Cold Pictures
DECEMBER 1, 2007 Listen to this Story
Winter officially doesn't arrive until Dec. 22, but temperatures have already started dipping all across the country. Most don't want to venture out in sub-zero weather during the day, or night, but that's how photographer Chris Faust takes some of his landscapes. He sets up a tripod and leaves his lens open for several minutes at a time.And the whole time, he's just waiting there... in the cold.
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by Chris Faust
Produced by Marc Sanchez
My name is Chris Faust, and I actually enjoy making photographs in the winter because it offers a completely different palette to the landscape, and it brings out all kinds of shadows and tones that are normally obscured by grass and leaves. So, I can't wait to see what the natural landscape, and sometimes the manmade landscape, reveals in winter light.
There isn't anyone around usually, and I can just meditate on a landscape and really look at the entire landscape. Because, I'm just sitting there for seven, five, ten minutes, and I can just feel the quiet. And, I can listen to anything that's possibly around: crickets, maybe some little rodent that might be zooming around, the wind just blowing in the winter and snow. I'm definitely connected to the landscape when I do that.
There's something about snow that sets off everything around it, like there's one photograph of a snow fence that I took in the book that has the fences coming out of a snow bank. And, there's two lights coming shining on it, so you have two shadows and they're disproportionate. One is at one angle, one is at another angle. And, if you look close enough, you'll see it's snow, but at first glance, you don't see that it's snow. It's not about that. It's kind of an abstraction.
There's another image that's of one of the lakers, which is a commercial freighter. It's there up in the Duluth seaway, and on there is water from the lake from when it wasn't full of ice. It's frozen on there. It looks just like putting string in a glass of water with sugar in it. You get these crystals that kind of hang off this chain. And because there's no freight on it, the prop is sitting out of the water, so you get this shiny, stainless steel against this ice. It surely looks cold, that's for sure.
I think music and photography are closely related. I can see why Ansel Adams was a pianist first, and then he went into photography. He had an old saying: "the negative is the score and the performance." I think if you look at photography like that: I'm going to go out and make a negative; I'm not going to take a negative, I'm going to make a negative; Then I'm going to make a print from it. It's the act of making your score, and then performing it.
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- Music Bridge:
- Rhuubarbidoo
- Artist: Múm
- CD: Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy (Fatcat)
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