Photographing Rocks73
Both you and I are incapable of devoting ourselves to contemporary social significances in our work; [. . .] I still believe there is a real social significance in a rock—a more important significance therein than in a line of unemployed. For that opinion I am charged with inhumanity, unawareness—I am dead, through, finished, a social liability, one who will be “liquidated” when the “great day” comes. Let it come.
—Ansel Adams (in a letter to Edward Weston, 1934)
During the turbulent days of the early 1930s, around the time of the founding of Group f/64 (by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, among others), Henri Cartier-Bresson is rumored to have commented, “The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!”
To me, Cartier-Bresson’s comment exemplifies an unfortunate philosophical prejudice that pervades many of our arts, sciences, and other pursuits: the prejudice of anthropocentrism (and its more nebulously defined offshoot, humanism), which is the prejudice that the affairs of the human species and the so-called “human condition” are sacrosanct and must always be considered of supreme importance to any other subject. It’s a notion that has never resonated with me, as a person or as an artist. Although some human accomplishments—technologies, science, art, philosophies, and some social constructs—have indeed made my life easier, safer, more prosperous, and more interesting, their greatest value to me is as means and not as ends. My experiences in the natural world, on the other hand, make a great proportion of my reasons to live.
Photographically speaking, my life would not be diminished much if I had never seen Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” photographs, or so many works by street photographers, war photographers, fashion photographers, architectural photographers, and others, amounting to humanity gazing into its own navel, impressed with its own doings or fascinated by its own oddities, rituals, shortfalls, and miseries. But photographs of rocks and the legacies of photographers such as Weston and Adams have been profoundly consequential and meaningful to me, if only in broadening my sense of “the world” beyond the vanities, tragedies, and petty affairs of my species.
Over the years, I have removed myself progressively further and further away from the rites, fashions, politics, conflicts, superstitions, tribes, and institutions of human societies. The more I widen the distance between myself and my fellow humans, and the closer I come to the natural world, the more peaceful and rewarding my experiences become.
In these days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as so many are lamenting or even rebelling against the difficulties of “social distancing,” I am more aware than ever of the fascination—to the point of obsession—that most people have with the lives and doings of other people, which I myself don’t feel. So many psychologists and cognitive scientists I know, or have read, fall onto the expression “we are social beings” as a means of explaining a plethora of odd—some useful, some irrational, and some outright terrifying—human behaviors, as if it was some fundamental axiom of the universe rather than just an outcome of evolutionary selection: a trait founded in fitness, and not necessarily in goodness.
“Nature” to me is not just a catch-all category for some places and life forms removed from the artifice of the human world. My perception of the world and of my place in it—a random member of a random species on a random planet at a random time, given by whatever forces a tiny blip of conscious living in which to appreciate the grandeur of the world beyond me—shapes my experiences, gives context to my very being, and allows me to perceive beauty and mystery not just within the narrow scope of human affairs, but on the grandest scale of existence, ranging from quantum fields to galaxies and beyond. Finding beauty in knowledge, in mathematics, in visualizing worlds beyond my own, frees me from the confines of my limited senses.
As I photograph and find solace in the desert wilds I love, in the company of rocks, plants, and animals that enrich my world in ways that no human endeavor can, would I be better off dwelling on some petty, tragic, or violent misfortune of the human species? Would I be better off if my living ceased to be beautiful to me because of some crisis, loss, danger, or other inevitable consequence of my brief and vulnerable existence as a living organism among so many others? I think not.
Stories told in rocks are often grander and more fascinating to me than any human predicament. Surveying the ground at my feet as I write these words, I see chunks of limestone made from the shells of crustaceans that lived here just three or four million years ago—a blink of the geologic eye despite being more than an order of magnitude longer than my species has been in existence. I am sitting on a large mound of sandstone whose grains were deposited by ancient winds about two hundred million years ago, at which time it was a tall dune that no doubt was seen, perhaps even visited, by herds of dinosaurs ranging in the area. In the wash below me are polished pebbles of quartzite formed about a billion years ago, in some places even some schist and gneiss that are almost twice as old—twisted, baked, squeezed, crushed, and eroded by astounding forces.
We are made of stardust, as a spiritually inclined friend often reminds me, but so are flowers and earthworms, trees and house cats, sand and rocks. Being stardust doesn’t make our story unique. In fact, it’s a trait we share with everything in material existence.
As the human world is abuzz with fears of the spreading pandemic, political corruption, (un)holy wars, and lamentations about the discomforts of social distancing, I’m proudly photographing rocks. I’m breathing the rich air of the desert after a recent rain, now tinged with aromas of new spring foliage. I’m listening to bird-songs and savoring the pleasant sensation of a light breeze on my skin. The world is indeed going to pieces, not because of any human catastrophe but because going to pieces is the word’s nature and predestined course. The world will keep going to pieces even if the pandemic ends tomorrow, even if all wars would end tomorrow, even if our activism and resolve give us temporary respite from so many threats, wars, and injustices, and even if current affairs ultimately accelerate the entirely ordinary, natural, and inevitable extinction of our species, so as to make possible another chapter in the story of life on this small planet where billions of other species have existed before us and where hundreds of millions of years of evolution of life still remain.
No matter what events unfold in the world, beyond my duties as a citizen in a society, and beyond whatever support, compassion, and goodwill I may be able to offer those lives that are within my ability to affect, I see little reason to deny myself the experiences and expressions that make my life meaningful and that have little to do with the state of the human world, or even with the ultimate fate of the human species. In the words of Robert Henri, “The end will be what it will be. The object is intense living, fulfillment; the great happiness in creation.” So long as I’m not called upon to more noble tasks, in the words of Caspar David Friedrich, “I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am.”