​Why Do We photograph?
 
Fine Art Photographer, John Holliger, explores with humor and fun, twelve “Principles of Classic Photography.”  Starting with amusing images of a gang of pushing-shoving sports and political photographers, John moves quickly into practical suggestions for photographers with cell phones to professionals who have forgotten how many lenses and camera bodies they have and where they’ve put them.
John’s video of Scottish music, funny lines, with photographs of photographers, illustrate the principles of classic photography.  John has gathered the principles into one printed page handout for each person.
Bring a jpeg photograph on a flash drive to get John’s reflections to spur a time of light discussion.  Pointy fingers are not allowed.  You are safe.   .  That’s my one rule:  Smile, Enjoy, laugh.
 
Let me know of your interest.  This will take place at the Westerville Senior Center's photographic club meeting, the 2nd Sunday in February, 1-3pm
 
John Holliger
70 Welshire Court
Delaware, Ohio 43015
www.photographybyjohnholliger.net   johnholliger@columbus.rr.com            Cell:  740-360-0741

 These are my notes from Why People Photograph by Robert Adams. 
I hope you find thoughts to ponder, I have.
​
Why People Photograph by Robert Adams

Reflections on Classic Photographers

If I like photographers, and I do, I account for this by noting a quality they share—animation.  They may or may not make a living by photography, but they are alive by it.
I think for example of a friend who when he was a young man, sometimes took pictures along country roads while sitting half up out of the sun roof of his moving, car, steering with his feet.
Apparently, he was meant to do this because over the years he went on to assemble a vast photographic celebration of Colorado life.  When I hear his voice on the phone now, full of avidity even in old age, I promise myself that I will take grand, unsafe pictures.
 
Photography, like the others art, has that kind of intoxication.  There is also a quieter pleasure.  Occasionally photographers discover tears in their eyes for the joy of seeing.  I think it is because they’ve experienced a miracle.  They’ve been given this gift of tears which they did not earn, and as with many unexpected gifts, the surprise carries this emotional blessing.
Photographers do not know where in the world they will find pictures.  Nobody does.  Each photograph that works is a revelation to its supposed creator.  Yes, photographers do position themselves to take advantage of good fortune, sensing for instance when to stop the car and walk, but this is only the beginning.  As William Stafford wrote, calculation gets you just so far—"smart is Okay, but lucky is better. “
Days of searching can go by without any need to reload film holders, and then abruptly, sometimes back in their yards, photographers use up every sheet of film.
 
There is another reason I like fine art photographers—they don’t tempt me to envy.  The profession is short on dignity.  Nearly everyone has fallen, been the target of condescension.  The stereotypical image of a photographer is a mildly contemptible, self-indulgent dilettante.  They’ve  been harassed by security guards, and dropped expensive equipment.  Almost all fine art photographers have incurred large expenses in the pursuit of tiny audiences, finding that the wonder they’d hoped to share is something few want to receive.  Nothing is so clarifying as to stand through the opening of an exhibition and only the paid staff have come.
Experiences like that could encourage defiance and resentment.  Why be quiet while you’re losing? But the best move forward.  Support from this who love them helps enormously.
I respect many photographers for their courage.  Sometimes this quality is undramatic and private.  It’s the grit to fight bad odds with discipline.  One writes in good-humored self-mockery, “I feel like I have been living in a small hole somewhere  with problems of nest management.”
 
 
Photographers must also withstand, with the help of their families and friends, the psychic battering that comes from what they see; sadness, grief, sorrow.  In order to make pictures that no one has made before, they must be attentive and imaginative. When Robert Frank put down his camera after photographing The Americans, he could not escape the sadness of the world he had recorded as could we when we closed the book.
 
Paradoxically photographers must face the threat that their vision may one day be denied them.   Their capacity to find their way to art, which is their consolation, to  see things whole, may fail for an hour or a month or forever because of fatigue or misjudgment or some other shift in spirit that cannot be predicted or understood or even recognized, until it has happened past correction.  For every Stieglitz or Weston who remained visionary to the end, there is an Ansel Adams who after a period of extraordinary creativity, lapsed into formulas.
 
 
Writing
 
Art is by nature self-explanatory.  We call it art precisely because it is self-sufficient.  Its vivid detail and overall cohesion give it a clarity not ordinarily apparent in the rest of life.  And so, if the audience lives in the same time and culture as does the artist, there is no need to add to their art a preface or other secondary explanations. 
 
I did not have to read photographers’ statements in order to love their pictures.  Almost nothing they say about specific pictures enriched my experience of those pictures.  Photographers seemed so strikingly unable to write at length about what they had made. 
Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, “You want me to say it worse?”
Photographers never fully know how they got the good pictures that they have.
Words are proof that the vision they had is not fully there in the picture. 
 
The best way to know what photographers think about their work, beyond gazing at their photographs as we study profound books, is to read or listen to what they say about other pictures made by colleagues or precursors whom they admire.  It is as close as photographers usually want to come to talking about their own intentions.
For photographers, the ideal book of photographs would contain just pictures—no text at all.
C. S. Lewis admitted, when he asked to set forth his beliefs, that he never felt less sure of them than when he tried to speak of them.   Photographers know this frailty.  To them words are a pallid, diffuse way of describing and celebrating what matters.  Their gift is to see and bring back to us this miracle of sight.

​­­­­
 
 
 
The Fish House



No sign out front
Where my Dad and I stopped and
Gazed in wonder during the day.
We came after the pre-dawn chaos of men and boats
Chugging into the darkness,
Of a shallow great lake with more frightening,
Fast-forming  storms than any of the other great lakes.
The men drove their boats in that lake,
Fears well hidden
 
We stood silently, as did the Fish House
Remembering the men and boats
Already on the waters beyond our sight.
 
The village knew the grey peeling squat building
Flirtatious Hollyhocks beneath small muddy windows
That was the Fish House
And its swaying dock on the river.
 
Hand hewn timbers
Generations old built to last
For their children’s children.
All that the fathers created with care for their cherished children mattered.
 
 
Long before dawn
In night’s darkness
Low humming, sputtering diesels
Departed the Fish House
Into the darkness of the River,
Entering the lake beyond the lighthouse
Scattering apart to “their” place on the lake,
As their fathers’ fathers had agreed.
 
Unrolling their long nets with respectful love
Nets repaired by their fathers’ fathers,
Each knot,
 a signature
and stories of joy and loss
And loss.
 
The schools of fish in those years, so abundant,
Hard to imagine.
The men of old could haul in their nets
Quickly filled with fish.
 
When the village was closing, going home,
The boats were returning
Smoking diesels rolled a deep wake
To the Fish House.
 
Now everything changed.
 
No longer a quiet place of head nods
Hand gestured directives
For departing into the dark waters.
 
On their return
Deep in the water from the weight of the fish
Chaos reigned in the Fish House
as tasks were barked and hollered
Wise-cracks and guffaws
Pelting laughter and raucous back slaps
As if a dam of pent up testosterone
Had broken free.  Hearts were full.
This too was the Fish House.
 
Beautiful pike, pickerel, perch,
white fish and walleye,
scooped up and tossed by the shovel load
into crates,
others threw loads of ice
as the fish wiggled and flopped.
 
 
 
 
My Dad and I loved to enter the Fish House at dusk,
A place of well-ordered chaos and joy
Generations old
From the father’s fathers.
 
When the village dentist arrived
With his beaming son,
One booming voice
Called out
“Hey Doc, got a beaut set aside for just you, Doc.”
My Dad would set aside his life, day or night,
When the phone rang from a fisherman or dock
Worker to pull a tooth.
To the question, “How much Doc?”  He shy smiled
And opened the door, meaning, “I glad you called
And I could help you.”
 
That same Fish House
Now locked up for years
Remains,
a witness
to generations of men in ordered chaos and joy and loss,
Contented hearts.
 
Flying ice and the beauty of fish now live in our hearts.
 
 
 
 
©2019 John Holliger

Uncreated Light
 
Long before
Edison’s glowing filament,
The ancients spoke of uncreated light.
 
In my younger, literal years,
My either/or, all-or-nothing left brain wanted
Easy, obvious steps.
 A favorite cliché was,
That’s a “no brainer.”
 
As a protective defense,
My intuitive,
Creative,
Imaginative voice was in hiding
In fear of being heard and my essence scorned.
 
I was repulsed by the gibberish language of mystery,
Inexplicable Metaphors, and
Fresh images which pained my ordered mind,
My reptilian, unconscious mind
that walked the same path out and back,
Day by day,
Believed that getting back without being noticed was
a successful day.
 
Then this rigid manner of living collapsed,
And my voice,
Hidden so deeply for decades
Began a long journey,
One with no map.
Finding myself in a cul-de-sac
I didn’t know I had wanted to find all along,
Turned me toward a Light, Uncreated by me or any other,
Inviting me to make a new path to a distant Aura
A Presence,
A Soft
Gentle
White.
 
That Uncreated Light
That shown evenly through icons onto the one
Standing there, gazing back,
An Otherness
Sensed in the forest when alone,
Or at the water’s edge of a Great Lake,
From my wet feet to the other side of that horizon of white mist.
 
The Ancient Japanese painters knew this white, Uncreated Light,
Separating and Connecting the images of village life on those long scrolls,
Hiding and revealing the odd shaped, narrow mountains
Thrusting into the clouds beyond sight.
 
 
Uncreated Light
 
Revealed so dependably here and there by morning’s mist,
The midwife to a new way of pondering.
Uncreated Light
Revealing surprising, captivating visions,
Kindness
A touch
An unspoken word
That says everything.
 
Uncreated Light  comes
From I know not where.
 
 
 
John Holliger ©2019

                 Turning onto a gravel road
 in search of a stand of old growth red spruce,
I crept along for miles
swerving around emerging boulders,
riding the high mounds of eroding streams,
creating their own path across and down the gravel road,
an “unimproved road,” forgotten, neglected,
paths within this path.
Now dropping into unseen depths,                                                                 
then surging up and out and forward,
skidding across ripples of stone,
Mile following creeping mile,
no map, no signs, many “posted” on trees,
an unknown distance from that first turning
onto this gravel path miles ago.
Into a patch of sunlight,
surrounded by weeds as desiccated as the gravel.
 
Many times,
 forgotten
gravel roads,
undisturbed by humans,  
Unveil unexpected songs, trickles
from springs hidden miles beyond sight upstream.
Here,
I pulled off the road and stopped.
I don’t know why, here, but something
Said, “Stop, here,” and I did.
“Get out and listen, look.”
I discovered again that refreshing feeling,
Opening the door  
And standing up,
then a few steps.
I remember the joy of walking
And the compressed tolerance of sitting for a season of driving.
 
Standing and walking,
Crushing stems and snapping branches,
I hear chanting, coming from somewhere near.
A deep voice,
Hidden,
Vocalizing in her own language,
Her contentment and gratitude.
In her mezzo-soprano tones,
She is thanking the Earth’ s spring,
flowing water to the sea,
and her life,
Her path,
so much like my own.
No maps, no signs, no “posted” signs on trees,
But
her path
Unknown yet trusted.
Hidden beneath curling branches.
My curiosity was focused,
Longing to see the one who sang.
By moving sideways, crablike
Across wobbly stones,
I came closer to her artful presence.
Dropping beneath branches intent on protecting
Her unseen place,
Her beauty, playfully vocalizing,
A gift of freedom.
 
Here
In secret,
She could fall over ancient rocks,
Singing ever-changing melodies of her luscious joy.
 
Here,
These stones were also
Singing their own song, I could not hear,
the protecting branches chanting their song, I could not hear,
My gift was my attentive silence,
For the stones, the moss, the spring, the branches, the water,
A silence that would not disturb the chorus of joy,
 
Here,
in this forgotten place
of gravel and desert. 
 
 
©John Holliger 2019