The Narrative Image

Imagine this. Suppose you have a growing collection of photographs and you need to make a portfolio that would be representative of your best work. Or say someone asked you to make a ‘coffee table book’. How would you pick the ‘best’ images? I can’t figure out how to do it. Inevitably, when ‘other’ people look at a given collection of photos, they always pick out favorites for reasons that can only be described as mysterious, questionable or ….just wrong. It goes way beyond the obvious to suggest that we all have personal preferences. Photos are seldom just artistic compositions – they are really more like snippets of memory. Most of us simply aren’t trained to subjugate our memories and the emotions they trigger for the sake of judging a picture by something as abstract as strong compositional design elements. Note to self: Maybe a good narrative image is one that combines snippets of memory with design elements to better preserve the emotional content of the…umm…sorry – ...

I should probably begin by telling you that about the only plant I’ve ever managed to successfully grow was a Chia Pet, so you can imagine that gardens and gardening are somewhat of an impenetrable mystery to me. On the left is an example of Mt. Hood National Wilderness (From the Ramona Falls trail. See http://thenarrativeimage.blogspot.com/2007/05/ramona-falls-trail-super-sized-part-two.html ). On the right is an example of Portland Oregon’s Japanese Garden. While I personally find both scenes beautiful, there are several aspects about the garden scene that show evidence of human tinkering. Some of the obvious signs are a human constructed concrete artifact, groomed bushes and trees, and a preponderance of plant varieties seemingly chosen for aesthetic purposes. Just for the purpose of comparison, this corn is an example of a garden designed for the efficient production of a food crop. Curiously, I find this scene aesthetically pleasing also, but did not find any growing at the Japan...

My January 16, 2007 blog entry, Invasion of the Alien Pods ( http://thenarrativeimage.blogspot.com/2007/01/invasion-of-alien-pods.html ), turns out to have been incomplete and its sensationalistic title essentially misleading. A comment from alert blog reader Cynthia astutely points out the incomplete part. She said, “And let us remember our dear animal companions who share the planet with us. Very helpful in assisting our root-bound cohorts with propagation.” Upon reflection, I realized also that the seed pods can’t possibly be ‘alien’. While it is fun to make metaphors about foreign invaders and the logistics of warfare as applied to vegetables, it is probably more informative to remember that plants share the same genetic code the rest of us do and that somewhere down the line, evidence implies, we all come from the same replicator. We are a big interconnected family, dependent on each other for our very lives. The interrelationships between species are so complex that it leads many...