Alaska: The Other Journey
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
– J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings
Pretty pictures, admonitions to save the environment, and shilling for Alaska tourism are out of the way and I can turn my attention to the deep stuff. When last we spoke, I mentioned some 1500 images that I came home with, left after editing in camera for blurs and accidentally forgetting to reset the ISO sensitivity and being so excited about a shot that I took 30 images of a puffin where a couple might suffice. Then I took the 500 best of those, ones that I was, for whatever reason, really excited about (What did we do before digital?).
After about 50 or so straight shots that I can bore my friends and family with, what about the other 450? Most are lovely images that I’ll keep to myself; the arctic squirrel at the door of my yurt, statues outside the Anchorage Museum, or an aspen tree that has no magic for anyone but myself.
It’s not enough for me to have simply pretty, literal images of my journeys. How we change along the road, how we are changed by our experience is what I want to show. The person who leaves on a journey is not the same person who comes back. So this post is about making images that try to describe the feeling of experience, rather than the sight of a place in time.
It’s a terrible thing to try to describe the smell of a glacier or lyrical movement through a forest. And it’s impossible to put in concrete terms what it is to look into a pond and see one’s own state of being. And it’s prone to drive one to madness when put to describe how one has been changed by the experience. But that’s why we have things like abstraction and poetry.
This will end up feeding a new project which I will expound on later. And I haven’t forgotten poor Bodhairim and I’ll talk about that in a later post too. For now, I’m pleased to be pleased about working again and home from the road for awhile…
Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though I oft have passed them by,
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.
– J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings