Quarantined 23 stories about the streets, I have a new subject to photograph. It’s the same in all good photography. Look for light. Look for different perspectives. Fall in love.
The tricky part, for me, has been finding a connection with the cityscape.
My landscape is made up of buildings. Man-made worlds built for work and for living. Structures of concrete and glass. Yet, the scene is not devoid of beauty. On the contrary, the clean aesthetic of the landscape fits well into modern minimalist art genre.
If I look a little closer I see a roof garden. A low lying green roof. A grassy field in the distance.
I generally take photographs of people, but even my landscape photos are best when I get to know them. I’ve become quite attached to my Woods and her barn in the Hudson Valley. Through times of snow, rain, and sun. Changing seasons dress the Woods in colors. And not primary colors, but lime green, and hunters green. Tawny brown and amber. Chinese red and mustard yellow.
But this landscape of high rise buildings is foreign to my taste. I can’t see any people from up here. Even in the windows of the office buildings. I see in the far away, little people walking along the streets. Riding their bicycles. Maybe there are people in the little cars whizzing by in their little box shaped cars.
At first I felt drawn to the landscapes above the city. The clouds, the setting sun, the moon. After all those are my friends at home. The clouds remember me and are happy to show off throughout the day.
Matsuo Basho said In composing haiku there are two ways, “becoming” and “making.”
Basho identified “becoming” as superior to “making” which he felt was inauthentic. For a haiku poet, to learn from nature should mean to submerge himself, to perceive the delicate life and feel its feelings, out of which a poem forms itself.
Basho believed, according to scholar Makoto Ueda, beauty in nature is a manifestation of the supreme creative force which flows through all things in the universe, animate and inanimate. The artist can depict this force “when the object enters his mind and dyes it in its own color, whereupon a poem emerges by itself.”
photographs: mbfitzmahan. Tokyo from above. July 2021. Tokyo, Japan.
