Wintering

Wintering (see in Gallery / Store) | Image by Bruce Harris

Light drains from the wintering field like water seeking lower ground. I stand in the unavoidable place where asphalt frames what's left of the wild, my nature photographer's eye searching through the viewfinder, watching shadows pool in places I've captured a hundred times before. Dry leaves rattle. Something scurries in the browned reeds. The camera raises, but that 'something' is no more. Late again. Not that it matters. If I've mastered any art in digital photography, it's the art of being late. A second is all it takes and I'm left with what I usually see, which isn't what I could have sworn I saw.

Missed opportunities become their own visual archive. A presence turned to absence. I scan through hundreds of digital images from a day's shoot, only to find a few that match the experience I remember. The real image always seemed to live between these mis-shot exposures, in that misty space where visual memory and imagination blur. That might be true of most things we try to remember; the moment of vibrance dulled in the before and after.

Light passes through cornea and retina, its millions of rods and cones, and finally the lens; the biological into the technological. Either way, half recollection and half invention, our visual perception stitches it together in a kind of lived fiction. And in that fiction, I can imagine a photographer. A friend. We'll call him David. He's hunched over his photo editing workspace, nose to a high-resolution screen, hand on trackpad tweaking digital layers and curves until the photons light into an aesthetic only he possesses. Couldn't memory occur in the same way, adding contrast where we need clarity, softening edges we'd rather forget?

The optic nerve is a siphon. Its opening, the retina. Our minds so thirsty for all that spills in, effortlessly filling our whole lives. And yet we selectively see, aware of so little of what is right before our eyes. Like our stories, another effortless manifestation of the mind, smoothing chaos into drama or song, disorder into a sculpture of order in all varieties of ways. Processing the mess of uncontainable, incomprehensible life into a tidy lie. But a useful one.

David turns his calibrated monitor toward me, too experienced to be proud, too confident to be shy. A black and white landscape photo. A deep-autumn tree in the Illinois November cold. Lake Michigan in the distance, not a leaf left on its spindled limbs. He's color blind, so it's the contrast that intrigues him, not the hue. Just shape and shadow. He turns back to the screen and softens the lake and sharpens the bark and tells me he can't miss what he never had.

The mind’s eye, unlike a camera lens, not only processes images but time as well, reducing me to a boy at dusk, my father's spring garden before me. Shovel in hand, he’s teaching me to turn the winter-beaten, earthy crust. He's more of a show-instead-of-tell guy, short on words but always kind as his heal kicks the blade to find last season’s soft soil. Can I tell the young boy, me, that the flowers calm his father? That planning the colorful arrays from spring to fall satisfies something he can't describe? That he knows what seems like a thousand names of the things that grow? He leads my fingers into the damp soil to wrap around the root of a weed and pull. We turn the earth and measure plots for a box of annuals. He points out things too early to bud. A coneflower pushing through. A coming rose tipping the thorns. They're all green, but it wouldn't matter. Color means nothing with the setting sun. It's the feel of the leaf he knows and has me rubbing their wax or their rough between my finger and thumb.

Years later, I point my smartphone camera toward a circling hawk and press the glass button. A chime, like a bell in the prairie. Buteo Jamaicensis lights up. Red-tailed hawk. My phone's AI photography system is 97.6% confident. Mystery lost. No wide eyes or a boy's fallen hush as the raptor dives in a field. Everything is labeled. Everything nearly perfect. Wonderment disappeared by instant knowledge.

We move through this world in the midst of a blooming digital augmentation. Photo filters brighten skies. Edges sharpen. Nearly dark becomes fully black. Glow ups like suns that never set. But not every spiderweb needs to glisten in a perfect dew-lit dawn. Sometimes they just hang in old barns and gather dust and drift away when the last sinews dissolve. Although, I wouldn't want to look at my image gallery if they were never processed. If words were left unrevised. It would be nice if there was some inbetween, some balance between instant and never again.

I swipe through my camera roll to the sunset I captured after the hawk had circled and left. "Beautiful," I thought, although what I remember is that everything was going gray in the diminishing light, and the orange sky the phone captured was not nearly that bright.

Let's see how our fictional David has refined and tweaked his landscape composition. The shadows are not black but lighter shades, like a mood matching the storm coming over the lake. I ask him what color blind means. If he sees a monochrome world. He tells me he sees color, but he sees it differently than me. He shoots black and white photography because grays to him say as much as color palettes might say to me. To David, contrast means more than hues. So if I remember the sunset as red, what do you remember it as? I ask. He says he remembers a sunset and the shades and shadows that mean to him the word we say as red.

By the time I leave the field, the sky has turned charcoal, and I'm stuck with another handful of missed nature shots. But I've got the memory of how the air felt and the way the hawk glided overhead. Maybe that's what we're preserving—a sense of light passing through us, leaving behind a faint imprint in the mind's eye. I think of my new friend, David, how he sees light pass into memory as well. But then I wonder if he was not color blind but simply blind. How light likely has no shape and what those non-shapes mean as memory. Shape-less memory; the idea walks by my side on the long trek home. I had no answers and didn't want to know. Not yet. I liked that surmising feel of the mind touching thoughts in the dark, giving shape to the world not by image but by sound. And smell. And the other senses that must be so thoroughly alive in that particular circumstance.

I picture David's desktop computer's fan whirring like a takeoff is coming. His eyes are a bit heavy and red. Long photo editing session. But he nods at his image. Turns to me. I nod back. Pretty good. My father assesses the garden work with a satisfied pat on my head, the annual's spilled containers strewn on the lawn. The hawk circles and fades into the night. I raise my digital camera and twist its lens hoping to catch something true. Maybe true is always just a moment away from gone. Maybe the most true thing is to do the work. Do the remembering. Make the imperfect record of what we were almost certain we saw.