Textures

What Do I Like in my Pictures

I have been taking photographs since I was a teenager. My grandfather was an avid photographer, he kept a darkroom in his house and he printed thousands of four by six black and white photographs of his family, our family. My uncle was also an avid photographer, so I had some precedent in my family.

I like taking pictures, I like trying to put a frame across our infinite universe and studying or capturing it’s elements in isolation, in the lonely space of focused attention where the camera seals off from view the rest of existence. That’s what makes a photograph interesting, what’s not in it. I am not an intellectual photographer or an art photographer, I am not a technician. I am a photographer in the sense that I take photographs. Some of them delight me.

I’ve noticed that one of the aspects of the world I like most to see in a photograph is texture, a word that, when it comes to photographs, is a bit confusing because by definition - “the consistency of a surface” - a photograph has two surfaces, that depicted in the photograph and the plain flat photograph itself. So which one has the texture? I’m about to lose myself in the weeds here, so I’ll just skip past that query.

But I take a lot of pictures of patterns, of things that repeat or that morph subtly from one consistency to another. Most of those pictures turn out to be rather boring, hardly worth looking at, but sometimes they are striking and beautiful. I’m not sure what makes them so, and that is why I am posting many photos, maybe we can establish some truths about textures in photography.

One thing I noticed, for example, is that for a photograph of a texture to be interesting, there cannot be too much information or action, no people. Texture photos most often look cool when they are detached from context and reason, they just invite you to look at them. What’s the meaning of a bunch of colorful cupcakes or a herd of green Tabasco bottles headed for the labeler on a conveyer belt?

Even when we know they’re grapes, with all the appealing associations of a sweet fruit, I love how that knowledge fades in importance as we focus on the textures and shadows on the orbs all together, and they become planetary bodies floating in space. To perceive texture we almost have to ignore what we know about the object.

So the word “texture” implies the plain physical gradient of a surface, but in a photograph we experience texture as more inclusive of other qualities like color and shape and light. In two dimensions of photographic space these additional qualities are perceived as texture, perhaps because the third dimension, which actually determines texture in the physical world, is absent. Damn, the weeds are getting thick again.

I’ve recently gone through the past ten years of my digital photos and selected the ones that I felt captured a sense of what I love about photographic textures. I’m not proposing that I’m a great photographic artist or analyst, I just have thoughts and some interesting photos that I want to share. Some of the ones I’m putting up have been posted to social media before. I’ll be doing this in several posts, there are 88 texture photos in my pile. I hope people will linger over the photos and just wallow in the textures, see if that isn’t more pleasurable than reading about inane political developments that are sure to keep you roiled for days on end (and that I’m resisting getting sucked into and thinking and writing more angry screeds about).

The theme today is food and round shapes, okay? I also have flowers and plants, snow and ice, a series with moths frozen in ice along a Montana lake shore that I just love, pictures of earth taken out the window of an airplane, some rocks and some buildings. Bon Appetit!