These are landscapes that are as much about a state of imagined perfection as they are about their beautiful interplay of light and form and texture and substance.
I was in a class in graduate school taught by a painter named Suzanne Joelson, I remember it being a contentious class because of the personalities in the class but mostly I remember bits and pieces of a pursuit of an understanding of the idea of the sublime. I can't remember if we reached a conclusion reached, but I remember a few of the examples: The description of a Madeline and a cup of tea from Proust and the image which has stuck like glue in my head: Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. For me, at some profound level, THAT image is the embodiment of a lot of things, the idea of what we want the sublime to be and that point of inflection between man and nature that IS what the Romantic movement is about.
The lakes region, is to me also the embodiment of that point both as an intellectual idea but, now I discover, in actual physical reality. The big, wild, idealized...but sort of controlled natural world, the idealized image of the epitome of 'man' confronting and existing in nature. The lakes region was the home to Wordsworth and Coleridge and their time was the same age as the painters Turner and Constable with their swirls of paint, light, atmosphere and form. It is easy to catalog and contain that time...until you arrive in the lakes, and discover that, in fact, the sky really does that, the light really does bend that way and slice through those clouds in emphatic sharp highlights. Arriving in the lakes is to find that, at some level all of that sometimes over inflated mythology has some basis in an amazing reality.
These images all include global, non-destructive, changes. There are a few little spotting spots too. Following the advice of my post production guru I am trying to be very, very deliberate in my post production. I will, over the next few weeks pull most of these into photoshop and work carefully to be a little more selective in some of the emphasis in the space, but, and this is important, the edits will be minimal and still within what traditionally would have been called 'straight photography'. Even though I have spent a good bit of time on each of these....but I can't say I am REALLY happy with any of them. I will slowly tweak them some more but I felt as though I just needed to get them out the door.
