Notes From Nowhere

These two at an altitude of about 9.000 feet. Visibility was significantly less than the images indicate — a blessing, since it made the scenery even more interesting. Then a rainstorm hit, and we took cover in a cave built in World War I.

Since we used a cable car to get up the mountain and started from the summit, the entire trip took less than four hours. Time and again, it surprises me how little you get done in the city within such a timeframe, and how much can happen outdoors.

Back in the Dolomites, if only for a few days. The plan is to continue with my Mountain Project. I know what I’m looking for, and I won’t take many photos — I’ll just be looking for the few images that I have in mind as additions to the existing project. The above scene struck me as having a kind of “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” (1941) tonal range. Never mind that it was early in the afternoon. Usually I’m not after a lot of tonal range, unlike zone system master Ansel Adams. But I took a few frames anyway, and this one is likely to be part of the project.

The second image is one of those I am looking for. Lucky, since this vista literally existed only for seconds. Had I been at any other spot in what was a two-mile stretch of rock, the image would not have worked. Otherwise, my mind is on the sketches I’ve been doing for a couple of months now. I’m going to post the sketches once I have a significant body of work, which may take a couple more weeks, perhaps a few months. But I like what I was told recently by someone who already saw what’s coming: that somehow the sketches inform the latest photographs.

I can think of at least three reasons why one wouldn’t have liked to live in antiquity: (i) You happen to be born not an owner of a couple of lavish villas, but a slave. (ii) You happen to be born the owner of a couple of lavish villas and a slaveholder. (Is (i) or (ii) better? A question I shall raise in the moral philosophy class I’ll audit in the fall.) (iii) You happen to be born an owner of a couple of lavish villas or a slave of such a person, but a volcano blows up in your neighborhood, covering both you and everything else with lava and volcanic ashes.

The fortunes of my own little life led me to Stabiae this past week, an archeological site near Pompeii. I loved it. Why would you print your images on paper, rather than paint them right on the walls? While not the focus of my stay, I made a couple of photos of these walls.