As I’ve said here before (forgive me!), it’s hard for me to write posts about fundamentally important things in and beyond photography, because in reality everything connects in one, and words, on their face, are useful, but distorting abstractions. If we don’t recognize their fictional simplifications, they are like fun-house reflections of reality. The exceptions are when our language comes close to poetry, living more in acting on us than in pretending to describe reality for us. When, for instance, words turn our heads toward realities that we then might see for ourselves.  Once I start considering such a matter carefully, it tends to extend and expand, till I stop at some limit of time or energy or attention span.  But I’ll do my best here to say some things worth your while, partly in relation to my new portfolio, “Songs for the Devon Bridge.”

Almost everything that has been said about photography, especially as an art, is, on its surface, a lie.  We can’t, and we never do, for example, “capture a moment.” In truth, there’s no such thing as a moment, or there’s only one. Which doesn’t mean that the word isn’t useful; we should just understand that that it’s a useful fiction. Sometimes we don’t even have a word that pretends to point us to the crucial essence. I’ll give an example of this later in this post.

The first three words of the title of this post are taken from the name of a movie starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner that was very popular in the 1980s.  Well, “romance” isn’t quite right for my connection to the Devon Bridge, and it’s wrong to say that my connection to the Bridge, including my working artistic connection, is to the Bridge as a thing in itself. If you look at the portfolio, it will be evident, for starters, that the Bridge doesn’t exist there as a discrete object.  It’s inseparable from the light and the river and the weather, and their continual movements and reflections and metamorphoses.  And, of course, what you see are images that I made from those and countless other things, including my camera and lenses and editing software.  And my artistic influences, conscious and unconscious, which are an endless daisy chain running through artistic history.  If these images were influenced at all by, say, Ernst Haas’s work with its exploration of color and movement, then we might go on to ask what artists influenced his work, and, in turn, who influenced theirs, until we get back to the primitive cave painters, at least.

So what’s the identity, the subject, the nature of these images of mine?  You will know only by looking at them carefully, experiencing them.  Even then, your conscious mind (and mine!) won’t be able to see most of their roots or effects.  As is true of your own photographs, too.  But that doesn’t change the value of getting to know them – as directly as possible.

Yes, the Devon Bridge is my favorite bridge in Connecticut.  (A historic bascule drawbridge placed on the National Register of Historic Places for its notable architecture and importance in the history of Connecticut transportation.)  During the (first phase?) of the pandemic, it was a God-send to me, a “place,” a subject for photography that I could visit just about as often as I wanted, without running into groups of potentially-virus-transmitting people.

But “romance” isn’t really right to describe my involvement with it, my positive attachment to it.  Do I value “it”?  I certainly do.  Did I come to value it even more through my increasing visits to it and my closer acquaintance with it?  Absolutely.

But when I was lost in observing and photographing the scene, my state was not what you would likely call emotional.  Was it love?  I might well say so, but not in the emotional sense that we usually use that word.  Cartier-Bresson touched on it when he said that what he valued most about photography was that while he was doing it, he could forget about himself.  As with so many of these impossible-to-define matters, the Tao Te Ching provides some help.  (I’ll quote the Ursula K. Le Guin translation, as I usually do.)

Hold fast to the great thought

and all the world will come to you,

harmless, peaceable, serene.

*

Walking around, we stop

for music, for food.

But if you taste the Way,

it’s flat, insipid.

It looks like nothing much.

It sounds like nothing much.

And yet you can’t get enough of it.

— Book One, Chapter 35

Zen classics say that the world after satori is, in some ways, just the same as the world before satori — and yet, everything’s different.  My connection to the Devon Bridge is positive and intimate, but people, including artists, aren’t taught to recognize that relationship, or what to call it.  It goes beyond common education and beyond the terms and habits of photographic society.

One of the distasteful things about that society for me is the way that it frequently pushes artists to define what can’t be defined, and towards practices of abstract intellection and description that our art should work against.  For instance, posing wrong-headed questions on project applications, like “What is the purpose of your project?”  If you really think you can answer that, you may better suited for politics or sociology than for art.

I like what Susan Sontag wrote in her essay “Against Interpretation” to the effect that criticism shouldn’t look to reduce photographs to some nugget of philosophy or social intent, but should be “amatory.”  Meaning that it should point to features, aspects of the work that inspire that nameless kind of positive, satisfying response (what to call it? pleasurable? inspiring? what?), not pretending to be comprehensive or reductive.  We know that kind of response, experience, satisfaction, but can’t define it or put an adequate name to it.

According to my wife, images in this new portfolio of mine evoke (in addition to other things among an infinity of connections) ancient Egyptian forms,

the ornamentation of classic Greco-Roman architecture,

the reflections in the canals of Venice, her favorite city in the world.

We should not think that our photographs, whether great or poor, have an end, or a linguistic cage to enclose them:  “You see them, but you don’t know everywhere they came from, and you don’t know everywhere their reflections will go.” What matters is how much they succeed in giving us that peaceable and mysterious “thing that we can’t get enough of.”

Please see my new portfolio, “SONGS FOR THE DEVON BRIDGE,” beginning at

https://www.lawrenceruss.com/index/G00009eiOKKC1P34/I0000jI.HubdOFgM