I recently borrowed a book, “Structure of the Visual Book”, by Keith Smith. In the introduction, in a section titled, “Erroneous Residual Concepts”, he says the following:
If still photography students take a course in cinema, some of the results of those films will be more related to still imagery than to motion pictures. I have heard Harold Allen say many times: “Some people think to make a color photograph, you just have to put color film in the camera. The result is not a color photograph.” The concept is not of color relationships.
When color is used in photography, it is often only to mimic nature– the one thing it can do least. At other times, it is used to decorate… which it does better, and, to alter mood or space. But there is a myriad of potential uses for color and few take the time to explore them. They are still seeing in black and white.
This pinpointed a thread of unease I’d been feeling about my photography recently. For years I mostly took macro photos of flowers and bugs. This was because the cameras and lenses I had available to me at the time did this type of stuff best. I loved finding the hidden structures in tiny things. Eventually I came to love flowers, and started growing interesting ones so I could photograph them.
This year, I bought some miniature rose plants. I’m not a rose person, but I was intrigued by their uniqueness. (I bought them from the now defunct Uncommonrose.com.) I spent many hours this summer sitting on my deck taking in the sun, staring at these beautiful, tiny, vibrant roses, and I realized that there was actually no way I could capture in a photograph how I experienced them.
My photographs of these roses do not mimic nature. They do not capture the feel of fresh air surrounding the plant, the velvet texture of the petals, the many different subtle colors that arise when the flower is viewed from different angles. I don’t know of any way to preserve this experience. My memory doesn’t do such a great job either.
This is one of the miniature roses, the cultivar “Hope and Joy”, whose essence I could not preserve:
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