to me unless I can make a little on the side.”

Imagine love and fulfilment not being enough. And then imagine thinking money will somehow make it better.

But also, I do get it. Film photography, like most hobbies, isn’t cheap. Film, like artificial trees and buildings to set up next to tiny railroad tracks, isn’t cheap. A camera, like a replica 1861 Springfield rifle, is kind of pricy. But in the end, it’s our hobby – whether or not I’ve convinced you it is.

The Moderation of Commodification

This is not to say that any and every exchange of money within the film photography community is somehow bad. That’s a ridiculous notion. We live in a capitalistic society, and that’s where we’re doing our art. Part of our creativity and artistry is in making prints or zines/books, and there’s no reason not to do that.

But then, that isn’t selling, that’s making, creating. We should create. We should make zines and books and help others by teaching them how to do it, too. And we shouldn’t charge for this knowledge. Not everything we do has to be commodified.

More importantly, we, as artists and creators, should also be supporters, especially of those just starting out.

I’m tempted to say that we flat out shouldn’t support celebrity photographers. They’re more than fine without us. But we shouldn’t support them if it means that our support for smaller and beginning photographers is affected.

Most importantly, we should be supporting the photographers closest to us. They could be within our local photography scene or good friends we’ve met online. Support those you have a personal relationship with first. Doing this fosters a stronger community, better friendships, it encourages those who might not have made zines to finally make one. It encourages people to join the hobby and helps those who are new to it go deeper into exploring their own art.

Be a Professional?

I am not a professional photographer. I’ve made and sold a bunch of zines and books, and when all is said and done, there’s no way I’ve come close to breaking even. But then, that was never the point. The point was that I could do these things, so I did them.

I have a regular job. I’m a screen printer. I have hours when I need to be there, I have a boss, and a paycheck. It’s a fine job, as far as jobs go. I’ve talked about it before, it’s nothing glamorous or artistic. It’s simply industrial printing. It’s a job that when I clock out, I don’t have to think or worry about it.

This isn’t some luxury that I’ve stumbled upon after decades of menial labor. In that respect, my job now is no different from the convenience store jobs I had in my early 20s. Once I was out the door, there was nothing you could do to make me think about work. And while I don’t hate my current job (and I absolutely hated working at a convenience store), both jobs gave me the luxury of leaving them at work.

Hustle culture gives you no such freedom. Unless you’re incredibly disciplined, working from home doesn’t either (are you working from home or living at work?). Being a professional artist usually requires you to employ your craft according to the wishes of your boss or client. It is exceedingly and mind-numbingly rare to be a professional independent artist.

I choose to be more than happy working a job that gives me the time to be a photographer (after work, weekends, holidays). And when someone asks me what I do, I tell them that I am a photographer. Because I am. Photography is my hobby, it’s not how I make my living, but what kind of life would I have without it?

“You don’t take a photograph,” a young Ansel Adams might have said, “you make it.”

This is probably Adams’s most famous quote. And, it’s usually just something rattled off by your photography professor because it sounds deep and you gave them a bunch of money, and they have to say something at least a little profound-ish. And you were young and impressionable. You’d buy anything.

It’s used by a thousand semi-professional photographers trying to convince their potential clients that they’re doing something different, something more thoughtful.

But was Adams really trying to be profound or obtusely philosophical? Was his meaning truly the chasm of profundity we seem to believe it was? Or is this quote just photography’s “Not all who wander are lost”?

Ansel Adams thought that the act of photographing something should be a process, something well-considered, crafted. And it’s hard to disagree with that.

And yet, it always seems a bit cringe when I hear “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” This could be my own hang-up, assuming that the person saying or writing it was being precious and pious. It sounds pompous and inflated with self-importance. This is because it often is.

Let me get this out of the way right up front. This is a pet peeve of mine. And since it’s a pet peeve, it means that I don’t have to care about your rational opinion of this because I fully understand that my opinion may not be rational. More importantly, I’d rather scan the curliest 35mm negatives than argue with someone about this. And no, you don’t have to listen to me and my dumb opinion, but here you are.

Etymology for Fun and Profit!

When we say “I am making a picture,” what we’re really attempting to say is that we have given this subject, this scene, or whatever we’re photographing some thought. We’re not just taking a throw-away snapshot. I don’t think that’s how Adams meant it, but we’ll get to that soon enough.

First, I want to dig into the words “take” and “make.” They rhyme, and that’s a big clue to solving this mystery of why some of us say that we “make” a photograph. And we’ll get to that later too.

One of my other pet peeves is writers who begin an essay, “the dictionary defines” whatever they’re talking about. It’s lazy, it’s poor form, and I know attacking it is an easy target, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be a target.

This, however, is different. We’re talking about two words that are, in the case of photography, almost interchangeable. Regardless of which one we use, we are exposing some chunk of photosensitive material to light. Both words describe the same action.

Both words, however, are very different, with wildly contrasting connotations. When we “take a picture,” it’s quick and thoughtless, but when we “make a picture,” it’s full of intention and purpose.

Historically, the words “take” and “make” are roughly the same age. “Take” comes from early Scandinavian, and we got “make” from one of the old Germanic languages. Both were welcomed into Old English a long time ago.

The definition of “take” is pretty straightforward. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “take” means “To seize, grasp, or capture something.” The original definition generally refers to capturing a town or vessel during wartime. But all of our basic definitions for “take” are drawn from this idea.

The definition for “make” is “to bring into existence by construction or elaboration.” It goes on: “To produce (a material thing) by combination of parts […] to construct, assemble, frame, fashion.” “Make” is about production, about the material produced. It’s the end result of whatever we’re doing.

Even now, we can see how “take” and “make” both have their parts in what we do. We “take” or capture a picture. We “make” or produce a material print.

Taketh a Likeness

But let’s go a little farther. Why did we ever say “take a picture”?

While it’s impossible to know who coined the term, it was first used in relation to imagery in the early 1500s. This was 300 years before the invention of photography. In the letters of Sir Thomas Cromwell, he mentions that someone would visit and “see his daughter and also take her picture.”

In this case, “take” meant “to paint” a portrait. Throughout the following centuries, we see this usage again and again.

Francis Meres complained in 1597 about someone “With such trimming and setting, and smoothing and correcting, as if ye meant immediately to have your pictures taken.”

Oliver Goldsmith wrote of a “limner, who travelled the country, and took likenesses for fifteen shillings a head” in 1767. [Side note: the word “likeness” meaning an image or painting, dates back to well over 1000 years.] [Also, a limner was someone who illustrated a manuscript.]

When photography came around, they just continued using the same word: take.

In an 1839 article about Louis Daguerre (one of the inventors of photography), an author wrote about his daguerriotypes, “Some of his last works have the force of Rembrandt's etchings. He has taken them in all weathers—I may say at all hours.”

The same word, “take,” was also used in early cinematography. “The biograph people came down from New York and took moving pictures of the ten-seater [bicycle],” wrote the Denver Evening Post in 1897.

To be fair, “make” did show up from time to time when talking about paintings, but it does seem to have been pretty rare, and always in the past tense, often in the distant or ancient past.

What we don’t see, however, is any reference to “making a photograph” prior to Ansel Adams in 1935. This is because, I believe, it was Ansel Adams who started this in his 1935 book Making a Photograph. It was Adams who redefined the word “make,” and all joking aside, that’s commendable.

But I don’t think he was using the word as we use it today, I think we’ve redefined it even further, twisting it and his quote to suit our own ideas.

Language is constantly changing. When I was growing up, “out of pocket” meant hat you had to pay a bunch of money because your shitty insurance wouldn’t cover something they said they would. Now it means ridiculous or crazy, though in retrospect, I see the connection.

There are two types of people when it comes to definitions and word usage: prescriptivists and descriptivists. Prescriptivists want words and meanings to remain as unchanged as possible. They want unchanging grammar, standardized usage, and regular spelling. Descriptivists look at how language is actually used rather than how it’s “supposed” to be used.

Normally, I am more of a descriptivist. I understand the need for standarization when it comes to writing, but languages are fluid and constantly changing. I love looking back through etymologies and seeing how usage and definitions have changed over the years and centuries.

But not here. Again, this is a pet peeve. I won’t be budging. With the take vs. make argument, I’m a prescriptivist. It’s take. Always has been.

However, the descriptivist part of me finds it a little interesting to see how the usage of “make a photograph” has slipped since Adams said it in 1935.

The Original Quote

But there’s something more to this. We’ve taken a look at the quote (“You don’t take a photograph, you make one”), but I haven’t told you the whole quote, the full context.

Are you ready? Because I don’t think you are.

“The unique quality in photography is a combination of rigidity, based on the pure physical, scientific facts of life, and the possibility of controlling that rigidity. You don't take a photograph, you make it. Expression is the strongest way of seeing.”

This appeared in a 1979 issue of Time Magazine. The quote is not sourced, but I believe it comes from his 1935 book, Making a Photograph. Ansel Adams was a wonderful photographer, but his writing leaves much to be desired.

I spent hours upon hours trying to source this quote to no avail. What I also found is that the quote we know, the “You don’t take a photograph, you make it,” doesn’t show up on its own until after his death.

For how often it’s quoted, and for how much it’s associated with Ansel Adams, you'd think that this was some motto he repeated constantly. That his friends would all roll their eyes and leave the room, "oh god, Ansel’s going on about making a photograph again!”. You’d think he had it tattooed on his chest. With a few buttons missing, just across his bulging pecks you could read “you don't take a photograph, you make it."

This was something he said of course, it was something he believed, I guess, but it wasn't central to anything he did.

The more I consider it, the more I think that while Ansel Adams said those words, he had no idea how far-reaching an impact they would have. It was just a clunky sentence lost among other clunky sentences.

The photography community seems to have co-opted his words and memories, making the quote what it is today. We gave it a different meaning. We completely changed the intent. Ansel Adams had very little to do with what is his most famous quote.

A Bit About Adams & Pictoralism

When Adams started taking photography seriously in the early 1920s, he had just missed the war going on in the art world. In the early days, photography was largely used to document things and for portraiture. It was not seen as an art, especially not on the level of painting.

Photography was a science. You needed certain chemicals in specific amounts, there were beakers and bubbling sounds, every darkroom was a laboratory. Most painters saw photography as a rigid science, not as an art. Hell, most photographers agreed.

But around 1880 that started to change. Some photographers like Gertrude Kasebier, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Steichen insisted that photography was art, actually, and their style often pulled inspiration from impressionistic painters. This resulted in the Pictoralist movement, with photographs in soft focus and dream-like. Adams caught the tail end of this movement, and his early work is in that style.

While he missed the war between art and science, he was starting to wage one of his own. By the time he wrote his first book in 1935, the proliferation of roll film, retail photo labs, and snapshot cameras like the Kodak Brownie brought photography to the masses.

Now, everyone and their grandma were taking pictures. And while Adams embraced the influx of new photographers (he wouldn’t have had an audience for his book otherwise), something didn’t sit right.

Anyone could load a box camera, take a picture, drop off the roll at the drug store, and pick up the prints a week later. But what only a few could do was judge the light of a scene, adjust the aperture, exposure accordingly, load the large format camera, take the picture, develop the negative (still often a glass plate), and then make a print in the darkroom.

For most, that was impossible. To Adams, that was essential. Just taking a photograph wasn’t enough; making the photograph (which, to him, absolutely and always involved making the print) was true photography.

It’s Like Poetry, It Rhymes

In all likelihood, he used the word “make” because it rhymed with “take.” He was riffing on the expression “take a picture.” It was pretty cute of him to do so, I’ll admit. If a different word has been used rather than “take,” I can’t imagine he would have gone for the word “make.” He was taking a centuries-old concept (“taking a picture”) and turning it on its head.

When you make something, it’s a process. There is planning. There is problem-solving. Most importantly, to “make” something stresses that there is something material, tangible being made. That’s the emphasis.

In the phrase “take a picture,” the end product was assumed (a picture of some sort). The main focus, however, was upon the subject – the person having their picture taken – not the painting or, in Adams’s case, the print.

In “making a photograph,” Adams was moving the focus from the subject to the process and the result, and he spent the rest of his life writing books about just that. This isn’t surprising, coming from someone who compared making a print in the darkroom to a musical performance.

And as I said at the top, I don’t disagree with him. But that’s not how people are using the term today. The vast and wide majority of people who insist upon saying “I made a picture” might develop it themselves, but there are no darkroom prints. Even the thought of it isn’t there. It’s just exposure, development, and digitizing. Its use within digital photography is even more baffling. Nothing material is actually being made, and that is the opposite of what Adams was talking about.

The Gloves Come Off

I don’t want to ruffle more feathers than I have to here, but in my experience, most people who say they “make a photograph” are trying to set themselves apart from those who are just taking pictures on their phones. But that wasn’t really what Adams was doing. He was setting himself apart, yes, but he was doing so while teaching anyone who would listen how to, in his words, “make a picture.” It wasn’t about him being better or deeper or more philosophical. It was about teaching people how to make a damn picture. It was about the end result: the material, the print, the actual picture.

Photographers who use this quote to signify their thoughtfulness in photography use the quote thoughtlessly. We use “make” to set ourselves apart from the common folks who “just” take pictures. But why do we feel the need to do this? Why not let our work speak for itself? Are we afraid that it can’t? Are we afraid we really are “just taking pictures?” And then, what’s wrong with that?

This reminds me of being raised in a born-again Christian household. If anyone would refer to our religion as a “religion,” we’d have corrected them: “It’s not a religion, it’s a lifestyle.”

This wasn’t even pedantic, it’s just ridiculous and starting an argument for no reason. But it was done to set ourselves apart from other religions (and even other Christians). It was said to make ourselves feel superior, and more importantly, to let others know we were superior.

Why I’ll Take “Take”

Since all of this is silly and semantical, I’ll admit to you that I prefer the word “take” over “make” a photograph. Whether I’m shooting a quick shot on my phone or spending 30 minutes metering, setting up a shot, selecting a lens, adjusting the aperture, and finally exposing the film, I am “taking” a photo. If I later make a print of that photo which I took, I’ll have made a print.

But in another way, I like to use the word “take” because it reminds me of one of its earliest definitions: thievery.

On the surface, we are stealing a bit of time, we are taking the light, exposing the film. The scene before us is stolen and kept latent in the dark until we develop it. When we “leave only footprints and take only pictures,” we are very literally taking the effects of that light with us, like a sunburn on pale skin.

I’m also taking (as in learning) something from the experience. With every place I travel, everywhere I photograph, I’m gaining experience in photography, I’m being introduced to something new about the land, and I’m taking in that knowledge while I’m taking the picture.

And more thoughtfully, we are taking a bit of wherever and whomever we’re photographing with us. We carry them in our memories, of course. But we’re also carrying them in our cameras, on our exposed film.

I’m not talking about the colonial idea of the camera “stealing their soul,” but maybe it’s not too far removed from that.

When we go out photographing, especially in places we’re just visiting, we are exploiting those places for our own pleasure (and if we sell our work, for our own financial gain). Of course, it’s usually harmless, but we are still engaging in some mild exploitation, and it’s always good to remember that.

I’m not saying it’s wrong to do it. I’m not talking about obviously exploitative shots like poverty porn, photographing the homeless just because, and certainly not whatever it’s called when the creepy photographers give their naked model a camera and she poses with it sort of like she’s taking a photo, but has never actually held such a camera, but it doesn’t matter because it’s not about the camera, it’s about the naked model pretending to like photography so the creepy photographer can pretend to feel some sort of connection to a woman… whatever that is. Anyway, I’m not talking about that. That’s obviously exploitative and gross and just weird, so please stop it.

But I do use “take a photograph” to remind myself that I am actually taking something from what I’m photographing. At the very least, it’s a thought to be remembered.

Conclusion (Finally)

If I wasn’t clear before, you take a picture, you make a print. Ansel’s phrasing was fine and understandable before everyone grabbed it and turned it into some pseudo-intellectual dorm room platitude.

Ansel Adams hoped that our focus in photography would include the entire process, from the camera to the negative to the print. The entire process was “making a picture.” Because producing an actual print is so rare now, I use “make” exclusively when talking about producing the print. Using “make” exclusively for the material, the print, allows us to put more emphasis on the print itself.

Again, this is a pet peeve of mine. It’s not rational, not really. You don’t have to honor it or even acknowledge it. I fully understand that my opinion is not rational. And you didn’t have to listen to me and my dumb opinion, but here we are, together to the end.

Last week I told you a story, I told you about my first hike of the season, I told you about solitude and how important a role it plays in where I travel, where I photograph. Last week I told you all about it, I told you almost everything. It was, however, a lie of omission.

“I scrambled up some natural steps,” I told you, “between sagebrush and giant boulders left stranded.” Before taking in the Columbia River still hundreds of feet below, I took out my phone, recorded a video, and posted it to Instagram.

I told you about walking the ranch road, which “made for a feeling like I was walking in history” without telling you that I took out my phone and recorded another video, posting it again to Instagram.

The same was true for the balsamroot flowers, as it was true for the walkway on the basalt cliff. The same was true for the bus, except I took two videos.

The ravens, however, I kept for myself. They were my solitude amongst the imagined solitude and a miraculous 5G connection.

I made some glancing reference to all of this. “All along the hike,” I confessed, “I had been taking quick videos with my phone and posting them as stories on Instagram. I thought that I wasn’t going to do this,” I told you, “and was a little unhappy with myself after the first few, finally giving in and sharing the whole day.”

This is maybe the only fully true thing I wrote. But even this is understated. Even this seems like some throwaway line, lip service paid to some vague concept of the rugged outdoors I claim to seek. Solitude doesn’t work like that. Solitude isn’t just isolation. Solitude isn’t a place. It’s not where you go to get away from it all. Solitude is expansive and expanding, it is terrifying and fleeting. Solitude is a life. It’s thousands of days, hundreds of years, centuries all wrapped up in that moment you realize you are alone, that there is nothing that will touch you.

It is not the canyons, the desert, the solo camping trips. It’s not the hours or road miles before you, after you. It’s not even being alone, it’s not even lonesomeness. It is something you carry inside of you. Something concealed, something necessarily and only yours. Solitude is you. It is the very essence of who we are. It is not family or friends or community, but our solitude affects all of those. When we ignore it or get lost within it, our solitude affects those we love. When we embrace it, love it, trust in it, trust in ourselves, then we can offer our true selves to our loved ones.

The walk I took last week was not solitude, and not just because I had a data connection or because I talked to a few people. It was not solitude because every chance I had at solitude was cast aside by an Instagram video. I wanted solitude, but more than that, I wanted to reach out, to tell my friends and the people of my community, “hey, look at what I’m doing right now!”

I wasn’t content to spend time with myself, to get to know who I was that day. That connection I sought is a connection I have almost constantly. I didn’t really want to share my day as much as I wanted to ignore myself. And while connection and community are essential to life, so is solitude, so is connecting and communing with yourself.

In that way, the time away was a failure. And I needed some redemption, I craved that isolation, that chance for solitude.

An Explanation

And so, this past weekend, I tried again. It wouldn’t be a hike this time, I’m still not sure I’m up for that. It would be a drive. But I think I owe you an explanation as to what that means.

My drives are well-planned. I select lonesome dirt roads leading from stop to stop, photographing anything that catches my eye. I visit small towns, but even then, I keep to the side streets, the alleys, and secondary roads leading in and out. I’m not quite slinking or skulking, but I avoid the highways and asphalt as much as I can.

When I stop to photograph along the way, I take my time. In a way, it’s a meditation, a relationship is built or continued, as was the case last weekend.

I have driven almost every public road in Douglas County, Washington, from the highways to jeep roads that faintly trace their way across the sage and hills. This trip was a return, a rekindling. The locations I selected were mostly from memory, and I tried to approach them in new ways, both physically and mentally.

The landscape changes slowly out there, but it does change, and with photography, we have a record of that change. Our photography is the thought and the words of that conversation.

Cloudless

I was packed – two cameras, a few lenses, over a dozen rolls of film, and far more sheets than I would use. I had my tent, my sleeping bag, food, and a feeling that my solitude could come into play at least to some degree.

There was one large caveat, however. The skies would be cloudless. Normally, this would be enough for me to postpone a trip. Clouds are often essential to what I shoot. They frame my subjects, they are dark halos over once-loved homes, they are the heavens rendered reachable, touchable. Without clouds, there is nothing above. There is void. But there might also be solitude. And it was at this I decided to make the trip anyway.

I took my phone, of course. My offline maps were loaded on it, and it’s an essential tool for what I do. But I was going dark, not quite off-grid – I could still be reached (and reach out) if necessary.

My photography wanderings are quite an undertaking, with multiple trips from the house to the car, loading it with camera gear and packs. As I was lugging my 4x5 kit down the stairs to the car, I realized this. So much prep and effort are packed into a three day, two night excursion. It’s understandable why it’s so rare. But I don’t understand why I hardly leave the house otherwise.

Home

Apart from work, I am homebound. It used to be different. I used to go to the movies a few times a week. I used to photograph Seattle, taking on huge photography projects, which led me to explore the less-traveled parts of town. I once walked over five miles a day just wandering down various streets and paths through the city. But now, even with the beautiful spring, here I am inside.

To add to this, I used to publish a zine every month or so. I used to have a podcast with a world built around a growing community. I’d receive dozens of messages each day from listeners, friends, people asking questions, and others answering mine. I was online and connected about as much as I am now, but that connection seems lost or that it’s moved along.

I feel like I’ve been infected with a short attention span. Where once I was able to watch movies, even at home, with little care about what’s happening on my phone, I find myself wandering through uncountable YouTube videos and for no good reason.

Even on May the 4th, Star Wars Day. I wanted to watch something adjacent and picked Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress and The Bogart & Bacall film The Big Sleep as interesting takes on A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back. But I didn’t. Instead, I just flipped through YouTube like I flipped through channels as a bored kid.

The movies and local photowalks take almost no planning or commitment at all, while my days-long trips take foresight and a level of preparedness that would keep most people from doing them. I don’t understand why I can hardly leave the house or focus unless it’s some big production. I don’t have answers here. It’s not that sort of thing.

Letters and Numbers

Most of the roads through Douglas County are laid out in a grid, each road exactly a mile away from the next, each road numbered or lettered accordingly. When I plan, I look for roads that break that pattern. They are placed where the land would not relent to an unnatural straight line. This was not even a compromise, we stood no chance, we gave in to the contours of the land.

There is a road which peels itself off from Road E Northwest called Road 13 Northwest. Because of the land, this road is mostly diagonal, curving along a sagebrush-covered ridge. Here, it is hardly more than a two-track.

In the spring, wildflowers grow in abundance along this road. Mostly it’s the balsamroot flowers, but also rock buckwheat, phlox, and buttercup. There are yellows and purples and whites mixed amongst the brown grasses and light sage.

In one particular spot, a large basalt boulder was planted, and with the cloudless blue skies and colorful ground, I stopped and spent an hour. Not a single car or truck passed by. It was me and my 4x5. I used strange and expired color film. This is duplication film, never meant to be exposed inside a camera. I knew it would draw out the colors, saturate the scene, bring every color to its most intense. It would look the way it felt.

As I walked the small prairie, placing my tripod among the flowers, I missed the clouds. I knew I would. The clouds add a dynamic to our static scenes in the same way wind might. I love to force long exposures, capturing the wind on my photos – the flowers swaying, the leaves a blur, the clouds smeared across the sky. And here there was nothing. Not a cloud above from one wide horizon to the other.

I missed them, but was resigned. It was what it was, and there was little I could do but capture this cloudless day.

Botheration

But to what end? It’s not that I suffer from impostor syndrome – the idea that someone will finally catch on to the truth that you have no idea what you’re doing and hold no qualifications at all to do it. I know where I stand as a photographer and am fine with whatever my abilities are.

My issue is that I can’t convince myself that anyone cares, and also, why should they? It’s not that I don’t want them to care, but I also understand why they don’t. “What I do isn’t for everybody,” I tell myself, which is really another way of saying that what I do doesn’t matter.

The evidence for this floated thoughtlessly through the air around me. The reason my books don’t sell like they used to, I’ve convinced myself, is because nobody cares enough to buy them. It’s got nothing to do with the photography community becoming more insular and cliqueish. It’s got nothing to do with algorithms and chance. My complete lack of self-promotion couldn’t be the reason. It’s the reality I’m living in now, and with each book I print fewer copies of, the more copies I have left over.

As I took my final photo of the boulder surrounded by a thousand flowers, I thought of this. I thought to myself, “Why bother?”

It hasn’t quite dug and wormed its way to the depths of “why bother photographing anything at all?” But I can’t say it hasn’t entered my thoughts. I photograph because I am in love with photography. It is selfish, it is for me. It is part of my meditation, my solitude.

26 ¾

I drove a hundred dirt road miles that day, stopping every few to photograph a cemetery, an abandoned home, or some landscape. But at first, the pictures were hard to take, it was difficult to decide what was and wasn’t a composition. My concentration was returning, but was not yet returned.

I have kicked around several projects over the years that encompassed this ground. Most recently, I wanted to do something with Road 26¾ Northeast. It begins at Road Y Northeast and stretches diagonally to where Road Z Northeast would live if there were a Road Z. The lack of Road Z has more to do with the land than with any naming convention.

After it straightens out, it becomes Road 26 Northeast, crossing Strahl Canyon Road – one of the rare unlettered and much less straight roads. Continuing east, 26 becomes barely a trace before regaining breadth at Road C Rex. Rex is a suffix tacked on to any road that exists east of the mythical Road Z. When it flips back over to A, it is Road A Rex. I’ve never received an adequate answer to why “Rex” was employed.

In the evening of the first day, I found myself on Road 26¾ Northeast. With the sun lowering behind me, the golden light of evening cast its long shadows across the boulders strewn along the hillsides and the rows and rows of powerlines and pylons just to the south.

There are numerous and unnamed lakes skirting the edges of Road 26¾ Northeast. Even after it straightens and drops the “¾,” the lakes and ponds remain. I’ve waited hours here before, alone with the empty spaces. I have never seen another person on this road. This evening, however, I stopped here and there for a quick shot with the Mamiya RB67. There’s no need for a tripod, even if there were time. I felt in a small hurry and knew I would return the following morning, taking the road west to catch the early light. That is my golden hour. The evening is beautiful, to be sure. But the morning is a resurrection. It is all life and light anew.

In my hurry, I didn’t have time to notice the cloudless sky. I didn’t think of my books, my projects, and perhaps a new one forming itself. I didn’t remember Instagram, I couldn’t recall the last time I spoke to someone. I collected my few photographs and left.

That late evening, I set up camp in a small, little-used campground along Banks Lake, the man-made reservoir created when they erected Grand Coulee Dam. Someday, I would love to see it drained. I set up my tent, crawled into my sleeping bag, and shivered my way through the night. A coyote cried off in the distance, and then another, their distant calls and talking not so different from ours.

Morning

With the warm dawn, I returned to Road 26 and the cloudless sky. Not everything we want has to align for us to create. Perhaps it’s even better when things are askew. When we can conjure something artistic out of the chaos (or, in my case, the dreadful curse of a cloudless sky), that is where we can experience our true creativity.

Creativity, like solitude, is inside of us; we only have to learn how to draw it out, how to trust it, how to love it properly.

I stopped by a pond that I had driven by the evening before. Here, the pylons reflected themselves in the still water, uncontorted by ripples. I parked on the hill above and walked with my 4x5 and tripod along the road.

Sometimes I’ll do this – I’ll park some small distance away from where I want to shoot, just to approach it on foot, slowly, deliberately. I set up my shot, taking a handful of black & white and a few in color. I wasn’t sure which was best suited, and as usual, I’m still not.

Long ago, I fell in love with the often grotesque infusion of industry and technology among nature. Here, with the pylons and towers stretched and lined across a landscape randomly dotted with boulders and lakes, that strange perfection is on abundant display.

There is no cell service on most of Road 26 Northeast. Here and there, as you crest hills, and if the wind is right, you can receive the messages you missed when you were down below.

Sacred Communication

As I photographed the scene of parallel lines strung across the land, I thought how this was almost a metaphor for how we used to communicate. Here, all I had to do was walk up a hill to receive my messages. Before the internet, we communicated mostly by letter (a long-distance telephone call was prohibitively expensive, while a stamp cost only slightly more than a quarter). All I had to do was walk to the post office and pick up my mail.

I wrote and received a lot of letters back then. Each trip to the post office yielded several, and often zines as well. These were the punk rock days, and communication via the United States Postal Service was almost sacred.

Each letter was written in our solitude, and when we read the letters received, we looked into the solitude of others. It was personal and infrequent, even though we often wrote to each other a few times a week. There was no way to send a text message or email, no expected immediacy to our communication, to our relationships. And each letter received was tangible, real, it was permanent.

This sloppy metaphor falls apart with the slightest breeze. A walk up the hill to check my messages would mean someone would see that I received them, which would mean that I would have to respond immediately, thoughtlessly (so as not to appear thoughtless). And also, with the messages came a thousand distractions, a thousand things to pull me away from this solitude, this meditation.

With a letter, there was something worth savoring. There was something worth drawing in, reading it over and over. There was handwriting, there was the smell of the paper, the house it came from. Often, we’d send small surprises with the letters – stickers, bizarre Christian comic books, zines we found, mix tapes. Everything to say “I thought of you.”

Up that small hill, I had a cell phone connection, but I remembered back to when we could maintain our connections without a connection. Sometimes I brush all of this off as pointless nostalgia. But it’s not empty sentiment. I truly was happier then. It’s not that I am a Luddite or rage against social media, text messages, and assumed immediacy. I have fully adapted and will likely live the rest of my life with this.

But I appreciated communication more when it wasn’t so easy to communicate. I loved that connection more when there was no continuous connection. It all felt special because it all was special.

Go Back

As I walked back up the hill to my car and to a chance not taken to check my messages, I wondered if we could go back. If we could send letters and prints and zines. Not for the sake of nostalgia, but because it was actually and realistically better.

I wished for a way to share photos without the internet, without wading through ads and an absolute constant stream of information and media. Could we still divorce photography and art from content?

There is a midwestern writer named Sanora Babb who wrote a few novels and published short stories in the 1930s. I remember reading in the introduction to her novel The Lost Traveler that writers “like Jack Conroy, Miriedel Le Sueur, Babb, and other isolated midwesterners shared a virtual reading room together as youths in widely scattered towns and farms. Their interests merged—in literature, writing, and politics—despite their isolation. They knew one another, in most cases, only through letters.”

Could such a thing still be possible? Is it realistic? Practical? In a world where we value efficiency and constant turnover, I have my doubts. But what would it be like to share prints and zines and even long letters physically rather than digitally? How would that change us? Where would that take our relationships? How might that affect our photography?

Spencer P.O.

I kept these thoughts with me as I drove away from Road 26¾ Northeast. They followed me through a patchwork of public and private land, littered with No Trespassing signs, cleverly posted along tattered public roads in hopes of scaring away anyone wondering if they might illegally cross some imaginary line, all under this cloudless sky.

Knowing these lines well enough, I followed such a road west and then north, skirting a field of the first green stalks of wheat breaking the soil. Before me, as my car bottomed out on the center of what was now passing for a road, I saw Chester Butte, a small rise taller than any of the other small rises on the Columbia Plateau.

It was covered in wildflowers like splotches of yellow and purple paint splashed across the hills. With my RB67, I crisscrossed my way to the top. Returning once again to a cell phone signal I ignored. Below, the public and private land mixed as one, with young wheat fields and canola fields blending in with craggy basalt coulees and sage. In the distant west, I caught glimpses of Moses Coulee carved north and south across the huge plateau.

Over 100 years ago, the small town of Spencer grew inside this coulee. There was a hotel, a cafe, and a post office, which served as a singular point of connection for the area ranchers and farmers to the outside world. For them, a letter wasn’t just a quaint way to keep in touch, it was the only way to send or receive information and news about scattered family and the outside world.

Sanora Babb wrote about her love for mail in An Owl on Every Post, when she lived in 1920s Kansas, but life in Moses Coulee back then was not so different.

“As soon as the mailbags were dragged into the post office, people gathered and talked and waited—mostly waited without talking—for the postmaster and a helper to put up the mail. In this town and others to follow, it was I who went for the mail, one of the best pleasures.

“There was talk outside on the sidewalk, but in the post office, there was now almost complete silence as if everyone was listening to the significant whisper and slide of the letters and papers being sorted and placed in boxes and cubbyholes.”

Atop Chester Butte, I thought of Spencer, I thought of Sanora’s words, which I had read the night before. I remembered that sound, that “significant whisper and slide of the letters” as the post master of my small hometown sorted the mail – a town so small, we had no delivery to our doors, but had to visit the post office to pick up our mail. I remembered the sweet adhesive and paper smell of the lobby, how we greeted our neighbors, how we talked and gossiped. It happened daily, but it was an event, it was something we looked forward to.

Our post office was like this hill, Chester Butte, where I was standing. It was our connection. We had televisions and telephones, the radio and newspapers, but the post office was somehow more important, more official. The news and weather were for everyone. The mail we received was personal. Here was a place where we gathered and talked and went our separate ways in our solitude, holding letters filled with news from far-off friends and loved ones that meant nothing to anyone and everything to us.

I made a lot of zines when I was younger. Again, these were the punk rock days. I’d tape them up, put an address and stamp on them, and they’d be delivered across the county in only a few days. A couple of weeks later, a letter would be slid into my post office box, written by whoever received the zine (usually already a friend). They’d give me their thoughts and tell me about their week. Often, a zine would be sent with their letter, and the correspondence would continue back and forth for years.

I thought of this atop this butte and wondered where any of them were now; wondered if we might have kept in better touch if the internet hadn’t happened upon us. So much immediate connection killed the so much more meaningful connection.

The way down and away from Chester Butte brought me once again to the thoughts of solitude and letters and how we’ve lost both to the very way you’re reading this now. These words wouldn’t exist without the internet, but then maybe they wouldn’t have to.

Clouds

The rest of the day brought me through Moses Coulee, past what used to be Spencer, across the southern reaches of Douglas County. I shot sixteen or seventeen rolls of 120 and a couple of dozen sheets of 4x5. I camped near where I hiked on my last trip, and that evening I saw my first cloud.

With one frame left in the RB67, I took its photo in the coming evening air. The miles behind me unwound through my head as I watched the clouds move and gather and separate with the breeze.

For all those miles, all those scenes and photographs, the skies were clear, formless, cloudless. There was nothing above and all that existed was below, was near me, was part of me. But now the clouds had gathered, it was time to go home.

I had packed the night before - camera, film, water, food. I had checked maps, selected my trails, and committed them to memory. This would be an easy hike, I thought, but then recalibrated. I am out of shape, this is the first hike of the year (first hike in a year), and I haven’t felt great in months. This will be what it is.

It’s not that I didn’t care, but I had to get out. The winter and early spring of Seattle was suffocating me. The constant noise of cars, the echo of far too many voices, the monotony of concrete and asphalt and concrete was walling me off, brick by brick.

There’s a balance we try to strike as photographers between living in the moment and photographing that moment. It’s impossible to do both, though we often tell ourselves otherwise.

We lie to ourselves, saying that while we are experiencing the through the lens, it’s still happening and we are still fully present. We want so badly for this to be true, even when we’re not hiding behind the camera. Experiencing the moment without the filter of a lens grows terrifying the more time we spend behind it.

It was tempting to leave the camera at home, but of course I didn’t.

What I did was a compromise I made with myself years ago. Each hike, I make some vague attempt to carry my camera inside my pack. Of course, this runs antithetical to the photographer’s philosophy/film manufacturer’s marketing slogan of always having a camera at the ready.

This, I’ve found, allows me to experience the moment first, and then hide behind my camera. This also means not capturing some of the moments. But then, this is also a rule I end up breaking to no real advantage by the end of the hike.

With large format a pack is necessary. There’s really no other way to carry a tripod and camera that needs a tripod (as well as film holders) into the field. But I’ve also started doing it with medium format, lugging the boat anchor known as the Mamiya RB67 on my back.

When I see something worth a photograph, I sling off the pack, unroll the top, take out the camera bag, take out the camera, and shoot. This entire operation requires only thirty seconds or so. The lens is already on the camera, the film is already loaded. All I need to do is check the light.

The sun rose softly behind thick morning clouds as I crossed the Columbia River on Interstate 90. I had left Seattle hours before dawn and regretted not camping the cold night before. The light was dim and gray, and though I was there to photograph the spring wildflowers, I had brought enough black & white film to last the entire hike should the clouds fail to disperse.

Washington is known for its lush forests of firs and moss, its tall granite peaks, and glacial lakes. But that is almost never my destination. East of all that, on the other side of the Cascade Mountain Range, lies an almost prairie landscape full of sage and grasses intercut with seemingly inexplicable dry box canyons. It’s called the Scablands, and that’s an awful name for one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. This is the shrub-steppe, a (nearly) desert grassland that covers nearly one-third of the state.

While a few trees dot the landscape – mostly the invasive Russian olive tree – the rolling hills are covered with sagebrush, a slow-growing shrub whose leaves smell of camphor and mint. When it rains, the air fills with this scent and everything in the world seems perfect, even though it really, really isn’t.

When I arrived at the trailhead, there were more cars than I had ever seen there before: fifteen. Maybe sixteen. Had my spot been blown up? I wondered, reminding myself that this wasn’t my spot, that I’m only here a few times a year. This is public land, and it’s ours. But still, that’s a lot of cars for a place three hours from Seattle. I parked, double-checked my gear, took a long drink of water, and started down the trail.

The hike was at a place known by a few different names. Most commonly, it’s called Ancient Lakes – a misnomer we’ll come back to. But it’s also called Potholes Coulee, and has been for nearly a century. This is a state wildlife area known as the Quincy Lakes Unit, part of the Columbia Basin Wildlife Area.

The main features, apart from the lakes, are two half-mile wide canyons running parallel, east and west into the Columbia River, for two miles with a thin spine separating them. From space, they look like a giant had pressed two fingers into the mud. The north canyon, Ancient Lakes Coulee, is the most traveled and visited. It’s the easiest to get to and has several small lakes inside it. The south canyon is Dusty Lake Coulee. They are not mirrors of each other, but hikers rarely do both.

But I would do neither this time. Over the years, I have explored and camped in both. I have walked in from the same trailhead, level with the floor of the coulees. And I have also scrambled the 250 feet down the side of the coulees from the top. I have hiked and photographed the overlooks, side canyons, wetlands, and oddities of this place for the last fifteen years.

Though the coulees themselves weren’t where the trail was taking me today, my first stop was a photo I have wanted to retake for years. Nothing was wrong with the original one. Or the one I took after that. But I wanted to see what I could do with it again.

A main trail – actually an old ranch road – leads you across the wide mouths of both coulees, here nearly a mile in width. Along the way, several trails lead you inside the coulees, with various branches splitting off here and there.

I tramped past the first main trail off, and then the second, cresting over the crumbled remains that divided Ancient Lake Coulee from Dusty Lake Coulee. From here, I looked east along the tall spine left standing. These were sheer basalt cliffs with columns like the Devil’s Fence Post or Giant’s Causeway. But they were here, unheralded and unnamed, tucked into the cliffside with some small sunlight piercing the clouds and showing their tall shadows. Looking a mile across to the other side, a small waterfall was lit up white by the sun, and it twinkled and shone. If I had time, I said, I’d visit it on the way out.

I backtracked some, returning to the trail into the coulee. My footprints were the only ones on it that morning, and I tracked over only the faintest of prints left in the mud some weeks before. This was the first warm weekend, more would be coming. But for now, it was just me.

What I was seeking was off-trail a bit, and I began angling away from the trail, moving through grasses, sage, and nearly-opened rock buckwheat flowers, stepping over tumbleweeds of invasive Russian thistle, until I found a century-old iron wheel stuck into the ground. What was left of its spokes was cut so the axle could be freed.

I don’t know what this wheel was attached to or why the wheel was left. I know nothing of it at all, finding it by accident as I roamed around a decade ago.

I slipped off my pack and removed the camera. I circled the scene a few times, deciding how to shoot it this time, forgetting how I shot it last, though maybe that’s for the best. When I reshoot a location, I try my best to forget how I shot it before. But I also want to photograph it differently, and so I try to feel my way into something new. Sometimes it even works.

The light was still dim, and I used 400 speed Ilford HP5 with a yellow filter to bring some small handful of contrast to the scene. Still circling the wheel, I shot several frames, including a close-up of a thistle branch. The sun cooperated by staying hidden, and I continued on, looking for the trail that would lead me lower.

If the coulees had flowing water, it would empty into the Columbia River, running perpendicular just a mile west of the trailhead. The land between the coulees and the river, 500 feet below, is a maze of tall, sharp outcroppings and dead-end narrow basins. Few trails lead down the various precipices, but I had found one that did.

The trail here was a well-cut walkway clinging to the side of a basalt cliff. Over the millennia, the cliff had shed, littering and piling thin rocks along its walls. Eventually, I thought, the cliffs will shed so much they will no longer be cliffs, but hills, steep and rolling. For now, though, walking over this uneven and precarious talus path, the view winding down to the river, still hidden in a canyon of its own, stopped me.

With the sun, still low and again behind clouds, the gray valley unfolded itself. The rocky path I was on descended to a landing lush with grasses and sage. As the cliff I was walking along faded away, another, opposite me, extended with various levels and shelves, themselves covered in grasses, leading to basalt walls and columns hundreds of feet high. Trails branched and combined within this small space.

Above me cried two ravens, flying side-by-side in the cool air. As they floated down into this little valley, towards the Columbia, one of the ravens turned upside down, tucked in their wings, and gave a quick and joyful “caw caw!” before flipping back and gliding with their friend. A moment later, the raven again flipped over, repeating the same call, and then back right. They did this several more times before flying back up the canyon, circling, and gliding back down again. As they escaped my view, I could still hear the upside-down “caw! caw!” echoing off the walls.

This is often seen as a mating ritual or a way to assert dominance, and both of those things might be true. But it’s also fun. Like most birds, ravens and crows fly to find food, to get from one place to another, for survival. But they also fly for fun. Ravens and crows play. I’ll often see my city crows sliding down roofs when it snows.

Taking some time to watch ravens in the wild is endlessly rewarding. They are intelligent, cautious, and shy, so if they see you as an unnecessary threat, they will leave you. But if you have patience and quiet, you can watch them for as long as they allow and your life will be all the better for it.

I didn’t photograph the ravens, I didn’t even try. This was a moment I wanted to experience myself, without the gauze of ground glass. Also, on a practical level, trying to frame and focus anything moving through the waste level finder of a Mamiya RB67 is a confusing, frustrating mess that not only results in no good photograph, but also succeeds in fully removing you from the moment. Part of being a good photographer is knowing when you’re not.

The grassy plain below was not flat like it seemed from above. This is a feature of this land that I will never grow accustomed to. Looking across any open space of sage and grasses reveals what seems to be a featureless flatland. However, when you make the trek across it, you rise and fall with the undulating ripples and hills, invisible just moments before.

I scrambled up some natural steps, between sagebrush and giant boulders left stranded before coming to a landing where the Columbia finally came into view, still hundreds of feet below, as if the river was falling with me.

By now, the sun gave a full view of the yellow and green landscape. The temperatures were rising, and I wanted to steal a small slice of shade before that too slipped away. To my right were the basalt cliffs, still reaching towards the Columbia, and to my left was a small outcrop of rock surrounded by the yellow blossoms of the arrowleaf balsamroot, a small sunflower which grows in bunches a foot and a half tall. Patches of these could be seen on the opposite slopes and shelves, but here was a small patch surrounding the dried skeleton of a sagebrush.

Since I was resting anyway, I went for the camera. With the light still coming and going, I went with a very expired Portra 400, shooting it at 100 and figuring it would all work out. The choice between black & white film and color is often one I struggle with, even when it comes to flowers. But on this day, there was no struggle at all.

The shadow of the formation, the shade whose shelter I was under, covered some of the flowers and part of the old sagebrush, but the rest glinted in their morning splendor, overlooking the grasses below. I took two shots and continued my walk.

Though I should not have been surprised, I lost the river behind a hill growing before me. This was a tall bench overlooking the final drop into the Columbia. With short breaths, I crested it and stopped.

The bench did not lead directly to the river itself, but sloped sharply before flattening out into a flood plain where countless boulders were strewn amidst trails leading to the water. A row of trees, their leaves newly green in the spring, lined the river, and between them, a few hikers had established camps. I could hear voices from below – the first I had heard since the trailhead.

There is a large part of me that hikes and photographs and travels for the solitude. I live in a city, and to visit a popular waterfall or overlook near the city seems ridiculous to me. I come to nature to escape the crowds of the city, not to meet up with them atop some ridge with a view of the entire Seattle metropolitan area. But that morning, the laughter and joy floated up with the breeze, and it somehow seemed fitting.

I could see no people, just a tent or two, but I photographed this view in both color and black & white, unsure which would relate the scene best. Looking at them now, I still don’t know.

The trail winding down to the campsites skirted a large washed-out gulch a few hundred feet wide. Crossing it, I expected to see layers of rock and earth denoting eras and the passing of time. Instead, the inside of this gulch and the inside of this shelf were a mix of cobble and sandy earth. Some of the rocks were basalt, which made sense, but many were of various colors and sizes, most worn smooth and rounded as if tumbled not just by some long-forgotten glacier, but by water.

This is one of the many stories of this land, all too involved to tell. But from here, you could see much of it. The basalt, then as lava, had flowed from fissures in southern Washington and Oregon. Here, it had flowed and then cooled 15 million years ago. During the ice age, 20,000 years ago, glaciers made their way south, coming close to Ancient Lakes, but never quite touching them.

Of course, at that time, there were no coulees and canyons. It was just rolling hills and grasses, much like the Palouse region in the far eastern portion of the state. But then the floods came, perhaps 15,000 years ago. Over and over, water burst from ice dams and from under melting glaciers, flooding all of eastern Washington, tearing away the loose basalt, creating channels and canyons where I now often photograph and hike.

Here in this gulch was the wash from those floods, now encompassed into a bar along the Columbia. The boulders below were carried both by the water and within icebergs. The entire Columbia River here and through the gorge to the Pacific was also largely carved out and deepened then.

All of this was so clear and plain here in the middle of this gray and ugly gulch. I crossed to the other side and to grass, made my way back up the shelf, and walked along its ridge. I was now off-trail again.

There’s something freeing about being off-trail. In the thick woods it can be dangerous, but here, with a clear view of everything in this world, it made me feel part of it all. I found a small coyote trail and went along it, noticing prints here and there.

I took no photographs as I walked a mile or so north. The soft grasses gave way to more rugged ground and sage, but I continued until I came up against a barbed wire fence.

I’m always a little hesitant to cross fences. I was fairly certain that it was public land on both sides, but I walked along it, waiting for a gate or an opening. In some time, I came to one – an opening where there once used to be a gate. This was public land after all. I knew there was an old ranch road that swung from the hills above and led down to the river. Once I found it, after a couple of miles of walking, I stayed with the ridge, following an older trace.

This brought me to a scene repeated throughout the deserts of the world: an old school bus left abandoned, spray-painted and gutted. I don’t know the story of this one. Maybe it was hippies who drove it down and couldn’t dig it out. Maybe it was a rancher who planted it there as a camp for his hands. This whole area was once a sheep ranch. Either is possible.

But here it sat, a school bus, stripped of everything, including the wheels and seats. The engine, coated in many layers of paint, stood open. The bus was a full-size late 1940s, early 1950s Dodge. Its windows were all broken out, and bullet holes pierced it on all sides. Generations of wasps had claimed it, so I didn’t enter, but poked my head inside. The seat had been removed and was sitting next to where a fire ring might have been.

I photographed it in color and black & white extensively. I had now switched to Fomapan 100 and finished off the Provia. In nearly every case, the color won out, and for the same reasons as the flowers - the yellow against the sage green and blackened basalt, the brown grasses and blue sky. There was a life within this color that black & white couldn’t translate.

With my last frame of Provia, I rested to change film and have my small lunch. I brought along a few rolls of expired Fuji Astia, a slide film that filled some perceived space between Fuji’s other offerings: the soft Provia and the intense Velvia. It was a line that didn’t last long, maybe 15 years. This had expired in 2000.

With age and how I develop my color film, I knew that there wouldn’t just be color shifts, there would be a borderline surreal representation of color. It looks back to a feeling I had when I first started photographing eastern Washington – I didn’t want to show how the place looked, but how it felt.

I ate my peanut butter sandwich and gathered my things. I tend to spread out when I photograph. With large format it’s the worst, but even with medium, even with only one camera, one lens, and two film holders, I can be a bit of a mess. I checked the ground to make sure I left nothing behind.

All along the hike, I had been taking quick videos with my phone and posting them as stories on Instagram. I thought that I wasn’t going to do this, and was a little unhappy with myself after the first few, finally giving in and sharing the whole day.

It’s not that I want to stay hidden or to keep these spaces for myself, but all week I had yearned to unplug and escape social media. And here, with every chance to do just that, I pulled myself back in. It was disappointing, but it was also a chance to share my morning with friends. It’s often difficult to tell what I actually want.

The ranch road I was walking made for a feeling like I was walking in history. Not just geologic, which was evident all around, but a history not too long before. These rough roads, now thankfully barred to motorized vehicles, were run by trucks and jeeps following the Second World War.

The eponymous lakes – Ancient and Dusty – also date from this time. For decades, both coulees were completely filled with water for and from irrigation. They were, essentially, reservoirs, and the strandlines from the varying water levels can still be seen along the slopes inside the coulees. Maybe the wheel that I photographed during the first part of my hike is from that era.

It was then that Ancient Lake got its name, though the people who named it knew it wasn’t ancient at all. But it’s a good name, so it stuck. But hell, even the coulees themselves aren’t ancient. I think we might have learned a lot since then.

I had nearly made a circle, drawing close to the shelf overlooking the Columbia, to where I had scrambled down the talus, to where the ravens played in the morning sun. I had searched for a path or trail out of this lower section and back to the main trail to the trailhead, but could find nothing and was running out of energy to explore.

The hike wasn’t a difficult one. The miles weren’t endless, but neither was my energy. I saw the path I took leading in and readied myself to hike it out. The ravens were gone, now roosting or playing somewhere else. The balsamroot flowers were still following the sun. The rock buckwheat flowers, which had been closed this morning, were now opening, likely for the first time that spring. The path was still steep and in full light of the sun.

After stopping to photograph a few flowers, I decided to just carry my camera slung on my shoulder rather than in my pack. Maybe I thought that I had already lived the moment, so having a camera at the ready wouldn’t matter. Maybe I needed to shift some weight.

I finished off the Fomapan and switched back to the color Fuji Astia and stopped much more often to rest and photograph and sometimes to just rest without taking a single photo.

Partway up the grade, I found a cool spot where the sun’s rays had not yet reached. I slung off my pack and had a fine view up and down the canyon. To this point, I had passed two other hikers, a couple returning from a camp they made the night before along the river.

Sitting there now, an older couple passed me. The husband was recording something on his GoPro and I seemed to have messed up his shot by existing. Pleasantries were exchanged and they made some remark about me finding shade. They weren’t wrong. I let them struggle up the hill and out of sight before I regained my feet and followed.

Finally at the top and back on the main trail, I could see that the waterfall from the morning was gone. It, like the lakes, was part of irrigation. When the orchard above the coulees was watering, we’d have a waterfall. When they weren’t, the waterfall was dry.

When I got back to my car, the parking lot at the trailhead was packed with over 80 cars. It was staggering. In the morning, there had been just 15, and already I was worried that Potholes Coulee/Ancient Lakes/the Quincy Lakes Unit of the Columbia Basin Wildlife Area had blown up.

And don’t get me wrong, it has. There are many times more people here now than were here a decade ago. And I never know what to think about that.

On one hand, too many people will overrun the land, or at least spoil the experience. On the other, if people don’t visit these places, if they don’t fall in love with them, we may lose them.

Potholes Coulee isn’t really in any danger of being lost. It’s well-loved and well-protected by the state. In recent years, they’ve actually added to the acreage. The locals visit often, and it’s not far enough away to keep Seattleites from invading. But still, there’s something about solitude.

Following my hike, I drove out and up to the next level of the canyon complex, the top level, part of the larger Columbia Plateau. I parked and hiked along a cliff that overlooked both Dusty Lake and Ancient Lake Coulees.

Below me were the two long canyons, and beyond the slot where the Columbia River flowed. Below me, my day was hidden, tucked away behind distance swales and falling unseen to the river. Also below me were dozens of scattered tents. But they were dwarfed by the breadth of the coulees, and even though there were more than I had ever seen, I had to look close to see them.

This second ramble added three miles to my day, but resting above even the spine between the canyons, above the hundreds of hikers arriving in their now more than 80 cars, I found that solitude.

Through the entire day, I shot only five rolls (the last was something called Kodak Lumiere, a sort of cousin of Ektachome with a bit more saturation). I’m sure I could have photographed much more, but at some point, I have to live my life and hike my own hike. And fifty photos from just a single day is kind of a lot if you think back to the times before content and digital.

That balance we try to strike as photographers between living in the moment and photographing that moment is encompassed in the much larger breadth of the day. I struck some sort of balance that day. It wasn’t the most balanced balance, but I’m more than satisfied with the hike and the day as well.

As for the photos, like the hike, they are what they are. This was my day, this is how it felt. This is my photography.