“Near Vail, Colorado, October 1980″

My first encounter with a Joel Sternfeld photo was at the Art Institute of Chicago in spring of 2007. A good friend of mine was interning in the photography department and had the wonderful opportunity to curate an exhibit on early color photography. She walked me around the exhibit explaining who the photographers were, why they were important, and why she grouped them in a certain way. Eventually we came to a photo of golden yellow trees fill the top half of the image and tower over a ravine full of wrecked cars, their rusted bodies almost lost in the shadows. This image struck me like few had before. It effectively used the grammatical device of anachorism or the placing of an object where it does not belong. I immediately started asking why those cars were there. Who had put them there? Who had owned them before? What would become of them?

I turned to my friend and said, “This guy takes pictures the way that I want to write songs.” At the time I was completing work on my first album of original songs. Many of my songs were narrative in nature, having grown up in a country music tradition, and I constantly struggled with including just enough but not too much information. This picture suggested without telling. It allowed the viewer to enter in, explore, and take ownership of the questions posed.   I immediately found a used copy of American Prospects and decided to, as an experiment, write a song in response to this image. The result is a song entitled, “Yellow Tree,” which suggests that the cars were left in the ravine by a figure who enjoys stealing cars for its own sake. This was a difficult writing process for me. I struggled to avoid mere description. I would never pretend to know what Sternfeld was saying. Instead, I wanted to treat his photos like the stage sets they appeared to be. In my mind, my character inhabited this image.

You can hear the song, “Yellow Tree,”  on my myspace page: www.myspace.com/sawgrassmusic

I have continued, on and off, to return to this set of photos. I have written about four songs over the last two years from them. Whenever I get stuck with writing about my own life or experiences, I enjoy turning to this book and wrestling with the images to conjure fiction from them. Sternfeld has a knack for capturing the strangeness of America. He frames surreal juxtapositions that exist in the seemingly infinite landscape of opportunity. His photos are quirky, disturbing, joyful, and melancholic. Most of all, they are complex. After these last few years of living in a contentious dialog with this book of photos, I still wish to write songs like Sternfeld takes pictures. I’m still learning what that might mean.

In Eudora Welty’s short story, “Livvie,” a young woman who has long been kept captive by her significantly older husband breaks free of her prison. Welty uses visual language effectively. Her descriptions of the house and its interior are static, still, and stale. All seems to have a layer of fine dust.

The front room was papered in holly paper, with green palmettos from the swamp spaced at careful intervals over
the walls. There was fresh newspaper cut with fancy borders on the mantel-shelf, on which were propped photographs of old or very young men printed in faint yellow-Soloman’s people. Solomon had a houseful of furniture. There was a double settee, a tall scrolled rocker and an organ in the front room, all around a three-legged table with a pink marble top, on which was set a lamp with three gold feet, besides a jelly glass with pretty hen feathers in it. Behind the front room, the other room had the bright iron bed with the polished knobs like a throne, in which Solomon slept all day. There were snow-white curtains of wiry lace at the window, and a lace bed-spread belonged on the bed.

Welty writes as if one was looking over a photograph, meticulously studying each detail moving from one object to the next. Compare this style of description to Livvie’s perception of nearby workers in the field.

She could see how over each ribbon of field were moving men and girls, on foot and mounted on mules, with hats set on their heads and bright with tall hoes and forks as if they carried streamers on them and were going to some place on a journey-and how as if at a signal now and then they would all start at once shouting, hollering, cajoling, calling and answering back, running, being leaped on and breaking away, flinging to earth with a shout and lying motionless in the trance of twelve o’clock.

Welty’s description of the outside is raucous and joyful. Verbs pile end-over-end in her sentences. If this was a photograph, it would be one which is blurred from motion, packed with objects, and overflowing with color.

Another visual device itself, the bottle tree is used as a metaphor for Solomon’s overprotective ways. It is, on its face, a way to trap evil spirits, but in the story it stands more for Livvies imprisonment than it does for her protection.

Much of this story could be communicated through a photographic essay, much like we will attempt to create about our site, because so much is tied to visual interactions and metaphor. The scene that came the clearest to my mind was when Cash and Livvie were standing over Solomon in his dying moments. When Solomon awakes from his slumber, Cash steps back and cocks his fist, ready to punch the old man if he tries to grab Livvie. Time seems to stand still, each character watching the other, waiting. This composition alone would tell a lot about the narrative and the relationship between the characters.

Can grammatical terms–metonomy, metaphor, conceit, etc.–be used to describe landscape in a way that helps us understand how and why it impacts us? We were asked to think about some of the terms Spirn explores in her book, The Language of Landscape, and think about how six of them might apply to our own site.

Aposiopesis – “a statement or address is broken off, to be completed in the imagination”. My site is a place where some structures and objects are destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, while others remain strangely preserved. Many times, changes to a structure leave remnants, clues to what was once there. For example, one might look at a building and see a patch of new brick amongst older brick. This might lead you to find the building’s use changed and the new owner decided windows were unnecessary so he or she bricked them up. Another example from my site is this fragment of fence. It hints at what was once there, lending mystery–perhaps even sadness–to the area.

Anachronism – “taking something out of time or place” Time itself is a very important part of my site. Maybe not as much time on the day-to-day level, but time over years. The way history has shaped the strange layering of my site is noticeable even if not fully understood. One sometimes sees a designer trying to reach back to a past to establish a sense of legitimacy, power, or familiarity. The Harborwalk extension, for example, features picturesque lamposts which are quite out of sync with the ultra-efficient and modern forms of the power substation directly behind the Harborwalk.

Alliteration – “the repetition of a certain form or shape” Many forms in my site are determined not out of consideration for originality or aesthetics, but instead result out of pure function. These elements are often repeated within and across my site. Often this alliterative quality elevates a common object to a surreal one. For example, there are many storage lots on my site. Where one would not pay much attention to an individual cherrypicker, seeing a cluster of dozens causes one to pause and consider.

Exaggeration – Making an object bigger for effect. The application of this grammatical term to landscape is, like others, tricky because we associate grammar with intention. Applying intention to landscape can be difficult because sometimes the original designers or makers did not intend anything other than to achieve their goals within a specific context. Only afterwards do students of landscape like ourselves come back and interpret what they have done in a certain way. For example, consider the power plant in my site that looms over the nearby houses. Each successive addition multiplies in size and ugliness. It dwarfs the neighboring buildings.

Placement – to set something in a way that establishes a relationship. The power plant example is quite relevant in this example as well. Exaggeration only works in its context. If everything is exaggerated, nothing is. If the power plant were not so close to the houses in my site, its scale would not seem so intrusive and foreboding.

Framing - “Framing brackets; it separates from context, focuses attention by screening undesired or irrelevant views, by directing the gaze.”Framing on my site is most often seen in the many fences that proliferate the area. Placed to obscure, the different types of fences say different things about the contents held within and the owners’ attitudes towards those on the outside.

Though these six element (and more) can be found on my site, it is up to me, the photographer, to select, frame, capture, and convey them to others. My construction of a shot can emphasize or obscure the presence of these grammatical elements. Surely landscape has an experiential grammar, but photography can twist and interpret it.

I have been on site more than usual over the last week because our photo assignment is due this coming week. This is why, while reading our assigned text today, I was constantly making mental comparisons between the sites she describes and the Borderland. I was particularly drawn to the passage that discusses how landscape grammar–the underlying patterns and structure that create meaningful and functional landscapes–can either be respected or ignored. Just like grammer in communication, one ignores the grammar of landscape at his or her own peril. Miscommunication is the best of circumstances when one ignores these underlying structures. Spirn cites a case in which developers and city officials set a stream down into a tunnel beneath a neighborhood, with cascading consequences for those houses built in the floodplains. I immediately started to think about how water works on my site.

Being on the harbor, it was not too long ago that my site bordered one of the most polluted bays in the nation. After the creation of the MWRA, deer island, and some serious sanitary engineering work, this problem has been largely ameliorated. Part of the issue were the CSOs (combined sewer overflows) that combined sewage and storm water flows together, and would divulge them together into outlets when rain threatened to overwhelm the system. My mind wandered to the Reserved Channel, an inlet of water that penetrates my site. Along the south edge of it is an isolated section of the Harborwalk, created because of Chapter 91 of Massachussetts law which allows the city and state to demand public uses from any private development within a particular buffer zone of the waterfront. So now a nicely kept section of wooden boardwalk, benches, railings, interpretive signage, and viewing stations sits in this mostly industrial area. It’s context, however, cannot be ignored. It wraps around a substation, for example, with large double fences, cyclone razor wire, and a deep, threatening electric pulse. On the other side is a ditch running out into the Reserved channel. I have only been during low tide, but at this point the ditch is nearly empty. Traffic cones, soda bottles, and jagged piers punctuate the rivulets and puddles leaking out into the channel. This is a CSO. A large pipe sits dormant waiting to vomit any excess into the ditch.

These are reminders of processes that cannot be ignored, but we do anyway. This whole area is the result of man reaching past the natural carrying capacity of land. It was marshy tideland before it was filled. A grid was imposed. Infrastructure was brought in so we could further economy. I can’t hate it. I am a part of it. I am a participant. But I want to understand it. Though the engineering triumphs of humans, such as filling in all this land and making it ‘productive’ are worthy of appreciation, they are not immune to nature’s process. Entropy is a strong process and its signs are everywhere. A collapsed shed. Rust creeping across a chain-link fence. Sprouting weeds in a vacant lot. These places only exist because we constantly repair and rebuild them. The more we ignore the underlying grammar of the landscape, the more work we must put in to rebuilding and shoring them up against the irresistible pull towards disorder. But what else would we do if not for this constant work? Could we live another way? Sometimes I’m not so sure.

A side note. While photographing the aforementioned ditch, I was struck by how easily photography can gloss over certain traits of an object and imbue it with others. Take this photo. At dawn, a polluted ditch turns into a trickle of light, leading towards the reflection of the buildings across the channel. Does a photo like this tell some sort of truth? Or does it disguise it? What is my moral obligation when I try to communicate the site? This is something that has puzzled me repeatedly as I have sorted through images for our “Significant Detail” set (which you can see on my Flickr now).

For our first photography assignment, we were asked to photograph light—how it interacts, scatters, reveals, disguises—on our site. I remember thinking, as I took the photos, “How do any of these pictures communicate the nature of this area?” This question has only grown larger as we move onto our next assignment entitled “Significant Detail.” We are to photograph “traces,” signs of greater processes or narratives that give a deeper understanding of our site. Luckily, our class discussions and readings attempt to give us greater insight into understanding and communicating through photography.

Spirn’s Landscape of Langauge discusses context and the various forms it takes. How context gives things meaning either by shaping them and thereby creating them on site as in a sand dune shaped by the contextual winds. Sometimes it’s the lack of context that gives an object meaning. Spirn gives the example of the great rocks of Stonehenge. Their sheer size and mass meant little until they were dragged all the way out to the their present location. Because they were ripped from their context, they symbolize power and strength to those who know how to read the objects. This last point is an especially important one; context is only understood and interpreted in the individual. If a person encounters the stones without knowing anything about history or geology, for example, they would interpret them differently or merely wonder at their strangeness. Context is partly that set of experiences and knowledge that each one of us accrues over our lifetime.

Seamus Haeaney expresses this understanding of context when he writes,

“It is this feeling, assenting, equable marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind, whether that country of the mind takes its tone unconsciously from a shared oral inherited culture, or from a consciously savoured literary culture, or from both, it is this marriage that constitutes the sense of place in its richest possible manifestation.”

Without prior knowledge, cultural mythology, or at least tools for understanding process, material, and form in a place, it can only be appreciated on a relatively shallow level. To experience a place in this way is to be like the tourist who wanders through a historical place snapping pictures of every pretty thing they see, all the while not knowing the how, the why, the when. Certainly not unpleasant, and sometimes unavoidable, but not the charge we are given with our own sites. Though Heaney mainly concerns himself with how the voice of poets reflect their particular place of origin, he concludes by saying why they were different from just another person living in that place. None of these poets surrenders himself to the mythology of his place but instead each subdues the place to become an element in his own private mythology. Perhaps this is the true call: To subdue the place into our own mythology. Only then will we be able to communicate the emotion of a site.

Joel Meyorwitz, in an interview, seems to reject all this forethought of meaning, all this agonizing over what is in front of the camera lens, “I’m visceral. I just go, and if I see something I don’t ask what it means.” He goes on to talk vaguely about being in “the zone” and “feeling right” about certain places as opposed to others. Personally, I find this talk frustrating because it makes me feel as if he has instincts that I do not. Perhaps these could be sharpened by anyone after years of committed photographic work, but I’ve been point-and-clicking casually and intermittently for only a few years. I do, however, understand that not all communication with one’s surroundings is purely logical and it is important to allow for chance, to be open to opportunity.

These three readings all point to an understanding of place that starts within the individual. Burdened or blessed with external cues, larger cultural myths, knowledge of process, form, or material, experience, or even effervescent feelings, we often arrive at a place with both too much and too little to truly see deeper meaning. Previous prejudices have the potential to blind us to subtle beauties of a place; ignorance causes us to miss subtle signals to larger narratives. Only through close observation and study could we possibly approach a sense of place.