Several years ago a friend commissioned me to produce a series of pictures on the theme “Faith : Hope : Love,” and I have been struggling, off and on, to do so ever since. This trio of photos is not necessarily my final product, but rather are the results of an exercise I set myself while walking a trail in a Maine forest recently to see how well I could manage capturing those abstract concepts in that specific setting. I was inspired to try this when I took the “Hope” shot of the the little tree “looking up” at its grown siblings behind it.
I have thought a lot about this assignment, about why it has proven so difficult. Besides the difficulty of trying to image any abstract concepts in ways that are not too obvious or cheesy, I think that it is especially hard to picture concepts that incorporate aspects of wholeness or goodness. And this is a problem not just in the visual arts, but in all sorts of art. It can be hard to depict holiness or goodness in ways that are not either trite or sentimental or cheesy. The recent Lord of the Rings movie trilogy is only one case in point, because as much as that series did well in visualizing Middle Earth, in my opinion it was rather less successful in, say, imaging the holiness or ethereal nature of the Eleves (though, admittedly, the goodness and earthiness of the Shire was done rather splendidly).
The problem may, indeed, be in the fallen nature of things as they are themselves, in which we cannot readily conceive of interesting and engaging stories which do not involve conflict/transgression and reconciliation/redemption or what happens when the conflict/transgression is all there is.
Photographically, it is far easier for me to shoot a piece of urban decay to picture a concept such as dissipation or ruin. And to be honest, personally, it has been long been easier for me to picture brokenness over wholeness as a reflection of my own self, save for the area in the photographing of people which I do with intermittent joy, which you do not see a lot of on this blog, in any case. Perhaps that reality may be changing a little and perhaps I will ultimately need to incorporate people into my final product of the “Faith : Hope : Love” series.
However, and if and when it turns out, I will certainly keep you posted 🙂
The Dassler Effect 