Riverside County, 2007 copyright of Douglas Stockdale
As I pull back to re-examin my Riverside project, I also finding myself thinking not so much about what the project per se is, but more about pictorial space. How I use the camera/lens to create or capture the spacial artifact in my photograph. To try to create a series based on the concept of pictorial space just seems tooooo simple. There has to more than that to it, eh?
It just seems that what I photograph, the actual subject rendered in the photograph is secondary to the concept of trying to define space. Maybe I just cannot articulate it at the moment. sigh.
But I find that what I have photographed is just not that important in this series. And I don’t fully get it, at the moment. But I do know that as I go through my series, the photographs that stop me are not what I thought that this project was about. I did take that picture nevertheless, but perhaps not for the reason I had thought.
Something had attrached my attention to the point that I composed and captured an image. Because many of these photographs still do resonate within me and now I am trying to understand why. So I will continue to think about it, but more importantly I am also trying to just react to the photographs that cause me to slow down and look again.
As to this photograph made of a Riverside ranch in Southern California, we do have an opportunity to experience vast amounts of visual space. So in a sense, this is one aspect of pictorial space, with the light source to create shadows and volume and foreshortening that give the impression of a three dimensional space on a two-dimensional field, which in this case, is your monitor.
More to think about, eh?
Best regards, Doug
